Chauncy and Edwards: All That Different or Potential Best Friends?

In the preface of his “Seasonable Thoughts on The State of Religion in New England.”, Charles Chauncy laid out his reasons for writing the book, but also his reasons for opposing the movement that was growing in New England centered around “revival” and spiritual “awakening” at the time. This work of Charles Chauncy's was published in 1743, 3 years before Jonathan Edward’s “Treatise on Religious Affections”, which went into detail about how the “affections” could serve as a witness to whether or not a conversion was “true religion”.  Chauncy went so far as to say that, “It is a fundamental and soul-damning error, to make sanctification an evidence of justification.” For Chauncy, sanctification was not only incompatible as a sign of justification, but it was also a soul-damning error to assume such. Rather, justification for Chauncy was evidenced in the manifestation of the Fruits of The Spirit.  It can be deduced that for Chauncy, sanctification was a more emotional task and had little to do with evidencing justification.

Meanwhile, Edwards provided a sort of “proof text” for ways to discern, through the various manifestations of “affections”, whether justification was real or not.  These affections were an emotional reaction to conversion, some of which, according to Edwards, were true religion and others of which were falsehoods. The affections always had an effect on the body, leading me to believe that they were emotional in nature. Edwards talks about this emotional (mind) to physical connection on pg. 17 and 18 of “Treatise”. 

Their emotional nature is in direct contrast with the fruits of the spirit that Chauncy championed. However, especially in hindsight, there is definitely a lot of overlap between the fruits of the spirit and the religious affections. Though these two men were opposites and foes, it could be suggested that their theological frameworks were just one step off from each other on the subject of justification. If either had written a generation after the other, instead of being opposites one may have drawn on the other and continued with their own thoughts as "the next step".