Writing a hundred years ago, Benjamin Warfield looked on the New Divinity teaching of Jonathan Edwards Jun., Samuel Hopkins and Joseph Bellamy as a lost cause. He felt it had forsaken all traces of Calvinism for Pelagianism, becoming the staple fare of Arminians. He looked upon it as an evangelistic, revivalist movement quite void of a Christian gospel with its rejection of the satisfaction of Christ and the doctrine of imputation and perversion of Edwards Sen.’s philosophical …
Posts Tagged Jonathan Edwards Junior
… theology, modified Calvinism radically. Its adherents, termed Edwardeans, took the go-ahead from Jonathan Edwards, hence their nick-name. However, they drew conclusions from Edward’s highly philosophical view of man, that were wildly speculative. This was particularly the case regarding man’s supposed ‘natural’ and ‘moral’ attributes. Joseph Bellamy (1719-90), Samuel Hopkins (1721-1803), Jonathan Edwards Jr. (1745-1801), Nathaniel Emmons (1745-1801) and Timothy Dwight (1752-1817) …
… teaching is Kirk Wellum on Caleb Evans when he argues, “Following the New England theologian Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), he (Evans) argued that men and women did not come to God through Christ because they were morally unwilling and rebellious, not because they lacked the natural ability (the thinking, feeling, willing facilities) to respond to the call of God in the gospel. They did not come because they did not want to come.”
Though Edwards distinguishes between moral …
… is the ‘natural light’ philosophy that Fuller obtained by reading the Cambridge Platonist John Edwards whom he mistook for Jonathan Edwards, the New England revivalist. Fuller’s logic, however, is built on his high view of man and his low view of the Fall; two very unscriptural positions. He sees the total fall as a rejection of Christ. Up to then, there is an Esau and a Jacob in all men, one or the other waiting to come out. The Bible teaches that man is doomed to death for disobeying …
The Atonement
Aug 17
… and the Fullerites amongst the Baptists. In America, after the Influence of Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards had declined, Grotianism was adopted and further liberalised by the New Divinity School of Jonathan Edwards Jun., Joseph Bellamy, Samuel Hopkins and Nathaniel W. Taylor. These were men who paved the way for a thorough-going rejection of the Biblical doctrine of the Atonement. The latter school, according to modern writers such as Professor Michael Haykin, was influential in …
… every man’s lot, though he might not have sinned like Adam
In the eighteenth century, Jonathan Edwards, a great theologian but a fond dabbler in philosophical riddles, taught that man must be seen both as a natural and as a moral being. He did this to make it easier to analyse the effect of sin on man but managed to separate in man what Scripture sees as a unity. This led Edward’s students, including his son of the same name, to develop a dualistic theology of man in his nature …
… confessed to have been influenced in his understanding of the Gospel by reading the works of John Edwards of Cambridge (1737-1716),which he found ‘good’, obviously mistaking the Cambridge man for Jonathan Edwards of New England whom had been recommended to him by his friend Robert Hall, Sen. of Arnsby. One scholarly work links John Edwards with the Cambridge Neo-Platonists. This could explain why Fuller emphasises the figurative nature of penal redemption and imputation in his theology …
Demythologising History
Nov 9
… Samuel Ward, Richard Holdsworth, Philip Nye, John White, Cornelius Burgess, John Durie, Thomas Edwards, Thomas Goodwin, Daniel Featley, Joseph Hall, William Laud, George Abbot, Joseph Mead, Robert Leighton, John Bergius and the bulk of British scientists, educators, poets and writers, besides a majority of German, Dutch, Swiss, Polish, Romanian, Hungarian and Swedish Reformers, all refute Wilson.
Wilson’s self-altered maxim concerning bishops and kings is also pointless as the …
… Antinomian. It would have been opportune to hear why even such moderate Calvinist as John Ryland Junior, in his defence of Gill, Brine and Toplady against accusations of Antinomianism, named Lady Huntingdon’s Connexion especially as being tinged with the error. Furthermore, the long controversy with the Huntingtonians is only mentioned in a footnote in which Huntington is called a Hyper-Calvinist although he was a Sublapsarian who wrote widely against Antinomianism and was a Free Offer man …
Putting an End to Sin
Aug 21
… that red thread. I attach some thoughts on the subject as a reaction to a New Focus article by Jonathan Bayes under the title ‘Propitiation for the World: Some Thoughts on 1 John 2:2b.’
In this article, the author does his best to explain away the meaning of ‘whole world’, and also the propitiation the world from sin. Indeed, he relates propitiation of sin merely to ‘ours only’ in the text and not to ‘world’s.’ The original is so long that I cannot possibly …
