¹ The most extensive development of this image is found in The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin …, ed. Holbrook, Clyde A., The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 3 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 389–412Google Scholar (hereinafter referred to as OS); and Images or Shadows of Divine Things, ed. Miller, Perry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948), No. 44, pp. 54–56Google Scholar and No. 166, pp. 112–119 (hereinafter referred to as Images).

² For example, Paul Tillich describes human sinfulness in terms of the dialectic of destiny and freedom that characterizes all finite existence. “As an individual act, sin is a matter of freedom, responsibility, and personal guilt. But this freedom is embedded in the universal destiny of estrangement in such a way that in every free act the destiny of estrangement is involved and, vice versa, that the destiny of estrangement is actualized in all free acts” (Systematic Theology [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957], II, 56).Google Scholar

³ The argument that “nature,” understood as the “substance” of the cosmos, is a historical process, requiring a “minimum space and time,” is offered by Collingwood, R. G. in The Idea of Nature (New York: Galaxy Books, 1960), 13–27Google Scholar . The same argument applies a fortiori to a view of “human nature.” See the discussion of “the imago dei as man's historicity” in Kaufman, Gordon, Systematic Theology: A Historicist Perspective (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1968), 329–51.Google Scholar

⁴ Clyde Holbrook provides a brief survey of the various definitions of this view. His own summary is probably as precise as possible: “a complex of notions involving an elevated confidence in freedom of choice, a sharply upward revised estimate of human nature, and a form of common-sense moralism, all of which were related to an acute dissatisfaction with Calvinism” (Editor's Introduction, Original Sin [Yale ed.], 4, n. 9).

⁵ This modification is consistent with his definition of being in terms of the extent and complexity of relationship among entities. As the “nature” of physical entities depends upon the range of their consent to being, so human nature is constituted by the relationship of its members established and maintained over the continuum of time and space. Cf. the early notes “on the mind” in The Philosophy of Jonathan Edwards from His Private Notebooks, ed. Townsend, H. G. (Eugene: University of Oregon Press, 1955)Google Scholar , with The Nature of True Virtue, ed. Frankena, W. K. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960)Google Scholar . Perry Miller notes that Edwards' understanding of reality includes the dimension of relationship and thus of time. “All things are in sequences, and there must be a nexus of one with another … for sentient beings, the nexus is sensation, and their identity is consent….” (Jonathan Edwards [New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1967], 151)Google Scholar . The reference to “nexus” calls to mind the ontology of A. N. Whitehead; and it is appropriate to relate Edwards' metaphysics of the “system of being” to Whitehead's cosmology of “actual occasions,” for both treat “relations” as primary facts and insist on the “historical” dimension of entities. See Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960)Google Scholar , ch. II, for the definition of Whitehead's primary categories. Both Edwards and Whitehead modify Platonic ideas of participation by including the necessity of “the history of redemption” (or “the process of becoming”) as the mode of actualizing “nexūs” of being.

⁶ Taylor, John, The Scripture Doctrine of Original Sin Proposed to Free and Candid Examination, second edition with supplement (London: M. Fenner, 1741).Google Scholar

⁷ See Smith, H. Shelton, Changing Conceptions of Original Sin: A Study in American Theology since 1750 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1955), 10–59Google Scholar , on the impact of Taylor's work. For a detailed account of the controversy over original sin in New England during this period see Wright, Conrad, The Beginnings of Unitarianism in America (Boston: Starr King Press, 1955), 66–90.Google Scholar

⁸ An Essay on Native Depravity (Boston: William Peirce, 1835), 187–88.Google Scholar

⁹ The Nature of True Virtue (hereinafter referred to as NTV), 5.

¹⁰ For general information on Turnbull, see Holbrook, OS, 70–74.

¹¹ Clyde A. Holbrook, Original Sin in the Enlightenment, in The Heritage of Christian Thought: Essays in Honor of Robert Lowry Calhoun, eds. Cushman, R. E. and Grislis, E. (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 155.Google Scholar

¹² This reply presupposes the result of Edwards' treatise on freedom of will, viz., that all volitions must have a cause, and that a cause must be sufficient for its effect; therefore, the unconditioned self-determination of will which the Arminians teach could not be the sufficient ground for unfailing evil choices on the part of all men (Freedom of Will, ed. Ramsey, Paul, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 1 [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957], 184).Google Scholar

¹³ Native Depravity, 186.

