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For Taylor, the efficient cause of an act was the bride's free will, an act of willing initiated by nothing but itself. Taylor himself did not think Edwards had stigmatized this position and made his own position compatible with Freedom of the Will by noting Edwards' inferences from the work of his English Arminian antagonists, Daniel Whitby and Thomas Chubb. For Edwards, these men argued that a person acted without motives and, consequently, that the will was determined only by itself. Then, according to Edwards' famous argument, a previous act of will determined the initial act. Edwards' inference might have been fair, but no one defended such a position, for all believed that no one acted in the absence of motives, even if individuals were free to act, or not to act, in spite of all motives. Indeed, Taylor explicitly said that the will always acted with motives, so that the will alone never determined action—thereby, he thought, agreeing with the president. But his reason for agreeing was not that the will lacked spontaneity (which Edwards denied), but that motives always accompanied willing. Edwards' original opponents in actuality limited the spontaneous power of the will in the same way that Taylor did. The will had a competency to attend or not to attend to a presented motive, and to act or not to act as it pleased. Do we want to call someone an Edwardsean who stands on this issue with Whitby and Chubb?
Why is Sweeney driven to make Taylor an Edwardsean? Some of this is a quibble over who gets called what, and the semantics leave much to be desired. I don't care if Taylor is an Edwardsean or not. But Sweeney's interest needs to be explained.
The main group of historians who see Taylor as a trickster and underminer of Calvinist verities are practicing Presbyterians, still clinging to the idea that Charles Hodge at Princeton should be regarded as the 19th century's great figure, a thinker still unappreciated. Sweeney, I believe, is taking on this historiographic tradition. He wants to rescue Taylor from the descendants of the enemies he acquired at Princeton in the 1830s.
I sympathize with the rescue of Taylor, but what Sweeney has in mind is not the right way to go about it. Taylor is the major creative religious philosopher in America in the 100-year period between Edwards and Bushnell. To regard him as great, we do not need to claim him for the Edwardsean tradition; he is no more Edwardsean than Bushnell is, or is not, a Taylorian; or Edwards is a Lockean. He is just Taylor. Sweeney's categorization—or rather the fact that he puts so much weight on making the categorization—suggests to me he is still caught up in the battles of 19th-century theology, as if what is at issue is how close, or not so close, these men were to The Truth of Edwards.
I began this review by intimating that one problem at issue is how likely it is that volumes such as Sweeney's will resurrect these long gone but remarkably astute divines. I believe such studies of ideas will revitalize general interest in these men if the studies find a way themselves to break out of the grip of the New England Theology. If you doubt this conclusion, try to interest yourself in my paragraph eight.
Bruce Kuklick is Nichols Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author most recently of A History of Philosophy in America: 1720-2000 (Oxford Univ. Press).
Copyright © 2003 by the author or Christianity Today International/Books & Culture magazine.
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