Post-Reformation
New England, North America
Puritan / Calvinist
Also: Jonathan Edwards
⭐ He was born in the same year as Wesley (1703), and both stood in the great evangelical revival of the 18th century — the two men are two directions of the same revival. Olson's diagnosis is very clean: Wesley put the love of God at the center of his preaching and teaching, while Edwards made everything revolve around the glory of God — and every evangelical Protestant wants to bring the two together. ⚠ He became a close friend of George Whitefield during Whitefield's preaching tours in North America — and Whitefield is the very man who broke with Wesley over this same issue.
Below: first his own position, then the church’s verdict — kept separate. A rejected opinion keeps equal weight here.
His own position
⭐⭐ The strongest philosophical argument on the monergist side of this thread comes from him, and we think every reader on the other side should face it squarely. The core of Freedom of the Will is a causal argument. Olson sums it up: everything that really exists must have a cause, yet Arminian libertarians freely assume an uncaused, spontaneous event — the human faculty of free decision; the existence of uncaused events does not fit human reason, and so, as Edwards wrote, “this Arminian notion of Liberty of the Will, consisting in the will's Self-determination, is repugnant to itself”. ⚠ This blow lands precisely: if the self-determination the libertarian speaks of really has no prior cause, then it is not freedom but chance — and a random choice cannot bear responsibility either.
He pushed the bondage of the will further than most: Olson reports his view that what binds the human will is not only the sinner's will — the very fact that humans are creatures makes free will impossible for them. In The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended he answered the question by what right does God impute Adam's sin to everyone with divine constitution: the self-identity of every individual is wholly constituted by God — as Olson puts it, without God as the glue that binds a person's momentary experiences to his ideas, personal identity would dissolve into nothing — and what makes a person still the same person he was years ago, answerable for his past wrongs, is the continuity of this same divine constitution.
The church’s verdict
Never condemned; the most important theologian of the Puritan tradition. ⚠ But one way his argument turns back on him, pointed out by Olson, must also be recorded (and is attributed to Olson): Edwards fervently believed that God is free with respect to the world — God had no need to create the world or redeem it, otherwise the world would become part of God. Then the question arises: does God have libertarian freedom? If not, how can he be supreme? If so, why is such freedom unreasonable and absurd in human beings? Olson's verdict: Edwards's critique of libertarian freedom seems to land him in this dilemma, but he does not admit it.
What was at stake for salvation
He was defending the glory of God and God's supreme sovereignty: if the human will could determine itself, there would be something outside God's causation, and God would no longer be the ultimate cause of all things.
Principal works
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Freedom of the Will
Also called On the Freedom of the Will; ⭐ the strongest philosophical argument on the monergist side of this thread
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The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended
Also called The Doctrine of Original Sin Defended; his argument for personal identity from divine constitution
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The Nature of True Virtue
Also called On the Nature of True Virtue
Threads he belongs to
Grace and Free Will
Round 3 · The Arminian Controversy Claim ⭐⭐ The strongest philosophical argument on the monergist side: a choice without a cause is not freedom but chance.