In a 2003 article in the Journal of Religious Ethics, Stephen Wilson and Jean Porter lamented that Jonathan Edwards had played only a minimal role in contemporary ethical reflection. Happily, this neglect has begun to be addressed in recent years, and Elizabeth Agnew Cochran's fine book joins the efforts of William Danaher, Philip Quinn and others in turning to Edwards as a helpful interlocutor for their own work in theological ethics and moral philosophy.
The resurgence of virtue ethics, drawing largely on Aristotelian categories and on Aquinas’ theological appropriation of them, has been an important development in western ethical reflection in the last 30 years, catalysed by the 1981 publication of Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue. In Receptive Human Virtues, Cochran argues that Jonathan Edwards provides a Reformed, more Platonic counterweight to Aquinas, thereby broadening and enriching the tradition of Christian virtue ethics. She also appeals to Edwards to challenge MacIntyre's influential narrative of the decline of virtue ethics (and virtue itself) in the modern period, as well as J. B. Schneewind's insistence that law rather than virtue is primary in Christian ethics.
Drawing primarily on A History of the Work of Redemption, Cochran outlines three categories of human virtues in Edwards’ thought: love to God, virtues proper to created natures such as humility and meekness, and virtues which presuppose sin, such as repentance. Edwards portrays Christ as the perfect embodiment of the first two categories. In addition, Cochran notes two qualities which Edwards discusses at some length in the The Nature of True Virtue and The End for Which God Created the World: justice and private or partial loves. These meritorious qualities are viewed by Edwards as good but incomplete virtues, since they are dependent on natural human faculties and do not presuppose God's converting grace. Cochran draws as well on other writings by Edwards, including his sermons, and there is more in his vast opus which remains to be plumbed, especially in his ‘Miscellanies’ notebooks. Cochran argues that Edwards’ nuanced treatment of human virtues is a valuable resource in contemporary ethical reflection for the way it upholds both the necessity of divine grace and authentic human moral agency. Edwards, in Cochran's view, models a way for contemporary virtue ethics to affirm human vulnerability and dependence on God as a framework for understanding genuine moral growth.
Cochran's work is also a valuable contribution to the ongoing interdisciplinary interest in Jonathan Edwards. Edwards emerges in Cochran's book as a synthetic moral thinker, in critical yet often appreciative interaction with prominent voices of his own time. Edwards had very catholic tastes in reading, and Cochran nimbly shows Edwards’ ethical affinities with a variety of non-Calvinist sources, including the Cambridge Platonists, Francis Hutcheson and Samuel Clarke. Edwards embraced aspects of their thought, while also holding onto Calvinist convictions about the depth of human sinfulness and the consequent need for divine revelation and grace. Edwards’ ethical assumptions also mark him as a person of his own era, reflecting some of the eighteenth-century confidence in the rationality of the universe and the powers of human reason, and Cochran sees no need to downplay these features of Edwards’ moral thought in the interests of presenting a neater theological portrait.
Finally, though Karl Barth's name does not appear in Cochran's index, her book is also a resource for those who, under the sway of certain readings of Barth's ethics, have despaired of the possibility of developing a genuinely Reformed virtue ethics. For all these reasons, we can be grateful for Cochran's contribution.
