"Spoiling the Egyptians": Jonathan Edwards's Theocentric Vision of the God-Creation Relationship in its Early Modern Context
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the face of the rise of intellectual movements that valued the central dependency on the powers of human reason and capabilities to construct and maintain a flourishing world, Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) responded by offering an alternative Scripture-based theocentric and Trinitarian vision of life that entails participation in the fullness of Christ. Edwards’s vision has extensive relevance even in our present scientific age because of his individualized adaptation of the philosophical concepts he shared with his interlocutors. This dissertation examines how Edwards despoiled his interlocutors’ ideas by creatively using their philosophical categories and reworking them for his own purposes. First, I look at how he challenged the mechanical view of the natural world provided by the natural philosophers by insisting on creation’s utter dependency on God. Unlike the distant God of the providential deists, Edwards’s theology of nature postulates an all-encompassing God who discloses himself through creation in the language of a Scripture-based natural typology. Next, I explore the topic of human understanding and show how Edwards reworked John Locke’s concept of simple ideas into what he called a “new spiritual sense”: a refashioning that resulted in a sophisticated unLockean view of spiritual understanding. Edwards also turned the moral sense philosophers’ notions of universal benevolence and virtue on their heads by basing a person’s ethical life on divine love. Finally, I analyze how Edwards opposed the deists, arguing for the plausibility of the revelation-based Christian faith and challenging their notion of human reason as the sole judge of what is true. I conclude by commending Edwards’s vision of the God-creation relationship as a far richer and more dynamic and vibrant way of perceiving our world than the sterile, reductionistic worldview our present Western society has inherited from the early modern age. Thus, I present Edwards as a compelling apologetic exemplar, in both approach and substance.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it