As part of my preparation for my dissertation defence in August 2021, I was asked to think about why my doctoral research matters to the church.

At first glance, I admit that my investigation into why the eighteenth-century Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards believed that God predestines most people to hell doesn't appear all that relevant to Christians today.

Sure, there's a few die-hard Edwards fans out there who would probably be interested in the topic. It's also an interesting question for historical theologians, since there's no consensus about why Edwards affirmed double predestination (i.e., the idea that God has chosen, from eternity past, who will be saved and who will be condemned to hell, and people have no influence over God's eternal decision).

A few theologians have also noted some inconsistencies and contradictions in Edwards' theology surrounding the issue of predestination, but no one has analyzed his work in-depth on the topic. So I've made a useful contribution to scholarship on Jonathan Edwards.

But to answer the initial question, here are four main reasons I believe my research is useful for the Church today:

1. Because theologians are concerned about speaking correctly and accurately about God, because what we say about God matters to both those inside and outside of the Church. Thus, it's important to examine Edwards' arguments for why he believed that God predestines people to hell, in order to determine whether his ideas might be true or not.

2. The idea that God might predestine people to hell is the most significant challenge to God's love and goodness. Since Edwards is seen as such a great theologian and supposedly one of the best defenders of Calvinism, I wanted to examine Edwards' arguments for double predestination to see whether he can manage to uphold God's loving goodness while justifying why God would predestine anyone to hell. If he can't do this, then perhaps it's a clue that his interpretation of predestination is not the best one.

3. Regardless of whether Edwards' position on predestination is true or the best one, it's useful to learn why a significant theologian such as Edwards believed as he did, since this might give us greater insight into how he did theology. By extension, such a study can help us reflect on why we believe what we do, in order to be more thoughtful about how we do theology. And yes, that means I do think we're all theologians, in one way or another.

4. Because learning about why we believe what we do, and why others may believe differently, should lead us to have greater grace for others with whom we disagree.

I'll expand on each of these reasons below. First, though, I'll explain why Jonathan Edwards is a relevant and interesting theologian to study on the issue of predestination.

But Why Study Jonathan Edwards?

What's most interesting to me about Edwards in regard to predestination is that as a youth, he thought the idea that God predestines anyone to hell was a "horrible" doctrine. Yet at some point as a young adult, he said he had a "wonderful" change of mind. From then on, he never again questioned the justice of God's absolute sovereignty over individuals' eternal destinies.1

As someone who very much agrees with Edwards' first opinion, I wanted to discover what caused Edwards' change of mind. Unfortunately, he never clearly explained it.

His change of mind on the issue is especially interesting because Edwards is often seen as one of the greatest theologians in North American history. He is even called "the most formidable defender of Calvinism in the history of North America" for how he attempted to defend double predestination against critics of it.2

Near the end of his life, Edwards wrote two major works titled Freedom of the Will and Original Sin. In these books, Edwards attempted to argue that people don't have control over their own choices, and that all people are rightfully held guilty of the first sin of Adam and Eve. Taken together, these books make a case that God is just when God predestines anyone to hell, and that God is merciful and gracious when God chooses to save anyone, which Edwards claimed God does by irresistibly sending the Holy Spirit to indwell a person's heart.

So as someone who strongly disagrees with Edwards' final position, the goal of my dissertation was to go through Edwards' writings and find every argument that he makes in favor of double predestination and against his opponents' views on predestination. By doing this, I hoped to find out why he changed his mind on this issue, and why he argued so strongly in favor of double predestination for the rest of his life.

Edwards is also still widely read by many theologians today, especially by evangelicals. His perspective on predestination is also often appealed to by influential Calvinist pastors and scholars. I hoped that by studying his perspective, I could understand more about why Calvinists today still want to believe in double predestination.

I also wanted to put my own views to the test to see whether Edwards might be able to convince me of his position, or if I would find problems in his reasoning that would reinforce my current view that double predestination isn't the best way to understand how God saves people who believe in Jesus.

