Jonathan Edwards, it seems sought to advance Reformed Theology speculating in 2 specific areas. Instead of leaning into the promises of God in scripture and putting the weight of assurance on Christ as covenant head who fulfilled the law as a type of Covenant of Works, advancing the elect humanity into the new creation, functionally he chose to put the emphasis back on thinking about man’s affections, emotions and immediate actions (Revivalism), and he did all of this having abandoned the Reformed understanding of secondary causes. In Edward’s adoption of Occasionalism he had developed a view of God’s direct causes requiring a sort of continual destruction and recreation of the universe for God’s will over history to play out. For man this continuous advancing of reality carried a special weight of immediate action. Being a man of his times this understanding of the nature of reality and cause seemed to drive his practical emphasis of pietistic human action.
Today, coming through the same American Revivalist constructs, those emphasis play out in the expectation of immediate call to action from each sermon as opposed to resting in Christ, and slow growth in grace. Also, even within Reformed circles a suspicion of Antinomianism for those who don’t follow that pattern of thinking in regard to a call to action and expectation of advancement in some way towards relative holiness through an optimistically doable 3rd use of the law (normative law) is not sensed to be a big enough demand in each Sunday service. Whereas the first use of the law often gets overly associated with a first conversion experience and the Revivalist focus on regeneration.
All of this seems like a systemization of things God has not revealed, nor told us to speculate about or fix our eyes on. I would argue that it’s all based on and flows out of the speculative philosophy of Occasionalism that Edwards was excited about, and not leaning back on the confessions themselves to understand scriptures and to understand where the weight of assurance should rest, trusting God to work in each person in the ordained means (Word, sacrament, prayer).
Not that a call to human action is always out of place, but there is a reason Edwards got fired from his first pulpit with these weights and pressures that his inward looking for heart affections, extreme pietism and rigid view of God’s direct occasions of cause of all things really helped shape a distinctly American version of Christianity that oddly gets thought of as Reformed, and part of the New school, New light way of understanding things. However even Edwards seemed to have corrected some of his excesses in the second half of his ministry.
All three uses of the law are always applicable to all law and are therefore all part of God’s whole counsel to us each Sunday and all third use of the law when looked at with God’s demand of perfection will suddenly take us back to its first use leading us back to Jesus, Jesus, Jesus our only hope and comfort. In Christ alone we have peace because He has done for us all our works. (Isa 26:12). I would argue that less experimenting and innovating and more Ordinary Means of Grace is the better way, leaning more into our Confession and seeking to conform to it’s structure, emphisis, and focus. This puts the weight of action back on God to work in us through the means He has ordained. This will correct something that Edwards speculations had unbalanced even in his own ministry.