Via Media Podcast, Episode 17
Jonathan Edwards on the World Religions
Gerald McDermott
August 8, 2019

https://www.beesondivinity.com/the-institute-of-anglican-studies/podcast/2019/jonathan-edwards-on-the-world-religions

Announcer:
The Institute of Anglican Studies at Beeson Divinity School welcomes you to Via Media, a podcast exploring the religious and theological worlds from an Anglican perspective. Here is your host Gerald McDermott.
McDermott:
Before we begin today’s discussion, I want to remind all of our listeners that the Second Annual Anglican Theology Conference is coming in September to Beeson Divinity School here and Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. The focus of this year’s conference, and the title of this year’s conference, is The Jewish Roots of Christianity. Diverse scholars from three different countries will present cutting-edge research on questions such as, “Did Jesus start a new religion with Christianity?” “Did Paul follow the Jewish Law?” “How did the Church split from the synagogue?” There will also be a discussion of the largely untold story of Anglicans and modern Israel. And finally, I will suggest in my talk what difference the Jewish roots of Christianity make for Anglicans. The conference is going to be September 24th and 25th. Reserve your spot today so that it doesn’t get taken by someone else by registering at beesondivinity.com/events. Beesondivinity.com/events.

Welcome again to Via Media. This is Gerald McDermott at Beason Divinity School. Today is going to be a little different. Rather than interviewing someone, I’m going to talk at length about Jonathan Edwards, the world religions, and Anglicans.
That is, Jonathan Edwards wrestled long and hard with the world religions and questions such as: “What about the un-evangelized?” back in the eighteenth century, surprisingly enough. And the things he came up with, and the approaches he took, I think, actually are quite instructive for Anglicans who are wrestling with this question that is a central question for Christians around the world: Why be a disciple of Jesus and not a disciple of the Buddha? What does Jesus have to do with Islam? Are there any connections whatsoever? How can we preach the gospel in this world when we are competing with so many other different religions?
There are good answers to all these questions, and Jonathan Edwards, I think, can help us answer some of these questions.
Now let me start by telling a little bit of my story of my encounter with Jonathan Edwards. It started when I was a grad student back in the eighties. And I was doing research for my dissertation, which became my first book, the One Holy and Happy Society: The Public Theology of Jonathan Edwards. And I was reading Edwards’ notebooks, his unpublished notebooks that later were published as the Miscellanies. And I found hundreds and hundreds of pages in these theological notebooks that Edwards probably never intended to have published, hundreds and hundreds of pages of notes that Edwards had written on the world religions.
I was astonished to see him quoting from the Koran. I was surprised to see him mentioning what I came to discover were Confucius and Lao-Tzu, or Lao-Tse as Chinese say. And I was astonished to see that he was scouring New England and old England for all the books he could get on the world religions, encyclopedias of religion, dictionaries of religion, and books of commentary by the Jesuits on what they had found about the far eastern religions in the journals they had sent back to Europe at the end of the seventeenth century and beginning of the eighteenth century.
Edwards had read all these, so I was astonished to see this and curious, beyond curious. And also it struck me, because I was trying to become an Edwards scholar, and I was reading tomes and tomes and tomes of secondary literature on Jonathan Edwards and noticing that no one made any mention of this whatsoever. By the end of several years of research, I had pretty much gone through all the major secondary literature on Edwards. And that was my finding, that absolutely no one had done anything with these hundreds of pages of Edwards’ ruminations on the world religions.
And so I just tucked it back in my brain that one day I would return after I got my dissertation done and after, hopefully, I get it published, and it was published, that I would return one day and write another book on Jonathan Edwards and world religions. And so I did, years later, and it became my first book with Oxford. It’s titled Jonathan Edwards Confronts the Gods.
And so what I’m going to survey here very quickly is what I found when I got deep into my research on Edwards and the world religions.
Now, what prompted Edwards’ concern about the world religions and his fascination with the world religions were to a great degree the Deists. The Deists were thinkers at the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries, who posited a God who was remote from the world, not completely uninvolved, but relatively remote from the world. And generally they said there’s no such thing as revelation beyond nature and reason. There’s no special revelation. And the essence of religion is morality.
Now who are the Deists? There are three principle authors, John Toland, Matthew Tindal, and Thomas Chubb. And Edwards read all three. And the Deists had an enormous campaign against Orthodox Christianity and particularly the Calvinist version of Orthodox Christianity that suggested—or said outright in some places—that everyone who has not heard the gospel is automatically going to Hell. And since we know that only one-sixth of the planet has heard the gospel, that means five-sixths of the human beings in human history were doomed simply by virtue of the fact that never heard the gospel and therefore never became Christians before they died. And so we know for sure they’re all in Hell.
