GODLY MIND: PURITAN REFORMED ORTHODOXY AND JOHN LOCKE IN JONATHAN EDWARDS’S CONCEPTION OF GRACIOUS COGNITION AND CONVICTION

Abstract

How is it that, among comparably intelligent, well-intentioned people exposed to the same arguments, some seem to apprehend the truth of metaphysical and theological propositions, and others do not? Is some sort of disposition to susceptibility necessary, particular to individuals, in addition to conceptual understanding? Ancient Platonists and Peripatetics thought so. Puritan theologians in New England did also. Among people who repeatedly heard the same sermonic exposition and exhortation, and knew the formal doctrines articulated therein, some seemed to apprehend these as existential realities in respect to themselves, and others to entertain them, more or less earnestly, as propositions of varying abstractness and probability. For New England Puritans and Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), the phenomenon of differential conviction posed a practical and theoretical problem respecting the content and character of saving conversion, which they considered the decisive event in Christian life.