Editor’s Introduction
This volume offers an unprecedented collection of essays and topical notebooks on some of the key Christian doctrines by America’s premier theologian, Jonathan Edwards. The writings range over such topics as the triune being of God, grace, justification, and the signs of true holiness—all integral components, it turns out, of a theological vision in which creation, by God’s grace, participates in God’s own life of self-communication. Though Edwards never produced a systematic theology, these writings help demonstrate the remarkable coherence and creativity of his thinking.
Given the wide range of the pieces in this volume, the introduction, while it seeks to highlight the nature and significance of each document included here, also incorporates other writings on the Trinity, grace, and justification by faith. Edwards’ thought is located within the history of Christian doctrine, going back to Augustine and Aquinas, particularly within his Reformed heritage as epitomized in Calvin. What emerges is a picture of Edwards as a theologian mindful of the past yet not afraid to innovate, to come up with daring conceptions of God as essentially dispositional and relational. Fundamental to this picture are three key issues: the inseparable unity of the immanent and economic Trinity, grace as the immediate presence of the Holy Spirit working in the manner of a new disposition, and the ultimate significance of Christian good works in God’s own design.
The writings presented here include long-established pieces in the Edwards canon, newly re-edited from the original manuscripts, as well as documents never before published, some of which reveal new aspects of Edwards’ thought. Separately, they show Edwards working methodically, sometimes over his entire career, on particular problems, and other times feverishly addressing a single, pressing point of controversy. Together, and in conjunction with other writings, such as Edwards’ sermons and entries in the “Miscellanies,” these essays and notebooks constitute a compelling, highly original, and still relevant reworking of some of the central issues in Christian theology.
The Doctrine of the Trinity
the christian doctrine of the trinity and jonathan edwards’ context
The Christian doctrine of God as the Trinity was originally formulated by the ancient church fathers as a confessional expression of faith, not as a speculative idea. The church fathers believed that the God they experienced in Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit is the same God as the God they knew as the Creator and the Lord of creation. This belief had to be articulated in a doctrinal formula so to make clear the distinctiveness of the identity of the Christian God in relation to various other conceptions of the deity. They had to find some way to affirm that God was one and three. The God of the biblical witness, in other words, is at once one and also distinctively three: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
The same point can be stated in terms of the distinction between the “economic Trinity” (the differentiated agency of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in God’s redemptive activity in his relation to the world) and the “immanent Trinity” (the eternal distinctions of persons within the internal being of God). When Christians speak about God as eternally triune in God’s immanent Trinity, they are affirming that God’s activities of creating, saving, and sanctifying are not accidental but rather rooted in, and consistent with, the way God is eternally within his own life. So the church doctrine of God as immanently triune emerges out of the experience of God as economically one and three. In this way, when the ancient church fathers originally articulated the doctrine of the Trinity, the immanent Trinity and the economic Trinity were inseparably connected. The church fathers’ experience of God as economically triune led them to confess God as immanently triune; the confession of God as immanently triune articulated the economic Trinity’s eternal grounding.
The official formulation of the trinitarian doctrine began with the ecumenical council at Nicea (325), which affirmed the Athanasian view that Jesus Christ, whom believers experienced as their Savior, was God himself—that is, homoousios (“of the same substance”) with the Father. The council at Constantinople (381) completed the formulation by asserting that the Holy Spirit as well as the Father and the Son were all of the same substance. God is, in other words, “one in substance, distinguished in three persons” (mia ousia, tres hypostases). Both the Greek Eastern and the Latin Western churches embraced these simultaneous affirmations of God’s unity and God’s threeness. However, in general, the Greek East stressed the distinctions among the three more than the unity and tended to guard the unity with ideas of the Father as the fountainhead of the Deity and of the mutual indwelling (perichoresis) of the three persons. Meanwhile, the Latin West, most prominently exemplified by Augustine, tended to emphasize the divine unity.
With the formulas “of the same substance” and “one in substance, three in persons,” the ancient church fathers were not so much concerned with spelling out the technical meanings of such philosophically loaded terms as “substance” and “persons” as they were with describing the fundamental nature of the God in whom they put their faith. The trinitarian creed functioned as a name that identified the particular God who was incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth. The goal of the two fourth-century ecumenical councils was simply to define the most distinctive characteristic of the God of the church’s faith as contrasted to non-Christian ideas of the deity.
As the church moved on, however, the theological articulation of the doctrine of the immanent Trinity in particular became philosophically more elaborate and abstruse, with the result that the immanent Trinity’s rootedness in the economic Trinity and in the living faith of Christians became largely invisible and ignored. Under the influence especially of Aristotelian conceptions of substance and God, the nature of the Christian God began to be portrayed by most theologians as self-contained, impassable (i.e. unaffected by the changes in history), and remote from what happens in the world. Such philosophizing about the Trinity received its fullest and most elegant expression in the writings of Augustine, Aquinas, and the medieval scholastics in the Western church, and in Gregory of Nyssa and others of the Eastern, with somewhat different emphases between them.
What is striking about Jonathan Edwards’ writings on the Trinity is that there is none of this bifurcation between the doctrine of the Trinity and the Christian life of faith and practice. Everything Edwards wrote about the Trinity expresses the intertwining connectedness of the Trinity and the Christian’s experience of God as the Creator, Savior, and Sanctifier, and thus between the immanent and the economic Trinity. Edwards was wellversed in the Western church’s teachings on the Trinity through the writings of Reformed scholastics such as Francis Turretin and Peter van Mastricht and Puritan writers like William Ames. But Edwards was also acquainted with the Eastern tradition through the writings of the Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth and, indirectly, Gregory of Nyssa him- self.1 As we shall see, Edwards wished to—and did—stay faithfully within the orthodoxy of the councils of Nicea and Constantinople. But at the same time, remarkably, he closed the gap between trinitarian doctrine and the Christian life, thereby returning to the ancient church father’s original desire to see the Trinity as connected with the living Christian faith. The Puritan emphasis on the practice of piety and Edwards’ own involvement in the Great Awakening were surely among the important factors behind what has been called Edwards’ “practical Trinitarianism.”2
What Edwards faced in his day, however, was not only the problematic way the Trinity had been elaborated in Christian theology itself. He also lived in the age of Enlightenment, when a general antagonism against mystery and anything that was not “reasonable” was leading many believing Christians to anti-trinitarianism. In what has come to be known as the Trinitarian Controversy of the 1690s in England, the traditional doctrine of the Trinity became a target for its metaphysical abstruseness. Socinians and Arians respected the biblical authority and the divine status of the Son and the Holy Spirit but relegated them to a lower ontological status than God the Father, thereby making Christ no more than a creature. Even the mild-spirited English divine Samuel Clarke declared that he could find no biblical support for the consubstantiality of the Son and the Spirit with God the Father, and that the trinitarian question was nonessential for Christian faith.3
In New England, the Arminianism of Samuel Clarke had a special appeal for liberals. As Conrad Wright points out, Arminianism and antitrinitarianism “temperamentally and historically . . . went together.”4 In downplaying the role of the Holy Spirit and emphasizing the contribution of the human will in conversion, Arminianism was fundamentally anti-trinitarian. New England Arians, most notably Jonathan Mayhew, appealed to the Scripture in their rejection of the Nicene Creed, concluding, “my Bible saith not . . . that there is any other true God, besides [ Jesus’] Father and our Father, his God and our God.”5 Deists were also anti-trinitarian because of their general distaste for “absolute mysteries”
1. For a discussion of the background of JE’s doctrine of the Trinity, see Amy Plantinga Pauw, “The Supreme Harmony of All: Jonathan Edwards and the Trinity,” Yale University Ph.D. diss., 1990, pp. 23–75. 2. Ibid., p. 193. 3. Cf. Roland N. Stromberg, Religious Liberalism in Eighteenth-Century England (London, Oxford Univ. Press, 1954), pp. 1–55.
and for whatever was not harmonious with the “natural religion” of human “reason.”
Many divines in England and New England attempted to defend the orthodoxy against all anti-trinitarian challenges. But, as William S. Babcock points out, the would-be defenders of the tradition and the anti-trinitarians ended up talking past each other, because there was a more fundamental challenge underlying anti-trinitarianism than either realized. The anti-trinitarians were, instead, changing the basic way of talking about the nature of reality itself. Babcock clearly shows, for example, how during the Trinitarian Controversy of the 1690s, the exchanges between the orthodox bishop Edward Stillingfleet and John Locke failed to address Locke’s anti-trinitarian doubts.6 The bishop of Worcester’s arguments were couched in Aristotelian substance language, while Locke, on the basis of his empiricist epistemology, had given up making any sense out of the “real essence” of things and of substance itself—or, as Locke called it, the idea of “a supposed I know not what.”7
The nature of learned discourse was clearly shifting in the age of Enlightenment. Beginning in the seventeenth century, the old idea of substance—the technical language of the traditional Trinity doctrine—
became problematic because of the Lockean empiricist dictum that one should not talk about what one cannot experience, and also because of the tendency of Newtonian science to see the nature of things as a network of relational laws and active forces rather than a system of individual and self-contained substances and forms. It was clear that if seventeenth- and eighteenth-century divines were to defend orthodoxy meaningfully, they would have to address this shift of language, which was occurring whether anyone wished it or not.
This basic challenge to the old way of thinking about the nature of things did not escape Jonathan Edwards. He attempted to renew the original spirit of the trinitarian doctrine without ignoring the urgent philosophical issues of the Enlightenment. One aspect of Edwards’ greatness as a theologian was that he did not merely study or oppose certain philosophical ideas and issues of his day but constructively offered possible solutions to them in philosophical and theological terms. The problem that Locke raised about the idea of substance was a case in point; Edwards attempted to work out an alternative view of reality itself.
Even a cursory reading of Edwards’ writings on the Trinity highlights the fact that there is something radically original about his language. Among his paragraphs we find surprising, fascinating statements: “It is [God’s] essence to incline to communicate himself”; God’s being is “a disposition to communicate”; the Father’s being is communicated to, and “repeated” in, the Son and the Holy Spirit as the result of the Father’s exercise of his dispositional essence.8 Edwards does occasionally use the terms “substance” and “substantial” in his discussion of the nature of God, but the meaning behind them has changed from seventeenth-century usage. As Wallace E. Anderson astutely noted, Edwards’ “predecessors thought of substance as the owner of properties; while Edwards thought of substance as the doer of deeds.”9 For Edwards, the being of God as well as the essential nature of things in general was no longer articulated in terms of self-contained substances but rather in terms of dispositions, activities, and relations. Before we turn to the Trinity, it is necessary to outline Edwards’ new way of understanding the nature of reality.
edwards’ new conception of reality
The Aristotelian and scholastic notion of substance referred to the abiding element behind “accidental” or changeable qualities (substratum) as well as to what makes a thing what it is (quiddity). In Edwards’ day, the Lockean principle that true knowledge is based only on actual experience combined with the Newtonian vision of reality as essentially relational and dynamic made this notion of unobservable substance no longer tenable. Edwards replaces substance with the idea of “disposition,” which he also calls “habit,” “propensity,” “law,” “inclination,” “tendency,” and “temper.”1
What made this fundamental metaphysical reformulation possible for Edwards was his realist (as opposed to nominalist) conception of habits and dispositions. “In memory, in mental principles, habits, and inclina-
6 Editor’s Introduction
8. See, for example, “Miscellanies,” no. 107[b], in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, 13, The “Miscellanies,” a–500 , ed. Thomas A. Schafer (New Haven, Yale Univ. Press, 1994), 277–78; and “Discourse on the Trinity,” below, p. 114. Following initial citation, all volumes in The Works of Jonathan Edwards are referred to as Works followed by the volume number.
9. “Editor’s Introduction,” The Works of Jonathan Edwards, 6, Scientific and Philosophical Writings, ed. Wallace E. Anderson (New Haven, Yale Univ. Press, 1980), 67.
1. See The Works of Jonathan Edwards, 2, Religious Affections, ed. John E. Smith (New Haven, Yale Univ. Press, 1959), 206–07, 282–83; The Nature of True Virtue, in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, 8, Ethical Writings, ed. Paul Ramsey (New Haven, Yale Univ. Press, 1989), 539, 623; “The Mind,” in Works, 6, pp. 384–85. For a further discussion of JE’s “dispositional ontology,” see Sang Hyun Lee, The Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards (rev. ed., Princeton, Princeton Univ. Press, 2000).
tions, there is something really abiding in the mind when there are no acts or exercises of them,” he wrote.2 A disposition or habit, in other words, has a mode of reality apart from its manifestations in actual events and actions. A disposition or habit, for Edwards, is more than mere custom or the usual way something happens; it is an abiding and ontologically real principle. Dispositions or habits also take on the character of laws for Edwards in that they actively and prescriptively govern the occurrences and characters of events or actions. “All habits,” he asserted, are “a law that God has fixed, that such actions upon such occasions should be exerted.”3 When there is a habit or disposition, it functions like a prescriptive law that certain events will—not only may—occur whenever certain circumstances prevail. Habits and dispositions, in short, are ontologically real and causally active lawlike powers. Like substances, habits or dispositions function as the abiding element and also the character of an entity. In addition, they are dynamic powers. To define reality as essentially dispositional, then, is to see reality as intrinsically dynamic, tending to actions and events. Redefining Aristotelian metaphysics, Edwards declares in a remarkable sentence in one of his regulatory notebooks, “Subjects to Be Handled in the Treatise on the Mind,” that “it is laws that constitute all permanent being in created things, both corporeal and spiritual.” An entity is no longer a substance; rather, its being “consists in powers and habits.”4
Edwards also says that being is proportion or beauty.5 This aesthetic category refers to the content or character of dispositions and habits. Disposition and beauty are two ways of looking at the same reality. “Disposition” refers to the dynamic aspect of beauty, while “beauty” refers to the manner or direction of disposition. The nature of things, in other words, is disposed to be actively related in a beautiful way. True beauty is God’s beauty. For anything to exist, it must be both disposed to and actually react in a fitting way to the true beauty of God.
One of the most important consequences of such a dispositional reconception of reality is that being is seen as inherently disposed to more activities and relationships. For Edwards, actual actions and relations have a greater degree of being than the dispositions that are disposed to those
2. Works, 2, p. 385. 3. “Miscellanies,” no. 241, in Works, 13, 358. 4. Works, 6, 391. 5. “The Mind,” in Works, 6, 336. For an excellent discussion of the place of beauty in JE’s thought, see Roland A. Delattre, Beauty and Sensibility in the Thought of Jonathan Edwards: An Essay in Aesthetics and Theological Ethics (New Haven, Yale Univ. Press, 1968).
actions and relations. The exercises of dispositions, in other words, will increase being by making it more actual and more real. Being is, therefore, essentially disposed to repetition and an increase of self-realization. This also means that being can be at the same time actual and self-realized, and disposed to further exercises and, thereby, to more being and beauty. This point, as we shall see below, has a crucial implication for Edwards’ articulation of the Trinity.
Edwards uses his dispositional reconception of being in his understanding of the nature of the Divine Being. “It is [God’s] essence to incline to communicate himself,” he writes. This disposition to communicate is what “we must conceive of as being originally in God as a perfection of his nature.” Edwards then resolves this communicative disposition into God’s “disposition effectually to exert himself.”6 Stated another way, God’s disposition to act as God is the essence of the Divine Being. And to exert God’s own dispositional essence is to bring about an “increase” of the actuality of God’s own being—that is, to communicate himself. God, who is fully actualized, also continues to be essentially disposed to further exercises and increases of his prior actuality, and to further self-communications.7 Since God, for Edwards, is also true beauty and a knowing and loving being, God’s being is essentially the sovereign disposition to know and love the true beauty and to continue to know and love it.
We must note here two important implications of this reconception of the Divine Being. If God is essentially a disposition of beauty, God is, by implication, essentially relational. This is so because, in Edwards’ view, beauty is a relation of “consent,” a relation of proportion and harmony.8
Without plurality there cannot be relations. Thus the Divine Being is inherently plural and relational. As we shall see below, Edwards found this idea eminently useful in articulating what the Scriptures and tradition teach about God.
The second implication is that Edwards uses his dispositional conception of God to articulate the reason for God’s creation of the world. As we have seen, God can be at once fully actual and continually tending to further actualizations. God is essentially a disposition, and dispositions are not exhausted by their exercises. Dispositions abide, and God is inex-
6. “Miscellanies,” no. 1218, in The Philosophy of Jonathan Edwards from His Private Notebooks, ed. Harvey G. Townsend (Eugene, Univ. of Oregon Press, 1955), p. 152; see also The Works of Jonathan Edwards, “The Miscellanies,” 1153–1360, ed. Douglas A. Sweeney (New Haven, Yale Univ. Press, forthcoming).
haustibly creative through self-communication. In Concerning the End for Which God Created the World, Edwards tells us that the same divine disposition that is fully exercised within God’s internal actuality was disposed to be exercised also ad extra (“outside” of God) in the creation of the world.9
The world, therefore, is the never-ceasing process of God’s exercise of his dispositional essence in time and space, an everlasting process of God’s external self-communication and repetition. Edwards’ concept of God as essentially disposition links God’s inner-trinitarian with God’s triune activity in the world—that is, the immanent and the economic Trinity. The exercise of the same divine dispositional essence constitutes both God’s inner life and God’s outer self-enlargement. This logic of dispositional ontology, Edwards also found, was useful in his delineation of what the Scripture and Christian life teach about the inseparable connection between God’s internal life and God’s redemptive activity in the world.
This brief discussion of Edwards’ new concept of reality is not meant to imply that his doctrine of the Trinity is primarily based on his philosophical presuppositions. Edwards’ first and last authority was God’s revelation in the Scripture, with Christian experience also acting as an authority and source of theology to the extent that it is consistent with Scripture. In the middle of his discussion of some complex issues in “Discourse on the Trinity” (since 1903 known as “Essay on the Trinity” but here given Edwards’ own intended title), Edwards makes the following confession: “I am far from asserting this as any explication of this mystery that unfolds and removes the mysteriousness and incomprehensibleness of it: for I am sensible that however, by what has been said, some difficulties are lessened, others that are new appear; and the number of those things that appear mysterious, wonderful and incomprehensible are increased by it. I offer it only as a further manifestation of what divine truth the Word of God exhibits to the view of our minds concerning this great mystery. I think the Word of God teaches us more things concerning it to be believed by us than have been generally taken [notice of]” (p. 139). Edwards’ discussion of the Trinity is, as he describes it, “a further manifestation of what divine truth the Word of God exhibits.”
