Arminianism that is:

In reply to:
[color:"blue"]isn't Arminianism "another gospel"

Me thinks yes, as well.

Background of Edwards’s Sermons on Justification, Samuel T. Logan, Jr.

In the fall of 1734, writes Jonathan Edwards in his “Introduction” to A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God, “began the great noise in this part of the country, about Arminianism, which seemed to appear with a very threatening aspect upon the interest of religion here.” With masterful understatement, Edwards continues, “There were some things said publicly on that occasion, concerning justification by faith alone.”

The things “said publicly” were Edwards’s own sermons on that subject, sermons consciously preached to counter the perceived Arminian threat. Was Edwards’s perception of that threat accurate? Probably so, as Ola Winslow indicates in her summary of the situation into which Edwards spoke.

The battle was already at hand. By 1734 heresy had filtered into his own parish. Men were beginning to take sides. He set himself to resist the oncoming tide. The result was a series of sermons designed to combat point by point what he believed to be the false doctrines of his theological opponents. His refutation was in Calvinistic idiom: the sovereignty of God, his inexorable justice, particularly justification by faith alone. Some of the more influential members of his congregation, particularly Israel Williams, the “monarch of Hampshire”, opposed the bringing of so controversial a theme into the pulpit. Their opposition was strongly put, but Jonathan Edwards chose to disregard their protests. His decision was the beginning of disharmony in the parish. It was also the beginning of the revival. According to his scale of values he had suffered “open abuse” in a good cause Because this series of sermons in their published form constitutes Edwards’s most careful, most thorough exposition of the doctrine of justification by faith, a firm grasp of their cause and effect elucidates their content significantly. Edwards’s own further description of the events of late 1734 thus provides helpful insight.

Although great fault was found with meddling with the controversy in the pulpit, by such a person, and at that time—and though it was ridiculed by many elsewhere—yet it proved a word spoken in season here; and was most evidently attended with a very remarkable blessing of heaven to the souls of the people in this town. They received thence a general satisfaction, with respect to the main thing in question, which they had been in trembling doubts and concern about; and their minds were engaged the more earnestly to seek that they might come to be accepted of God, and saved in the way of the gospel, which had been made evident to them to be the true and only way. And then it was, in the latter part of December, that the Spirit of God began extraordinarily to set in, and wonderfully to work amongst us; and there were, very suddenly, one after another, five or six persons, who were to all appearance savingly converted, and some of them wrought upon in a very remarkable manner.

In the context of Edwards’s preaching on justification, the Spirit of God worked mightily and the bulk of Narrative of Surprising Conversions describes the results of that work. Indeed, this work was the firstfruits of the Great Awakening which the Spirit brought to Northampton, to New England, and to much of America six years later.

So Edwards’s remarks on the doctrine of justification by faith alone must be understood, in at least one sense, as his response to a genuine Arminian challenge. But in the shadows of the Northampton meetinghouse lurked another threat, a threat of almost exactly one hundred years duration in New England Puritanism. On October 8, 1636, John Winthrop had noted in his Journal, “One Mrs. Hutchinson, a member of the church at Boston, a woman of ready wit and bold spirit, brought over with her two dangerous errors:

1. That the person of the Holy Ghost dwells in a justified person.

2. That no sanctification can help us to evidence to us our justification.”

The wedge that Anne Hutchinson was driving between justification and sanctification, by seeking full identification of the Spirit with the believer, threatened the Holy Commonwealth because it undermined the Puritan attempt to identify visible saints, those who would structure and operate both church and state. Thomas Shepard answered this antinomian threat in his massive and pivotal The Parable of the Ten Virgins and Mrs. Hutchinson was banished by the General Court on November 2, 1637, and was excommunicated by the Boston church on March 22, 1638.

But the effects of antinomianism lingered, particularly in terms of the question of criteria for full admission to the Lord’s Supper. Relationships among ideas, beliefs, and political and sociological realities are always complex, and never more so than in seventeenth-century New England. Without seeking to unravel all these relationships, we can say that the question of the visibility of God’s saving work, the question of whether there is a reasonably discernible connection between faith and works remained a vital one throughout the seventeenth century and well into the eighteenth.

Solomon Stoddard was Edwards’s grandfather and predecessor in the Northhampton pulpit and it was very shortly after he became the pastor there in 1669 that Stoddard began to reject the notion that regenerating grace may have visible effects (cf. Stoddard’s Appeal to the Learned). Critics differ as to whether Stoddard was an “arch-Calvinist” or a “Liberal.” Regardless of the label, the effect was to relax the criteria for admission to the Lord’s Supper and, more important for our purposes, to sever the visible connection between justification and sanctification in a manner similar to the proposals of Anne Hutchinson.

Stoddard’s unofficial title, the “Pope” of the Connecticut Valley, reflected the genuine reality of his overwhelming influence both on his people and on those of neighboring parishes. Thus, when Edwards arrived in 1726 to assist Stoddard, he was entering a situation where, ecclesiologically, a type of practical antinomianism predominated. Surely this judgment is open to misinterpretation and must be carefully qualified, but, in terms of the perceived relation between actual justification and visible sanctification, it remains accurate.

Edwards apparently accepted and practiced “Stoddard’s way,” even after Stoddard died in 1729. But by the time he wrote A Faithful Narrative (published in 1736) Edwards gave clear evidence of moving away from Stoddard back toward what he considered standard Puritan practice. In describing the conversions and new church memberships which occurred after the justification sermons, Edwards said this:

This dispensation has also appeared very extraordinary in the numbers of those on whom we have reason to hope it has had a saving effect. We have about six hundred and twenty communicants, which include almost all our adult persons. The church was very large before; but persons never thronged into it, as they did in the late extraordinary time.—Our sacraments are eight weeks asunder, and I received into our communion about a hundred before one sacrament, fourscore of them at one time, whose appearance, when they presented themselves together to make an open explicit profession of Christianity, was very affecting to the congregation. I took in near sixty before the next sacrament day: and I had very sufficient evidence of the conversion of their souls, through divine grace, though it is not the custom here, as it is in many other churches in this country, to make a credible relation of their inward experiences the ground of admission to the Lord’s Supper.

Of course, it was disagreement over precisely this issue which exacerbated the tensions between Edwards and his congregation and which contributed to his dismissal from the Northampton pulpit on June 22, 1750. That the matter of the necessary and visible relationship between justification and sanctification remained critical for Edwards is clearly manifested by the subject of his greatest work, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746) and by the fact that, as John Smith points out in his introduction to the Yale edition of the Affections, the primary human influence evident in that treatise is Thomas Shepard’s Parable of the Ten Virgins.

Clearly, then, when Edwards mounted his pulpit in late 1734 to address his congregation on the subject of justification by faith alone, he was doing so in the context of the perceived opposite dangers of Arminianism and antinomianism. Exactly how is a man justified? What roles do God’s sovereign grace, human faith, and evangelical obedience play in the process? In his answer to these questions, Edwards sought to walk the razor’s edge of biblical truth while avoiding the illusory appeal of both Arminianism and antinomianism.

Westminster Theological Seminary. Westminster Theological Journal Volume 46, Vol. 46, Page 26-30. Westminster Theological Seminary, 1984; 2002.


Reformed and Always Reforming,