So that explains my personal interest in Edwards and the topic. But again, why does any of this matter to the Church?

1. Theology Is Concerned With Seeking Truth About God

One definition of theology is "a religious belief system about God or ultimate reality".3 However, the word theology comes from two different Greek words: theos meaning "God" and logos meaning "word" or "speech". So theology can also mean something like "speech about God" or "speaking about God".

I agree with Jonathan Edwards when he proposes that the reason God created the world is so that God reveal himself to intelligent creatures, who can then know God and love God.4

However, that means it is important to know God truthfully and accurately. If we misrepresent God by saying false things about who God is or how God acts, then we don't really know him. It would also be insulting to God, and we would be doing bad theology.

What we say we know about God will also affect how much we love God, and will influence how we portray God to non-Christians we are attempting to witness to.

I believe that theodicy (i.e., defending God's goodness despite the existence of sin, evil, and suffering in the world) is a key issue that Christians need to address in order to help both Christians and non-Christians come to love God more. I also argue here that theodicy could be a helpful criteria to use when choosing between theological systems, such as between Calvinism, Arminianism, and open theism.

As predestination is one of the major areas of debate between Calvinists, Arminians, and open theists, how well Calvinists can defend their perspective on predestination is a very relevant issue that needs to be addressed, as I explain in my next point below.

2. Predestination is a Serious Challenge for Theodicy

Predestination is a word that's used a few times in the Bible to refer to events that God decided will happen even before they actually occurred or will occur (e.g. Acts 4:28, Ephesians 1:5, 1:11, Romans 8:29-30, 1 Corinthians 2:7).5 These sorts of predestined events are usually seen as being specifically willed by God, who is the ultimate cause behind why these events happened exactly as they did.

So predestination is a Biblical concept. However, ever since the early church theologian Augustine argued that God has ultimate control over who will be eternally saved and who will not, there have been heated debates and disagreements among Christians over what predestination means in these verses, and how it relates to human free will.

This debate has been especially fierce because predestination is the most significant challenge for God's goodness. Christians who believe in predestination must not only attempt to explain why a perfectly good and loving God might allow or even ordain the existence of sin, evil, and suffering in this world, but they must also explain why a perfectly good and loving God might predestine individuals to an eternity of suffering far more intense than anything they ever experienced in their earthly lives.

Such a task is very difficult. Clark Pinnock argued that

the idea of everlasting torment (especially if it is linked to soteriological predestination) raises the problem of evil to impossible dimensions... if Christians want to hold that God created some people to be tortured in hell forever, then the apologetic task in relation to theodicy is just hopeless.6

Even if someone prefers to understand hell as annihilation in contrast to eternal torment, the same question arises if we ask why a good and loving God would predestine anyone to be eternally destroyed.

Many Christians might answer that people are predestined to hell on the basis of God's foreknowledge of these individuals' future free actions, such as their personal sins combined with their lack of personal faith in Christ. But why would God create people who God knows will never believe in him, if God really wants all people to be saved (e.g. 1 Timothy 2:3-4, 2 Peter 3:9)?

To avoid this question, some Christians argue that God doesn't actually predestine individuals to either heaven or hell. Instead, God predestines the Church as a whole, leaving individuals to freely opt into the Church through faith in Christ (or opt-out, by not believing in Christ, as I'd prefer to say). This is called corporate election,7 and I think there's some merit to it.

Alternatively, Christians might opt for Karl Barth's idea that the only person who was predestined was Jesus. In this view, Jesus was both chosen/elected to be the Messiah, and also rejected/reprobated by God to suffer the punishment for our sins when he died on the cross. Yet I believe Barth's view is problematic because it logically leads to universalism, which has problems of its own.

As another option, a few Christians argue that predestination has nothing to do with eternal life, and so predestination is only about people being chosen by God for earthly service to Him.8 I think this view also has some good potential.