Edwards’ extensive attention to biblical passages in all of his writings on the Trinity shows that he was serious about Scripture as the norm and source of theology. But within the parameters of what Scripture teaches, he did not hesitate to engage in philosophical and theological reflection. In an early entry in the “Miscellanies,” he boldly declares:
There has been much cry of late against saying one word, particularly about the Trinity, but what the Scripture has said; judging it impossible but that if we did, we should err in a thing so much above us. But if they call that which necessarily results from the putting [together] of reason and Scripture, though it has not been said in Scripture in express words—I say, if they call this what is not said in Scripture, I am not afraid to say twenty things about the Trinity which the Scripture never said. There may be deductions of reason from what has been said of the most mysterious matters, besides what has been said, and safe and certain deductions too, as well as about the most obvious and easy matters.1
In order to explicate what the Scripture already teaches, Edwards was not afraid to use even what “naked reason” can discover. “I think that it is within the reach of naked reason,” he proposes, “to perceive certainly that there are three distinct in God, each of which is the same [God].”2
the real distinctions within god
Edwards approaches the doctrine of the Trinity not only with the biblical mandate and reasons from Christian experience but also with his relational conception of being as beauty. For Edwards, “God is God, and distinguished from all other beings, and exalted above ’em, chiefly by his divine beauty.”3 The nature of God’s being itself demands an internal relationality and plurality within God. At barely twenty years of age, Edwards wrote in his first entry in “The Mind,” “One alone, without any reference to any more, cannot be excellent; for in such case there can be no manner of relation no way, and therefore, no such thing as consent. Indeed, what we call ‘one’ may be excellent, because of a consent of parts, or some consent of those in that being that are distinguished into a plurality some way or other. But in a being that is absolutely without any plurality there cannot be excellency, for there can be no such thing as consent or agreement.”4 And in “Miscellanies,” no. 117, written soon afterwards, he adds: “Therefore, if God be excellent, there must be a plurality in God; otherwise there can be no consent in him.”5 It is perhaps no coincidence that Edwards’ first writing on the Trinity, “Miscellanies,” no. 94, from early 1724, was composed only a few months after he reflected on the nature of excellency in the first entry in “The Mind.”6 In his outline of the projected “Rational Account of the Main Doctrines of the Christian Religion Attempted,” he listed excellency and the Trinity as topic headings in the same section, thereby showing his intention to treat them together.7
The reconception of being as excellency had profound implications for the doctrine of the Trinity in Edwards’ mind. Noting the significance of these implications, Wallace E. Anderson has commented that Edwards’ “new concept of being, when applied to the divine perfections, stands in sharp contrast to the long tradition of philosophical theology into which he was born. God’s goodness is not grounded in the absolute unity and simplicity of his being, but belongs to him only as he constitutes a plurality involving relations.”8
Now we turn to Edwards’ articulation of the plurality within the Divine Being. The plurality or distinctions demanded by the biblical witness, and by Edwards’ own conception of being as excellency, is the plurality and the distinctiveness of the three: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Edwards believed that he could demonstrate the three real distinctions through rational reflection. His argument uses both the psychological and the social analogy combined with the logic of his own conception of being as disposition, with its expansive and self-communicative character. The psychological analogy, used by Augustine, Aquinas, and others, especially in the Western tradition, sees an image of the Trinity in the individual human being: the self, understanding, and will. The social analogy, favored more in the East, compares the Trinity to three individual human beings, for example, Mary, Martha, and Peter.9 Through Edwards’ dispositional articulation of the Trinity, the two analogies merge into one.
Edwards’ psychological analogy is based upon Locke’s view of the human self as the mind, the mind’s reflexive (or introspective) perception of the mind’s own internal contents, and the mind’s willing. So Edwards’ initial formulation of the real distinctions within God is: “God, and the idea of God, and the love of God.”1
However, Edwards was not satisfied simply to illustrate the divine Trin-
6. For the dating of “Miscellanies,” see “Editor’s Introduction,” Works, 13, 57, 91 ff. For a discussion of the dating of JE’s earliest writings on the Trinity, see also the editor’s notes on The Threefold Work of the Holy Spirit, in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, 14, Sermons and Discourses 1723– 1729, ed. Kenneth P. Minkema (New Haven, Yale Univ. Press, 1997), 371–72. 7. Works, 6, 396. 8. “Editor’s Introduction,” Works, 6, 84. 9. For a discussion of JE’s use of the social analogy, see Pauw, “The Supreme Harmony of All,” pp. 47–56.
ity with analogies. He wanted to argue for the truth of God’s being one and three. So he sought to show how God’s idea of himself and God’s love of his own idea were equally as divine as God himself. The first strategy Edwards uses to show the divinity of God’s idea and God’s love of himself is his assumption that the mind’s “absolutely perfect idea of a thing is the very thing” all over again, and that “the perfect act of God must be a substantial act” and, likewise, God himself again.2 For Edwards, the term “idea” referred to much more than an intellectual concept; he assumed that “all sorts of ideas of things are but repetitions of those very things again.”3 On this basis he concludes that “the Deity [is] truly and properly repeated by God’s thus having an idea of himself; and that this idea of God is a substantial idea and has the very essence of God, is truly God, to all intents and purposes” (p. 114). Simply stated, the second person of the Trinity is “begotten” through God’s idea of himself.
Edwards’ next step is to posit that God has an “infinite delight” in his idea of himself.4 In this “infinite delight” of God, “the Deity becomes all act; the divine essence itself flows out and is as it were breathed forth in love and joy” (p. 121). This is so because “the pure and perfect act of God is God.”5 The result is that “the Godhead therein stands forth in yet another manner of subsistence, and there proceeds the third person in the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, viz. the Deity in act” (p. 121).
But there are problems with this statement of the real distinctions within God. As compelling as it is, it nonetheless falls short of completion. The argument for the deity of the Father and the argument for the deity of the Son are not synthesized. As Robert W. Jenson has pointed out, the conception of act in regard to the Holy Spirit is also not fully developed.6
However, Edwards’ argument for the real distinctions within the Trinity takes a more consistent form in his dispositional articulation of the Trinity, an argument that is more important to his theological perspective as a whole. In this more central argument, Edwards does not abandon the psychological analogy. The notion of the self with intellectual and volitional or affectional powers is used to articulate a fundamentally dispositional argument for the real distinctions within God. And, as we shall see, the psychological analogy evolves into a moderate form of the social
2. “Miscellanies,” no. 94, in Works, 13, 261, 258. 3. “Miscellanies,” no. 66, in Works, 13, 236. 4. “Miscellanies,” no. 94, in Works, 13, 261. 5. Ibid., 260. 6. Robert W. Jenson, America’s Theologian: A Recommendation of Jonathan Edwards (New York, Oxford Univ. Press, 1988), p. 97.
analogy within the framework of a dispositional conception of the Divine Being.7
As we saw earlier, Edwards held that “it is [God’s] essence to incline to communicate himself.” And this “disposition to communicate himself,” he went on to say, is what “we must conceive of as being originally in God as a perfection of his nature.”8 As we also saw, the exercise of a disposition, for Edwards, is ontologically productive insofar as that to which a disposition is disposed becomes actual (and thus “more real”) through the exercise of the disposition in action. The exercise of a disposition brings something from a state of virtual to one of actual reality. The exercise of the divine disposition, then, leads to God’s self-repetition or self-communication. Using this logic of dispositional ontology, Edwards articulates the three persons of the same God as the primordial actualization of the Divine Being and the intellectual and affectional repetitions of that primordial actualization. Edwards explains divine self-repetition or selfcommunication as the result of the abiding nature of God’s disposition to further exercises.
So the first person of the Trinity, the Father, is God’s first actuality, which is the primordial first exercise of God’s dispositional essence. As Edwards put it in “Discourse on the Trinity”: “The Father is the Deity subsisting in the prime, unoriginated and most absolute manner, or the Deity in its direct existence” (p. 131). But God’s dispositional essence, according to Edwards, is his beautiful or excellent disposition to know and love true beauty. The Father, consequently, must be the Deity’s primal act of knowing and loving beauty. Edwards elaborates on this by saying that “that knowledge or understanding in God which we must conceive of as first, is his knowledge of everything possible. That love which must be this knowledge is what we must conceive of as belonging to the essence of the Godhead in its first subsistence” (p.141). Here Edwards is speaking about the primal being of God, which really is beyond human articulation, and so words stumble. What is there for God to know and love in God’s first act of being actual? Edwards’ answer: “everything possible.” And this knowledge cannot be distinguished from God’s primal love. What is clear, however, is that God in his “first subsistence” is the first actuality of that to which the divine dispositional essence is disposed. God the Father is God’s “direct existence.” It is not that the Father is constituted by or is ar- rived at as the result of his acts of knowing and loving; rather, the Father is the primal knowing and loving, “the Deity in its direct existence.” In short, the Father is essentially the actuality of knowing and loving.
But how is the Father as actuality related to the divine disposition which is God’s essence? Is the divine disposition in any way prior to its first exertion, namely, the Father as actuality? In “Miscellanies,” no. 94, Edwards suggests an answer. Discussing the power of God, he writes that as power “is distinct from those and other things, ’tis only a relation of adequateness and sufficiency of the essence to everything. But if we distinguish it from relation, ’tis nothing else but the essence of God. And if we take it for that which is that by which God exerts himself, ’tis no other than the Father; for the perfect energy of God with respect to himself is the most perfect exertion of God, of which the creation of the world is but a shadow.”9 Power, for Edwards, is a disposition.1 So the disposition and energy of God is the Father. What Edwards is saying is that the Father as God in his “direct existence” is identical with God’s dispositional essence; God the Father is at once the primordial divine actuality of true beauty and the divine disposition to exert himself. It is not that the Father as the divine actuality has the divine disposition, nor that the Father as a disposition achieves or arrives at actuality. In the Father, the divine actuality is the divine disposition, and the divine disposition the divine actuality. Actuality and disposition coincide. And if this is true for God the Father, it would also be true for God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. I shall refer back to this point when we discuss the second and third persons of the Trinity.
If Edwards is to affirm God’s aseity, or self-existence—God’s dependence on nothing other than himself for his existence—then demonstrating the coincidence of actuality and disposition in God as the Trinity is crucial. If the divine disposition were in any way prior to God’s actuality, God would be dependent upon a principle other than his own actuality for his existence. Thomas Aquinas affirmed God’s aseity by maintaining that God’s essence is his existence.2 In other words, there was never anything, logically or temporally, “before” God’s actuality. Edwards also says that God’s essence is his existence. But he says more than that: for him, God’s dispositional essence is existence. Thus, for God, disposition is existence.
Now to conceive of the Father as at once actuality and disposition is to assert that the Father is essentially disposed to further exercises and thus to further actualities—that is, to the repetitions or self-communications of the Father’s actuality. This repetition of the Father’s eternal actuality occurs in two ways: in the Father’s reflexively knowing himself and in his reflexively loving what he knows. Hence there is, Edwards writes, “a reflex act of knowledge, his viewing himself and knowing himself, and so knowing his own knowledge: and so the Son is begotten. There is such a thing in God as knowledge of knowledge, an idea of an idea, which can be nothing else than the idea or knowledge repeated” (pp. 141–42). Elsewhere he adds that “in the Son the deity, the whole deity and the glory of the Father, is as it were repeated or duplicated. Everything in the Father is repeated, or expressed again, and that fully.”3 Edwards’ conception of the “begetting” of the Second Person as the intellectual exercise of the Father’s disposition is clear in his statement that “the Father’s begetting of the Son is a complete communication of all his happiness, and so an eternal, adequate, and infinite exercise of perfect goodness, that is completely equal to such an inclination in perfection.”4 The Son is “the divine nature and essence again,” “the same God” as the Father (p. 116). Furthermore, just as in the Father, actuality and disposition coincide in the Son: “The Son is the adequate communication of the Father’s goodness, is an express and complete image of him. But yet the Son also has an inclination to communicate himself, in an image of his person that may partake of his happiness: and this was the end of the creation, even the communication of the happiness of the Son of God.”5 Just as with the Father, so the Son is at once fully actual and also disposed to further exercises and thus to further repetition and self-communication of his actuality.
The Father repeats his actuality not only by reflexively knowing himself but also by loving what he knows, and the act of the Father’s loving what he knows is a further exercise (this time, affectional) of the Father’s dispositional essence. So Edwards writes in the “Miscellanies” that “the Father loveth the Son as a communication of himself, as begotten in pursuance of his eternal inclination to communicate himself.”6 And he elaborates in “Discourse on the Trinity”: “[T]he divine essence itself flows out and is as it were breathed forth in love and joy. So that the Godhead
3. “Miscellanies,” no. 1062, first published by Egbert C. Smyth in 1880 with the title “Observations Concerning the Scripture Oeconomy of the Trinity, and Covenant of Redemption,” and reprinted in Treatise on Grace and Other Posthumously Published Writings by Jonathan Edwards, ed. Paul Helm (Cambridge, James Clark & Co., 1971), p. 77.
therein stands forth in yet another manner of subsistence, and there proceeds the third person in the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, viz. the Deity in act” (p. 121).
As with the Father and the Son, actuality and disposition coincide in the Holy Spirit. “Now the sum of God’s temper or disposition is love, for he is infinite love. . . . This is the divine disposition or nature that we are made partakers of (II Pet. 1:4)” (p. 122). Thus, the Holy Spirit is the Deity repeated and self-communicated affectionally, and is at once the actuality of the divine love and the disposition to love. God as the triune being is both fully actual through the actuality of the three persons and continually disposed to repeat that full actuality through further exercises. Stated another way, God’s actuality is the Father’s eternal and infinitely full actuality, plus its complete repetition in the Son and the Holy Spirit. This simultaneously actual and dispositional being of the Trinity makes it possible to view God as both fully actual and also tending to further increases.7
What is the Holy Spirit’s relation to the Father and the Son? Edwards at times sees the Holy Spirit as the result of the self-communicating activity of the Father alone. But he also follows Augustine in speaking about the Holy Spirit as the mutual love between the Father and Son. Since Edwards sees both the Father and the Son as divine dispositions as well as actuality, it would be natural to think of both the Father and the Son as capable of acting, that is, capable of loving each other. The Father and the Son’s “love and joy is mutual, in mutually loving and delighting in each other” (p. 121). In this respect, the conception that the Holy Spirit is the mutual love between the Father and Son would be more consistent with
7. JE’s reconception of the Divine Being as at once fully actual ad intra and also essentially disposed to repeat ad extra his prior actuality, provides a creative alternative the contemporary discussions of God’s being and becoming. While classical theism overemphasized God’s immutability and self-sufficiency, thereby making it difficult to explain God’s involvement with the world, the process has tended to endanger God’s prior actuality and transcendence by seeing God as excessively involved in time and change. JE attempted to see God as at once fully actualized and at the same time essentially disposed to repeat his prior actuality through the creation of the world, and thereby introduced a dynamic element of becoming into God’s own life ad extra without compromising God’s eternal actuality. For recent discussions of being and becoming in God, see, for example, Keith Ward, Rational Theology and the Creativity of God(Oxford, Blackwell, 1982); Colin E. Gunton, Becoming and Being: The Doctrine of God in Charles Hartshorne and Karl Barth (Oxford, Oxford Univ. Press, 1978); Robert C. Neville, Creativity and God: A Challenge to Process Theology (New York, Seabury Press, 1980); Royce G. Gruenler, The Inexhaustible God: Biblical Faith and the Challenge of Process Theism (Grand Rapids, Mich., Baker Book House, 1983). For a discussion of Karl Barth’s use of the idea of God’s self-reiteration, an idea similar to JE’s concept of God’s self-repetition, see Eberhard Jungel, The Doctrine of the Trinity: God’s Being Is in Becoming (Grand Rapids, Mich., Eerdmans, 1979).
Edwards’ dispositional articulation of the Trinity than his view of the Holy Spirit as simply the Father’s delight in the Son.
Related to this issue of the Holy Spirit’s relation to the Father and Son is Edwards’ adherence to the tradition of the Western church in maintaining that the Holy Spirit proceeds both from the Father “and the Son (filioque).” By including the phrase “and the Son” in its creeds, the Western church wanted to stress that the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Christ as well as the Spirit of the Father. The Eastern church, however, was afraid that the Western church’s formulation introduced two sources of divinity into the Trinity and thereby reduced the importance of the Father as the origin of everything. Edwards at times does say that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father, but his affirmation of the filioque is more consistent with his overall perspective on the Trinity as three distinct and equal divine persons. Edwards’ adherence to the filioque also fits with his Augustinian conception of the Holy Spirit as the bond of mutual love between the Father and the Son.
At times Edwards does not appear to be content simply to assert that the Holy Spirit proceeded from the Father and the Son. Again following Augustine, he distinguishes between the Father and the Son as the sources of the Holy Spirit. He explains:
Though all be firstly from the Father, yet all is nextly from the Son. As ’tis a peculiar honor that all should be firstly from the Father, so there is a peculiar honor in that ’tis immediately from the Son.
And even ad intra, though the Holy Ghost proceeds both from the Father and the Son, yet he proceeds from the Father mediately by the Son, viz. by the Father’s beholding himself in the Son. But he proceeds from the Son immediately by himself by beholding the Father in himself. The beauty and excellency and loveliness of the divine nature, though from the Father first and originally, yet is by the Son and nextly from him. . . .
Though the Spirit, the beauty, the loveliness and joy of the Deity, be from the Father originally and primarily, and from the Son as it were secondarily, yet the Son hath this honor that the Father hath not: that that Spirit is from the Son immediately by himself (p. 143).
These words echo Augustine: “There is good reason why in this Trinity we speak of the Son alone as Word of God, of the Holy Spirit alone as Gift of God, and of God the Father alone as the one of whom the Word is begotten and from whom the Holy Spirit principally proceeds. I add the word ‘principally,’ because we learn that the Holy Spirit proceeds also from the Son. But this is again something given by the Father to the Son— not that he ever existed without it, for all that the Father gives to his onlybegotten Word he gives in the act of begetting him. He is begotten in such a manner that the common gift proceeds from him as well, and the Holy Spirit is Spirit of both.”8 It is obvious that both Augustine and Edwards wanted to regard the three persons of the Trinity as equally divine while acknowledging at the same time their distinctiveness. Both the Father and the Son are involved in the proceeding of the Holy Spirit, but in different ways.
For Augustine as for Edwards, the Father and the Son as fully divine persons do something in the immanent Trinity. The Father “begets” the Son, loves the Son, and lets the Holy Spirit “proceed” from them, and the “begotten” Son loves the Father and also participates in letting the Holy Spirit proceed from them. But what does the Holy Spirit do? Edwards’ usual answer is that the Holy Spirit is the act of love itself, whether of the Father toward the Son or between the Father and the Son. This conception of the Third Person as the “bond” of love has been the typical teaching of the Western church and has been criticized as an abstraction and an impersonalization of the Third Person. Edwards, however, did not leave the matter here. Judging by the active role he allocated to the Holy Spirit in the trinitarian economy of salvation (discussed below), one would suspect that Edwards could easily conceive of the Holy Spirit as being an active agent within the Trinity, just as the other two persons are. In “Miscellanies,” no. 370, where Edwards discusses the sun as an analogy of the Trinity, he attributes an active agency to the Holy Spirit. The Father is the “substance of the sun” while the “brightness and glory” of the sun images the Second Person of the Trinity. Edwards then says that “the Holy Ghost is as the heat and wonderful influence which acts upon the sun itself and, being diffusive, enlightens, warms, enlivens and comforts the world.” According to the sun analogy, the Holy Spirit’s active role of enlivening the world corresponds to its active role of having a “wonderful influence,” which acts on God himself.9
It is, however, in “On the Equality of the Persons of the Trinity,” printed here for the first time, that Edwards makes a clear departure from the Western tradition and sets forth a remarkably original conception of the Holy Spirit within the Trinity. “In one respect,” he writes, “the Father has the superiority: he is the fountain of Deity, and he begets the beloved Son. In another respect the Son has the superiority, as he is the great and first object of divine love. The beloved has as it were the superiority over the lover, and reigns over him. In another respect the Holy Ghost, that is, divine love, has the superiority, as that is the principle that as it were reigns over the Godhead and governs his heart, and wholly influences both the Father and the Son in all they do” (p. 147). Here the Holy Spirit is no longer just the bond of love but an active agent. The Holy Spirit “reigns,” “governs,” and “influences” the other two persons of the Trinity. Edwards did not elaborate on this conception. But what he does say represents a profound advancement over the Western church’s typically underdeveloped doctrine of the agency of the Holy Spirit in the intra-trinitarian life of God.
