“Edwards’ Vision and the Religion that Whitefield and Franklin Shaped”
Lecture 3 by Dr. George Marsden
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
Princeton Theological Seminary

Lecture / Blogging Schedule

In the first lecture, Marsden looked at what Edwards would think of our culture today. In the second, he reflected on how Franklin might consider our modern society.

Tonight, Marsden treated us to a cameo appearance of Edwards’ contemporary, George Whitefield. Although he was English, Whitefield made five trips to America. In the 1740’s he became the best known preacher in America. Whitefield played an immense role in shaping American religious history and culture, far more than Edwards. Almost every Protestant denomination could claim Whitefield as their progenitor. Whitefield was at the heart of civil religion.

As is well known, Whitefield was the leading figure in the Great Awakening. While was a pious young man (apparently a “nerdy-looking” one at that), but had a preaching voice like an opera star. In fact, Ben Franklin visited one of Whitefield’s revivals and gave money to his cause. He said that Whitefield could preach to 30,000 people if needed. He was one of the great entrepreneurs of religion, an innovator in using the press to keep himself in the news. Whitefield he was a person of great integrity, even as he was promoting himself as a preacher.

Although Whitefield and Edwards were both involved in the Great Awakening, and they respected each other very much, Whitefield was personally much closer to Ben Franklin. He stayed in Franklin’s home, and suggested that they found a colony in Ohio to do missions in the Indians there. Whitefield and Franklin had very similar outlooks in some respects. Franklin saw Whitefield’s religion as helpful to society. Both were skilled in promoting themselves, in being “self-made men.”

The friendship between them connects with the traits of later American religion. Both Franklin and Whitefield believed that religion should be voluntary, not something that should be forced by the state as in Europe. American diversity made this a necessity, but Whitefield made it a virtue before it was necessary.

Marsden believes that American voluntarism is a good thing, and so is the separation of church and state. But it has immense implications for the place of religion in American culture. Most successful churches have had to use marketing strategies to grow. Sometimes this explanation is exaggerated, because the logic of it is that the religion will become adapted to what people already want and believe. In fact, what has happened is that many of the most popular religious movements have actually challenged the beliefs and behaviors of their audiences, providing an alternative through the classical tenets of the Christian faith. Despite marketing strategies, Whitefield would still recognize the Gospel in American religion today.

It’s also true that the voluntary principal meant that the important aspects of the Christian faith were also left out in order to draw people in. There are demands that marketing makes on the faith that tend to distort the message.

The synthesis of American protestant evangelical Christianity with modern enlightenment thinking took place in the early republic. Marsden commended Mark Noll as the most effective person in describing this synthesis in his book, America’s God. In continental Europe, there was a push against such a synthesis. Abraham Kuyper (among others) was part of the Anti-Revolution party; his brand of Christianty was opposed to the Enlightenment and provided a cultural critique. The traditional American Protestantism was very open to the Enlightenment ideals. They borrowed 18th century outlooks and assumptions that were compelling with their faith. Princeton Seminary itself was a good example of this synthesis. After all, B.B. Warfield did not really understand Kuyper’s cultural critique.

The broad point is that the combination of the voluntary principle and it’s result for modern ideology after the American revolution has contributed to a religious culture that treats Christianity as a private personal matter.

Despite lots of Christians having selected political agendas and moral causes, most American Protestantism leaves the basic assumptions of American culture alone. Most American Protestants don’t think of their religions in terms of a cultural critique. Sometimes they have a political or moral cause which may energize the Right or the Left, but there are many things that they don’t address.

American Christianity is not secular but a paradoxical mix of secularism and religion. It’s fascinating to try to understand. America is the most religious nation, and 90% of Americans believe in God. Two-thirds of these still consider the traditional Christian God to be their God.

When we imagine Whitefield returning here to our day and age, it’s fair to say that he would be astonished at how secular we are and yet how many religious believers there are and that these religious believers are quite content with the culture in tranquility. He would be astonished that we believe that we consider this the greatest nation on earth. Marsden believes that one of the central features of American modern culture is that we live dual lives. The Franklin aspects of method and technique (methodological secularism) have become part of the public culture that religion seldom touches. Religion has become a private affair.

This dualism has reached epidemic proportions today. Marsden invoked a recent study by Christian Smith that suggests how pervasive these trends are. His new book, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, says that teens are not rebelling against their faith. However, 90% of those teens survey cannot articulate what’s special about their particular tradition. Most importantly, however, they articulate a religious worldview that Smith characterizes as “moralistic therapeutic deism.” Most teens believe in a vague moral order like Franklin’s deism, where God is essentially separate from the world. Yet they believe that God serves a therapeutic function where he might be called on for comfort and strength. This is evidence that the evangelical religion of Whitefield has thrived, as has Franklin’s humanistic philosophy.