¹⁴ For a full discussion of self-love see NTV, 42–60.

¹⁵ Augustine taught that the evil consequences of sin and death that attended Adam's transgression are inherited by each successive generation through the process of natural reproduction. The nature of our first parents “was deteriorated in proportion to the greatness of the condemnation of their sin, so that what existed as punishment in those who first sinned, became a natural consequence in their children … as man the parent is, such is man the offspring … what man was made, not when created, but when he sinned and was punished, this he propagated…. (The City of God, tr. Dods, Marcus [New York: The Modern Library, 1950], Bk. XIII, 3, pp. 413–14)Google Scholar . The Augustinian position represented the whole race as present in Adam as the whole oak is present in the acorn. Adam's posterity are not disparate individuals, but constitute an essential unity; they all participate in that essence of mankind which was once totally present in and corrupted by Adam. “In the first man, therefore, there existed the whole nature, which was to be transmitted by the woman to posterity.” Each person born into the world, then, by virtue of his being “man,” participates in the infected nature, or essence, of Adamic humanity.

Calvin uses the image of the “root” to describe Adam's relation to his posterity: “… rotten branches came forth from a rotten root, which transmitted their rottenness to the other twigs sprouting from them” (Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. McNeill, John T. [Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1960], II. i. 7)Google Scholar . He also uses the images of a spring (Adam) which flows out in a perpetual stream (mankind) and of an infectious disease. In short, original sin is defined by Calvin as “a hereditary depravity and corruption of our nature, diffused into all the parts of the soul which first makes us liable to God's wrath, then also brings forth in us those works which Scripture calls ‘works of the flesh’” (Institutes, II.i.8). However, Calvin rejects traducianism and thus a literal process of hereditary transmission. Rather — and this is the position upon which Edwards builds — Calvin emphasizes the divine act of ordaining the race of Adam a moral unity. As each soul is created anew by God, it is identified with the fallen race. “For the contagion does not take its origin from the substance of the flesh or soul, but because it had been so ordained by God that the first man should at one and the same time have and lose, both for himself and for his descendants, the gifts that God had bestowed upon him” (Institutes, II.i.7). Cf. Niesel, W., The Theology of Calvin, tr. Knight, H. (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1956), 83–88.Google Scholar

¹⁶ The two theories were never mutually exclusive, but complementary. Most Puritan theologians, following the Westminster Confession, retained both. “The first idea predicates a direct participation, and the second a representative participation in Adam's first sin. The Puritans thus sought to fix a double grip upon the doctrine of original sin” (H. S. Smith, op. cit., 3). Edwards also continued to use the language of both hereditary transmission (Adam as the “root” of mankind) and of federalism (Adam as a “public person or common head”). He even understands part of his task to remove objections which Taylor had raised to the claim that Adam was “a federal head for his posterity” (OS, 259). Yet Edwards does not speak of Adam's entering a covenant of works with God. As I shall argue below, it is more characteristic of Edwards to speak of God's “constitution with Adam,” by which Edwards understands a relation quite different from that intended by the term “covenant.”

¹⁷ Scripture Doctrine, 244.

¹⁸ Edwards uses the term “arbitrary” in its etymological sense of an unconditioned exercise of will. However, he does not imply any caprice in divine actions, for God's willing is a function of his whole being and is thus always informed by infinite reason and goodness.

¹⁹ Scripture Doctrine, supplement, 108.

²⁰ Ibid., 13.

²¹ It is important to note that Edwards accepts John Locke's claim that personal identity consists in “same consciousness” with the qualification that the continuity of memory “depends wholly on a divine establishment” (OS, 398). That is, personal identity is not exclusively a function of the individual's mental operations, but also a product of divine creativity.

