From: Barritt (mbarritt@nc.rr.com)
Date: Tue Jun 10 2003 - 01:54:22 BST
One day, the universe awoke and asked, "now what do I want to do today?"
----- Original Message -----
From: "johnny moral" <johnnymoral@hotmail.com>
To: <moq_discuss@moq.org>
Sent: Monday, June 09, 2003 3:09 AM
Subject: MD Edwards on Free Will
> 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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