I began this section by mentioning Edwards’ initial argument for the real distinctions within God using the psychological analogy. In western theology, reliance on the psychological analogy has led to a tendency to stress the divine unity rather than threeness. With his dispositional argument for the real distinctions, however, Edwards has transformed the psychological analogy into a perspective that clearly emphasizes the threeness of the trinitarian persons. His use of the psychological analogy ends up reinforcing the social analogy, or at least makes the two analogies compatible.1 The picture of the Trinity as God, God’s self-knowledge, and God’s love has become, in Edwards’ vision, God, God all over again as selfknowledge, and God all over again as self-love. The self’s faculties and their functions in the psychological analogy are now the self and its two repetitions or self-communications. There clearly is now a “triplicity” within God.2
Edwards’ concept of triplicity explains why he was not hesitant to use the language of the social analogy. He speaks about the Divine Virtue as consisting in “love to himself, or in the mutual love and friendship which subsists eternally and necessarily between the several persons in the God-
Editor’s Introduction 19
1. Pauw makes a similar point in regard to the Cappadocian theologians in “The Supreme Harmony of All,” p. 57.
2. “Miscellanies,” no. 94, in Works, 13, 262. In using the term “triplicity” in reference to the threeness of the trinitarian persons, JE departs from Francis Turretin, who wrote: “‘Trinity’ however is the appropriate word, not ‘triplicity,’ which implies a multiplication of essence. God, therefore, is said to be triune (trinus), not triple because there are three persons, but only one numerical essence.” Institutes of Elenctic Theology, trans. by George M. Giger (3 vols. Phillipsburg, N. J., P & R Pub., 1992), 1, Third Topic, Question XXIII, § ix, 255. JE does not accept the implication of “a multiplication of essence,” nor does his main view agree with the numerical oneness of the divinity.
head.”3Discussing the equality of the three persons of the Trinity, Edwards says that “they are every way equal in the society or family of the three” and that “they are all God; each has his peculiar honor in the society or family” (p. 135). So the Trinity is not to be compared just to the human self, with its internal differentiations, but also to the “society” and “family” of a plurality of beings. We recall that, according to Edwards, “one alone cannot be excellent,” and that “if God is excellent, there must be a plurality in God.”4 Given Edwards’ relational concept of being and of God as essentially beautiful or excellent, his use of the social analogy was inevitable.
There is yet another consequence of Edwards’ dispositional articulation of the Trinity. He is no longer working with substance metaphysics, which draws a sharp distinction between the substance or substratum of a thing and its activities and accidental qualities. For Edwards, there is no substance lying behind God’s self-repeating and self-communicating activities.5 Direct existence, reflexive knowing, and reflexive loving do not belong to the Divine Being but rather are, and constitute, the Divine Being. The disposition to those activities is the general law that governs their pattern. The divine disposition is an abiding reality apart from its exercises. But within God, the divine disposition and the divine existence and activities all coincide as the one Divine Being. Edwards did not conceive of the divine disposition as being in any way prior to existence and activities. God’s being, therefore, does not have some dimension hidden behind God’s actions and the disposition to those actions. As Stephen H. Daniel has put it, “[T]he three persons are thus not modes of being of a logically prior substance or substratum but are rather (as Barth notes) subsistences or modes of being. . . . God is not a substance underlying the communication; he is the substance of communication.”6 The result is that the triune God’s creative, revelatory, and redemptive activities are the way God is.
the unity and threeness of the triune god
If Edwards’ conception of the trinitarian persons as the repetitions of the Divine Being led him to stress the mutual fellowship among a plural-
3. Nature of True Virtue, in Works, 8, 557. 4. “Miscellanies,” no. 117, in Works, 13, 284. 5. Gunton discusses the problems that arise in Augustine’s doctrine of the Trinity from his use of the concept of “substance” as something which “underlies the threeness of the persons.” “Augustine, the Trinity and the Theological Crisis of the West,” p. 45.
ity of persons, and thus to a social analogy of the Trinity, how does he articulate the unity of the Divine Being? In the traditional Western trinitarian formula of “one substance and three persons,” the notion of a single underlying substance was used to express the unity of the Trinity. For Edwards, there is no substance in the Divine Being. Discussing the sun as an image of the Trinity, he says that “substance of the sun” represents the Father, but in a parenthesis adds: “[B]y substance I don’t mean in a philosophical sense, but the sun as to its internal constitution” (p. 138). Edwards’ most frequently used term for the Divine Being is the “essence” of God. And the term divine “essence” (which he uses interchangeably with the terms “deity,” God’s “being,” and God’s “nature”) refers to all that each of the three persons is. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in everything that each of them is (knowing, loving, and the self-repetitions thereof) and is disposed to, appears to be what Edwards means by the divine essence. In describing the Father as God in his “direct existence,” for example, Edwards says that “that knowledge or understanding in God” and “that love which must be this knowledge is what we must conceive of as belonging to the essence of the Godhead in its first subsistence” (p. 141). And by the Father’s knowing of himself, “the Godhead is really generated and repeated” and “has the very essence of God” (p. 114).
If this is the case, are there then three divine essences? Paul Helm has queried whether, by conceiving of the second person of the Trinity as God’s self-repetition of his essence, “Edwards has proved too much—not the second person of a Trinity of persons but a second theos.”7 Is his view “implicitly tritheistic”? Of course, Edwards himself would vehemently deny such a suggestion. In “Miscellanies,” no. 1105, he points out that the affirmation of one Jehovah in Deuteronomy 6:4 was to warn Israel “against imagining . . . that there was a plurality of essences or beings, among whom they were to divide their affections and respect.”8 Edwards tells us that we should never think of the three divine persons as “three distinct gods, friends to one another.”9
The traditional Western trinitarian formula was “one substance in three persons” (una substantia, tres personae). But since Boethius, the divine person had been defined as “the individual substance of a rational
7. “Introduction,” Treatise on Grace and Other Posthumous Writings, p. 21. 8. “Miscellanies,” no. 1105, in The Works of President Edwards (4 vols. New York, 1851), 3, 535 (hereafter referred to as Worcester rev. ed.); see also The Works of Jonathan Edwards, 20, “The Miscellanies,” 833–1152, ed. Amy Plantinga Pauw (New Haven, Yale Univ. Press, 2002), 487.
nature” (naturae rationabilis individua substantia).1 So the problem of explaining how one God could be three “persons” was formulated as a question of how in the divine substance there could be three individual substances. Edwards, however, was not working with substance language. For him, the problem was how God’s being and its two perfect self-repetitions could be all one God. He insists that in the Son and the Holy Spirit the Father’s essence is fully repeated and thus duplicated. What, then, does it mean to affirm that God’s being is not three essences or deities but “the same essence” and thus one God?
The first answer we find in Edwards is that God’s unity lies in the “simplicity” of God’s being. Given Edwards’ relational conception of being, his reference to the doctrine of simplicity, although it appears only a few times and always without elaboration, is rather surprising.2 What is the “simplicity” doctrine? The main point against Arius in the decision of the ecumenical council at Nicea was the Son’s co-divinity (homoousios, “of the same substance”) with the Father and not specifically their unity. But in the history of the church, the council’s decision functioned as a strong emphasis upon the unity as well as the equality of the divine persons. Under the influence of the Greek philosophical conception of perfection, the unity of the Divine Being eventually began to be seen as a divine “simplicity.” According to this conception, God’s perfection requires that he be without parts of any kind. The theological motivation in asserting the simplicity of God was to protect God’s aseity, or self-existence. It was thought that if God had a nature or properties distinct from him, he could be thought of as being dependent upon something other than himself.3
Both the Eastern and Western churches affirmed divine simplicity, but the Western church expressed it in its extreme form. The generic understanding of God’s unity—that it consists in the three distinct persons’ being three particular instances of the one common, divine nature—was ruled out in the West. The Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 asserted that “each of the persons is that reality, namely, the divine substance, essence, or nature.”4 The Son is of the same substance with the Father, in that they are identical with the divine essence. The Reformed scholastics and Pu-
1. Boethius: The Theological Tractates, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. H. F. Stewart, E. K. Rand, and S. J. Tester, rev. ed., Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Harvard Univ. Press), p. 85. For a discussion of this point, see Babcock, “A Changing of the Christian God,” pp. 141–42.
ritan divines continued this simplicity tradition; Wollebius even asserted that there is “nothing in [God], but what is God, what is himselfe.”5 Francis Turretin, too, maintained that “the essence of God is perfectly simple and free from all composition.” Turretin went as far as to assert that God is not just “specifically” (that is, generically or sortally) one but “numerically” single.6
Edwards’ references to simplicity are few, but they cannot be ignored. In Freedom of the Will he mentions, without elaboration, God’s “perfect and absolute simplicity.”7 In “Miscellanies,” no. 135, he says that if human faculties were infinitely enlarged, we would have “the same simplicity, immutability, etc.” of the Divine Being.8 An even stronger assertion of God’s simplicity appears in Edwards’ unpublished sermon on Hebrews 1:3, from April 1734, where he states that the Father “has no excellency but the Son has the same: not only specifically the same, or the same in kind, but numerically; the same individual glory, so that they have but one glory that is common to both.”9
The idea of a numerical identity contains ambiguity. As Christopher Stead has pointed out, simplicity “could mean either ‘excluding all differentiation’ or ‘comprehending all differentiation’ or merely ‘not composite,’ ‘not constructed out of parts.’”1 A numerical identity of God, in the sense of an absolute absence of differentiation, would of course be totally inconsistent with Edwards’ conception of God as triune and beautiful. Did Edwards then have in mind the second meaning, namely, “comprehending all differentiation”? He does not explicitly say. Amy Plantinga Pauw has observed that Edwards’ references to God’s numerical simplicity are eccentric, not integral to his overall perspective.2 What can be safely said is only that, in invoking the language of numerical identity, Edwards shows a strong desire to emphasize the unity of the Divine Being.
The second way in which Edwards deals with the unity-threeness issue is by making a distinction between God’s being as it refers to God’s unity
Editor’s Introduction 23
5. Johannes Wollebius, Compendium Theologiae Christianae (Amsterdam, 1703), I. i., quoted in Pauw, “The Supreme Harmony of All,” p. 31.
6. Institutes of Elenctic Theology, 1, Topic Three, Question VII, § i, p. 191; and 1, Topic Three, Question XXV, § i, p. 265.
7. The Works of Jonathan Edwards, 1, Freedom of the Will, ed. Paul Ramsey (New Haven, Yale Univ. Press, 1957), 376.
8. “Miscellanies,” no. 135, in Works, 13, 295. 9. MS sermon on Hebrews 1:3 (April 1743), Edwards Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Unless otherwise noted, all MSS referred to in this volume are in the Beinecke collection.
and God’s being as it refers to the three persons. Edwards often uses terminology well known in Western theology as well as among the Reformed scholastics: God is one in essence and three in “the manner of subsistence.” In describing the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son, Edwards points out that “the Godhead therein stands forth in yet another manner of subsistence.” He goes on to say, “The Holy Spirit is the Deity subsisting in act” (p. 131). God, in other words, is one in essence and three in the manner in which the same essence subsists. The result appears to be that the term “essence” is to be taken somewhat differently when it is used in reference to the unity of God, on the one hand, and when in reference to each of the three persons, on the other.
Edwards uses this approach sometimes with different terminologies. In “On the Equality of the Persons of the Trinity,” he maintains that although none of the three persons of the Trinity has “a distinct essence” of its own, each does have “a distinct glory,” “a relative glory, or glory of relation.” Edwards then describes the relative glories of the three persons: the Father is the origin of the other two persons, the Son is the Father’s “object,” and the Holy Spirit is “the messenger of the other two persons.” In the same manuscript, Edwards also makes a distinction between God’s “being,” or “the divine essence in itself considered,” and God’s “relative being” (pp. 147–48). Echoing the simplicity tradition of Western theology, Edwards insists that the divine essence is “undivided and independent” in spite of the equal divinity of the three persons. “’[T]is true the divine essence is undivided and independent . . . with respect to its being, but not with respect to its relative being; or, to speak more plainly, that the divine essence should be, and should be what it is, is not in any respect in any dependence or by derivation. But yet it may be by derivation. That it should be here or there, or that in some instances it should be where it is, or belonging to such persons, this don’t in the least detract from the glory of the divine essence in itself considered” (pp. 147–48). Edwards does not elaborate on any of these distinctions, though his discussions indicate that he wanted to think more about them. However, the distinctions between the divine “essence,” “being,” or “glory . . . in itself considered,” on the one hand, and the divine essence “in a manner of subsistence,” God’s “relative being,” or God’s “relative glory,” on the other, seem to be somewhat at odds with Edwards’ usual assertion that each of the three persons of the Trinity is “the same God,” “the same divine essence.” And in a typically Western theological fashion, Edwards affirms God’s unity somewhat at the expense of God’s threeness.
The first two approaches Edwards takes in affirming the unity of the Di- vine Being follow the theological tradition of the Latin West. The next three we shall note, however, are reminiscent of the Greek East. In the first of these Edwards deals with the unity of the Divine Being by seeing God’s essence as the universal or common characteristic, of which the three persons are particular instances. Here Edwards’ sources are most immediately the Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth and, indirectly, Cappadocian fathers like Gregory of Nyssa.3 Cudworth maintained that the “essence or substance of the Godhead, which all the three persons or hypostases agree in, as each of them is God, was not one singular and individual but only one common and universal essence or substance.”4 Edwards does not announce anywhere that he agrees with Cudworth’s generic or sortal use of the term “divine essence.” In his sermon on Hebrews 1:3, Edwards is ambivalent. At one point he denies that the Son’s essence is the same as the Father’s “specifically” (that is, generically) or “in kind” and asserts a numerical identity. But then, in the same sermon, Edwards also states that the persons of the Trinity “partake of the same essence,” and that the Father and the Son “have one glory that is common to both.”5 Edwards seems to be tentative or undecided in his references to the sortal view of divine unity. But in his references to the generic view, though they are few in number, we see the influence of the Eastern tradition on Edwards’ trinitarianism.
In the fourth approach Edwards takes to the divine unity, he follows Cudworth and the tendency of the East to see the first person of the Trinity as the unifying principle. In “Miscellanies,” no. 143, after stating that the Son and the Holy Spirit both originate from the Father, Edwards writes: “Hence we see how and in what sense the Father is the fountain of the Godhead, and how naturally and properly God the Father is spoken of in Scripture as of the Deity without distinction, as being the only true God.”6 In “Discourse on the Trinity,” Edwards explains that the Father’s ontological primacy in the Trinity carries over to the Father’s priority in
3. Ibid., pp.41–43. There is no evidence that JE read the Cappadocian theologians, but there is a scholarly opinion that he shows “a very real, though mediated dependence,” especially on Gregory of Nyssa. JE could have been acquainted with Gregory’s thought through the Cambridge Platonists, especially Ralph Cudworth. See Patricia Wilson-Kastner, “God’s Infinity and His Relation to Creation,” Foundations 21 (Oct.-Dec. 1978), 310, 317; and Pauw, “The Supreme Harmony of All,” p. 27. On the question of when in his life JE might have read Cudworth, see Thomas H. Johnson, “Jonathan Edwards’ Background of Reading,” Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts 28 (Dec. 1931), 197; Works, 6, 329; and Emily S. Watts, “Jonathan Edwards and the Cambridge Platonists,” Univ. of Illinois Ph.D. diss, 1963.
the order of acting. “Here we may see why,” observes Edwards, “in the economy of the persons of the Trinity, the Father should sustain the dignity of the Deity . . . and should be God, not only by essence, but as it were by his economical office” (p. 135). As the “fountain of the Godhead,” the Father is the ontological ground for both the second and third persons of the Trinity.
The fifth and the last approach we see in Edwards’ treatment of divine unity is a much more deliberate perspective, which is more integrated than the others into his overall philosophical and theological framework. I refer to Edwards’ conception of God’s unity as consisting in the perichoresis, or the inter-dwelling, of the three persons of the Trinity. This approach to divine unity emerges in the context of Edwards’ discussion of whether all three persons have their own faculties of understanding and will. Augustine had maintained that it was “absurd” to think that the Father is wise through the Son “as though the Father does not understand nor love for himself.” Augustine’s concern here was to defend the unity of God in the simplicity tradition, according to which if one of the persons depended upon another for wisdom or love, the identity between the divine essence and attributes would be compromised. For this reason, Augustine insisted that wisdom “is so retained in the nature of each one, as that he who has it, is that which he has, as being an unchangeable and simple substance.”7
Departing from both Augustine and the Western doctrine of divine simplicity, Edwards explains the manner of the three persons’ understanding and loving with an entirely different concept of the divine unity. He writes in “Discourse on the Trinity”:
In order to clear up this matter, let it be considered, that the whole divine essence is supposed truly and properly to subsist in each of these three—viz. God, and his understanding, and love—and that there is such a wonderful union between them that they are after an ineffable and inconceivable manner one in another; so that one hath another, and they have communion in one another, and are as it were predicable one of another. As Christ said of himself and the Father, “I am in the Father, and the Father in me” [ John 10:14], so may it be said concerning all the persons of the Trinity: the Father is in the Son, and the Son is in the Father; the Holy Ghost is in the Father, and the Father in the Holy Ghost; the Holy Ghost is in the Son, and the Son in the Holy Ghost. (P. 133.)
The implication of this for the three persons’ understanding and loving is clear: “There is understanding and will in the Father, as the Son and the Holy Ghost are in him and proceed from [him]. There is understanding and will in the Son, as he is understanding and as the Holy Ghost is in him and proceeds from him. There is understanding and will in the Holy Ghost, as he is the divine will and as the Son is in him” (p. 134). Some years before Edwards made this observation, he had dealt with the issue of the understanding and love of the three persons in a different way. In “Miscellanies,” no. 308, from the spring of 1728 (two years before he wrote the first several pages of “Discourse on the Trinity”), he had stated that “the Father understands, the Son understands, and the Holy Ghost understands, because every one is the same understanding divine essence; and not that each of them have a distinct understanding of their own.”8
Here Edwards was adopting the Western tradition’s typical emphasis on the extreme unity of the divine essence, with the result of downplaying his own strong affirmation of the real distinctions within God. But in the middle of “Discourse on the Trinity,” some years after “Miscellanies” no. 308, Edwards shifts to a strong perichoretic formulation of the divine unity and of the relation between the three persons and the divine understanding and loving.
In Edwards’ perichoretic approach, we have a vision of God’s unity that is profoundly different from the Western church’s traditional tendency to see God’s unity in the singularity of divine substance. For Edwards, God’s unity consists in the “wonderful union” between the persons of the Trinity and “a communion in one another.” The concept of God’s unity here is one of mutuality, communion, and fellowship rather than a monadic and self-contained individuality. And this perspective is more in line with Edwards’ conception of God, according to which there is no underlying substance behind the persons, and also according to which there is a clear emphasis upon the threeness of the Trinity as God and God’s two self-repetitions.
the equality and economy among the persons of the trinity
Edwards strongly affirmed the equal divinity of each of the persons of the Trinity, but at the same time he talked about an order of being and of acting among them upon which God’s activities are based. This ordering or economy of the trinitarian persons is discussed in “Miscellanies,” no.
1062, which was first published by E. C. Smyth in 1880 with the title “Observations Concerning the Scripture Oeconomy of the Trinity, and Covenant of Redemption.” Edwards articulates the equality and ordering of the persons on five interconnected levels. The first and the most basic, as discussed earlier, is the ontological equality of the three persons. In the Son and the Holy Spirit, Edwards wrote, “the whole deity and glory of the Father . . . is repeated, or expressed again, and that fully: so that there is properly no inferiority.”9 The three persons are the same “in glory and excellency of nature.”
The second level is the order of subsisting among the three persons, and is a matter of their origin and relation. The Father is “unbegotten,” the Son “begotten” of the Father, and the Holy Spirit has “proceeded” from the Father and the Son. Thus, the unbegotten Father has a kind of “priority of subsistence”—though not ontological “superiority”—over the begotten Son and the Holy Spirit that has proceeded from them. The Son has “a kind of dependence” on the Father and the Holy Spirit, on both the Father and the Son. The Son’s being “begotten” and the Holy Spirit’s “proceeding” are eternal—that is, there was never a time when they were not begotten and proceeding. Further, the origin of the Son and the Holy Spirit is “no voluntary, but a necessary proceeding; and therefore infers no proper subjection of one to the will of another.” The Son and the Holy Spirit, as fully divine, exist “by necessity” without being dependent on the voluntary will of any other being. In short, the priority of the Father over the Son and the Holy Spirit, and the priority of the Son over the Holy Spirit, is the “natural order of the eternal and necessary subsistence of the persons of the Trinity.”1
The third level is an “order of their acting that is agreeable to the order of their subsisting.” Edwards explains that “as the Father is first in the order of subsisting, so he should be first in the order of acting,” and “as the other two persons are from the Father in their subsistence, and as to their subsistence naturally originated from him and are dependent on him; so . . . in all that they act they should originate from him, act from him and in a dependence on him.” This order of acting is not “by necessity” but “by agreement.” “[T]he persons of the Trinity all consent to this order . . . as they all naturally delight in what is in itself fit, suitable and beautiful.”2 This order of acting is suitable because it is based on the prior order of the persons’ subsistence.