Now the Deists got hold of these Jesuit reports coming back from the Far East at the end of the seventeenth century that reported on the virtues of the Chinese, the virtues that seem remarkably like the Christian virtues. And yet, as far as the Deists knew and the Jesuits who were missionaries to China were reporting, the Chinese whom they got to experience and the Chinese whom they read, had not heard the gospel.
Now we know, as a backstory, that actually the gospel did come to China, back as early as the eighth century. But the Chinese, whom the Deists were talking about by virtue of the Jesuit reports, were those who presumably had not heard the gospel. But they were full of what the Deists called “Christian virtue.” And so they were saying, number one, that the God who sends to Hell those who haven’t heard the gospel, because they haven’t heard the gospel is a monster. And number two, why is it that they’re seems to be more Christian virtue in China amongst those who have never read the Bible or never heard the gospel than the majority of people back in England who have heard the gospel and read the Bible.
And so their conclusion was that Orthodox Christianity, which Calvinism represents, is a bastardized religion. It’s an immoral religion, and therefore we should reject it and embrace the new version of Jesus, whom the Deists were recommending.
So Edwards was clearly bothered by this. You can tell. You can see his mind thinking in his theological notebooks. And his writing about the world religions particularly picks up in the fifties at Stockbridge, where he’s sent into exile with an American Indian Tribe. And there, at Stockbridge, you see something else happening. He works with these Indians. He’s preaching to them. He’s teaching them. He’s disciplining them, and he sees what he would call the “fruit of the spirit” in them.
He sees what the reformed call—and Edwards was a reformed theologian—a “regenerate disposition.” But most of them had not converted explicitly to becoming disciples of Jesus, so what seems to be a regenerative disposition, but without classical Christian conversion. And then when he compared them to the Congregationalist Reformed Calvinist Christians back in Northampton, where he spent most of his career, the leaders of whom had kicked him out of his pulpit. And when he compared the Indians’ virtues with the relative lack of Christian virtue, at least among some leaders who kicked him out of the pulpit and who had been exposed to the Bible and the gospel; you can see in his private notebooks. He started asking himself questions. “Why is it that sometimes I see more of the fruit of the spirit in these Indians, who haven’t converted yet, than in those Christian leaders back in Northampton who kicked me out?”
And so Edwards himself wrestled with the question that many Christians today wrestle with. What about the un-evangelized? What happens to them?
Now, the key concept that Edwards was struggling with—or that helped him, at least in part, to work his way through these problems and try to come up with some sort of solution—was the concept of biblical saints in scripture who show a gap between their regeneration and their conversion to Christ. So when I say gap, I mean temporal gap. In other words, those people who seemed to be regenerate at one point and yet not converted yet.  So it takes some months or years before they actually convert to explicit discipleship to Jesus Christ.
So, for example, he agreed with Calvin that John the Baptist was regenerated while he was in the womb, while he was in his mother Elizabeth’s tummy a few eighteen inches away from the Messiah on Mary’s visit, also pregnant. And John the Baptist in the womb rejoiced at the presence of Messiah. Both John Calvin and Jonathan Edwards said that John the Baptist as an infant in the womb, before he was born, was regenerate. And yet, it wasn’t for about thirty years that John the Baptist became a self-conscious disciple of the Messiah, his cousin.
Now Edwards also pointed to Cornelius in Acts 10:11, the Roman centurion, who—and here, too, he agreed with Calvin—that Cornelius was already regenerate before he heard Peter tell him the gospel of Jesus Christ, because the angel had appeared to him and said, “Your prayers and your alms have been received on high.” And Edwards and Calvin both took that to be evidence that Cornelius was already regenerate.
Now Edwards said the same thing about Zacchaeus, that he was already regenerate before he met Jesus, that Nathanial was already regenerate before  he met Jesus, that the woman of Canaan, who said “Even the dogs eat the crumbs from your table” showed signs of regeneration before she fully converted to follow this prophet from Nazareth.
And Edwards also pointed to the holy pagans, what could be called holy pagans, Melchizedek whom the book of Genesis presents in chapter 15 as clearly a man of God. Job and his family, who weren’t Jews, Bildad the Shuhite who was one of Job’s friends, who at first accused Job of sin, but then when he was rebuked by God, he accepts it and basically he ends the book saying, “All these things are mysterious, and I was wrong to have said what I said.”
