The most important aspect of Green’s education during this period was his study of Jonathan Edwards. It was Edwards who quieted his mind on Calvinism and enabled him to solve the key riddle about predestination—why should anyone act morally? As Green put it in his autobiography, Edwards did the most to “bring me off from all the notions that bordered on Arminianism,” the idea that man could achieve salvation on his own, that he had the free will to change his own fate. This doctrine, derived from the teachings of Jacob Arminius in the sixteenth century, threatened all that Calvinism stood for. The attack was serious enough that Green was tormented by questions about man’s culpability in sin and his ability to reform his ways. The role of free will only baffled him further during these early years. In 1744, Green hesitantly decided “that I think a man may be a free agent without having any power to believe, for a man may act freely and chuse to do one thing without being able to do the contrary to it, so a sinner may act freely in chusing to go on in sin without being able to chuse holiness.”16
Looking for better answers, Green read Edwards’s writings intently, especially his renowned Freedom of the Will and his Inquiry Concerning Qualifications for the Sacraments. Edwards had several concerns in these tracts. With the Enlightenment and “rational” religion advancing methodically in the mid-eighteenth century, he wanted to counter the attacks on Calvinism, especially by answering those critics who said that John Calvin’s rigid theological system built on the doctrine of predestination undermined a person’s moral responsibility. Edwards carefully set out to reconcile free will (the notion that individuals are free to do as they please) with Calvinism (the idea that an omniscient God controls all). Edwards reconciled the seemingly irreconcilable by distinguishing between natural necessity and moral necessity. An all-powerful but loving God governs through the latter—in his greatness he grants individuals the power to choose within the limits that God has decreed. As one recent biographer of Edwards explained, God “created intelligent beings who were free to choose what they wanted in the most significant ways possible in a God-governed universe. Their choices were fully their own, and they were morally responsible for their choices.”17
Green was impressed with this line of argument, and he came to believe that Calvinism’s critics were the inconsistent ones. Green noted in his autobiography that most skeptics were “partly Calvinists, and partly Arminians.” An intellectual muddle, in other words: the skeptics “dare not look the Calvinistic principles through, follow them to their source, and receive them with all their consequences. . . . They believe the perfections of God, and that he foreknew all things,” yet they were unwilling to accept that God controlled all.18
Green fleshed out his Edwardsean insights in a series of sermons and tracts that he published in the 1760s, beginning with a published sermon in 1764 on baptism and culminating in 1770 with a short pamphlet that summarized his views. Like Edwards, Green rested his theories on one sturdy foundation: God is all-powerful, loving, and good. In staking his claim for God’s greatness, Green again acknowledged the conundrums that it created: if God is so powerful and good, why does he permit evil? If he is so loving, how can he be so cruel as to save some sinners but not others? And if God truly controls all, then are not humans powerless to achieve salvation? And are they not blameless for current or past sins?19
Unlike the confused explanation he gave in 1744, he answered these perplexing questions in the 1750s and later by constructing an Edwardsean defense, distinguishing between what he termed natural inability and spiritual inability. The difference between the two concepts was great, Jacob asserted. “Natural Inability, is the Want of Power or Faculty to do what Persons have a Will to do, what they choose and desire to do,” he explained. “A Man that has lost his Hands cannot do the Work that others do, tho’ he might wish and desire to. . . . The Man without Hands . . . [is] under a natural Inability.” By contrast, spiritual inability involved a conscious choice by the individual to do good—or ill. For the sinner, “the Motives to do good and avoid evil, have no considerable Weight with him. His wicked Disposition overcomes the Motives to good. . . . The Sinner is not blind and deaf like him that is without sight and hearing; the Sinner has Eyes to see, and ears to hear, and an understanding by which he may consider, but he has no Heart to read, hear or consider.”20
Green well knew that skeptics would accept this as only a partial explanation, that they would counter with the observation “That Persons have not Power to alter their bad Will and Inclination; and that they cannot help being of such a bad Heart and Temper” (Green’s emphasis). To answer such objections, Green drew on Edwards’s concept of the will. “If any Person has a Will to love God or Holiness,” Green explained, “there is then Nothing in the Way, he does the Thing; he loves God and Holiness.” In other words, spiritual inability represented the “want of Will and Inclination.” In defining the will, Green and Edwards were tackling head-on the advances of liberalism and the Enlightenment. These “modern” values, espoused most powerfully by John Locke and René Descartes, placed a premium on individual rights by asserting that people have the freedom—the free will—to act as they choose. Individuals, in other words, were responsible for their own actions.
Edwards and Green agreed that free will involved a person’s ability to choose. But where they differed from Enlightenment apostles was in assigning the agent ultimately responsible for bestowing such an important right. For liberals, free will resided within individuals; for Edwards and Green, it resided with God. Both men reached this conclusion after traveling down the same path. It all began with an understanding of the supreme deity: he was sovereign, the creator of the universe and all within it. In his loving greatness, God decided to grant individuals the right to act. Edwards explained the presence of sin through his concepts of natural necessity (ingrained, naturalistic reactions to things such as physical pain) and moral necessity (habits of the heart where God gives one the choice of what to do), while Green called it natural inability and spiritual inability. For both men, God was the one who bestows choice, or free will, on individuals. Sinners, Jacob maintained, “are acquainted with their Duty. They know what is Right and what is Wrong; they know the dreadful Consequences of Sin, and the happy Effects of Holiness. Heaven and Hell are set before them.” Jacob added, though, that it was impossible for the unregenerate to achieve his or her own salvation; only God can bestow that: “’Tis impossible to choose a new Heart. . . . ’Tis contrary to the Nature of Things.”21
Having satisfied himself that free will can be reconciled with Calvin’s predestinarian teachings, and that individuals do have a choice to act morally or to sin, Green next worked out his views on the church’s role in this Calvinistic world. Who should belong to the church—only the elect (i.e., those who are saved)? Or should everyone, including the unsaved, be allowed to join and participate in the sacraments? The writings of Englishman Isaac Watts, the Calvinistic theologian and hymn writer, guided Green on this question of church purity. Green analyzed Watts’s Rational Foundation of a Christian Church, which was nearly four hundred pages and published in 1747, and praised it as “the most rational and scriptural, of any thing I have seen upon these subjects.” From Watts, Green worked out the role of reason in religion and the rationale for instituting a purer church with stringent admission standards. “Wherein soever Revelation gives us plain and certain Rules for conduct, Reason itself obliges us to submit and follow them,” Watts explained. “Where the rules of Duty are more obscure, we are to use our Reason to find them out, as far as we can, by comparing one Part of Revelation with another, and making just and reasonable Inferences.”22
From there, Watts showed the importance of reason to church formation. “The Light of Reason teacheth, that there must be a mutual Consent, Compact, or Agreement, amongst such Persons as profess the same Religion, to walk according to the Directions and Dictates of it.” Perpetuating the church by admitting properly qualified members, he continued, was essential. On this issue, Watts cited both reason and the New Testament: common sense dictated that members with like views band together, and that these members “will think it proper to cast such Persons out of their Fellowship, that they may not infect the rest, nor dishonour