The covenant of redemption is based on the first three prior levels of the trinitarian economy. So the fourth level of the trinitarian economy is the agreement that the Father and the Son primarily make in their plans to redeem the fallen creation. And it is in accordance with the three persons’ prior order of acting that the manner of the covenant of redemption is established. As the head of the Trinity, the Father “begins that great transaction of the eternal covenant of redemption, is the first mover in it,” and “proposes the matter unto [the Son].” And “the Son (though he acts on the proposal of the Father), yet acts as one wholly in his own right, as much as the Father, being not under subjection or prescription in his consenting to what is proposed to him, but acting as of himself.” The Father initiates the covenant by determining “to allow a redemption, and for whom it shall be,” and by proposing it to the Son.3 But the Son voluntarily agrees with the Father’s proposal. The equality of the three persons and the economic ordering are thereby both preserved.
The consequence of the covenant of redemption, which we may see as the fifth level in the trinitarian ordering, is “a new kind of subordination and mutual obligation between two of the persons, arising from this new establishment.” The Son takes on a new kind of subjection to the Father, “far below that of his economical station”—namely, the Son’s subjection of himself to humiliation and to the role of a servant. At the same time, the Father promises to the Son the office of the “head of authority and rule to the universe, as Lord and judge of all.” This new role of the Son “does not belong to him in his economical character.” Yet this new role of the Son’s subjection and humiliation, resulting from the covenant of redemption, is still “not contrary to their economical order; but in several respects agreeable to it, though it be new in kind.” That is, “if either the Father or the Son be brought into the subjection of a servant to the other, it is much more agreeable to the economy of the Trinity, that it should be the latter, who by that economy is already under the Father as his head.”4
Edwards’ treatment of the role of the Holy Spirit on the fourth level of the trinitarian economy is somewhat ambivalent. On the fifth level, which is the consequence of the covenant of redemption, Edwards tells us that the Holy Spirit is subjected to the Son and put at the Son’s “disposal.” But the establishment of the covenant of redemption itself is thought to be between the Father and the Son. Edwards merely describes the Holy Spirit as the “main thing purchased” through the work of redemption.5
But Edwards quickly realized that the Holy Spirit’s role in the whole affair appears rather diminished. Where is the equality of the trinitarian persons? Edwards asserts toward the end of the “Observations” that “it is true, that the Holy Spirit is infinitely concerned in the affair of our redemption, as well as the Father and the Son,” and “that there was a consultation among the three persons about it, . . . and so, that there was a joint agreement of all.” Further, “[i]t is not only true, that the Holy Ghost is concerned in the work of redemption equally with the other persons; but that he is also concerned in the covenant of redemption, as well as they.” After all this, Edwards still adds that the Holy Spirit’s “concern in the covenant is not that of a party covenanting.”6 Obviously, Edwards had not yet worked out in his mind the nature of the active role of the third person within the Trinity—something, as we saw earlier, he began formulating in “On the Equality of the Persons of the Trinity.” In writing the “Observations,” Edwards appears to have retained the notion of the Holy Spirit as the “bond between the Father and the Son.”
So, on the level of being, the three persons of the Trinity are absolutely equal with one another; no subordination is implied. The order of subsistence among the persons entails a kind of superiority, or rather a priority of the Father over the other two persons, and this ordering inherent on the level of subsistence is the foundation of all of the orderings that exist in God’s activities in relation to the world. Edwards is keen to emphasize here that what God does in relation to the world, and how he does it, are not accidental or contingent upon anything extrinsic to God but firmly rooted in God’s own eternal being—that is, in God’s life as an eternal respect and love among the three equally divine but distinct persons, and in the way they subsist eternally as distinct though equal divine persons.
Besides the ordering in the inner-trinitarian subsistence and God’s activities ad extra, there is another sort of hierarchy that Edwards discusses in “Miscellanies,” no. 1062: the priority of God’s disposition to communicate himself through creation over the trinitarian persons’ agreement on the covenant of redemption on behalf of the fallen creation. Just as the economical order among the trinitarian persons inherent in God’s nature is prior to the covenant of redemption, “we must conceive of God’s determination to glorify and communicate himself as prior to the method that his wisdom pitches upon as tending best to effect this.” That is, “God’s glorifying and communicating himself by the redemption of a certain number of fallen inhabitants of this globe of earth, is a thing diverse from God’s natural inclination to glorify and communicate himself in general, and superadded to it or subservient to it.”7 What Edwards is asserting is that God’s inherent disposition to communicate himself for the glorification of himself is logically prior to, and independent from, God’s activities of redeeming fallen humanity. In other words, God’s actions and plans of actions in relation to the world are always grounded in what God already is within God’s own internal life, and ultimately in what God is in his own nature.
I shall return to this matter shortly. But the implication of the above discussion for my purpose here is that for Edwards, what God does in relation to the world is fundamentally grounded in and thus inextricably related to what God is within himself. It is the same divine disposition to communicate himself through the intra-trinitarian life that is exercised in the historical activities of the economic Trinity. The immanent Trinity and the economic Trinity are inseparably connected, and the logical and ontological link between them is God’s dispositional essence, which is exerted in both.
the immanent and the economic trinity
The continuity of the immanent and economic Trinity is a hallmark of Edwards’ theology.8 For Edwards, God’s inner life is not a puzzle subject to theologians’ speculations but rather a living truth about God that emerges from the believers’ heartfelt experiences of God’s self-communication of himself in Jesus Christ and in all history and space. What believers have experienced from God’s redemptive activities in their own lives is a reflection of the way God himself is in his own life ad intra. In this way, Edwards restores the Trinity doctrine’s original connection with the lived faith of the Christian community.
We can encapsulate the meaning and implication of Edwards’ understanding of the continuity of God’s inner life and external activities in the following ways. The first point, briefly alluded to above, is that the innerouter trinitarian continuity is based on God’s inner and outer being and
7. Ibid., p. 79. For later sermons on the economy of the Trinity in the work of redemption, see MS sermons on I Cor. 11:3 (Mar. 1746), Gal. 3:13–14 (Apr. 1746), and I John 4:14 (Apr. 1746, Edwards Collection, Trask Library, Andover-Newton Theological Seminary, Newton Centre, Mass.).
life, and is all the exercise of the same dispositional essence of God. In an entry in the “Miscellanies,” Edwards schematized his conception of the inner and outer aspects of God’s same activity of self-communication in the following manner:
God is glorified within himself in these two ways.
1. By appearing, or being manifested, to himself in his own perfect idea, or, in his Son, who is the brightness of his glory.
2. By enjoying and delighting in himself, by flowing forth in infinite love and delight toward himself, or, in his Holy Spirit. So God glorifies himself towards the creatures also two ways.
1. By appearing to them, being manifested to their understandings. 2. In communicating himself to their hearts, and in their rejoicing and delighting in, and enjoying the manifestations which he makes of himself.9
“The same disposition that inclines [God] to delight in his glory,” Edwards writes elsewhere, “causes [God] to delight in the exhibitions, expressions and communication of it.”1 There is no metaphysical gap between God’s own internal life and his external self-communication. What believers experience in Jesus Christ is God himself. In Edwards’ thought, as in that of the fourth-century Eastern theologians, as Robert W. Jenson has put it, “the roles of Jesus and his Father and their Spirit in our history, and the roles of those three ‘persons’ in God’s own reality, intersect with each other to make but one divine history.”2
The second significance of Edwards’ close connection of the immanent with the economic Trinity is a corollary of the first point: God’s redemptive activity ad extra would be trinitarian in nature, just as God’s internal life is trinitarian. This means that there is both unity and clear distinction among the three persons of the Trinity in their economic roles. As Edwards explains in “Miscellanies,” no. 1062, the Father “determines that a redemption shall be admitted, and for whom.” The Son in his mediatorial work undertakes “the great and difficult and self-abasing work of our redemption.” The Holy Spirit, or the divine love, is “the main thing that [Christ] purchased” and is to be dispensed by Christ to the elect.3 In “Miscellanies,” no. 402, Edwards refers to the Mediator as Jesus Christ, not only as the Son: “The great thing purchased by Jesus Christ for us is communion with God, which is only in having the Spirit.”4God’s economic work is trinitarian, as is God’s inner-trinitarian life.
Since Augustine the Western church has tended to stress the unity of the three persons of the Trinity rather than their distinctions. The distinctions among the three persons in their external relations were honored through what is known as the doctrine of appropriations, which stated that particular works were appropriated to particular persons of the Trinity: creation was the work of the Father, redemption the work of the Son, and sanctification the work of the Holy Spirit. This way of thinking, according to Jenson, had the effect of “shielding” God’s intra-trinitarian proceedings from what God does in history. For Edwards, what God does in history is not just related appropriately to the intra-trinitarian life of God, but rather “reproduces” it in history.5 Edwards is at considerable pains to maintain that the three persons of the Trinity have particular roles to play in redemption and that the ordering of those roles is grounded in, and repeats, the eternal order of subsistence within the Trinity. “It is not meet,” explains Edwards, “that the Redeemer should be God the Father; because he, in the divine economy of the persons of the Trinity, was the person that holds the rights of the Godhead, and so was the person offended.”6 Likewise, “’tis not fit that [the Mediator] should be . . . the Spirit, for . . . in being mediator between the Father and the saints, [the Mediator] is mediator between Father and the Spirit.”7 Of course, Edwards also affirmed the unity of the three persons in their external activities. But their unity is no longer stated in terms of “indivisibility” but rather as a mutual agreement among the three. “[A]ll the persons of the Trinity do concur in all acts ad extra.”8 Edwards applied his trinitarianism in his conception of God’s activities ad extra more rigorously than his predecessors in the Western church.
The third and final point we must highlight in regard to Edwards’ strong emphasis upon the unity of the immanent and economic Trinity is the way God’s inner-trinitarian life and his external activities confirm and also help articulate the truth and meaning of each other for humankind. Edwards frequently describes, and argues for the truth of, the Trinity ad intra on the basis of God’s trinitarian manner of doing redemptive work in human history. For example: “[I]t appears that the Holy
Spirit is the pure act of God and energy of the Deity, by his office, which is to actuate and quicken all things, and to beget energy and vivacity in the creature.”9 Similarly, the Holy Spirit “quickens and beautifies all things. . . . Now whose office can it be so properly to actuate and enliven all things, as his who is the eternal and essential act and energy of God?” (p. 123). Edwards here characterizes the person of the Holy Spirit on the basis of what the Holy Spirit, according to believers’ historical experience, actually does. In the “Discourse on the Trinity,” Edwards summarizes this point by stating that “what I have here supposed concerning the Trinity is exceeding analogous to the gospel scheme, and agreeable to the tenor of the whole New Testament” (p. 134). Edwards’ doctrine of the Trinity, therefore, is no speculative exercise but emerges out of, and directly speaks to, the “gospel scheme”—that is, the reality and manner of God’s redemptive activities in human history.
the triune god and the work of creation and redemption
Thus far our discussion has dealt primarily with the triune being of God ad intra, or the immanent Trinity and its connection with the economic Trinity. The writings included in this volume, other than “Discourse on the Trinity” and “On the Equality of the Persons of the Trinity,” are on the topics of grace, faith, justification by faith, and sanctification. The selections from the “Controversies” notebook also relate to grace, justification, and true virtue. From our discussion of the immanent Trinity, we can see that Edwards’ discussion of grace, justification, and sanctification would be an elaboration of the external and redemptive activities of the Trinity, or the economic Trinity, and the nature of the human participation in those activities.
An important consequence of Edwards’ doctrine of the immanent Trinity for his treatment of God’s redemptive activities is that the latter will be thoroughly trinitarian. Edwards sees God’s activities ad extra as the external extensions or repetitions of God’s inner-trinitarian life. Now this, for Edwards, means that the distinctions as well as the unity of the trinitarian persons will be stressed in the history of God’s redemptive activities. God the Father “determines to allow a redemption”; the Son, the Mediator, undertakes “the great and difficult and self-abasing work of our redemption”; and the Holy Spirit is “the main thing that [Christ] purchases,” that is, divine love for fallen humanity, which is the repetition of the mutual love between the Father and the Son within the Trinity. As we shall see below, Edwards aims to assign to the Holy Spirit a role in re- demption that is fully equal to the roles played by the other two persons of the Trinity.
In Edwards’ view, the trinitarian persons’ covenant to redeem fallen humanity is “superadded” and “subservient” to “God’s natural inclination to glorify and communicate himself in general.” Creation would be logically prior to the redemption of the fallen creation. What Edwards is saying, then, is that both creation and redemption are exercises of God’s disposition to communicate himself, and also that redemption serves the end of creation. Edwards makes exactly this point in an important statement at the beginning of The End for Which God Created the World: “[I]t may be further observed that the original ultimate end or ends of the creation of the world is alone that which induces God to give the occasion for consequential ends by the first creation of the world, and the original disposal of it. And the more original the end is, the more extensive and universal it is. That which God had primarily in view in creating, and the original ordination of the world, must be constantly kept in view, and have a governing influence in all God’s works, or with respect to everything that he does towards his creatures.”1
It is axiomatic in Edwards’ thought that “all God’s works, or with respect to everything that he does towards his creatures,” must be understood within the framework of God’s end in creating the world.
In creating the world, God’s aim can only have been the highest good, because God by nature is disposed to do only what is good and beautiful. But it is God himself who is “infinite and most worthy of regard.” As Edwards puts it in his notes on “The Nature of True Virtue” in the “Controversies” notebook, God, “being infinitely the greatest and best of beings, comprehending within himself infinitely the most being and the most virtue, . . . it becomes him, as an infinitely holy God, to make himself his supreme end” (p. 323). Therefore, in creating the world, as in doing all things, God’s aim can only be himself. But then a problem arises: since God is already “self-existent from all eternity” and “absolutely perfect in himself, in possession of infinite and independent good,” how can God himself be an aim yet to be achieved?2 Edwards’ answer is that God’s end in creation is “himself communicated.”3 Through creation, God seeks to be “diffused, overflowing, and as it were enlarged; or in one word, existing ad extra.” An “increase, repetition, or multiplication” in time and space of God’s eternal prior actuality is what God aims at.4
If God’s end in creation is himself repeated ad extra, what moves him to seek such a goal? Edwards’ answer lies in his conception of God as essentially an eternal disposition to know and love true beauty—or, in other words, the inclination to communicate himself. God, for Edwards, is essentially “a disposition effectually to exert himself, and to exert himself in order to an effect.”5 God is also “the infinitely beautiful and most excellent,” and is a knowing and loving being. Thus, God is the eternal disposition to know and love true beauty.
One more element needs to be added to this summary definition. As we saw earlier, when a disposition is exercised through the acts of knowing or loving, there is an ontological increase, a movement from virtuality to actuality or from the real possibility to which a disposition is disposed (say, the real possibility or virtual reality of singing well) to the full actuality of that to which that disposition is disposed—for example, the full actuality of singing in the act of actually singing well. And for Edwards actuality is “bigger” than virtuality or real possibility.6 The exercise of the divine disposition, then, would constitute an increase of the divine actuality. Thus God, as the eternal divine disposition, is the disposition to increase his own actuality. Edwards concludes, “[I]t is [God’s] essence to incline to communicate himself.”7
The first eternal actuality of God is the first and primal exercise of the divine disposition to know and love beauty, which is to say, God the Father. The Father’s further exercise of divine disposition through his reflexive knowing constitutes the Son, who is the intellectual repetition or self-communication of the Father. Finally, the Father’s and the Son’s exercise of divine disposition through the mutual love between them is the affectional self-communication of the Father and the Son, or the Holy Spirit. Hence, God’s actuality as the Father and the Father’s intellectual and affectional repetitions of his own actuality (the Son and the Holy Spirit) make up the inner-trinitarian actuality and self-communication of God, which is “completely equal” to the eternal divine disposition. God ad intra,in other words, is God’s primordial actuality plus an increase of that actuality. God ad intra is actual “to an infinite degree and in the most perfect manner possible.”8
If God’s actuality is the infinitely perfect exercise of divine disposition, why then was God moved to create the world? God is infinitely actual, but
God’s essence remains as a disposition to communicate himself through more knowledge and love of beauty. As Edwards explains, God’s infinite exercise of his disposition ad intra is indeed perfect and complete, but it is “not the same kind of exercise” as the exercise of God’s perfection ad extra through creation; and, additionally, “God, who delights in the exercise of his perfection, delights in all kinds of its exercise.”9 Thus, “a disposition in God, as an original property of his nature, to an emanation”—that is, a repetition ad extra—“of his own infinite fullness, was what excited him to create the world.”1
God’s ultimate aim in creation, then, is God himself communicated and repeated outside of himself. In order to achieve this end, according to Edwards, God created human beings who can repeat God’s internal knowledge and love in their own knowing and loving, as well as the physical universe, which, with the help of human perception of it as the image of God’s beauty, can shine forth God’s glory in its own way. Edwards states, “God has made intelligent creatures capable of being concerned in these effects, as being the willing, active subjects, or means, and so they are capable of actively promoting God’s glory.”2 “In the creature’s knowing, esteeming, loving, rejoicing in, and praising God, the glory of God is both exhibited and acknowledged; his fullness is received and returned.”3 The intelligent beings’ knowing and loving of God cannot “add” anything to God’s eternal perfection ad intra. But God does become “more” in the special sense that, through the creatures’ knowing and loving him, God’s internal fullness is repeated ad extra, and God’s own eternal glory is thereby “enlarged.”4
For created beings to be able to fulfill their function of repeating God’s glory in time and space, God must then communicate his own knowledge and love to them. Thus, God’s ultimate end of repeating his fullness ad extra includes in it another goal: to communicate himself to the creatures, to seek their good and make them “happy.” The good of the creature is also an “ultimate end,” an end that is valuable “for its own sake.” But for Edwards, one ultimate end can be more valuable than other ultimate ends. So, according to him, God’s end of communicating himself ad extra is his “chief ultimate end” in creation, while the ultimate end of seek-
9. “Miscellanies,” no. 553, in Works, 18, 97. 1. End of Creation, in Works, 8, 435. 2. “Miscellanies,” no. 1218, in Philosophy of Jonathan Edwards, ed. Townsend, p. 152; see also “Miscellanies,” 1153–1360.
ing the good of the creature is “comprehended in” that chief ultimate end. This is why Edwards insists that “that which God had primarily in view in creating . . . must be constantly kept in view, and have a governing in- fluence in all God’s works, or with respect to everything that he does towards his creatures.”5 Creation and redemption are to be understood in the light of God’s end of self-communication.
This brief consideration of God’s end in creation brings out at least two principles that are important to Edwards’ thinking. The first is the primacy of God in creation and redemption. God’s act of creation itself, and all that happens in relation to creatures, is fundamentally the exercise of God’s own dispositional essence; the end that governs all that happens is God’s self-communication. The second principle is the importance of history and all dimensions of the created world. They are important events to God himself because it is precisely through earthly repetitions of God’s internal beauty that God’s end in creation is going to be achieved.
Restated in soteriological terms, these two principles mean, first, that the primacy of God will be affirmed in the redemption of fallen creation. The sovereignty of God’s grace in redemption is rooted in the way Edwards conceives of God’s work of creation. The soteriological meaning of the second principle is that, for Edwards, the redemption of fallen humanity is going to involve an actual change in the human being. God’s goal of repeating his internal beauty will really be actualized in and through the redeemed persons’ knowledge and love of God’s beauty and of all things in relation to that beauty. Redemption is going to be God’s work and, at the same time, a work in which the elect really participate. Can redemption be sola gratia if there is a real change in the elect? Conversely, if grace is redemptive, how can there not be a real change in the elect? To maintain both is required by Edwards’ view of God’s end in creation, and this is Edwards’ main task, which he fulfills with a remarkable originality in his writings on grace, justification, and sanctification.