Yet the problem for theodicy is worst for Christians who believe that God actually causes some people to not believe in Jesus, so that God can guarantee that these people will be condemned to hell. Usually, proponents of this view claim that God acts in this way in order to demonstrate God's justice, wrath at sin, and power, without which, God wouldn't be fully glorified. This idea is often called double predestination, and this is what Jonathan Edwards believed. So did other major Christian theologians such as Augustine, Martin Luther, and perhaps most famously, John Calvin.

In response to the above idea, some theologians rejected the idea of double predestination. For example, John Wesley said he believed that double predestination is blasphemous because it would mean that God's offer of salvation to all people as found in verses such as John 3:16 is a lie, and so would make God worse than Satan!9 Arminius argued that double predestination is contrary to God’s wisdom, justice, and goodness, among other issues.10

More recent critics have argued that if double predestination is true, then God would be worse than the worst human tyrants,11 and God would be as sadistic as a child who takes pleasure in torturing a cat in a microwave.12 I agree with Clark Pinnock that if God does predestine people to hell, then God would be a bully "to which I could submit but which would not inspire admiration in me and certainly not love".13

So if double predestination makes it harder for some people to see God as attractive and worthy of worship, obedience, and love, then churches and pastors who affirm it may have a more difficult time with evangelism. I believe these churches and pastors also risk producing less passionate and less committed Christians who may grudgingly obey God out of fear, but might not fully trust God's goodness in their personal lives or be motivated to tell about God's love to others.

Some people are able to love God despite believing in double predestination, as Edwards did. However, even the staunch Calvinist John Piper says that people should not believe in double predestination if it would cause them to question God’s justice, righteousness, goodness, or love.14

I've argued here that theodicy (i.e., defending God's goodness despite the existence of sin, evil, and suffering in the world) is a useful criteria when choosing between competing theological perspectives. So if even Jonathan Edwards can't sufficiently defend God's goodness regarding double predestination, then perhaps that is a clue that his understanding of predestination is not the best one, and we should consider alternatives that do a better job of upholding God's goodness.

Yet if Christians are called to seek truth about God, then we shouldn't believe things about God just because they make us feel good or because these beliefs attract people to our churches. Thus, we need to consider other criteria that may indicate whether our belief is true or not.

This brings us to the question of how we should do theology. What sources should we use when going theology, and which sources should have priority over others?

3. Learning How Edwards Did Theology

In my dissertation, I sort Edwards' arguments for double predestination into the categories of the Wesleyan Quadrilateral: Scripture, Reason, Tradition, and Experience.

Although I'm not a Wesleyan, I think that these categories comprise every possible source that Christians might appeal to when making theological arguments. I believe that if a doctrine is able to be supported by all four sources, there is a a good chance it is theologically sound, and is more likely to be true than if it were to lack support from one or more of these sources.

Primarily, I used these categories only as a general way to organize Edwards' arguments for double predestination, and there was cross-over between them. Discussions of Scripture, for example, appeared in multiple chapters, as did Edwards' philosophy of causality. But by organizing Edwards' arguments into these categories, I hoped I could see how Edwards made use of these four sources, and which ones he tended to prioritize in his arguments about predestination. I hoped that perhaps this would give a clue as to the reason he chose to affirm double predestination.

Using a process of elimination, and by considering alternative approaches that Edwards could have used, I narrowed down what I believed were the most important source(s) behind Edwards' belief in double predestination.

In the end, I believe that the most significant factor behind Edwards' affirmation of double predestination was Tradition. Specifically, it was his desire to defend the core traditional Protestant conviction that salvation is by faith alone and God’s grace alone, against what he perceived as the threat of "Arminian" moralism or legalism in New England.

What's interesting is that Edwards' theology could nearly have led him to universalism. Some theologians today even argue that Edwards was a closet universalist, or at least, an inclusivist.15 Yet I think what kept Edwards from affirming that all people will be saved is how his reading of Scripture convinced him that most people will end up in hell.

