Transcript Jonathan Edwards* Work Ethic

Jonathan Edwards:
The Beauty of Work
A Colonial American argument for
social responsibility in the workplace
Why I’m interested in Edwards
I’m a “blue-blooded Boston
Brahman”.
I’m a Christian ethicist and
theologian.
I’m the director of the Jonathan
Edwards Center – Poland.
Why you are interested, intrigued
or infuriated by Edwards.
You teach or study American
literature, culture, history and/or
(business) ethics.
You are forced to read/teach
“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry
God”.
Why we love/hate Edwards
He’s a Calvinist. How do you like
someone who believes God creates
people just to send most of them to hell?
He appeals to idealistic philosophy,
metaphysics, and the Bible.
He uses big words and archaic grammar.
Crossing Borders: Why we struggle to
understand Edwards
The “Sinners” sermon is a
rhetorical masterpiece – but it is
set in a cultural, intellectual,
religious climate far removed from
readers today.
Beyond Words – Crossing Borders
For Edwards, ‘doctrinal statements’ function
as grammatical rules implicit in discourse.
Doctrine is foundational for the ethical,
philosophical, theological structures that
draw upon it.
Theology is an “ad hoc performance … a tool
in Christian communal self-description [which
requires us to constantly restate doctrine] in
the light of cultural and conceptual change.”
A paradigm shift in ethics
A shift from universalist accounts
toward particularist accounts ‘that
proceed from within a specific
historical and theological context.”
This allows us to compare particular
systems and authors.
God’s Sovereignty
and Human Free Will?
For Edwards free will is not an
instrument for moral struggle
and victorious achievement, but
a capacity for friendship and
mystic communion.
Edwards’ Ethics: Three main ideas
 Beauty is the key to understanding God as
well as the nature and dynamics of (the
spiritual) and moral life.
 The creation of the world was/is the joyful
overflowing of the fullness of being and
beauty in the divine life.
 The Christian (religious, human, ethical) life
is renewed by participating in the divine life.
The Heart of Edwards’
Ethical Systems = Beauty
Edwards’ ethics is not fueled by
the fires of hell but enlightened
by the the beauty of God.
Beauty is relational
Beauty is “consent to being”.
 Primary (spiritual) beauty is warm,
heart-felt consent to being in general.
 Secondary (natural) beauty is symmetry,
proportion, harmony.
Divine Life is Relational
Trinity: mutual relationship of love.
God’s idea of himself is perfect –
this is God the Son. The Holy Spirit
is the result of mutual love
between the Father and Son.
Hell? Yes! But erotic love?
“In Edward’s Trinitarian writings
there is a strong theme that
accords with the emphasis in
contemporary feminist ethics on
the positive role of erotic love
and intimacy.”
William Danaher
Beauty is love
Love is relationship.
Love is the sum and root of all
virtues, moral attitudes and
actions.
Divine Life is Active
Beauty is active not passive.
It is not being beautiful but
“beautifying”.
God’s essential virtues are
knowledge, love and joy.
Divine Life is Relational
„The Father is the principle of
happiness, the Son the principle of
knowledge and understanding, and
the Spirit the principle of love.
Hence…the Father has love because
the Holy Spirit dwells in him; the
Father understanding because the
Son dwells in Him, and so on.
Creation: Divine Life Overflowing
God’s joy could not be contained, it
overflowed and the world was
created as an extension of the
beauty and life of God.
For God love is a disposition, a
habit, a life-style.
Edwards was a panentheist!
Creation: God enlarges himself
God gives himself to others, creates
them to love and be loved.
Human beings are created in God’s
image, to love, to seek relationships,
to bless and to beautify.
The Image of God
Humans beings created in the
image of God are also active
(dynamic), relational, creative
beings.
Personalism: Ethics arises from the
encounter with another person.
Participation in the Divine Life
Our
lives
are
transformed
by
perceiving beauty, by reverence for
the presence and power of (divine,
religious, ethical, human) life.
This awakens a desire to participate in
that life, to participate in its
beautifying activity.
Edwards and John Lennon?
“Imagine all the people …”
Ethical Imagination
Imagining the world as a better
place is the first, essential step
to making it a better place.
Three Questions
Communitarianism versus liberalism?
Morality in business? Social
responsibility in the marketplace?
Common (ethical) ground between
Christians, humanists, agnostics,
followers of other religions?
Core commitments of liberalism
Constitutionalism: rule of law
Individual human rights
Special priority of individual rights
with respect to the common good
Libertarians versus Liberals
Libertarians (“classic liberals”) argue
for a robust set of property rights that
rules out government redistribution and
requires a laissez-faire capitalist
economy.
(Egalitarian) liberals argue that some
redistribution is necessary to preserve
equality of opportunity and to prevent
or ameliorate poverty.
Communitarianism
The liberal tradition puts too much
emphasis on individual liberty and too
little on community.
Community is a crisscrossing network
of relationships between a group of
individuals who share a common set of
values, norms.
Carrot and stick approach.
Communitarianism vs. Liberalism
Communitarians accept liberalism’s
core commitments of
constitutionalism and individual
human rights.
Communitarians argue for a
communitarian form of liberalism,
with a less expansive interpretation of
basic human rights.
Mark Valeri:
Edwards & Business Ethics: 3 phases
(1) Idealistic: Puritan ideals for
economic practice.
(2) Pragmatic: practical economic
reform, focus on church not
society.
(3) Sceptical: looked to external
controls of the market.
Phase 1: Virtue leads to wealth, but
wealth corrupts
A prosperous society was a godly society.