The Nature of Grace
In the writings included in this volume, grace is primarily discussed by Edwards in the “Treatise on Grace” and in the three notebooks and the section in the “Controversies” notebook on “Efficacious Grace.” But the topic is also extensively dealt with in Religious Affections, “Charity and Its Fruits,” select “Miscellanies” entries, sermons, and other writings. By “grace,” Edwards refers to God’s act of being gracious as well as to the re- ality of grace dwelling in the regenerate and the many effects of this new reality, often called “blessings.” The term “regeneration” usually refers to the basic change that occurs in a human being through the infusion of the Holy Spirit, and the word “conversion” to the actual effect of such a change in the act of faith.6
Edwards’ treatment of grace is thoroughly trinitarian, and stresses God’s sovereign initiative in grace as well as the reality of grace in regenerate human beings. The trinitarian character of grace, for Edwards, means that both the distinctiveness and the unity of the triune persons are important to God’s work of redemption. As we saw earlier, the three persons of the Trinity are united in pursuing the divine goal of self-communication ad extra, but, as for “the particular manner and means of it,” the three persons act according to a “covenant or agreement.” According to this agreement, the distinctive roles of the three persons are clearly laid out. “[T]he Father appoints and provides the Redeemer . . . ; the Son is the Redeemer by offering up himself, and is the price; and the Holy Spirit immediately communicates to us the thing purchased by communicating himself, and he is the thing purchased” (p. 136).
In designating the Holy Spirit’s role as “the thing purchased,” Edwards is criticizing a general tendency in Puritan theology to see the Holy Spirit as the one who “applies” what the Father and the Son have accomplished. Edwards complains, “Merely to apply to us . . . the blessing purchased” is “but a little thing to the purchaser of it by the paying an infinite price by Christ . . . and to God the Father’s giving his infinitely dear Son to be a sacrifice for us” (p. 137). Edwards then defends the equal honor and the importance the third person has with the other two persons in the affair of redemption. “To be the love of God to the world,” he writes, “is as much as for the Father and the Son to do so much from love to the world; and to be [the] thing purchased was as much as to be the price: the price, and thing bought with that price, are equal. And ’tis as much as to afford the thing purchased: for the glory that belongs to him that affords the thing purchased, arises from the worth of that thing that he affords; and therefore ’tis the same glory, and an equal glory: the glory of the thing itself is its worth, and that is also the glory of him that affords it” (pp. 137–38).
grace as the holy spirit
The equal honor of the Holy Spirit as “the thing purchased” is important for Edwards’ scheme of thought, because it is the Holy Spirit who brings a new reality to the sinner and because this new reality has to be a spatio-temporal repetition of God’s internal fullness. Only the Holy Spirit himself, as the full Deity, together with the Father and the Son, can carry out such a task.
Now the fallenness of creation means that human beings are not able to know and love God’s beauty and therefore cannot repeat God’s glory in time and space. Fallen humanity must be redeemed in order to know and love God as well as all things in God. In this way, human beings are put back on the track, so to speak, of pursuing the end for which God created the world. Redemption, according to Edwards, involves both the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the sinner and also the justification of the sinner through the act of faith in Christ, who has purchased that redemption. The coming of the Holy Spirit, justification, and the atoning work of Christ are all God’s grace in the larger sense of the word “grace,” although Edwards usually employs it to refer to the work of the Holy Spirit. In this section I shall first deal with Edwards’ doctrine of grace as the redeeming work of the Holy Spirit and then turn to the doctrine of justification.
Grace, for Edwards, is primarily the work of the Holy Spirit. He writes: “All gospel righteousness, virtue and holiness is called grace, not only because ’tis entirely the free gift of God, but because ’tis the Holy Spirit in man. . . . This grace is the Holy Spirit; because it is said, we receive of Christ’s fullness, and grace for his grace [ John 1:16].”7 The regeneration which gives the sinner a “new principle of action” and in which the sinner receives “Christ’s fullness,” according to Edwards, consists of the “indwelling” of the Holy Spirit himself in the elect. The indwelling of the Holy Spirit brings about a “new birth” to the fallen human being (p. 187). Just as the biological birth of a person involves “the vivification of the fetus in the womb,” the “new birth” of the saint consists in “some actual alteration.”8 At this point, Edwards makes a clear departure from his predecessor and grandfather Solomon Stoddard, who saw no need for any alternation in a person’s inclination or disposition before the act of faith. The act of accepting Christ, for Stoddard, was the first gracious act of the soul and did not presuppose any infused habit prior to the act. As Thomas A. Schafer has put it, Stoddard exalted “the category of act over that of substance, and personal decision for the gospel over an ex opere operato infusion of the Spirit.”9 In Edwards’ view, however, an act presupposed a prior disposition or habit. For this reason he writes, “[T]he prime alteration that is made in conversion, that which is first and foundation of all, is the alteration of the temper and disposition and spirit of the mind.”1
The all-important point in Edwards’ doctrine of grace is that the new disposition in the regenerate is identified as the direct function of the Holy Spirit himself. “[W]hat is done in conversion is nothing but conferring the Spirit of God, which dwells in the soul and becomes there a new principle of life and action.”2 And the Holy Spirit as a new disposition works within, not against, the natural functions of the human self. This new disposition is not a new faculty but “a new foundation laid in the nature of the soul, for a new kind of exercises” of the saints’ ordinary faculties.3
The conferring of the Holy Spirit is “immediate,” in the sense that it is not limited by any established laws of nature. The conferring of grace is also “instantaneous” and “in a moment,” meaning that no human effort could ever produce or bring about grace (p. 161). Following the Reformed theologians Turretin and van Mastricht, Edwards also insists that the infusion of grace is “physical.” “Physical infusion” stands in contrast to a change brought about by “moral suasion” (p. 165). Finally, grace is “ef- ficacious” and “irresistible” and “gives both the will and also enables us to put that in execution” (p. 217). The effectiveness of God’s act of grace, in other words, is not subject to the acceptance or rejection of human beings.
The immediate context for Edwards’ discussion of the “infusion” of grace as “immediate,” “instantaneous,” “physical,” and “efficacious” was the polemic between the Calvinist and Arminian divines on the origin and nature of grace. In the broadest terms, Western theology’s discussion of grace pivoted around the issue of how to balance the primacy of God’s forgiving action in the redemption of fallen humanity with the active participation of the believer in the new reality of grace. Addressing this fundamental issue, Edwards and other Calvinist theologians of his day reaf- firmed the Reformed theological perspective on grace in the face of Arminian emphasis on the role of human responsibility in attaining and responding to God’s grace. The creativity of Edwards’ own articulation of the doctrine of grace goes far beyond a mere reiteration of the tradition in response to the Arminian challenge. But it is nonetheless true that Edwards spent a considerable amount of energy refuting the tenets of Arminianism promoted by such theologians as Daniel Whitby, George Turnbull, Henry Stebbings, and others.
In the “Efficacious Grace” section of the “Controversies” notebook, Edwards gives a summary statement of the issues in contention between himself and other Calvinists, on the one hand, and the Arminians, on the other. He writes, “The questions relating to efficacious grace controverted between us and the Arminians are two: I. Whether the grace of God, in giving us saving virtue, be determining and decisive. II. Whether saving virtue be decisively given by a supernatural and sovereign operation of the Spirit of God, or whether it be only by such divine influence or assistance as is imparted in the course of common providence” (p. 300). The first question has to do with the extent to which God’s grace determines the will and deed of the regenerate, and in what sense the “freedom” of the regenerate human self is preserved in the all-determining operation of God’s grace. The second question is more about whether human efforts can contribute to the “attainment” of God’s grace.
Edwards’ primary concern in the “Efficacious Grace” section in the “Controversies” notebook, as well as in the three notebooks called “Efficacious Grace,” is to answer the Arminian challenges on those two questions. To affirm the Calvinistic view that grace is “determining and decisive,” and not subject to human choice, Edwards first engages in a philosophical critique of the Arminian view of freedom as necessarily involving the will’s independent determination of its own choice. He begins with the maxim that all events and actions must have causes. If the will determines itself, Edwards argues, the will’s act of determining itself must have as its cause another act of self-determination. And that second act of self-determination also must have as its own cause yet another act of selfdetermination, and so on. Thus, the chain of actions either leads in in- finitum or ends up with a first act which is not self-determined. The notion of freedom as the self-determination of the will, Edwards concludes, is logically incoherent.
The Arminian notion of freedom as the will’s self-determination required that the will be “indifferent” before its act of choosing. Edwards finds this idea also problematic. He asserts that if virtue “arises from indifference,” then before it came from good acts “it was owing to no goodness in them . . . ; for goodness certainly inclines to goodness” (p. 221). To say that the will’s indifference is necessary for its freedom, according to Edwards, is to maintain that “a man acts most virtuously when he acts most without motive.” For Edwards, such a view is “contrary to all our natural notions of virtue and vice, praise and dispraise” (pp. 205, 206).
Edwards’ own view is that, like everything else, a voluntary human action must have a cause. The cause of moral action is the inner disposition of the moral agent. “The soul,” writes Edwards, “in all that is voluntary, ever more follows its prevailing inclination” (p. 203). There is a relationship of “moral necessity” between the inward disposition and the willing and doing. “Moral necessity,” Edwards explains, refers to the causal connection between “some previous habitual disposition, or some motive exhibited to the understanding” and “some inclination or volition of the soul, or voluntary action,” while “natural necessity” involves nonmoral factors, as when “by a natural necessity men’s bodies move downwards, when there is nothing to support them.”4 In other words, what causes a person’s properly voluntary willing and doing is not some nonmoral factor external to the full engagement of the moral powers of the human self.
Edwards insists that the inward disposition’s determination of willing and doing is not inconsistent with human freedom or liberty. In fact, for him, the only meaningful sense in which human beings are free does not depend on the will’s independent self-determination but rather on the moral agent’s ability to do what he or she is internally disposed to do without external interference. Edwards writes, “The mind exercises its liberty in following its prevailing inclination, if we mean anything that has any existence: for the soul, in all that is voluntary, ever more follows its prevailing inclination, is guided by its own choice. Wherein it is not guided by its choice, it don’t act of choice and so don’t act voluntarily, and so exercises no liberty” (p.203). So Edwards reaches a compatibilist view of human freedom: for the human self to be determined in its understanding, volition, and action by its own internal disposition is not incompatible with either the voluntary and free character of human action or the self’s responsibility for its action. In this way, Edwards seeks to demonstrate that God’s determining operation of grace is compatible with the full and free engagement of the human self. Edwards’ view of human liberty allows him to affirm the all-determining, or “efficacious,” operation of God’s grace in the regenerate and at the same time to conceive of the consequent Christian deeds of these regenerate persons as properly their own voluntary actions.
A key ingredient in Edwards’ philosophical defense of the Calvinist doctrine of grace against the Arminian challenge was a creative conceptualization of grace as the Holy Spirit’s indwelling and acting in the regenerate human self “after the manner of” an internal disposition or principle of action. The Holy Spirit is in the regenerate person as a new inward disposition “acting in union with his natural faculties after the manner of a vital principle” (p. 196). It is the Holy Spirit who acts in the regenerate, “uniting himself to the soul of a creature as a vital principle, dwelling there and exerting himself by the faculties of the soul of man, in his own proper nature” (p. 196). It is also true that the Holy Spirit acts not as a force external to the regenerate self but as “a new foundation laid in the nature of the soul for a new kind of exercises,” so that regenerate persons are “properly denominated” from the Holy Spirit, “and are called spiritual.”5 In short, Christian deeds of regenerate persons are “properly” the acts of the Holy Spirit himself and at the same time “properly” the deeds of the regenerate human beings themselves.
Against Arminians, Edwards has shown how the operation of God’s grace is “efficacious.” By “efficacious grace,” Edwards means that God “gives both the will and the deed, that ’tis God by his operation and efficiency gives both the will and also enables us to put that in execution (p. 217). What God does in regenerate persons, according to Edwards, “is often spoken [of] as thoroughly effectual, and the effect as infallibly consequent” (p. 240). Grace, in other words, is “irresistible” and not subject to human choice, as Arminians maintained. Furthermore, unlike what Arminians thought, God’s efficacious grace is not inconsistent with freedom. God’s grace operates efficaciously in and through the natural powers of the regenerate human self. In different senses, God and the regenerate human being are both fully active. The oft-quoted passage in which Edwards beautifully summarizes his compatibilist view of grace and human moral agency is found in “Efficacious Grace, Book III”: “We are not merely passive in it, nor yet does God do some and we do the rest, but God does all and we do all. God produces all and we act all. For that is what he produces, our own acts. God is the only proper author and fountain; we only are the proper actors. We are in different respects wholly passive and wholly active” (p. 251). In short, the operation of God’s grace is “determining and decisive” but does not violate human liberty, as Arminians believed.
Edwards’ second controversy with the Arminians on efficacious grace had to do with its origin, or the way it is attained by the regenerate. Edwards and other Calvinists believed that the Arminians had hopelessly compromised God’s absolute sovereignty as the source of grace, as well as the utter inability of fallen humanity to do anything to contribute toward attaining grace. Edwards asserts that “a principle of saving virtue is immediately imparted and implanted by that operation [of God] which is sovereign and efficacious in that respect, that its effect is not from any established laws of nature” (p. 301). So here is a second sense in which God’s grace, for Edwards, is efficacious: God brings about the effect of grace without depending upon any factors other than his own sovereign will. God alone is the author of grace and of the unfailing execution of its effects.
Arminians assumed that the betterment of human nature required divine assistance, but such an assistance, they insisted, had to come through human choice and endeavors and without violating the integrity of the laws of nature. Edwards begins his critique of this position by reiterating his fundamental conviction that “saving virtue differs from common virtue . . . in nature and kind,” not “only in degree and circumstances” (p. 301). Given this presupposition, it follows that such saving virtue could not be acquired “by repeated acts and obtained by human culture and improvements” (p. 301). Edwards asks whether “sincerity of endeavors” can lead to the attainment of saving grace, as Arminians contend. He points out that there must be a first sincere act, and that “this first distinguishing sincerity, that is the spring of the whole affair, must have existence by some means or other: and it must be either from some sincere endeavor of the man’s own foregoing, which is a contradiction; or it must be from God, which is the point required; or it must be from chance, which is to be from nothing” (p. 311). Arminian overconfidence in humans’ ability to save themselves by sincere efforts, Edwards comments, “tends exceedingly to cherish presumptionin sinners while in health and vigor, and to their utter despair in sensible approaches of death by sickness or old age” (p. 300). The discontinuity between grace and the fallen nature, therefore, can be overcome only by God. Grace can be “immediately implanted or infused into the soul” only by God himself and not acquired by humans. And since there is a qualitative difference between having saving grace and the fallen human condition, there is no middle ground between having grace and not having it. Comparing salvation to resurrection, Edwards writes, “Now there is no medium between being dead and alive. He that is dead has no degree of life; he that has the least degree of life in him is alive” (p. 160). Therefore, the infusion of grace is “instantaneous” (p. 161).
Efficacious grace is not only beyond the grasp of human capacity but also above the laws of nature. According to “Miscellanies,” no. 1263, because God directly acts to cause events, he usually abides by the previously established laws of nature. But since the thing that efficacious grace makes possible—the sense of God’s beauty—is beyond the laws of nature, the bestowal of such grace requires (as in the cases of God’s creation out of nothing and his resurrection of the crucified Jesus) God’s “sovereign and arbitrary” operation, which is not in any way dependent upon anything other than his own wisdom and will (p. 302). Grace, for Edwards, is efficacious both in effectually determining the effect and also in being sovereign—not dependent upon any creature—in bestowing it.
the holy spirit as the new disposition
Edwards states unambiguously that saving grace “is no other than the Spirit of God itself dwelling and acting in the heart of a saint” (p. 192). And Edwards asserted, as we saw above, that the Holy Spirit’s direct presence and operation in the regenerate is not incompatible with the effects of the Holy Spirit being the voluntary acts of the regenerate person. This compatabilist view was premised on Edwards’ contention that the Holy Spirit works as a new disposition or principle of action internal, not external, to the regenerate person’s own self. Edwards’ interest in seeing grace as a personal reality for the regenerate hung on the concept of the Holy Spirit’s indwelling and acting in the regenerate as a new disposition.
While rejecting the human capacity to contribute to the attainment of grace, Edwards, like other Calvinists, strongly emphasized the visible and behavioral reality of the effects of grace in regenerate persons. For Edwards, however, the importance of the reality of salvation for the regenerate was accentuated by his own theological framework, in which the redemption of fallen creation was comprehended in the ultimate end of God’s self-communication or self-repetition ad extra and was the consequence of the exercise of God’s own dispositional essence. God’s own activities of self-communication are involved in human redemption; and this self-communication has to happen within the fabric of time and space. It was a matter of special importance to Edwards, therefore, to maintain in his doctrine of grace the human reality of regeneration as well as the absolute primacy of God in that regeneration.
Now the key question here is this: What is the exact meaning of Edwards’ contention that the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity himself, acts in the regenerate “as” and “after the manner of” a new disposition or principle of action? How do the supernatural and natural meet in the workings of grace? This question has a long and complex history in the development of Christian doctrine, and a brief overview of that history will be useful to our understanding of Edwards’ unique perspective.
One of the basic themes in the development of the theology of grace in the West is the distinction between “uncreated grace” (gratia increata)—
God’s grace as the direct presence or action of the Holy Spirit—and “created grace” (gratia creata)—God’s grace as the abiding effect of the Holy Spirit which indwells in the saints as a new habit or disposition.6 In the twelfth century Peter Lombard identified the grace of charity with the direct presence of the Holy Spirit. Many theologians who followed Lombard, however, believed that grace had to be emphasized as an enduring transformation just as much as absolute sovereignty. The distinction between “uncreated grace” and “created grace” was introduced in the thirteenth century to resolve this issue.
Thomas Aquinas, in particular, was eager to emphasize grace as having a fixed and stable nature because he, following Aristotelian metaphysics, conceived of the supernatural operation of God as working in and through the natural order of things rather than as a violation of them. For Aquinas, human nature had three principles: the being of the soul and the faculties of reason and will. The nature of the human soul is directed to the natural end of the human being and, as a substance, is a completed form (forma completiva) that cannot be modified or redirected in any way. Now for Aquinas, without the change or elevation of human nature to a supernatural level, supernatural virtues and actions are not possible. Thus, God gives the saints a supernatural form, or an “entitative habit” (donum habituale), on the level of being, so that it can be the “basis” for the supernatural virtues that God would also infuse into the saints’ faculties and powers. Referring to the ontological level, where grace has to function first, Aquinas writes, “Grace reduces to the first kind of quality. However it is not simply a virtue; rather it is a kind of habitual state which is presupposed by the infused virtues, as their origin and root.”7
Aquinas’ conception of “created grace,” both on the ontological and the operational levels, is undoubtedly intended to articulate the real change that occurs in the actual being and powers of the regenerate person. What became controversial later was that “created grace” for Aquinas appeared to be a kind of semi-independent or intermediary principle that could be separated from “uncreated grace.” Grace on the level of being, says Aquinas, is “a kind of habitual state” and the infused virtues “an intermediary” by which grace issues forth in virtuous acts. Such mediating principles between God and the transformed saint’s virtuous acts are necessary for Aquinas because, as Robert P. Scharlemann explains, the self-moving nature of the human will would be annulled if the actions of God’s grace were direct and extrinsic. “An external movement might conceivably be a movement by the Holy Ghost, but it would not be a movement of love unless it were also an act of the will, that is intrinsic and voluntary.”8 Thus, for Aquinas, an “intrinsic and voluntary” act of a virtuous nature does not occur without (a) a mediating virtue that facilitates the movement of the will or (b) the “habitual state” of grace in the nature of the person. In this way, Aquinas rejected the Lombardian conception of grace as the direct activity of the Holy Spirit, although for him the presence of “created grace” did not negate the Holy Spirit’s continuing activity for the regenerate.9
Nevertheless, the prominent role played by “created grace” in the thought of Aquinas and the Scholastics in general was seen by the Reformers as a threat to the absolute sovereignty and gratuitous nature of God’s grace. And in reaction to Luther’s strong emphasis on grace as God’s absolutely gratuitous act of acceptance of the sinner, the Council of Trent emphasized the reality of “created grace” even more by describing it as an “inherent” quality in the regenerate.1
Edwards does not use the terms “uncreated grace” and “created grace,” and it is not clear whether he knew of this distinction. We may still ask, however, whether he had in mind something like “created grace,” an intermediary or quality produced by the Holy Spirit. When Edwards says that the Holy Spirit operates in the regenerate “as” and “after the manner of” a disposition or principle of action, is he thinking of “created grace” in the Thomistic sense?
