The Work
A Careful and Strict Enquiry into the Modern Prevailing Notions of that Freedom of Will, Which Is Supposed to Be Essential to Moral Agency, Virtue and Vice, Reward and Punishment, Praise and Blame was published by S. Kneeland in Boston in 1754 and is universally regarded as Jonathan Edwards's greatest philosophical work and one of the finest works of American philosophy in the colonial period. Its full title announces its method and target: it is a careful enquiry, using the standards of Enlightenment philosophical reasoning, into the Arminian notion of free will - the view, championed by Daniel Whitby and others, that genuine moral responsibility requires a freedom of self-determination that is incompatible with Calvinist predestination.
Edwards had absorbed Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) at Yale and used it against the Arminians: Locke's empiricist account of the mind, Edwards argued, actually supports Calvinist compatibilism rather than Arminian libertarianism. The argument synthesizes Calvinist theology with Lockean philosophy in a way that left the Arminian position without a defensible reply for generations.
Biblical Engagement
Romans 9:18 - 'Therefore hath he mercy on whom he will have mercy, and whom he will he hardeneth' - is the locus classicus of Calvinist theology that Edwards takes as his starting point. Paul's argument in Romans 9 - that God's election is not based on human merit or effort but on divine sovereignty ('it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that sheweth mercy,' v. 16) - establishes the theological claim that Edwards's philosophical argument is designed to defend. If God's will determines who will be saved, and if human choices are also determined by prior causes including divine providential causation, then Arminian free will is both philosophically incoherent and scripturally unsupported.
John 6:44 - 'No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him: and I will raise him up at the last day' - is Christ's statement that coming to him is not simply a matter of human volition but requires divine 'drawing.' Edwards reads this verse as clear evidence that human choice in spiritual matters is not self-originating: the Father's drawing is the cause of the coming, not merely its occasion or accompaniment. The Arminian view - that God draws all people equally and that individual response is the decisive factor - cannot, Edwards argues, do justice to 'except the Father draw him.'
Proverbs 21:1 - 'The king's heart is in the hand of the LORD, as the rivers of water: he turneth it whithersoever he will' - is the Old Testament text that most directly asserts divine sovereignty over human volition, even royal human volition. If God turns the king's heart as rivers are turned, then human choices - including the choices of the most powerful human beings - are within the scope of divine providential causation. Edwards uses this verse to show that the biblical tradition does not teach the libertarian free will the Arminians invoke.
Acts 2:23 - 'Him, being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain' - is the verse from Peter's Pentecost sermon that shows divine determination and human moral responsibility operating simultaneously. The crucifixion was both 'the determinate counsel of God' and the 'wicked' act of human agents. This is the biblical basis for Edwards's compatibilism: human choices are causally determined by God's providential ordering and morally attributable to the human agents who make them. The two claims are not contradictory.
The Philosophical Argument
Edwards's central argument is that 'free will' in the Arminian sense - a self-caused choice uncaused by any prior disposition or motive - is incoherent. Every choice is caused by something: if not by the agent's character, desires, or strongest motive, then by nothing at all. But a choice caused by nothing is not a free choice; it is random. The only coherent concept of freedom is the ability to act as one pleases - and this is compatible with the agent's pleasing being itself determined by prior causes.
This compatibilist argument was not new - it appears in Thomas Hobbes and anticipated Kant - but Edwards's development of it in dialogue with Locke and against the specific Arminian targets of his day was unusually precise and sustained.
Author and Context
Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) was the greatest theologian and philosopher of colonial America. He entered Yale at thirteen, graduated at seventeen, and served as the Congregationalist pastor of Northampton, Massachusetts, from 1727 to 1750 - when he was dismissed by his congregation over a controversy about admission to communion. He served subsequently as a missionary to Native Americans in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where he wrote Freedom of the Will, and died shortly after taking office as president of what would become Princeton University.
Edwards wrote Freedom of the Will in a period of theological controversy: the Great Awakening (1740-1742) had divided New England Congregationalism between those who supported the revival (Old Lights) and those who opposed it (New Lights), and the theological debates about grace, conversion, and the will were intense. Edwards's philosophical defense of Calvinist predestination was the culmination of decades of theological reflection.
Reception and Legacy
Freedom of the Will was immediately recognized as a definitive philosophical treatment. Samuel Hopkins, Joseph Bellamy, and the 'New Divinity' movement that dominated New England theology for the next century built their theology on Edwards's foundations. In the twentieth century, philosophical interest in compatibilism - the view that free will and determinism are compatible - has returned to Edwards as a sophisticated early statement of the position. His argument anticipates the contemporary debate between compatibilists and libertarians in philosophy of action.