This forced Edwards to find a place in his system for his understanding of hell, despite all the contradictions it causes in his philosophy and larger overarching worldview, which he used to try to defend what he saw as critical Biblical doctrines.

But by looking at Edwards as a case-study of how one intelligent, thoughtful Christian came to affirm a certain position on a controversial topic where there is no Christian consensus, I hope my dissertation can help us understand why Christians can disagree on many different topics, leading to all the diversity of Christian belief and practices we see in the world today.

If we could break down all the reasons we believe as we do on any particular issue and discern which reason seems to be most central, then perhaps greater insight could be gained as to why Christians choose to affirm one perspective over another, even though we're all working with the same Bible.

This sort of self-analysis of our own theology would hopefully lead to having greater grace for Christians who come to differing conclusions, without demonizing them or questioning their salvation.

4. Having Grace for Those Who Disagree

After having finished my study of Edwards' view on predestination, I'm even more convinced that double predestination is not the best Biblical understanding of predestination. I would personally opt for understanding predestination as either corporate election of the Church as a whole, or election of individuals to earthly service.

However, I do appreciate what Edwards was attempting to do by standing up for the idea of salvation by faith alone, which is a gift based on God's grace and was purchased by Jesus' death on the cross.

Although Edwards has harsh words for the "Arminians" of his time, it must be noted that the people he called by this name were not teaching what is usually thought of today as Arminianism, if Arminianism is best defined by the beliefs of its originator, James Arminius.

Instead, these "Arminians" in Edwards' day were basically teaching moralism or legalism, and so claimed that people could be saved by doing good works and avoiding sin. This understanding of salvation is strikingly similar to the ancient teachings of Pelagius, which were condemned as heretical.

Augustine was rightly concerned about Pelagius's teachings, and used double predestination to argue against them. Double predestination also gained popularity during later times in church history when the gospel was being threatened by distortions that put undue emphasis on good works as being necessary for salvation, such as in the Reformation.

It seems that for theologians such as Augustine, Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Jonathan Edwards, allowing any room for human free will was seen as risky and as possibly supporting the idea that people could earn their salvation, or at least, people could deserve some credit for their salvation.

As a result, I can respect what these theologians were attempting to do. It's just too bad they felt the need to rely on double predestination in order to do it, when it has such negative implications for God's character. But I would prefer for people to be Calvinists if the only other option is to think that it's possible to earn salvation by doing good works, avoiding sin, or being a good person.

However, I think it is possible to affirm that salvation is by God's grace alone through faith alone, yet while still preserving room for human free will in salvation. This is because God allows people to freely choose whether they want to resist the work of the Holy Spirit in their hearts, as I've talked about here.

In my view, people who come to have faith in Christ need to give all the credit and glory to God and not to themselves, because all they did was choose to not resist the Holy Spirit. This could be an improvement on the usual way that Arminians describe people freely saying "yes" to God's offer of salvation, which could make it appear to Calvinists and others that people are actively doing something to be saved.

Thus, it can be useful to engage with the concerns of those on the "other side" of theological debates, in order to understand what their core concerns are, and then try to find ways to improve our own theology in an attempt at perhaps bridging the gap between the two. It can also force us to face the difficult verses that challenge our Biblical interpretation, rather than ignoring them like Edwards often did.

Conclusion

Yet I can't be too hard on Edwards. Through my study of Edwards' childhood and upbringing, I can relate to what it's like to grow up being worried about whether I was saved or not, and whether God is truly good and loving.

I can see how if Edwards had a spiritual experience that convinced him he was elect, it would likely have brought him great comfort and a conviction that God is good and loving (at least, toward Edwards himself and other 'elect' Christians). Perhaps Edwards' spiritual experience truly was a movement of God in his heart, which helped him get over these fears and enabled him to love God.