²² James W. Jones has recently argued that the problem of the continuity of the self is resolved in Edwards' interpretation of experience as the unifying activity of the Divine upon the individual, “the fact that in all that impinges upon one, the same God is acting towards one according to his purpose” (Reflections on the Problem of Religious Experience, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 40 [December, 1972], 453)Google Scholar . This general approach to the theological definition of moral agency has its roots in Niebuhr, H. Richard, The Responsible Self: An Essay in Christian Moral Philosophy (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), esp. 120–26, 162–78Google Scholar . Roland Delattre has rightly pointed out the parallels between Niebuhr and Edwards on this point (Beauty and Sensibility in the Thought of Jonathan Edwards: An Essay in Aesthetics and Theological Ethics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968], 217–26)Google Scholar . A full exposition of moral agency as response to divine shaping activity can be found in Niebuhr, Richard R., Experiential Religion (New York: Harper & Row, 1972)Google Scholar . These studies reflect Edwards' conviction that the individual is constituted a “person” by enacting a “role” in the “theater” of divine action — language shared also by Calvin and his disciple-enemy, Hobbes.

²³ Lewis Smedes discusses the latter aspect in terms of being placed in a common “situation.” “Adam by his act brought history under a new control, with a new destiny. Christ by His act also brought history under a new control, with a new destiny. To be in the situation which each key man created is to be ‘in’ that man” (All Things Made New: A Theology of Man's Union with Christ [Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1970], 115).Google Scholar

²⁴ Freedom of the Will (Yale ed.), 433.

²⁵ The Nature and Destiny of Man (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1964), I, 242.Google Scholar

²⁶ Schneider, Herbert W., The Puritan Mind (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1958), 148.Google Scholar

²⁷ For example, Berger, Peter, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of the Sociological Theology of Religion (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1969), 3Google Scholar : “Society is a dialectic phenomenon in that it is a human product, and nothing but a human product, that yet continuously acts back upon its producer.” The result of this process is that “what appears at any particular historical moment as ‘human nature’ is itself a product of man's world-building activity” (7).

²⁸ The Works of President Edwards, eds. Williams, E. and Parsons, E. (London, 1817)Google Scholar , reprinted by Burt Franklin: Research and Source Work Series, No. 271 (1968), VIII, 458–90.

²⁹ Ibid., 466.

³⁰ Ibid., 475.

³¹ Ibid., 473.

³² Ibid., 474. While Conrad Cherry interprets this treatise as “definitely set within a Weltanschauung which conceives the universe, and the divine and human roles within that universe, after the manner of a capacious court of law,” he also recognizes that Edwards employs “an analogy of friendship” to account for the type of union in which man has a “‘sense’ in faith of Christ's excellency….” (The Theology of Jonathan Edwards: A Reappraisal [Garden City: Anchor Books, 1966] 93–94).Google Scholar

³³ Cf. A History of the Work of Redemption, Containing the Outlines of a Body of Divinity, including a View of Church History, in a Method Entirely New (published posthumously from sermons preached at Northampton, 1739), Works (London ed.), V, 11–282.

³⁴ Cf. Wisdom of God Displayed in the Way of Salvation, Works (London ed.), V, 333: “Making a holy creature, a creature in the spiritual image of God, in the image of the divine excellencies, and a partaker in the divine nature — is a greater effect than merely to give being.”

³⁵ Cf. A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, ed. Smith, John E., The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 2 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 365–69.Google Scholar

³⁶ Works (London ed.), V, 335.

³⁷ Works (London ed.), VIII, 479.

³⁸ Cf. James Carse's discussion of the themes of history and visibility in Edwards' thought, in Jonathan Edwards and the Visibility of God (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1967), 163–78.Google Scholar

³⁹ Miscellanies, Yale MSS., No. 262, quoted by Carse, op. cit., 176.

⁴⁰ Images, No. 166, pp. 112–19.

⁴¹ Cf. Images, No. 44, pp. 54–56, copied into the “book of emblems” from Edwards' own notes on Isaiah 28:24: “… God deals with His people as a prudent husbandman with his field and with his grain, for God's people are his husbandry.”

⁴² Images, No. 166, p. 114.