The Highway Forums Announcements What's New on The Highway website? Jonathan Edwards's 'End of Creation': An Exposition and Defense

Jonathan Edwards’s Dissertation Concerning the End for which God created the World is a treasure trove of resources and insights for contemporary philosophical theology—especially given his interest in resisting the erosion of the centrality of God in science, history, moral philosophy, and “true spirituality.” His concerns were—and still are—legitimate. In this paper I make common cause with Edwards by defending his End of Creation against criticisms grounded in a recurrent strategic error in interpretation. I will examine three such critical works....

I will argue two defensive theses. The first is that Edwards did not hold that God is normatively bound to value things according to their value. My second thesis is that Edwards’s view of the inexhaustible fullness and self-sufficiency of God grounds Edwards’s view of God’s end and motive in creating the world, and therefore does not entail pantheism or Neoplatonic emanationism. To establish these two theses, I briefly describe two features of the intellectual milieu within which Edwards worked that have not been adequately acknowledged in Edwards scholarship. In section three, I offer a brief exposition of Edwards’s argument in End of Creation, presenting evidence that, though Edwards was aware of the intellectual influences of his day, he was not taken in by them. In fact, he attempts to undermine their influence while working within the discourse shaped by their terms and concepts. In the fourth and final section of this paper, I discuss in detail the nature and genesis of these errors in Edwards scholarship.

Hebrews 5:12-14 (ASV) "For when by reason of the time ye ought to be teachers, ye have need again that some one teach you the rudiments of the first principles of the oracles of God; and are become such as have need of milk, and not of solid food. For every one that partaketh of milk is without experience of the word of righteousness; for he is a babe. But solid food is for fullgrown men, [even] those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern good and evil."