Well, Edwards said that he joins the list of holy pagans in the Bible for whom there seems to be a regeneration going on before there’s any sign of them explicitly receiving the gospel. Of course, Job and his friends and his family were in the Old Testament times before the gospel was fully revealed.
So Edwards in his private notebooks is struggling to try to figure all this out. And he comes up with three basic ways of thinking through these things. That is: truth, partial truths that he sees in other world religions, and good signs that he sees in the affections or the dispositions of people who have not received the gospel yet.
So the first way is what’s call the Prisca Theologia. That’s Latin for the ancient theology. And this is a tradition that goes to back to the Jews before Christ and was carried on all through the history of Christianity. And it goes like this: God gave the future truths of the Christian faith to Adam and Eve, that is the truths about original sin and expiation through a suffering servant, a Messiah who would come, and the need for regeneration and resurrection and also the Trinity.
And he taught them to Adam and Eve, who taught them to their children, who taught them to their children and so forth and so on. Now because of sin and corruption, these truths got distorted. But then when God poured out his spirit in revivals, in the history of Israel and then the history of the church—but particularly the history of Israel—these truths were restored and renewed. But particularly these truths were passed down by tradition, from generation to generation, to Noah’s sons, who in Genesis, become the fathers of all the nations, the seventy nations of the world.
And so that’s why, when they taught all these truths or part of these truths to their children and their grandchildren, who became the founders of the many nations, many of whom turned away from God, and most of whom you see other religions rising up, that nevertheless contain some partial truths about the true God.
So this is the explanation for why there is some truth in the midst of world religions that are finely false and actually perverse in many cases. But nevertheless contain some partial truths. This is an explanation that many Christians came to using the Prisca Theologia, the ancient theology that these truths were passed down through the generations after Adam and Eve, particularly through Noah’s sons whose descendants were the founders of the seventy nations.
And so Edwards uses this Prisca Theologia to say, “Look, because of the Prisca Theologia, because many Christians theological truths were disseminated in these ways ...” And also by borrowing from Jews directly ... and that’s why God put his people, the Jews, in Israel at the intersection of the three major continents of Europe, Africa, and Asia. So in the ancient world, if you were traveling from one continent to another, you almost always had to pass through Israel. Aha! Where the true God is and was and where knowledge of him was and, thus, many of these ancient civilizations learned from the Jews in their travels through Israel.
For example, there was a long story, a long tradition, that Plato had gone to Egypt and learned from the rabbis, and that’s why Plato has so much truth that is consonant with—at least to some degree—the truths of the Bible.
So Edwards used the Prisca Theologia to say, “God was not unjust.” It’s not true that five-sixth of the world was deprived of the basic truths of true religion. Through the Prisca Theologia, actually, many truths did come through, and God is not unjust by sharing the gospel only with one-sixth of the world. Actually much of the greater part of the other five-sixth received much of that truth, not through gospel per se, but through the Prisca Theologia. And that’s why, for example, both the Hindu Vedas and also the I Ching in China teach a hero who expiates crimes by his suffering.
So that’s why Jonathan Edwards wrote in the 18th century, “You find these scraps of truth in the world religions.” “Theoretically,” Edward says, “although we have no proof of it,” he added, “but theoretically, non-Christians in ancient religions and ancient civilizations could’ve taken advantage of these scraps of truth to know something about the true God.”
So that’s the first way that Edwards used to work his way through these things.
The second way was typology, that God planted types. Now that’s a theological word for symbols. God planted symbols. He planted types all over the world and all the different dimensions of reality to point to himself. And even in the world religions ... And the most common type he planted in the world religions was the type of sacrifice. All the world religions practice sacrifice, which shows the need of propitiation, that is that a holy God must be placated. His wrath must be placated, because our sins make him righteously angry. And he ought to be angry, because of our sins.
So Edwards says there’s a reason why all the world religions practice sacrifice, and always have, is because God has shown them this basic idea that comes from his holiness and the magnitude of human sin. Now the devil got hold of it and taught human sacrifice, but God co-opted the devil and used even the vicious, the horrific practice of human sacrifice to plant in the minds of civilizations that perhaps one day one human sacrifice would propitiate God for all the sins in humanity.