There are times when Edwards gives the impression that his view is similar to that of Aquinas.2 In an early miscellany Edwards writes, “But by those expressions concerning a holy life, we can understand nothing else but a disposition that would naturally exert itself in holy [living] upon occasion; so we say of the believing disposition.”3 Later, in the “Treatise on Grace,” Edwards says that “this saving grace in the soul is not only from the Spirit, but it also partakes of the nature of that Spirit that it is from”
8. Robert P. Scharleman, Thomas Aquinas and John Gerhard (New Haven, Yale Univ. Press, 1964), p. 131. 9. Cf. C. Moeller and G. Philips, The Theology of Grace and the Ecumenical Movement (London, A. R. Mowbray & Co., 1961), pp. 19–21.
(p. 180). In a 1737 sermon on Matt. 25:1–12, Edwards says that saving grace is “not from nature but is wrought in the heart wholly by the Spirit of that which is supernatural, or above nature.” And in “Charity and Its Fruits,” Edwards goes as far as to say that “this blessing of the saving grace of God is a quality inherent in the nature of him who is the subject of it.”4
But such descriptions of grace as these—which appear to describe grace as an intermediary principle or quality in the regenerate person that is produced by and thus distinguishable from the Holy Spirit—are far outnumbered in Edwards’ writings by descriptions that identify saving grace as the Holy Spirit. So, for example, toward the end of “Treatise on Grace,” Edwards more typically states that “there is no other principle of grace in the soul than the very Holy Ghost dwelling in the soul and acting there as a vital principle” (p. 196).
Alternatively, Edwards describes how the Holy Spirit “becomes” a new disposition in the regenerate person. At one point in the “Treatise on Grace,” Edwards writes, “Hence the Spirit of God seems in Scripture to be spoken of as to become a quality of the persons in whom it resided, so that they are called spiritual persons; as when we say ‘a virtuous man,’ we speak of virtue as the quality of the man.” (p. 197). In Religious Affections, Edwards says that in the Scriptures the Holy Spirit is represented as being in the regenerate “so united to the faculties of the soul, that he becomes there a principle or spring of new nature and life.”5
How are we to interpret Edwards’ intention in using the term “become” to describe the way the Holy Spirit is in the regenerate person? It should be noted, first of all, that Edwards does not use “become” very often, and it is certainly not the most common way he refers to the manner of the Holy Spirit’s indwelling in the regenerate. Second, when Edwards uses the term, he does not appear to mean anything different from his more usual expressions, namely, “as” and “after the manner of.” So only a few sentences after Edwards uses the term “become” in the “Treatise on Grace,” for example, he resorts to his more typical terminology to describe the way the Holy Spirit acts as a new disposition. Third, Edwards’ use of the term is always in the context of emphasizing the reality of the Holy Spirit’s presence and action in the regenerate, which for Edwards is so real that the Holy Spirit’s acts are also the regenerate person’s own voluntary deeds. In one place he states, for example, that the Holy Spirit is said to “become” a quality in regenerate persons “so that they are called spir- itual persons” (p. 197). In “Charity and Its Fruits,” Edwards also observes, “By his producing this effect the Spirit becomes an indwelling vital principle in the soul, and the subject becomes a spiritual being, denominated so from the Spirit of God which dwells in him and of whose nature he is a partaker.”6 In short, it appears probable that with the word “become” Edwards did not have in mind the notion that the Holy Spirit “turned into” a human disposition or became “incarnate” in the regenerate person. His use of this term reflects his emphasis upon the personal reality of grace for the regenerate person rather than an intentional departure from his usual view that grace is “the very Holy Ghost dwelling in the soul and acting there as a vital principle.”
Edwards also speaks of the Holy Spirit as “united” with the regenerate person. “Christ’s love, that is, his Spirit, is actually united to the faculties of their souls. So it properly lives, acts and exerts its nature in the exercise of their faculties” (p. 195). As was the case with the term “become,” Edwards’ use of the term “union” is an expression of his emphasis on the personal reality of the effects of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is so “united” with the powers of the regenerate person that his acts are also properly the regenerate person’s own acts. But Edwards is equally emphatic in his contention that the effects of the Holy Spirit are the direct actions of the Holy Spirit himself.
The Holy Spirit, according to Edwards, neither “turns into” a disposition of the regenerate person nor produces an intermediary principle logically distinguishable from the Holy Spirit himself. Thus, the meaning of the term “union” is not entirely clear. We are therefore brought back to the question of how to interpret the meaning of Edwards’ typical formulation, that the Holy Spirit operates “as” or “after the manner of” a new disposition in the regenerate. The answer may lie in a most ingenious concept set forth in “Miscellanies,” no. 629, where Edwards argues that, in the case of saving grace, the Holy Spirit operates independent of the preestablished laws of nature. “For the actings of the Spirit of God in the heart are more arbitrary and are not tied to such and such means by such laws or rules, as shall particularly and precisely determine in a stated method every particular exercise and the degree of it; but the Holy Spirit is given and infused into the hearts of men only under this general law, viz. that it shall remain there and put forth acts there after the manner of an abiding, natural, vital principle of action, or a seed remaining in us.”7 In other words, the
Holy Spirit acts “after the manner of” a principle of action in the regenerate person neither by becoming nor by producing a new principle of action; rather, the Holy Spirit remains and acts directly and immediately as the Holy Spirit, except in accordance with the divinely established general law that the Holy Spirit act “after the manner” of a human principle of action.
Having posited this general law, Edwards can maintain that the Holy Spirit acts directly in the regenerate person and at the same time assert that the Holy Spirit’s acts are properly the regenerate persons’s own voluntary acts. While Edwards’ compatabilist view of human freedom enabled him to maintain that the Holy Spirit’s functioning as a new inward disposition is fully consistent with his being the regenerate person’s own voluntary actions, Edwards’ general law explains how the Holy Spirit is led to operate like a disposition in the regenerate. The Holy Spirit is “united” to the powers of the regenerate by acting in and through, not from outside, the natural powers of the regenerate.
Now general laws, to Edwards’ way of thinking, are dispositional principles, like habits, which have an abiding reality apart from their exercise and are in some sense causal powers that govern the character of certain events and actions. If this is the case, then is the general law governing the manner of the Holy Spirit’s operations in the regenerate a kind of intermediate principle that mediates or facilitates the operation of the Holy Spirit and the natural powers of the regenerate? Not really. If this general law mediates anything at all, it governs the manner in which the Holy Spirit will act in the human self. It does not mediate the Holy Spirit’s presence in the regenerate person; rather, the Holy Spirit himself directly dwells or “subsists” in the regenerate person. There is nothing in the regenerate person that is produced by, or is similar to, the Holy Spirit that mediates the Holy Spirit’s presence.
Nor does the general law dictate that the Holy Spirit act at all. The Holy Spirit acts only because of the covenant of redemption made within the Trinity and in response to the incarnate second person of the Trinity as witnessed to in the Scriptures and encountered by the believing soul. Moreover, the general law does not have anything to do with the fact that when the Holy Spirit acts, he does so in his own divine nature. The general law that Edwards speaks about in “Miscellanies,” no. 629, does not have anything to do with the presence, the origination of action, or the content of the Holy Spirit’s operation in the regenerate; it only determines that the Holy Spirit should act “after the manner of” a natural principle of action when he does indeed act in the regenerate. Scholars like Conrad Cherry and Anri Morimoto are therefore correct in pointing out that for Edwards, the Holy Spirit is never “domesticated” or “given over” to human possession.8
Thus, Edwards’ general law governing the manner of the Holy Spirit’s operation in no way prescribes saving grace; the Holy Spirit alone is the source of grace and, even more, is that grace itself. Edwards’ doctrine is neither simply that of Lombard nor that of Aquinas but rather a unique synthesis of the two—specifically, of Lombard’s idea of grace as the Holy Spirit himself and of the Thomistic emphasis upon grace as functioning in and through the natural powers of the regenerate. Yet Edwards’ general law governing the Holy Spirit’s operation has to be clearly distinguished from the Thomistic concept of “created grace” as a virtue that is produced by the Holy Spirit and that makes the believer’s own free act of faith possible.
It is in this light that Edwards’ language about the intimate “union” of the Holy Spirit in the regenerate has to be understood. In Religious Affections, Edwards writes that “the soul of a saint receives light from the Sun of righteousness, in such a manner, that its nature is changed, and it becomes properly a luminous thing. . . . Grace is compared to a seed implanted, that not only grows there, and is an abiding principle of life and nature there.” Earlier in the same work, he speaks of the Holy Spirit as dwelling in the saints “as his proper lasting abode.”9 According to Edwards’ descriptions in these passages, the Holy Spirit’s indwelling in the regenerate person is so intimate that he “grows there,” like a seed, and makes the nature of the regenerate person “properly a luminous thing.” This is not a Thomistic conception of created grace distinguishable from the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit’s immediate and direct actions in and through the regenerate person are so accurately and thoroughly “after the manner of” a human principle of action that he can be said to be “implanted,” to “grow,” and to be within the regenerate person as in a “lasting abode.” And this is so not because the Holy Spirit “turns into” or produces an intermediate principle of virtue residing in the soul but rather because the Holy Spirit’s own direct action is strictly in accordance with the general law governing the manner of his action in the regenerate person. Thus Edwards can say toward the end of the “Treatise on Grace” that “if God should take away his Spirit out of the soul, all habits and acts of grace would of themselves cease as immediately as light ceases in a room when a candle is carried out” (p. 196). In this way, Edwards retains saving grace as immediately the Holy Spirit’s own direct action as is logically possible, while at the same time asserting that the Holy Spirit acts as a new principle of action of the regenerate person.
the immediacy of the holy spirit’s operation and the laws of nature
We have noted Edwards’ contention that God acts “immediately” or directly both in the infusion of the Holy Spirit as a new disposition in the regenerate person and in the regenerate person’s every virtuous action. For Edwards, not only is saving grace “immediately implanted or infused in the soul,” but “all succeeding acts of grace, must be as immediately and to all intents and purposes, as much from the immediate acting of the Spirit of God on the soul as the first” (p. 196). But is there any difference between the immediacy of God’s action in the infusion of grace and the immediacy of the Holy Spirit in the consequent exercises of grace? In addition, Edwards asserts in a number of places that God’s immediate action is necessary for any and all existences and occurrences in the world. Yet he observes that the Holy Spirit’s “gracious operations on the mind” are “most arbitrary and bound to no knowable law.”1 In what sense, then, are God’s immediate acts in his saving grace more immediate than his immediate acts in all occurrences?
In order to achieve some clarity on these issues, it is necessary to place them in the context of Edwards’ general conception of God’s operation and its relation to the established laws of nature. Here we must turn first to his youthful text “Of Atoms” and then to his systematic discussion of God’s operations, especially in “Miscellanies,” no. 1263. An examination of these documents reveals two ways in which the Holy Spirit operates in the regenerate: first, in the basic or general sense in which all events involve God’s immediate activity; and second, the more specific sense in which God’s activities in saving grace are “more” immediate.
In “Of Atoms,” Edwards establishes that an entity’s existence and actions are “what immediately results from the exercise of the divine power in such a particular manner,” or “the Deity acting” according to “certain conditions which we call the laws of motion.”2 The “particular manners” and “certain conditions” are the abiding, habit-like laws according to which God directly causes entities and actions in the world. To put the matter differently, habits are the laws that certain types of existence or actions should occur upon certain kinds of occasions. The main condition necessary for the exertion of all habits, according to Edwards, is God’s direct causal action to act in accordance to a certain law. Without God’s direct action, laws cannot be moved into exercises. The created world is a network of laws, dispositions, or habits, according to which certain actual entities, events, and actions will occur. Those laws are established by God and, once established, God acts according to them and lets them govern the character of the entities and actions that he directly causes. The world as a network of laws and habits is virtual, tending to certain kinds of actual entities and actions. When God acts to cause entities and actions according to these laws and habits, the world is actual. The world is in a constant movement from virtuality to actuality, and God’s direct operations are necessarily involved in all actual occurrences and actions.
In “Miscellanies,” no. 1263, Edwards makes a distinction between God’s “arbitrary,” “natural,” and “mixed” operations. God’s “arbitrary operations” are “not confined to, limited by, those fixed establishments and laws commonly called the laws of nature”; indeed, God’s “natural operations” give “respect to” and are even “limited by” those established laws of nature. There can be “absolutely arbitrary operations” in which God’s operations are not limited by any previously established laws whatsoever. At one point Edwards cites God’s creation out of nothing as the only case of an absolutely arbitrary operation, though he later adds God’s creation of intelligent beings as another example. But there can never be “purely” or absolutely “natural operations” (that is, occurrences in the world that are brought about only by the laws of nature without God’s direct operation). Most of God’s operations are “mixed,” or “partly arbitrary and partly by stated laws.”3 Put another way, God’s “arbitrary operation” is always and without exception necessary because the existence of entities and the exertion of laws all involve “the Deity acting” or God causing “resistance,” as in the case of atoms. So Edwards explains that the “arbitrary operation . . . is the first and supreme, . . . to which the other is wholly subject and also wholly dependent, and without which there could be no divine operation at all, and no effect ever produced, and nothing besides God could ever exist. Arbitrary operation is that to which is owing the existence of the subject of natural operation—the manner, measure, and all the circum- stances of their existence.”4 Edwards’ position here is as far from deism as is logically possible. Every created being and action consists of God’s direct activity. But God’s direct action usually abides by the established laws and habits which make up the structure of the universe. Thus, Edwards is not a pure occasionalist but preserves the relative yet real integrity and permanence of the created order.
There is one additional point in Edwards’ discussion in “Miscellanies,” no. 1263, that we must note here. He sees all entities as belonging to different scales or levels—moving up from material things, to plants and animals, to intelligent beings, to the incarnate Logos itself. The lower an entity is on this ladder of being, the more extensively it is governed by the laws of nature; the higher in the scale, the less. “The lowest rank of material things are almost wholly under the government of the general laws of matter and motion”—“almost wholly,” because even the lowest ranking material things could not exist or move without the direct activity of God. In addition, “the higher we ascend in the scale of created existence and the nearer we come to the Creator, the more and more arbitrary we should find the divine operations in the creature.” Thus, “any divine operation may be said to be more or less arbitrary, or to come nearer to that which is absolutely arbitrary, in the sense I have spoken of it, in opposition to a being limited by that general rule called laws of nature.”5 In short, Edwards can speak of different degrees of the divine operation being arbitrary, or not limited by the laws of nature.
The primary point we bring from the above discussion to the issues at hand is Edwards’ view that the immediacy and directness of God’s activity do not diminish because God’s activity abides by the laws he has established. Without God’s direct activity, none of the laws of created beings could exist or be exercised. With this general background, we can now attend to Edwards’ statements about the exact sense in which the workings of the Holy Spirit are both immediate and also “after the manner of” a disposition. Edwards writes in “Miscellanies,” no. 64:
Thus the matter is, as to the Holy Spirit’s gracious operations on the mind. We have shown in philosophy, that all natural operations are done immediately by God, only in harmony and proportion. But there is this difference: these being the highest kind of operations of all, are done in the most general proportion, not tied to any particular proportion, to this or that created being; but the proportion is with the whole series of acts and designs from eternity to eternity, as miracles are, as the creation of the world, the birth and resurrection of Christ are. These operations are most arbitrary and bound to no knowable law, any more than any actions of the Deity whatever. Not but that there is commonly, in these spiritual operations, a respect to outward means; but they are not at all tied to them.6
And again, in “Miscellanies,” no. 481:
Common benefits are as much immediately from God as men’s highest perfection and happiness; i.e. one is as much by the direct present exercise of the power of God as the other. But there is this difference: common benefits are statedly connected with preceding things in the creature, so that they are in a sense dependent on the creature; but this excellency and blessedness of the soul is connected only with the will of God, and is dependent on nothing else. As to the exercise of power, they are both immediately from God; the exercise of God’s power does as immediately reach one effect as the other; but as to prerequisites, the one is not so immediate as the other.7
The sum of what Edwards is saying here is that all existences and actions in the created world are immediately caused by God, except that God causes them in harmony with his preestablished laws. The operation of the Holy Spirit in the saint is “immediate” in this basic sense. In his section on “Efficacious Grace” in the “Controversies” notebook, Edwards further explains this basic sense in which God’s action is involved in all occurrences: “For there is an assistance [of God’s action] in all such natural actions, because ’tis by a divine influence that the laws of nature are upheld, and a constant concurrence of divine power is necessary in order [to] our living, moving or having a being” (p. 300).
But there is a special meaning of immediacy in the case of the Holy Spirit’s operation in the regenerate. When the Holy Spirit acts in the regenerate “after the manner of” a disposition, the Holy Spirit “is bound to no knowable law” except to “the general proportion . . . [of] the whole series of acts and designs from eternity to eternity”—that is, the proportion or beauty of absolutely all things considered as a whole, which is none other than the transcendent beauty of God himself. In other words, when the Holy Spirit acts in the regenerate, he acts “after the manner” of a disposition, but this disposition is the Holy Spirit himself. And the Holy
Spirit, as the third person of the Trinity, is none other than what Edwards refers to above as “the general proportion . . . [of] the whole series of acts and designs from eternity to eternity,” or the beauty of God himself. When the Holy Spirit operates in the regenerate person as a disposition that results in exercises, he only has to be consistent with himself. Of course, as Edwards said in “Miscellanies,” no. 629, the Holy Spirit abides by the special general law that he should act “after the manner of” a principle of action in the regenerate. But in abiding by this general law, the Holy Spirit abides only by his own nature and is “most arbitrary and bound to no knowable law.” In short, to use the language of “Miscellanies,” no. 1263, the Holy Spirit’s operations in the regenerate are not “mixed” operations (abiding by created general laws of nature) but are “purely” arbitrary or immediate operations—or at least, far more arbitrary or immediate than in the cases of God’s operations in all natural occurrences.
the holy spirit and the means of grace
Edwards’ contention that the Holy Spirit’s operation is immediate and also “after the manner of” a disposition leads to another, related issue: the relation between the Holy Spirit’s operation and the “means of grace.” In the Holy Spirit’s operations in the regenerate, according to Edwards, there is “a respect to outward means; but they are not tied at all to them.”8
What are the “outward means,” or the “means of grace,” and how are they related to the Holy Spirit’s arbitrary or immediate operation?
Recall the logic of Edwards’ concept of disposition. A disposition is a law that a certain type of action or event should occur upon certain kinds of occasions. The most fundamental occasion necessary for the divine disposition to exercise in the regenerate is, as we saw above, God’s immediate activity of causing acts according to that disposition. In the case of the divine disposition in the regenerate, this precondition is the Holy Spirit’s immediate action of causing an act according to the divine disposition. But according to Edwards’ epistemology and the logic of disposition, appropriate sense data have to be received from outside the mind in order for the internal disposition to be triggered into exercises.9 Since the disposition involved is the third person of the Trinity, the appropriate external sense data would come from earthly embodiments of the transcendent beauty of God. These embodiments are the “outward means” or “means of grace,” and they are “the word and ordinances and works of
God,” or Scripture, sacraments, and providence.1 The beauty of God embodied in time and space functions as the occasion that triggers the habit of grace to exert itself into acts of knowing and loving that true beauty. “The matter which the principle of grace acts upon, is those notions or ideas that the mind is furnished with, of the things of religion; or of God, Christ, the future world, the saints, the attributes of God, the works of God, those things that Christ has done and suffered, etc.”2 Thus, the proclamation of the gospel through preaching, the sacraments, teaching, and all of God’s works in history and nature are the means of grace that can move the habit of grace into exercise.
