Jonathan Edwards on the Atonement

Evidence suggests Jonathan Edwards' adherence to a version of the penal substitution theory of atonement. Evidence also suggests that Edwards' version of the penal substitution theory requires certain metaphysical commitments about the nature of Christ's relationship to the elect, echoing those issued in his Original Sin 4.3, and elsewhere, regarding the relationship of Adam to his posterity. In what follows, I argue that such evidence points to Edwards' adherence to what has more recently been described in the literature of contemporary philosophical theology as an account of realist penal substitution.     

Nature and Grace: Two Participations in the Thought of Jonathan Edwards

Christian theologians are increasingly interested in both ontological and soteriological forms of participation theology. Paul Gavrilyuk challenges scholars to be more precise in how these relate to each other. This article contributes to the need for further precision by engaging with the thought of Jonathan Edwards. Edwards employed both types of participation, but did not embed one within the other. Ontological participation, dubbed ‘common participation’, undergirds created nature and is a methexis in God for being. Soteriological participation, dubbed ‘special participation’, explains special grace and is a relational koinonia in the love between the Father and the Son. These two participations are complementary and facilitate a clear distinction between nature and grace.     

Focus Introduction: Taking the Measure of Jonathan Edwards for Contemporary Religious Ethics

The Journal of Religious Ethics marks the tercentenary of Edwards's birth with the following collection of essays. In keeping with the overall mission of the journal, this tribute takes the form of historical and constructive reflection, in which diverse perspectives on Edwards's work and diverse forms of engagement with it supplement and correct one another. Our hope is that these essays will serve both to generate interest in Edwards's work among those who are unfamiliar with him, and to advance the discussion of central issues in theological and religious ethics. In this introductory essay, we will offer some reflections on Edwards's general significance for contemporary ethics, followed by a closer examination of his main texts and a brief summary of the essays collected here.     

Reading Abraham Lincoln: An Expert/Expert Study in the Interpretation of Historical Texts

This study explored how historians with different background knowledge read a series of primary source documents. Two university-based historians thought aloud as they read documents about Abraham Lincoln and the question of slavery, with the broad goal of understanding Lincoln's views on race. The first historian brought detailed content knowledge to the documents; the second historian was familiar with some of the themes in the documents but quickly became confused in the details. After much cognitive flailing, the second historian was able to piece together an interpretative structure that brought him by the task's end to where his more knowledgeable colleague began. Data analysis focused on how, lacking detailed content knowledge, this historian was able to regain his intellectual footing, work through confusion, and resist the urge to simplify. Implications of this work for cognitive analyses in history and education are discussed.     

Poverty, Patriotism, and National Covenant: Jonathan Edwards and Public Life

In this essay I address three ways in which Edwards can inform Christian understanding of public life. First I show how Edwards provides both philosophical and theological rationales for social engagement and thereby resists the separation of religion from public life, and use his consideration of poverty as an illustration. Part II examines Edwards's dialectical treatment of patriotism, demonstrating both its importance to the Christian life and its susceptibility to deceptive accommodation to culture. Finally, in Part III I discuss Edwards's use of "national covenant," which despite its temptation to chauvinism Edwards used to undermine national pride. In the conclusion I assess what we can use from Edwards for contemporary Christian understandings of public life.     

Abraham Lincoln and Harry Potter: Children’s differentiation between historical and fantasy characters

Based on the testimony of others, children learn about a variety of figures that they never meet. We ask when and how they are able to differentiate between the historical figures that they learn about (e.g., Abraham Lincoln) and fantasy characters (e.g., Harry Potter). Experiment 1 showed that both younger (3- and 4-year-olds) and older children (5-, 6-, and 7-year-olds) understand the status of familiar figures, correctly judging historical figures to be real and fictional figures to be pretend. However, when presented with information about novel figures embedded in either a realistic narrative or a narrative with obvious fantasy elements, only older children used the narrative to make an appropriate assessment of the status of the protagonist. In Experiment 2, 3-, and 4-year-olds were prompted to judge whether the story events were really possible or not. Those who did so accurately were able to deploy that judgment to correctly assess the status of the protagonist.     

Enacting the self: Buddhist and Enactivist approaches to the emergence of the self

In this paper, I take up the problem of the self through bringing together the insights, while correcting some of the shortcomings, of Indo–Tibetan Buddhist and enactivist accounts of the self. I begin with an examination of the Buddhist theory of non-self (anātman) and the rigorously reductionist interpretation of this doctrine developed by the Abhidharma school of Buddhism. After discussing some of the fundamental problems for Buddhist reductionism, I turn to the enactive approach to philosophy of mind and cognitive science. I argue that human beings, as dynamic systems, are characterized by a high degree of self-organizing autonomy. Therefore, human beings are not reducible to the more basic mental and physical events that constitute them. I critically examine Francisco Varela’s enactivist account of the self as virtual and his use of Buddhist ideas in support of this view. I argue, in contrast, that while the self is emergent and constructed, it is not merely virtual. Finally I sketch a Buddhist-enactivist account of the self. I argue for a non-reductionist view of the self as an active, embodied, embedded, self-organizing process—what the Buddhists call ‘I’-making (ahaṃkāra). This emergent process of self-making is grounded in the fundamentally recursive processes that characterize lived experience: autopoiesis at the biological level, temporalization and self-reference at the level of conscious experience, and conceptual and narrative construction at the level of intersubjectivity. In Buddhist terms, I will develop an account of the self as dependently originated and empty, but nevertheless real.