Now another devilish practice that God co-opted, according to Edwards, was idolatry. Now idolatry is where human beings in all the different world religions would take something that’s material and use it to represent one of their false gods and actually touch and worship that material thing as if God is inside that piece of pottery or that carving from stone. Edwards said that was from the devil. And yet God co-opted it and used it to plant a seed in the minds of the world civilizations that, perhaps, one day God would come into matter himself and take upon matter himself, which of course he did in the incarnation.
So typology was a second way that Edwards tried to figure, or to work his way through, these questions about the great world religions.
A third way was what I call dispositional soteriology. That means looking at the disposition of the saved person. And what’s a disposition? It’s the inner character. It’s the person’s attitudes. It’s the person’s, what the Bible calls, “heart,” that regeneration changes the heart and makes a new heart. And a heart that is changed will have new habits of life. So this disposition will always be manifested in habits. And if the disposition has opportunity, it always will display itself in new habits of life.
Now Edwards talked about a holy disposition that could be found amongst non-Christians, which could show the Holy Spirit had been at work. What’s this holy disposition? Well, it’s a heart that recognizes the danger of sin, that has a dread for God’s anger, that is convicted of its own wickedness, so this person trusts in nothing but the mercy of God for his or her salvation. And they bitterly mourn for their sins. That’s what Edwards called a holy disposition, which he said we see in four classes of people that haven’t actually received the gospel yet.
First of all, he said we see it in Old Testament saints. Now, Edwards believes, with the early church fathers, that Christ actually did come to the saints of the Old Testament, because God the Father withdrew from direct dealings with the world after the Fall and delegated all direct dealings with humanity, with sinful humanity, to the mediator, the second person of the Trinity. And so every time we read in the Old Testament of God speaking, God manifesting himself, sometimes even the Angel of the Lord, it’s always the second person of the Trinity, the future Messiah—or actually he was still the Messiah then—as mediator who is manifesting himself to people in the Old Testament, the Old Testament saints.
And so, in a way, when they receive those manifestations, they’re actually receiving Christ. That is what Edwards said, and many of the early fathers before Augustan said something very similar.
A second class, he said, of persons in the history of redemption who can be regenerate and often are regenerate, but without having the opportunity to express their holy disposition, are infants, who are elect of God but die before they reach the age of accountability or even the age of which they’re able to speak and confess Jesus Christ.
Third, he talks about the New Testament saints before they hear the gospel. And we’ve already talked about them, like Cornelius.
A fourth category, he said, were the holy pagans like Socrates and Seneca, who he said “had many right notions of God and providence.” And even Plato, who Edwards said “in his vision of beauty had right notions of God and religion.” Now having the right notions of God and religion, for Edwards, are not the same thing as being saved. And I want to caution there. Edwards is not saying that dispositions save. He is saying that holy dispositions, when you see them, might be from the Holy Spirit, but we can never know for sure. And having the right ideas is not the same thing as being saved.
And Edwards was no romantic on the world religions. He wrote extensively about the absurdities of the worship of the heathen. He knows about human sacrifice and religious prostitution in the religions. He wrote about fornication and sodomy and castration and cannibalism in other world religions. He even says, at one point, referring to some of the practices of American Indians in their religions, “the devil sucks their blood.” So he was not a romantic. He was not a modern inclusivist, who thought that wherever you have any affection for God, that person must be saved and is already in the Kingdom.
And Edwards was also very cautious about these things when it comes to inspiration. He says, “Look, Socrates might have been inspired, in some sense, and yet there are degrees of inspiration. And just because the Holy Spirit inspires someone, doesn’t mean that person is saved.” King Saul was clearly inspired when he prophesized twice and was thrown on the ground in religious ecstasy. But he was clearly a wicked man. The apostle Judas was inspired by the Holy Spirit as far as we can tell, Edwards said. The Holy Spirit did miracles through Judas along with the other eleven. He was inspired by the Holy Spirit, but he clearly was a wicked man. “It would have been better for him,” as Jesus said, “if he’d never been born.”
So for Edwards, there was tension between the truth and the religions, which he saw, and the beautiful affections and the beautiful dispositions he saw in many of his American Indian friends there at Stockbridge. And they loved him and Sarah. And they truly were his friends. There was tension between the fact that he saw some truth in the religion of the Indians mixed with a whole lot of error and some beauty in the affections and the dispositions of non-Christians whom he knew, on the one hand. And on the other hand, the conviction that scripture indicates that very few are saved.
