Abstract

This dissertation concerns itself with how early American thinkers dealt with the problem of "freedom of the will". Trinitarian Calvinists play an outsize role in this investigation, and the reason for that is not hard to find, since New England Calvinism made the will and its freedom one of the principal problems with which both had to deal. The "covenant" theology of New England was itself a will-oriented theory, as was the word covenant itself. However, this is even more a study of Jonathan Edwards, for Edward's greatest work, A Careful and Strict Inquiry into the Modern Prevailing Notions of that Freedom of Will, dealt with this dilemma in so sophisticated a fashion that all subsequent discussion of freedom of the will for a century thereafter turned into a referendum on his ideas. On the broadest level, Edwards aimed to address an international audience, and the seventeenth century's complete reversal of roles played by the usual participants in the free-will debate. But Edwards also intended to speak to a problem in New England minds, too. Ironically, Edwards's definition of freedom of the will frightened rather than consoled established Calvinists, chiefly because the corollaries which Edwards's disciples drew from Freedom of the Will turned into weapons which threatened to destroy established Calvinism. Instead, they labored to find other ways of preserving their Calvinism then Edwards's. In the end, they found an answer in Nathaniel William Taylor, who laid the troublesome ghost of Freedom of the Will to rest, at least as far as the peace of mind of American theology was concerned. That by no means meant the end of the free-will debate in America; but it did signal the end of its importance as a theological question, and the end of the prominence of theologians in discussing it