Charles Taylor refers to the default position of humanism, where the principle is that there is no good beyond human flourishing. However, perhaps American churches tend to include God as an agent to guarantee human flourishing. So we might better characterize American religion as “theistic, therapeutic, humanism.”

Robert Jenson, in his book on Jonathan Edwards, makes the point that American mainline Protestantism tends to make sure that God never violates human personality. Similarly, evangelicalism is riddled with promises of personal happiness and growth in self-esteem. What’s missing in this popular theistic therapeutic humanism is the traditional Christian doctrine of human depravity or sin. The disappearance of depravity in the last century is surprising given the world wars and genocides that we have witnessed. Depravity has the most empirical evidence of all doctrines. Yet we hear little of it in most churches today, and any mention of our inevitable failings tend not to be our fault at all. But, not to worry: with God we can overcome them! In our political culture, we are congratulated on our great virtues, while our media culture celebrates human sinfulness. Advertising capitalizes our most pervasive motivating traits which tend to be 6 our the 7 deadly sins: pride, envy, greed, gluttony, sloth, and lust. And even anger manages to motivate us through talk-radio.

Churches avoid these extremes, but they tiptoe around the doctrine that says there might be something wrong with all of us. Human depravity is one of the leading themes of our greatest artists. It turns out that our secular humanists have pointed out defects in human nature better than Christians have. And so we lack any sense of tragedy in our culture.

Jonathan Edwards and The Beauty of God
For Edwards, the immensely high view of humanity is based in our intimacy with the Triune God. We are called to be the bride of Christ for Edwards. Thus there is great tragedy when we spurn God’s love and rebel against God for the sake of our own pleasure. Edwards’ greatest treatises were directed against the 18th century trend to build philosophies around the idea that God was not necessary. For Edwards, we need God to love God and love others. In original sin and true virtue, he shows how a world of self-interested agents would fail to build a world of harmony and peace. Even if we recognize sins in ourselves, we cannot cure them through our therapeutic self-help. We need to see the limits of human nature and stop putting ourselves at the center of reality. In order to have this realistic view of ourselves, we need to have our eyes opened to see the beauty of God’s love so that we are drawn to and transformed by its active power.

It's easier to describe this love than to sustain it. Edwards believed that we are very good at self-deception, and the human heart is a labyrinth of religious deceit. In Puritanism, religion was used for self-love and Edwards spent much of his life trying to figure out what is truly genuine religion.

Edwards’ theology truly counters the tendency for human self-interest to control our thinking and activity. Self-centered tendencies are present in progressive theologians, but are also found in popular evangelists. These tendencies describe the universe as built for our welfare and happiness, so that we identify the principles that work for our benefit, and we characterize God according to those principles that we discover. Edwards by contrast believes that the love of the triune God defines what is good and beneficial for us. Human good and happiness is part of God’s sovereign plan, but that’s very different from the happiness that we derive from ourselves.

It would be helpful for modern Christians to cultivate a stronger sense of our human limits. Most people believe that God does exists for our own sake. Often when people leave their faith, they say “I could not believe in a God that allowed such and such to happen.” We often start with our own standards of justice and construct God in our own image. But Edwards’ greatest theological insight goes beyond the sort of more conventional evangelism of Whitefield, and it’s helpful for keeping our focus on God rather than ourselves.

This emphasis is Edwards' alternative to modern ways of thinking is this: the emphasis on God’s beauty. We tend to think of beauty as in a passive sense, as a transcendent ideal, as if it’s for contemplation when we go away from our work. For Edwards, beauty is at the heart of practicality, of all human action. It’s the most active part of God’s attributes, that attribute called “love.” For Edwards, all of life is worship. The experience of God’s beauty is transforming and captures our affections and desires which are the sources of our actions. Edwards’ has a theology of active beauty. God’s beauty is a useful way of explaining the paradox between God’s grace and our choice. If this wholly gracious turn of heart is our own act, and the actions that follow are our choices, then if we think of the power of beauty, we cannot help but be drawn to it.

Of course, the transforming work of the Spirit is necessary to open our eyes beyond ourselves to see the transforming beauty of Christ’s work. We must be given eyes to see. Hence the emphasis by Edwards on “awakening,” the sensible change of affections that gives evidence of a true change of heart.

Edwards loved to use musical analogies to speak of this transforming beauty. Because of our depravity, our lives are out of harmony with God’s life. We do not have right relation with God. Our lives are made up of discordant notes. We might have trivial tunes, which are dissonant against the background of God’s opus. We must cease “whistling our own tunes” and listen to God’s symphony of his inner Trinitarian love.

Tomorrow, Lecture IV: “Jonathan and Sarah Attend a Megachurch: the Religious Affections and Evangelicalism Today” will be summarized over at The Fire and the Rose.