Layne Hancock

This chapter considers some of the confessional implications of Jonathan Edwards’s commitment to metaphysical idealism as it concerns divergent notions of divine and human action among those of the Reformed tradition. The most historically significant confession of the Reformed tradition is the Westminster Standards. This confession is broadly committed to a concurrentist theory of causation. The chapter begins by laying out various causation criteria within the dogmatic consensus of the Westminster Confession of Faith. According to the divine holiness requirement, God must establish a non-coercive causal structure for human agents that avoids infringing upon what the Standards call humanity’s natural liberty. In the final analysis, Edwardsean occasionalism might not be so far from Westminsterian concurrentism precisely because both were firmly committed to the idea of a Providence that upholds all creatures, actions, and things from the greatest to the very least in every moment of their existence.

This article coordinates recent scientific and economic research into the “rich-get-richer” phenomenon to define and explain the underlying causes. This has been labeled the “Pareto Distribution” in economic fields and the “Matthew Effect” in other social sciences. I then offer a moral sketch for the implications of these potential economic “natural laws” that rejects two extremes: primitivism and social constructivism.

C. Layne Hancock, "The Pareto Distribution and the Matthew Effect: Definition and Moral Considerations," Journal of Markets & Morality 25, no. 1 (2022): 99-114

This past year, while doing research in Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the author “found,” or rather rediscovered, Edwards’ personal copy of William Ames’ Medulla Theologicae. The author says “found,” though it was not missing as such; however, since the volume was not identified in the library’s description as belonging to Edwards, it went unnoticed for a long time.