From: johnny moral (johnnymoral@hotmail.com)
Date: Mon Jun 09 2003 - 08:09:59 BST
Well, I may as well start on my promised citations from various books about
Jonathan Edwards with one about Free Will, or as the subject is known in the
theological realm, Arminianism, after its chief proponent Jacob Arminius.
From James Carse's "Jonathan Edwards and the Visibility Of God:"
By putting himself under the Lockean teaching that the proper question is
not whether the will be free but whether the man be free, Edwards was in a
position to formulate the nature of man's relationship to God that followed
neither the Arminians nor the traditional Calvinists. By way of a
preliminary definition, Edwards writes that the will "is plainly, that by
which the mind chooses anything, The faculty of the will is that faculty or
power or principle of mind by which it is capable of choosing: an act of the
will is the same as an act of choosing or choice." This is the
conventional definition, and it is not until we ask why the will chooses,
and what determines which object it will choose, that we find Edwards moving
out into his own territory. He answers that "it is that motive, which, as
it stands in the view of the mind, is the strongest, that determines the
will." A motive is not something operating on the will from the outside,
like one link on another or a rider on a horse, but it is rather the VIEW of
something external to the will.
Edwards has eliminated the mechanistic description of the will's
operations, and replaced it with the living human mind. The human mind is
not an inert peice of equiptment that will wait in idleness until it is
activated by an external agent; it is life itself. It is the source of our
humanness; it is not a thing at all, but an action; it is our viewing of the
world, and our judging it; it is the richly interpenetrated confluence of
our passions and fears, our prejudice and our habits. To say that the mind
is anyone thing, or that it operates according to any one procedure, is
obviously impossible. To look directly into the human mind is to look
directly into a mystery which cannot be exhausted by any amount of
metaphorical descriptions. That the mind is located in the brain, or that
it is identical to some physical process, is manifest nonsense. Should we
cut open the skull and analyze by the subtlest scientific methods the
structure and compositoin of that organ we should know no more about the
ideas and thoughts and values that man had, than if we had attempted, by
studying the leg of a cadaver, to determine where he had wandered over the
face of this earth. It is this mystery which stands directly in Edwards
view. He knows that when he comes to that final statement of the nature of
the human will he must so state it that it will comprehend the whole
situation of man as an ever alive participant in the rushing currents of
history. He makes the statemenet with disarming coolness: "The will always
is as the greatest apparent good is."
There are several arresting consequences to this. The first is that it
effectively elimiates from our talking about the will the necessity of
referring to determinancy. As Edwards explains,
" I have rather chosen to express myself thus, that the will always is as
the greatest apparent good, or as what seems most agreeable; because an
appearing most agreeable or pleasing to the mind, and the mind's preferring
and choosing, seem hardly to be properly and perfectly distinct."
Another consequence is that it puts man out into the thrust and rush of
the historical process without giving him any access to eternal verities or
realities that can permanently withstand the change of the moment. Man is
restricted to what APPEARS to him; he cannot go behind the appearances to
the real thing. Here we can see how the boy still lives in the man [that's
in reference to his youthful idealism]; for there is in this statement the
same intellectual clarity that caused young Edwards to reject Locke's "magic
onions." [Carse's term for Locke's view of substance] We must emphasize
again that when Edwards uses the term "apparent" he does not mean to set it
in contrast with something "real" and non-apparent; he means to draw our
attention to the fact that it is our VIEW of the thing, and not the thing
itself, that counts in the action of the will. In this sense, the term
"apparent" is equivilent to the term "visible." That which falls outside
our view, therfore, has no effect on our mind.
...It would certainly preserve the mystery of the human soul, and it would
satisfy Edward's desire that we "speak in the old way as truly and properly
as ever," if we summaraized his teaching with this proposition: To say that
all mental events are determined is merely to say that whatever a man does,
he does for a reason.
Those Edwards quotes were all from Freedom of the Will, as quoted in James
Carse
on-line (cool!): http://www.ccel.org/e/edwards/will/home.html
more to come on Edwards' dynamic conception of God.
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