So the function of the means of grace is to give the habit of grace an opportunity to exert itself, and Edwards strongly emphasizes the necessity of these means of grace. “If there could be a principle of grace in the heart without these notions or ideas there, yet it could not act, because it could have no matter to act upon.” Edwards goes even further, maintaining that “the more fully we are supplied with these notions, the greater opportunity has grace to act.” The “eloquence, in instructing” the Word of God and Christian doctrine, “frequent and abundant instructions,” “stronger reasons and arguments,” “more lively” ideas of God’s works in nature— all these will give grace “a better opportunity to act.”3 The means of grace, including human efforts involved in them, do matter and are indispensable.
But at the same time, Edwards emphasizes with equally strong words that the means of grace do not and cannot produce grace. Means of grace are made use of, “yet they have no influence to produce grace, either as causes or instruments,” he cautions. The means of grace are needed and useful only if “infused”—if grace is “in the heart.”4 In this way, the integrity and the imperative necessity of God’s Word in Christ, and the sovereign operation in grace by the Holy Spirit, are given their due.
Furthermore, the function of the means of grace in giving the Holy Spirit the appropriate “opportunity” for exercise is not by any “natural force” of their own. In A Divine and Supernatural Light, Edwards states, “When it is said that this light is given immediately by God, and not obtained by natural means, thereby is intended, that it is given by God without making use of any means that operate by their own power, or a natural force. God makes use of means; but it is not as mediate causes to produce this effect. . . . The Word of God is no proper cause of this effect: it does not operate by any natural force in it.”5 The human dimension in the means of grace (say, the words uttered by a preacher) is a real factor in triggering the habit of grace into exercises, but it is not so by the “natural force” of words or “or by their own power” but rather by the Word of God represented in the human element and by the immediate operation of the Holy Spirit. On this point, Conrad Cherry aptly writes: “[T]he indispensability of the Word does not mean that the light or the inward operation of the Spirit is caused by the Word as a human vehicle,” or “as a natural cause.”6 This is why many persons who know the content of the Scripture may still not have any sensible idea, or the new sense of the heart, of God’s beauty in it, and the truth of it, unless they have the Holy Spirit as a new disposition.
We need to refine Edwards’ point a bit further. Granted that the means of grace as a “natural force” cannot bring about the acts of grace: Would not human words in a sermon as human words, for example, make a positive contribution to representing the Word of God in human form and thereby to providing the Holy Spirit with appropriate occasions for exercise? Edwards answers in the affirmative. We have to pay particular attention, however, to the way he does so, as in A Divine and Supernatural Light:
The Word of God is only made use of to convey to the mind the subject matter of this saving instruction: and this indeed it doth convey to us by natural force or influence. It conveys to our minds these and those doctrines; it is the cause of the notion of them in our heads, but not of the sense of the divine excellency of them in our hearts. Indeed a person . . . can’t see the excellency of any doctrine, unless that doctrine be first in the mind; but the seeing the excellency of the doctrine may be immediately from the Spirit of God; though the conveying of the doctrine or proposition itself may be by the Word. . . . As for instance, that notion that there is a Christ, and that Christ is holy and gracious, is conveyed to the mind by the Word of God: but the sense of the excellency of Christ by reason of that holiness and grace, is nevertheless immediately the work of the Holy Spirit.7
So the natural dimension of the words in a sermon, as a natural force, does have a positive role in conveying the content of the Word of God to the mind and in giving the Holy Spirit the appropriate “subject matter” to act upon. What the human words in a sermon cannot do merely by natural force, however, is produce in the mind an actual experience of the true sense of the divine excellency “revealed by,” and “contained in,” the Scripture. For this, the “immediate work” of the Holy Spirit operating as a new principle of action in the human self is required.
It is not that the Holy Spirit brings about new information that was not already in the human words in the Scripture. As Edwards explains in Religious Affections: “Spiritually to understand the Scripture, is rightly to understand what is in the Scripture, and what was in it before it was understood . . . and not the making of a new meaning.”8 Furthermore, it is not that the Holy Spirit bypasses the natural powers of the human self. In another passage in A Divine and Supernatural Light, Edwards states,
’Tis not intended that the natural faculties are not made use of in it. The natural faculties are the subject of this light: and they are the subject in such a manner, that they are not merely passive, but active in it; the acts and exercises of man’s understanding are concerned and made use of in it. God in letting this light into the soul, deals with man according to his nature, or as a rational creature; and makes use of his human faculties. But yet this light is not the less immediately from God for that; though the faculties are made us of, ’tis as the subject and not as the cause; and that acting of the faculties in it, is not the cause, but is either implied in the thing itself (in the light that is imparted), or is the consequence of it. As the use that we make of our eyes in beholding various objects, when the sun arises, is not the cause of the light that discovers those objects to us.9
In short, human words and natural faculties are all involved, but it is only the Holy Spirit that can enable the human powers to experience the divine excellency contained in the human words.
There is indeed both a discontinuity and a continuity between nature and grace in Edwards’ thinking here. As he makes clear in “The Mind,” there is no absolute disjunction between the being of God and the finite. God’s beauty and natural beauty are both relations of “proportion.”1 It is therefore ontologically possible for human words and finite realities to reflect and “typify” the beauty of God. But there is a discontinuity as well.2 “There is a divine and superlative glory” in “the works of redemption, the ways and works of God revealed in the gospel,” says Edwards. But God’s beauty is also “of a vastly higher kind, and more sublime nature, than in other things; a glory greatly distinguishing them from all that is earthly and temporal.”3 Human language about God, in other words, is not equivocal or discontinuous with God’s beauty. Nor can human language convey God’s beauty by its own natural power. The potential of human language, and of all means of grace, has an actual and positive usefulness only when God reveals himself in human events and words and only when the Holy Spirit, working through natural human powers, discovers God in human events and human words.
When a person experiences the sense of God’s transcendent excellency while listening to a sermon, the sermon and the listener are taken up and allowed to participate in something infinitely more profound: the interaction between the incarnate Son of God and the Holy Spirit. The intratrinitarian love between the three persons, replayed in time and history, is the ultimate ground on which the validity and functioning of the means of grace are ultimately based.
So the triune God himself is the author and cause of everything, but he also lets created beings participate in his own life. What we previously quoted from Edwards in regard to efficacious grace also applies here and is worth repeating: “[W]e are not merely passive, nor yet does God do some and we do the rest, but God does all and we do all. God produces all and we act all. For that is what he produces, our own acts. God is the only proper author and fountain; we only are the proper actors. We are in different respects wholly passive, and wholly active” (p. 251). God is the “author and fountain,” the one who “produces all” and “does all.” Yet by God’s grace, we also “do all” and are “proper actors.” God allows his actions to be also “our own acts.”
Edwards’ important conviction in his conception of grace is this: although regenerate human beings and the outward means of grace are genuinely involved, grace can neither exist nor operate without the immediate and continuous activity of the Holy Spirit. “[I]f God should take away his Spirit out of the soul,” Edwards observes, “all habits and acts of
2. “The Mind,” in Works, 6, 336; and Nature of True Virtue, in Works, 8, 564–68. For a further discussion of the continuity and discontinuity between God’s beauty and other forms of beauty, see Lee, Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards, pp. 141–44. Roland Delattre discusses God’s transcendence and immanence in terms of beauty (Beauty and Sensibility in the Thought of Jonathan Edwards, pp. 162–65).
grace would of themselves cease as immediately as light in a room when a candle is carried out” (p. 196). Edwards’ doctrine of grace belongs firmly to the Reformation. But he was a Reformed theologian who labored with an ecumenical outlook, attempting to maintain in a doctrine of grace both God’s absolute primacy and the regenerate person’s genuine participation, a concern that goes back to Calvin, Luther, Aquinas, Augustine, and indeed, St. Paul himself.
Justification by Faith Alone
Justification by faith is the hallmark doctrine of the Protestant Reformation. Calvin declared it “the main hinge on which religion turns.”4 Yet whether this doctrine is also “the main hinge” for Edwards’ theology has been questioned. It is clear that Edwards followed the Reformation tradition and considered this doctrine important. His first public theological discourse outside of the pulpit was his Master’s Quaestio of 1723, entitled “A Sinner Is Not Justified in the Sight of God Except Through the Righteousness of Christ Obtained by Faith.” Some of the key ideas and arguments Edwards uses in his later discussions of the subject were already present in this oration. Justification by Faith Alone, delivered in 1734 and published in 1738, is his most elaborate and sustained articulation of his position. There are also important discussions of the topic in “Miscellanies” as well as in other writings, such as Religious Affections.5 Presented in this volume are Edwards’ ruminations on the subject in his later years (the late 1740s to the mid-1750s) as recorded in the “Controversies” notebook. In these discussions, Edwards elaborated on and also expanded some of the key arguments presented in Justification by Faith Alone.
Edwards clearly wanted to be faithful to the Pauline and Reformation principle that sinners are accepted as righteous by God only through his gratuitous grace in Christ rather than through their own works of merit. But given Edwards’ basic theological framework and its internal concerns, his own treatment of the justification doctrine could not be a mere reiteration of that of his Reformed predecessors. Edwards was facing the challenge of how to maintain both that justification is by faith alone and that there is a prior disposition or a principle of holiness of which faith is the first exercise. The divine disposition in the regenerate person, of course, is the Holy Spirit himself, but the Spirit acts in the saint after the manner of the saint’s own principle of action, so that the act of faith is properly the saint’s own act. If this is the case, is faith not a virtuous act which should be rewarded?
Just as in the doctrine of grace, Edwards’ utmost concern in his treatment of justification is to affirm both the totally undeserved character of human salvation and also the reality of regeneration. He starts both his 1723 Quaestio and Justification by Faith Alone by explaining that justification means not only being freed from the guilt of sin and its deserved punishment (negative righteousness) but also receiving the gift of righteousness that entitles the regenerate to a new life of holiness and eternal life (positive righteousness).6 “We should take the word [‘justification’] in such a sense, and understand it as the judges accepting a person as having both a negative, and positive righteousness belonging to him,” writes Edwards.7 Corresponding to this twofold definition of the justification of the sinner is the dual character of Christ’s work of atonement, which makes justification possible. Christ through his suffering “satisfied” the guilt of the sinners and through his “active obedience” earned them a “positive righteousness” and the reward of heaven. Christ’s suffering on the cross was itself a propitiation for humanity’s sins and “an act of obedience to the Father’s commands.” Thus, “by the blood of Christ we are not only redeemed from sin, but also redeemed unto God.” Edwards concludes: “To be justified is to be approved of God as a proper subject of pardon, and a right to eternal life.”8
The two main questions regarding justification to which Edwards accords the greatest energy and space are What is the role of faith in justification? and How is the saint’s perseverance in faith and Christian good works related to justification by faith alone? I shall focus on these issues and conclude with observations on how the justification doctrine is related to Edwards’ larger theological framework.
the role of faith in justification
Before directly discussing the role of faith in justification, we may pause to consider how Edwards defined faith. Included in this volume is Edwards’ notebook on “Faith,” which represents his lifelong attempt (beginning in 1728) to come up with a satisfactory definition of “the com- plex act of the mind” called faith (p. 462). We note briefly three points from this notebook. The first is that for Edwards the nature of faith is dispositional and holistic. “Faith arises from a charitable disposition of heart, or from a principle of divine love” (p. 420). Thus, faith is both an act of understanding and an exercise of inclination, with disposition as the unifying and underlying principle of both. Faith is “assenting” as well as “loving.” In one of many summary definitions of faith, Edwards writes, “Justifying faith is the soul’s sense and conviction of the reality, the excellency and sufficiency of Jesus Christ as a Savior, with the soul’s answerable entire inclination, entirely an answerable inclining of the heart towards him, and application of itself to him, entirely inclining and moving the heart to him” (p. 428). Edwards’ holistic, dispositional conception of the source of faith naturally led him to emphasize the inseparable connection between faith and practice. He observes that love, which is the exercise of the divine disposition, is “the main thing in saving faith, the life and power of it, by which it produces its great effects” (p. 448). In addition to explaining the practical dimension of faith, Edwards’ dispositional and holistic concept of faith brings us back to the question we asked earlier: Is the conception of faith as an exercise of the prior reality of disposition consistent with the doctrine of the justification by faith alone? We shall return to this question shortly.
The second noteworthy matter in Edwards’ notebook on “Faith” is his conception of faith as both a “sense” of the excellency of Christ and God in themselves without regard to the good they have done for us and also the reception of Christ as the Savior of us and for us.9 In keeping with his conception of the true, heartfelt knowing of anything as a “sensible” knowledge or a “sense of the heart,” Edwards speaks of faith also as a “sense.” In faith, “There is not only a belief of what the gospel declares . . . but there is also a sense of it. . . . There is a difference between being convinced that it is so, and having a sense that it is so” (p. 435). Further, the “sense of the sufficiency of Christ’s mediation depends upon a sense of the gloriousness and excellency of gospel things in general” (p. 429).
But what is the object of this faith as “sense”? On one hand, faith is a sense of the excellency of God and Christ as such without regard to what they have done for us. Edwards writes in the notebook on “Faith” that adhering to God’s revelation in Christ and “acquiescing in it with the judg- ment is from a sense of the glory of the revealer and the sufficiency and excellency of the performer” (p. 424). Edwards also states that “[f]aith is the soul’s embracing and acquiescing in the revelation the Word of God gives us of Jesus Christ as our Savior, in a sense and conviction of his goodness and reality as such” (p. 434). But at the same time, faith is a response specifically to Christ, who is the Savior of us. Edwards asserts, “[T]he Lord Jesus Christ in the gospel appears principally under the character of a Savior, not so much as of a person absolutely excellent; and therefore the proper act of reception of him consists principally in the exercise of a sense of our need of him . . . ; which can be expressed by no other word but ‘faith,’ or ‘affiance,’ or ‘confidence,’ or ‘trust’ and others of the same significance, of which fide~, or faith, is much the best” (p. 427). Edwards also states that faith is the exercise of the virtuous disposition, which is appropriate in responding to Christ the Savior. Faith, writes Edwards, is “true virtue in its proper and genuine breathings adapted to the case,” the case being “the revelation made, the state we are in, the benefit to be received and the way and means to it, and our relation to these things” (p. 463). But the question arises: What is the relation between faith as a sense of the excellency of Christ as such, and faith as an act of receiving Christ as the Savior who has wrought salvation for us?
The answer to this question comes in Religious Affections,where Edwards observes that the love of God for what God does for us is subsumed under—and within—the more fundamental love of God for what he is in himself. Edwards observes that the saints “don’t first see that God loves them, and then see that he is lovely; but they first see that God is lovely, and that Christ is excellent and glorious. . . . The saint’s affections begin with God; and self-love has a hand in these affections consequentially, and secondarily only.” Making the same point more directly in reference to Christ’s work as the Savior, Edwards also states that the saints “first have their hearts filled with sweetness, from the view of Christ’s excellency, and the excellency of his grace, and the beauty of the way of salvation by him; and then they have a secondary joy, in that so excellent a Savior, and such excellent grace is theirs.”1Underlying Edwards’ point here is his basic theological vision that the end for which God created the world is the enlargement ad extra of his own being; the happiness of humanity is an end that is subservient to the former. The act of faith also serves God’s own ultimate end and thus is primarily an act of sensing and thereby loving “Christ’s excellency of his grace, and the beauty of the way of salvation”
as such and secondarily an act of sensing or embracing the fact that “such excellent grace is theirs.” Edwards’ position on the matter in his notebook on “Faith” reflects his basic theological framework. Faith, as Edwards describes it, is both an act of sensing the excellency of Christ as such and the act of embracing Christ as our Savior. Edwards distills into one sentence the two essential elements in the act of faith: “Faith is the soul’s entirely embracing and acquiescing in the revelation the Word of God gives us of Jesus Christ as a Savior for us, in a sense of his reality and goodness as such” (p. 434).
The third and final point to take from Edwards’ notebook on “Faith” is his description of the act of faith as an act of “uniting” with Christ, such that faith constitutes a “union” with the Savior. What does Edwards mean by “union” in this context? Two observations can be made. For one thing, faith, for Edwards, is “an active union” with Christ in the sense that a movement of the heart or an affectional function of the mind is involved. Using such expressions as “closing with,” “heartily joining,” and “consenting” interchangeably with “uniting,” Edwards writes that “[t]he heart must close with the new covenant by dependence upon it, and by love and desire” (p. 423). But to unite and close with Christ in faith is not just to consent to Christ affectionally without any understanding. We learn from Religious Affections that by the term “heart” Edwards means the affectional response of the understanding mind. Thus, faith as the heart’s uniting with Christ involves the proper perception and knowledge of Christ. “The heart could not be so united to him as its own Savior. . . . [I]t would not be so united and wedded to the idea of Christ as a Savior . . . if it were not conceived [to be] real” (p. 432). Further, “[t]he idea of a real good or lovely object, that is conceived to be real, possesses the heart after another manner than a very lovely idea that is only imaginary; so that there is need of both a sense of goodness and reality to unite the heart” (p. 433).
By faith as an act of uniting with Christ, Edwards also means a relation of dependence rather than equality. The union between the believer and Christ is “not merely like the various parts of a building that are cemented together and cleave fast together, or as two marbles or precious stones may be joined so as to become one.” Faith, rather, is “such a kind of union as there [is] between a head and living members, between stock and branches . . . that there is an entire, immediate, perpetual dependence for and derivation of nourishment, refreshment, beauty, fruitfulness and all supplies, yea, life and being” (p. 444). It is not “giving anything to God . . . offering a price for the benefit”; it is rather “as it were offering the prayer of a beggar” (p. 369). Faith is an act of receiving.
Having noted some highlights from Edwards’ notebook on “Faith,” I now return to the primary question at hand: What is the unique role of faith in justification? In Justification by Faith Alone, Edwards begins his discussion of the role of faith by acknowledging that “faith itself is a virtue” as an exercise of the new disposition. He goes on to ask how justification by faith alone can be said to be grounded not in human moral qualifications but only in God’s grace. This is the point where Edwards brings in the idea of union with Christ. It is not, Edwards writes, “on account of any excellency, or value that there is in faith, that it appears in the sight of God, a meet thing, that he that believes should have this benefit of Christ assigned to him, but purely from the relation faith has to the person in whom this benefit is to be had, or as it unites to that mediator, in and by whom we are justified.”2
What is the significance of this union with Christ? Union or relation with Christ is brought about by Christ’s act of offering redemption to the sinner and the sinner’s active reception of that redemption. Edwards explains that God “treats men as reasonable creatures, capable of act and choice,” and thus “sees it fit, that in order to a union’s being established between two intelligent, active beings or persons, so as that they should be looked upon as one, there should be the mutual act of both, that each should receive the other, as actively joining themselves one to another.” Christ has already done his part. The sinner now has to do his or hers in this “mutual act” of receiving each other. “Now faith,” Edwards declares, “I suppose to be this act.” And it is because of this union with Christ through faith that “God looks on it meet that [the believer] should have Christ’s merits belonging to him.” “God does not give those that believe,” Edwards continues, “an union with, or an interest in the Savior, in reward for faith, but only because faith is the soul’s active uniting with Christ, or is itself the very act of unition, on their part.”3
There is some ambiguity in the way Edwards relates the act of faith, the union with Christ, and the believer’s having an “interest” or share in the benefits of Christ. For one thing, he speaks of faith both as what the believer does to bring about union with Christ and also as the union itself. In one place, Edwards states that faith is “the Christian’s uniting act, or that which is done towards this union or relation” with Christ and also that faith “is itself the very act of unition on their part.” In another, faith is what on the believer’s part “makes up this union between him and Christ.”4 Is the act of faith itself the union, or does it bring about the union? Furthermore, Edwards says at times that the believer’s union with Christ is “the ground of their right to his benefits,” while at other times—as when he says that because of faith God does not give the believer “an union with, or an interest in the Savior”5—he appears to identify the union with the believer’s “right” or “interest” in Christ’s benefits. Perhaps language falters, even for Edwards, when trying to analyze the ultimately mysterious experience of being forgiven and accepted by God through Christ.