Was God unjust? It was a question he wrestled with, and he came to a clear conclusion. No, God was not unjust, quite the opposite. Most of the world has had plenty of revelation through the Prisca Theologia, through the world of nature as Paul says in Romans 1, and the world of human nature in the human conscience as Paul says in Romans 2. And so God is not unjust to judge those who do not respond to him, because he’s given plenty of truth to the vast majority.
Well, what about the minority who didn’t receive the gospel? Edwards’ response was basically, “We don’t have to have an answer for that. God has already revealed himself to be truth and beauty and love and justice. We must trust that God is just and God is perfect love and accept that we will—in this life—not be able to answer all these questions, that there are mysteries involved here.”
Now we Anglicans are more comfortable with mystery than some other kinds of Christians. We have mystery in our sacraments. We say there’s the real presence in Holy Communion, even though we don’t want to try to philosophically get too precise about our definitions of the real presence.
So, too, we can learn from Edwards that, in terms of the fate of the un-evangelized, we don’t have to have all the answers here. But we can learn from Edwards that we see enough of the beauty of God, and we see enough of the love of God, that we can trust to him questions about the un-evangelized.
And, like Edwards, we can also learn that we should not doubt God’s justice or the truth of his word. For example, in Romans 10:9, where he says that “if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, then you will be saved,” which suggests that actual confession of Jesus with the lips is necessary for salvation. So I think that Jonathan Edwards might agree with those who say today that we can trust that, for those who have not heard the gospel, God will somehow give them the chance to accept Jesus through a revelation of Jesus in a time and manner that he alone knows, so that the acceptance or the rejection of Jesus will indeed be the test for everyone.
I’m not talking about something after death, because Edwards was emphatic that there’s no second chance after death ... maybe at the point of death. Now, we have a little advantage in the last fifty years of scholarship on near-death experiences, where people who have returned from death after dying on the operating table, have said that whole worlds pass by and what seem to be years of experience flash through their minds and before their eyes. And so who knows what God can do, not after death, but at the point of death?
And Edwards can also teach us two things that we Orthodox Anglicans need to be reminded of when liberal Anglicans come to different conclusions.
So the two basic questions: Should we attempt to tell all non-Christians about Jesus if the Holy Spirit opens the door for an evangelistic opportunity? Now, liberal Anglicans will say, “No, because there are many paths up the mountain, and if they’re already a happy Muslim or happy Buddhist, they’re already finding the true God.”
Edwards would say, “No, the Muslim God and the various Buddhist gods, or the Buddhist nirvana, which is not a god, are false. And the happy Muslim and the happy Buddhist does not know the true God. Jesus Christ is the only Savior. Apart from him, there is no salvation. And those who don’t know him risk missing the true God forever.”
So even if they might know something of God through natural revelation, they don’t know the fullness of the true God. Paul, when he came to Lydia in Philippi, and Luke says, “She was already a worshiper of God,” Paul didn’t say, “Oh, that’s enough.” Paul preached to her the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Now the second question that Edwards can help us with, that is a live question from many Anglicans and all Orthodox Christians, is: When it comes to the other religions, is everything in the other religions just pure darkness and demonic?
Now, some fundamentalists would say today, yes, that everything in other religions is pure darkness and completely demonic. And so we must tell a would-be convert that he must forget everything he’s ever thought he knew about God and start all over. Well, Edwards would not do that. He talked about the truth in some of the religious beliefs of the Indians, for example. He talked about some of the truth in the Koran, although they’re worshipping a false God. And so Edwards would say that non-Christians might know something about the true God through nature and conscience, and we can build on that. Therefore, the Spirit of God has indeed planted points of contact in other religions, contra Karl Barth.
And so we can join Paul in, say, the sort of thing that Paul said to the Athenian philosophers: “What you worship is unknown. This I proclaim to you in great clarity: That is that there will be a judgement, and the judge will be the resurrected one, so therefore there will be a resurrection of all of us, and we must come to the feet of that judge who was raised from the dead.”
Well, folks, that’s a little bit on Edwards and the world religions and how he can help us Anglicans as we try to wrestle with these questions about Jesus and the world religions.
On my next podcast, I’m going to talk about some other things that Edwards has to teach us Anglicans.
Thanks for joining us today at Via Media.
Announcer:
You’ve been listening to Via Media with host Gerald McDermott, the director of The Institute of Anglican Study Studies at Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. The Institute of Anglican Studies trains men and women for Anglican ministry, and seeks to educate the public in the riches of the Anglican tradition. Beeson Divinity School is an interdenominational evangelical divinity school training men and women in the service of Jesus Christ. We hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of Via Media.
McDermott World Religions


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