Daily Inspiration Quote by Jonathan Edwards

Edwards’ idea of “true liberty” is a theological mic drop disguised as calm prose: freedom is not the ability to pick anything, it’s the ability to pick the right thing without internal sabotage or external coercion. He’s writing as a Calvinist pastor in an age that was getting increasingly enchanted with Enlightenment autonomy, and he refuses to let “freedom” mean mere open-ended choice. His definition quietly relocates liberty from the marketplace of options to the moral architecture of the will.

The key move is the double constraint. First, liberty is “the power of doing what we ought to will.” That phrasing sneaks in an assumption modern readers often miss: our wills are not neutral. They can be disordered, captive to appetite, pride, habit, or sin. If you can technically choose the good but cannot bring yourself to want it, Edwards says you’re not free; you’re governed. Second, liberty includes “not being constrained to do what we ought not to will,” which targets both tyrants and temptations. The tyrant is obvious, but Edwards is equally interested in the tyranny of the self: compulsion masquerading as preference.

Subtextually, this is Edwards defending a compatibilist worldview (divine sovereignty alongside human responsibility) while offering a pastoral diagnosis of why people keep choosing what harms them. The rhetoric works because it flips the emotional valence of restraint: limits aren’t anti-freedom if they protect the will from degradation. It’s a bracing, counter-Enlightenment claim with contemporary bite: what we call “choice” can be just another form of bondage.