Fortunately for Edwards, his change of mind came just in time for him to graduate from his Master's degree, since back then in New England, it was necessary to affirm double predestination in order to become a respectable pastor. Perhaps God wanted to make sure Edwards could become a pastor, so that God could use him to preach the gospel to many people during the Great Awakening revivals.

Since no one's theology is perfect in this life (1 Corinthians 13:12), I can accept that it was better for Edwards to become a pastor than the alternative. There are also some very helpful and good things in his theology that I can appreciate and want to make use of in my future work.

I can also appreciate how Edwards stood up for the true gospel in the face of growing legalism and moralism. Maybe at that time, in that culture, Edwards' defense of the gospel using double predestination was the best that could be given?

So I can have grace for Edwards, and even for other Calvinists, even though I still think that double predestination has horrible implications for God's loving character. Personally, I believe that God really does want to save all people, but that people can freely reject God's offer of salvation, and that once anyone believes, they're eternally secure due to the indwelling Holy Spirit, as per Ephesians 1:13-14.

Yet I hope that though ongoing dialogue and by criticizing and challenging each other's theology, Calvinists and Arminians and open theists can all work at improving our own theology, while having grace for those who disagree.

If you would like to read my dissertation which gets into everything I've spoken about in this post in much more detail, you can download it as a .pdf by clicking here.

Footnotes:

• 1. Edwards, "Personal Narrative," in Works of Jonathan Edwards Online, Vol. 16, Letters and Personal Writings, ed. George S. Claghorn (Jonathan Edwards Center: Yale University, 2008), 792.
• 2. Mark A. Noll, "Edwards, Jonathan," in The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Modern Christian Thought, ed. Alister E. McGrath et al. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 145.
• 3. Stanley J. Grenz, David Guretzki, and Cherith Fee Nordling, Pocket Dictionary of Theological Terms (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 1999), 113.
• 4. Jonathan Edwards, "Dissertation 2: Concerning the End for which God Created the World," in The Works of Jonathan Edwards Online, Vol. 8, ed. Paul Ramsey (Jonathan Edwards Center, Yale University, 2008), 441-443.
• 5. William D. Mounce, "Predestination," in Mounce's Complete Expository Dictionary of Old & New Testament Words (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2006), 533-534.
• 6. Clark H. Pinnock, "The Destruction of the Finally Impenitent," Criswell Theological Review 4, no. 2 [1990]: 253–254.
• 7. William W. Klein, The New Chosen People: A Corporate View of Election, Revised and Expanded Version (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2015).
• 8. Shawn Lazar, Chosen to Serve: Why Divine Election Is To Service, Not To Eternal Life (Denton, TX: Grace Evangelical Society, 2017).
• 9. John Wesley, "Free Grace," in The Works of John Wesley, Volume 3: Sermons, ed. Albert Outler and Frank Baker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 554–557.
• 10. James Arminius, Arminius Speaks: Essential Writings on Predestination, Free Will, and the Nature of God, ed. John D. Wagner (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2011), 40–41.
• 11. Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 19–20, 125.
• 12. Clark Pinnock, "The Conditional View" in Four Views on Hell, ed. Stanley N. Gundry and William Crockett (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1996), 140.
• 13. Clark H. Pinnock, "Response to Part 1," in Reconstructing Theology: A Critical Assessment of the Theology of Clark Pinnock, ed. Tony J. Gray and Christopher Sinkinson (Waynesboro, GA: Paternoster, 2000), 84.
• 14.John Piper, "Does God Predestine People to Hell?" on YouTube Desiring God, November 19, 2017.
• 15. Some proponents of Edwards as a universalist or inclusivist include Anri Moromoto and Gerald McDermott. For more on this debate, see John J. Bombaro, Jonathan Edwards’s Vision of Reality: The Relationship of God to the World, Redemption History, and the Reprobate (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2012), 255-257, or Michael J.McClymond and Gerald R. McDermott, The Theology of Jonathan Edwards (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 589-598.