I might have been wrong on Edwards and Free will

I am a big fan of Richard Muller and accept his criticism of Jonathan Edwards.  I now see where I might be wrong.

Did he commit the modal fallacy?

Dabney: Free Agency (Syst. Theol)

Chapter 11, pages 120-132.

Thesis:  God accomplishes his purposes not be compelling his creatures, but by operating through their free agency (121).

1.  The soul is the self-determining power.  "A free rational person does properly originate effects" (Dabney 124).  He is spontaenous and determines from within.  Man is not a machine, because the motive power is internal, not external.

This is different from Edwards.  While Edwards does say that man chooses according to his greatest inclination, man is yet within a system of a chain of external causes.

The Will and The Soul

Even though the soul is self-moved, the will is not (127).  The will is induced by some external object of choice, towards which the desire tends.  For example, a gold watch does not itself cause a thief to steal.  The thief's motive causes him to steal.  The gold watch induces his motive.  "The inducement is objective; the motive subjective.  The inducement is merely the occasion., the motive is the true cause" (128).

This is not fatalism or necessitarianism, though.  Dabney writes,

"Inducement is not motive; desire is an activity, and not a passivity of our souls.  Our own subjective judgments and appetencies cause our volitions" (128).

Our teacher Thomas Reid was correct to see that free agency is more than just the privilege to exercise the agency.  It is also seen in actively exercising the agency. Reid erred, however, in seeing the faculty of will and not the soul as self-determined (130).

Conative Powers:  This appears quite often in Dabney's corpus.  They refer to man's active powers of the soul; thus, the soul acts freely but not lawlessly (which corresponds to God's Providence). 

Dabney and the Will's Movement

One of the things that concerns me about the modern use of terms like "libertarian" or "compatibilist" is that it is hard to read a lot of earlier Reformed thinkers, since they didn't really fit into either camp.  While I would come down closer to the compatibilist camp, I wonder how often the fine distinctions can be maintained.  In any case, here is R L Dabney on human volition.  The relevance is that Dabney affirmed a strong doctrine of the will's free choice, albeit limited.  This allows us to blunt libertarian critiques of Reformed theology.

On the converse:  if you think that Jonathan Edwards's view is the Reformed view of the will, you will find it much, much harder to argue cogently for a moral universe.

Calvinists mean by “will” the whole subjective activities.  This includes disposition and subjective desires, both of which lead to volition (III: 221).  The important point for Dabney is that volition--the act of willing--must be cause or influenced by something.  The Calvinist finds the proximate cause in our disposition and subjective desires.

In regeneration God efficiently produces the holy disposition which regulates (acts as proximate cause) man’s volitions (227).  This means that in a very real sense, man is causing his actions from within himself.

Dabney accepts Edwards’s larger premise but notes Edwards erred in linking the motive of volition as the object and efficient of a volition (237).