A godly society was a cohesive society.
In a cohesive society individuals
sacrificed private interest for the public
good.
Therefore, a wise people relinquished
their private interests for the common
good.
Phase 2: The visible church as a
reforming society
He believed spiritual regeneration
brings social reformation.
Revivals would spark social
benevolence.
Northampton's elite should model
justice in their economic dealings.
Phase 2: Shades of Max Weber
The rich should act industriously for
the benefit of society.
Sloth is a disgrace to one's calling.
God prospers those who are of a
liberal, charitable, bountiful spirit.
Phase 2: Max Weber, but …
Wealth belongs ultimately to the
community … individuals are
stewards of the common wealth.
Benevolence is most effective when
channeled through the church.
Phase 3: Economic Crisis
 market controls
Crisis: inflation, depreciation, trade
imbalance, budget (gov’t) deficits,
poor investments, private debt.
Edwards despaired of a Christian
economic system, and proposed
specific rules of economic policy.
Phase 3: Distrust of human nature
 distrust of the market.
Edwards did not trust the hidden
hand of the market.
His resistance to a market economy
followed from his suspicion of
private enterprise, which in turn
resulted from his view of human
nature as fallen and sinful.
Johan Serré: “Buying and Selling”:
Edwards and the Free Market
Edwards’ understood the most important
threats to a free market economy (1)
monopoly, (2) information asymmetry, (3)
externalities.
Edwards expressed insights into the ‘law of
supply and demand’ and understood that
“buying and selling” (if regulated) could
benefit society.
Edwards and the Free Market
The degree to which Edwards (mis)understood
the free market does not devaluate his moral
judgments.
Rather his [particularist] ethics provides us
with a a framework to judge the moral value
of our current economic system.
Mark Valeri – Response to
Edwards and the Free Market
The mid-eighteenth century context--the
regnant economic ideology or the meaning of
terms such as extortion or monopoly-compels us to pause before we assume that
Edwards really knew what a Smithian free
market was. Nonetheless, this essay works
well in thinking from Edwards forward rather
than locking him into a pre-modern past
economic ideology.
Caleb Henry:
JE: Self-Love and Property Rights
Simple self-love: the love for oneself,
one’s own good.
Compounded self-love: the delight one has
in the good of others; this is rooted in a
law of nature.
Both are good and needed. ‘The good of
society requires justice.” But man’s selfinterest can also undermine society.
Jonathan Edwards on Property
Rights and the Community
A man should enjoy the fruit of his
labor and the benefit of his property.
But the right to property never goes
against the community.
JE: Social Responsibility in the
Marketplace
Scarcity should determine prices: it is
God’s providential activity upon the whole
society.
Merchants should never use inflation to
take advantage of the customer.
Edwards seeks to ensure societal stability
because economic instability undermines
of individual rights.
JE: Social Responsibility in the
Marketplace
Charity is vitally connected to property
rights. With societal privileges comes
societal duties.
“God has commanded charity through
revelation, but also through natural
reason.”
Property Rights and Providence
Natural property rights will lead to
varying distribution of wealth among
the populace, but the providence that
distributes monetary and societal
privileges also gives duties.
By explicitly connecting natural law and
property rights, Edwards believes he
has ensured societal stability.
Edwards vis-à-vis
Communitarianism and
Liberalism
A highly communitarian form of
classical liberalism, drawn from his
vision of the beauty of God.
Driven by his theology, by his vision
of God’s beauty, but open to other
religious, ethical, humanist
traditions.
Common Ground: Edwards for the
religious, agnostics, and humanists.
Edwards’ ethics is implicitly
Christian.
His insights can be restated as
religious ethics.
Or as humanistic ethics.
“Borrowed transcendence”.
Morality in Business:
Edwards’ Aesthetic Ethics
An alternative to rule-based and utilitarian
ethical systems.
Grounded in recognition of beauty and
reverence for being.
Dynamic not passive.
Inclusive, not exclusive.
Engaged, interdependent not individualistic.
Social Responsibility in the
Workplace
Be active, not passive.
Be present for others, seeking
relationship, meeting needs.
Seek the public (not private) good.
Imagine and work for a better
world (beauty, peace, justice).
Beauty is essential to well-being
Can you imagine virtue and love as
forms of beauty rather than as
forms of goodness?
Edwards helps us reclaim the
innate and essential relation
between aesthetics and ethics.
Homeward Toward Beauty
Home is where we are right now.
Home is a different way of being
present, of appreciating the beauty
we are given and experience, of
enhancing the beauty of everything
we touch.
Homeward Toward Beauty
This is a journey of discovery.
This is a social not individual
journey.
This is a journey towards greater
beauty, peace, justice among
people, between people and all
being (animals, nature).
Homeward Toward Beauty
“Our
deepest
religious
responsibility is to love creation
and hallow it – in order that it may
be changed.”
H. Richard Niebuhr
To savor or save the world?
Every morning I awake torn between a
desire to save the world and an
inclination to savor it. This makes it
hard to plan the day. But if we forget
to savor the world, what possible
reason do we have for saving it? In a
way, the savoring must come first.”
E.B. White
[email protected]
www.ewst.edu.pl
Jonathan Edwards Center – Poland
Ewangelical School of Theology in Wrocław
 Theologica Wratislaviensia: www.theologica.ewst.pl
Vol. 7, 2012 Jonathan Edwards
 Jonathan Edwards Reader: Polish edition Sept. 2014
 Library resources at EWST: Jonathan Edwards
Collection; materials on history of American culture,
religion, literature; best English language library in
Poland for biblical and theological studies.