For our purposes here, however, Edwards’ point is clear. It is not the goodness of faith but the believer’s relation or union with Christ that is the ground of sharing the benefits of Christ, and thereby of justification. But why, then, is the goodness of the act of faith not counted for what it is, and thereby as a contribution toward justification? This question arises regardless of whether we say that faith is identical with the union or that it brings about that union. In other words, faith as a good act either constitutes the union with Christ or helps bring it about. So why is the goodness of faith as a good act not considered a contributing factor?
This is the point at which Edwards invokes his distinction between “moral fitness” and “natural fitness.” A person has a “moral fitness for a state, when his moral excellency commends him to it” and “a natural fitness for a state when it appears meet and condecent that he should be in such a state or circumstances, only from the natural concord or agreeableness there is between such qualifications and such circumstances.” Edwards continues, “And ’tis on this latter account only that God looks on it fit by a natural fitness, that he whose heart sincerely unites itself to Christ as his Savior, should be looked upon as united to that Savior, and so having an interest in him.” There is a “natural agreement” and “congruity” between the believer’s faith and the benefit of the union with Christ and having an interest in his benefits. It is only because of “God’s love of order” that God has a regard “to the beauty of that order that there is in uniting those things that have a natural agreement, and congruity, and unition of the one with the other.”6
In his “Controversies” notebook, when writing on justification, Edwards delimits more carefully the function of faith and natural fitness in justification. Neither faith nor the natural fitness itself (and, by implication, union with Christ) earns or deserves justification. Edwards insists that natural fitness is “not so properly a fitness of the subject to be in Christ as the fitness of God’s act in looking on such an one as being in Christ” (p. 339). But “God insists on a proper capacity to receive, so that there should be a natural agreement between the qualification and capacity of the subject and the benefit that he is to be the subject of” (p. 369). Thus, faith is only “such a state or qualification of the subject that, things being ordered as they are in the redemption of Christ, gives opportunity for the Most High fitly to look on that subject as belonging to Christ, or being in him” (p. 339). In his discussion of the justification doctrine in his “Controversies” notebook, Edwards uses the term “natural suitableness” instead of “natural fitness” in an effort to make his meaning clear. “This is what is meant by the particle by when we read of being justified by faith; i.e. this is the qualification wherein lies the immediate suitableness, according as infinite grace and wisdom has constituted things, of our coming to an union and interest in Christ and by which we have that union and interest” (p. 410). Edwards agrees with “our divines” who hold that “faith don’t justify as a work, or a righteousness.”7The moral qualification of faith has no influence in the affairs of justification.
Edwards’ contention that faith has only a natural fitness for union with Christ and his benefits, however, does not resolve the question of why the goodness of the act of faith does count toward justification. The distinction between moral and natural fitness does not help explain Edwards’ main point that the phrase “justification by faith” does not mean justification by faith as meritorious. Faith, he writes, “arises from love or a holy disposition and relish of heart,” and is a “true virtue” (p. 446). If this is so, why is faith looked upon by God as possessing only natural fitness, not moral fitness, for salvation?
Edwards was aware of the ambiguity, and he directly confronts it by using the forensic paradigm for justification. With this approach, he attempted to affirm as clearly and firmly as possible the Pauline and Reformation doctrine of justification of the ungodly. However, in using forensic or courtroom language for justification, Edwards was not simply borrowing from the tradition. In the series of notes on justification in his “Controversies” notebook, Edwards includes an extensive word study of forensic terms in Scripture, observing that words by which the ancients
7. Ibid., p. 160. Samuel T. Logan, Jr., has argued that for JE faith and evangelical obedience are connected with justification as “non-causal conditions” while justification’s sole “causal condition” is the grace of God. See Logan, “The Doctrine of Justification in the Theology of Jonathan Edwards,” Westminster Theological Journal 46 (1984), 26–52.
“expressed moral matters were . . . formed especially for the life of their courts of judicature,” and that the biblical writers naturally “borrowed most of their moral terms from those courts” (p. 351).
In his study of the biblical use of such words as “righteousness” and “judgment,” Edwards goes beyond explicating the judicial origin of their meaning. He also shows that the biblical writers used judicial terms to refer especially to God’s gratuitous acts of grace to those who have no merit of their own. “God’s mercy and kindness towards his people,” Edwards writes, “is abundantly spoken [of] with regard to those exercises of it towards them, viz. his appearing as a righteous judge to plead the cause of his poor afflicted people, to vindicate them, to protect and deliver them. And ’tis with regard to these exercises of God’s mercy towards them that [it] is called his righteousness: not with regard to any proper merit of theirs—far from it—but as it was in God the part of a holy, righteous and good judge thus to vindicate his people from oppressors.” So when the term “righteousness” is “applied to men, or to God’s people themselves, who are the objects of the acts of the judge, it often signifies the effect of these acts of the judge, even their vindication, deliverance, salvation and reward.” Edwards then finds that the words “that signified judging were often used to signify protecting or saving the oppressed.” He concludes his word study by observing “the falseness of the opinion of those that deny the words justification and righteousness to be used as forensic terms by the apostles, but that some real change or inherent qualification was intended by these terms” (pp. 348, 351). Edwards highlights two things: that the Scripture uses forensic language to discuss justification and that it uses forensic language to refer to justification without any merit or “inherent qualification.”
In Justification by Faith Alone, Edwards provides a full articulation of the forensic conception of justification. He begins by establishing that the obligation humans have toward God is infinite. “Our obligation to love or honor any being is great in proportion to the greatness or excellency of that being, or his worthiness to be loved and honored.” Since God is “in- finitely excellent and lovely, our obligations to love him are therein infinitely great.” “What the evil or iniquity of sin consists in,” he earlier observed, “is the violating of an obligation . . . ; and therefore by how much the greater the obligation is that is violated, by so much the greater is the iniquity of the violation.” It follows, then, that the sinner has an “infinite guilt” because the sinner’s sin is “infinitely heinous.”8
Legally, acquittal for the sinner requires nothing less than an infinitely worthy obedience and righteousness. Arminians asked why the loving God would require of us something that we could not possibly fulfill. Would not God, out of his kindness, justify us, or at least begin to do so on the basis of our sincere obedience? Edwards retorts by asking how Arminians can affirm the need for Christ’s atoning work if they want to believe in a lenient God. What law does Christ then satisfy in his infinite sufferings? What law do these “imperfections of our obedience” transgress? God, for Edwards, is a consistent God whose laws do not change. What is required of the sinner, simply yet impossibly, is a “perfect righteousness.” “An imperfect righteousness before a judge is no righteousness.”9
Just as the demand is categorical, so must be the remedy. In commenting on Calvin’s view of the matter, Thomas Coates puts it succinctly: “To be regarded, or ‘reputed,’ as just in the eyes of God, a man must be perfect—not only 99 percent perfect, but 100 percent. Nothing less will do.”1But fallen sinners cannot attain this perfection on their own. Hence, our need for Christ. As Edwards explains it, “The reason why we needed a person of infinite dignity to obey for us, was because of our infinite comparative meanness . . . : we needed one, the worthiness of whose obedience, might be answerable to the unworthiness of our disobedience.”2
Considered apart from Christ, the sinner’s act of faith is worth nothing. There is a degree of holiness in the believer, inasmuch as faith is an exercise of the newly infused disposition. But such a holiness can only be finite, imperfect; it cannot make up for the sinner’s infinite guilt. Even if God accepted an imperfect holiness in the sinner, there would still remain the sinner’s infinite guilt. Edwards writes, “While God beholds the man as separate from Christ, he must behold him as he is in himself; and so his goodness can’t be beheld by God, but as taken with his guilt and hatefulness, and as put in the scales with it; and being beheld so, his goodness is nothing; because there is a finite on the balance against an infinite, whose proportion to it is nothing.”3
If the act of faith is the immediate operation of the Holy Spirit, the in- finitely holy third person of the Trinity, would not the believer’s act of faith carry an infinite weight? Edwards’ answer is that saints possessing the Holy Spirit are given holiness “according to the measure and capacity of a creature”; the regenerate are not “‘Godded’ with God” or “‘Christed’ with Christ.”4 The Holy Spirit operates “after the manner of the principle of action” in the regenerate person, making the regenerate person’s act of faith properly the person’s own act. So the act of faith, considered as the regenerate person’s act, falls infinitely short of what is required by God. All the holiness the sinner may have, Edwards claims, cannot compensate for the infinite odiousness of sin; “the person, on the whole, must be looked upon as without any moral value or amiableness, yea, on the contrary, as being infinitely odious” (p. 370).
In his argument for the requirements for justification, and in his description of the justification that is bestowed upon the sinner, Edwards is reminiscent of Calvin. Pointing out the complete perfection required of the sinner by the absolute justice of God, Calvin writes that God’s justice “is held of precious little value if it is not recognized as God’s justice and so perfect that nothing can be admitted except what is in every part perfect, and nothing can be admitted except what is in every part whole and complete and undefiled by any corruption. Such was never found in man and never will be.”5 Calvin also observes the inadequacy of the act of faith in meeting such a categorical requirement. “For if faith justified of itself or through some intrinsic power, so to speak, as it is always weak and imperfect, it would effect this only in part: thus the righteousness that conferred a fragment of salvation upon us would be defective.”6 So, according to Calvin’s and Edwards’ forensic mathematics, a finite degree of holiness present in the sinner is “nothing” when such holiness is measured in terms of its capacity to meet the categorical requirement of infinite perfection. Justification of the sinner is possible only by the imputation of Christ’s infinitely perfect righteousness.
In terms of Edwards’ forensic articulation, there is no question that justification is of the ungodly. Justification is the justification of the unjusti- fiable. There is an internal coherence in Edwards’ forensic restatement of the Reformation principle of salvation as unmerited. We are, however, still left with the question we raised earlier: What are we to make of the goodness of the act of faith, which exists in the believer before justification? Edwards clearly states in Justification by Faith Alone that “there is indeed something in man that is really and spiritually good, that is prior to justification.”7In the “Controversies” notebook, he reaffirms the point by saying that a person is justified “on one act of faith, and so on the first holy act” or “in the very beginnings of the person’s holiness, or as soon as ever his holiness is begun, in the very first point or first step of his holy course” (p. 371). However, such holiness, Edwards insists, does not function as a merit for justification. He maintains that “such a state, does go before justification, yet the acceptance even of faith as any goodness or loveliness of the believer, follows justification: the goodness is on the forementioned account justly looked upon as nothing, until the man is justified.”8
Edwards’ position, in a nutshell, is this: there is in a believing sinner a holy disposition and its holy exercises, which are absolutely without merit for justification and so, from God’s point of view, unacceptable as holiness. What we have here in Edwards is a reaffirmation of the Reformation doctrine of the justification of the ungodly, as well as an articulation of the ontological (dispositional) grounding in the sinner for Christian practice, which is considered holiness only after justification through God’s unmerited grace alone. Edwards is in complete agreement with Calvin’s view that justification and sanctification constitute a “double grace” through the union with Christ. Edwards would applaud Calvin’s insistence that “Christ justifies no one who he does not sanctify at the same time.”9But he is adding something to Calvin’s doctrine of “double grace,” namely, an ontological (dispositional) foundation for sanctified life, without making such a foundation or its exercises in any way meritorious for justification. Edwards has, in effect, carefully expanded the Reformed doctrines of regeneration and sanctification.
It has been suggested that Edwards’ view of faith as an exercise of the divinely infused disposition makes his justification doctrine practically Roman Catholic, similar to the teachings of Thomas Aquinas.1 Such, however, is not the case, for two fundamental reasons. For one thing, the act of faith for Aquinas merits justification, while for Edwards it does not. Faith, according to Edwards, is the “condition” for justification, not by merit but rather by being an act of union with Christ that is naturally (but not morally) fitting for God’s granting of justification. Although faith has a kind of fitness or congruity for justification, it does not earn or merit that justification. Edwards explicitly denies that faith has “a merit of con-
8. Ibid., pp. 164–65. 9. Calvin, Institutes, III. xvi, 1. 1. Thomas A. Schafer, “Jonathan Edwards and Justification by Faith,” Church History 20 (1950), p. 61; Morimoto, Jonathan Edwards and the Catholic Vision of Salvation, p. 46; Gerald R. McDermott, Jonathan Edwards Confronts the Gods: Christian Theology, Enlightenment Religion, and Non-Christian Faiths (New York, Oxford Univ. Press, 2000), p. 136.
gruity, or indeed any moral congruity at all” to either union with Christ or his benefits.2 Indeed, any holiness in the believer “is looked upon as nothing, until the man is justified.”
For Aquinas, in contrast, the act of faith is morally meritorious and in a sense earns, or is rewarded with, justification. Aquinas does not articulate justification in a juridical paradigm but rather in terms of making the sinner actually just and functionally adequate to strive toward a supernatural end. All changes in human beings, according to Aquinas’ scheme, are made possible by attaining appropriate “forms”—a “form” being what makes a thing or an act what it is. So the infusion of sanctifying grace as an entitative or ontological habit heals the sinner and also elevates him or her to a new level of being, with a new capacity to strive with free will toward a supernatural end. To enable this striving, God infuses the sinner with the virtues of faith, hope, and charity. Virtues are qualities that function as forms for the new actions of a sanctified person. The virtue of faith, for Aquinas, prepares and enables a person for a free act of faith. There are four things that make up justification: “the infusion of grace, the movement of the free-will towards God by faith, the movement of the freewill towards sin, and the remission of sins.”3 In regard to merit, Aquinas states that “our acts are meritorious in so far as they issue from a free will that is moved by God through his grace. . . . Now to believe is an act of mind assenting to the divine truth by virtue of the command of the will as this is moved by God; in this way the act stands under the control of free will and is directed towards God. The act of faith is, therefore, meritorious.”4 In Aquinas’ scheme, the sanctified person is duly prepared for the act of faith. When such a person has faith, he or she by definition merits what faith is aimed at, namely, justification. “This implies,” as Robert P. Scharlemann has noted, “that in some sense man earns—merits—eternal life.”5 Granted that Aquinas and Edwards are working within their own distinctive metaphysical and theological frameworks, it still is true that for Aquinas faith is meritorious, while for Edwards it is not.
The second reason Edwards’ justification doctrine must be distinguished from that of the Roman Catholic tradition in general, and that of Aquinas in particular, has to do with the concept of imputation. For Edwards, justification involves the imputation of both the negative and pos- itive righteousness of Christ. Edwards explains that a person’s “sins being removed by Christ’s atonement, is not sufficient for his justification; for justifying a man . . . is not merely pronouncing him innocent or without guilt, but standing right, with regard to the rule he is under, and righteous unto life.” Imputation is both “negative” and “positive”: remission of sins and acceptance as righteous. Positive imputation continues for the regenerate person even after the initial justification. The value of the good works of Christians “is founded in, and derived from Christ’s righteousness and worthiness.”6
For Aquinas, imputation does play a negative role in justification. As he himself puts it, imputation “proceeds from the Divine love, that sin is not imputed to a man by God.” But the idea of a positive imputation of Christ’s righteousness has no place in Aquinas’ doctrine of justification. For Aquinas, justification is defined as an actual change, or what he calls “transmutation,” from the state of injustice to justice, and this change naturally proceeds from the infusion of grace.7 In this framework there is no need for God to count Christ’s perfect righteousness as a sinner’s own. A positive imputation of Christ’s perfect righteousness is an idea that belongs to the forensic doctrine of justification. Thus, for Edwards, unlike Aquinas, justification involves an imputation of a righteousness, the source of which is “outside us.”8 Persons are not justified by what is in them but rather by what Christ has earned for them.
Therefore, at the points most crucial for the Reformation doctrine of justification—specifically, justification as unmerited and the positive imputation of Christ’s righteousness—Edwards is Protestant and Reformed. There is, for Edwards, a degree of holiness in the believer prior to justification. But such holiness in no way merits justification and can be looked at as holiness by God only by a positive imputation of Christ’s perfect righteousness. Thus, Edwards does not blur but rather clearly asserts the distinction between justification and sanctification.
In his justification doctrine, Edwards is clearly an heir of the Reformation. But here we must return to a point we alluded to earlier: while reaf- firming the Reformation doctrine of justification, Edwards also saw grace as laying a foundation for Christian practice even before justification. This foundation, which is none other than the indwelling of the Holy Spirit ready to function as a new disposition, in no way enables the be- liever to deserve or merit justification. The new disposition, however, lays the ontological and psychological ground for the sanctified life of the justified. How are we to explain this particular emphasis on the reality of the new life of the regenerate? How is this enlarged doctrine of regeneration and the strictly forensic doctrine of justification integrated by Edwards into a coherent perspective?
The answer lies in Edwards’ larger theological view that God’s end in creating the world is to communicate and repeat in time and space his internal glory, and that the redemption of the elect must be understood as an integral part of God’s pursuit of this end. The indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the regenerate, the justification of the ungodly, and the Christian practice of the justified, in other words, have an end beyond the salvation of fallen humanity. Edwards writes, “The Scripture teaches that the way of justification that is appointed in the gospel covenant, is appointed, as it is, for that end, that free grace might be expressed and glorified; Rom. 4:16, ‘Therefore it is of faith, that it might be of grace.’ The exercising, and magnifying the free grace of God in the gospel contrivance for the justification and salvation of sinners, is evidently the chief design of it; and this freedom and riches of grace of the gospel is everywhere spoken of in Scripture as the chief glory of it.” The end of justification is that God’s “free grace might be expressed and glorified.” And the justification of sinners by faith and not by works—“the gospel contrivance”—is the “design” through which this end is achieved. So any doctrine contrary to the doctrine of justification by faith and not works “diminishes the glory of divine grace (which is the attribute God hath especially set himself to glorify in the works of redemption).”9 Here Edwards is arguing for the validity of the doctrine of justification by grace through faith on the basis of God’s own end, which such justification is to serve. Edwards’ forensic doctrine of justification, therefore, is an integral part of his overall theological framework.
Edwards’ emphasis on the ontological reality of the new life of the regenerate is also to be understood as a part of his conception of God’s end in creation. God’s end in creation is to repeat his internal glory in mundane human life as well as through nature. God fulfills this end not by externally coercing human beings but rather by working in and through the human subject and human actions—that is, by the Holy Spirit’s operation as a natural principle of action. The presence of a disposition to ho- liness in the believer even before justification thus prepares the justified person to actually live a Christian life. The Holy Spirit as a new disposition enables the believer to have faith in and to unite with Christ, and God justifies the sinner because of the natural fitness of faith and union with Christ. So Edwards can say that “what is real in the union between Christ and his people, is the foundation of what is legal.”1 “What is real” refers to the natural fitness of faith for justification, not some meritorious qualification. Through his conception of faith as having a natural fitness, Edwards was attempting, without making faith a meritorious act, to answer the Arminian charge that forensic justification is nothing more than a legal fiction. His soteriology must certainly be viewed in the context of the polemic against Arminianism. But Edwards’ emphasis upon the reality of the new disposition in the believer cannot be understood apart from his overall theological vision that through human beings and their actions God wishes to repeat his own internal glory.
justification of the saints in the old testament
In his “Controversies” notebook, Edwards devotes an entire section to how the saints under the old testament, or old dispensation, found their justification through faith in Christ.2 The old testament saints’ experience of justification in Christ of course presupposes God’s atoning work in Christ, and Edwards explains the experience of atonement by “the church of Israel” within the framework of the doctrine of the Trinity. His approach here can only be trinitarian because, in his view, God’s redemptive activity in the world is the carrying out of the covenant of redemption that had been made by the three persons of the Trinity.
Edwards first establishes that the old testament saints knew that the “Lord on earth,” who redeemed them out of their bondage in Egypt and guided them through the wilderness, was “a different person from him in heaven that sustained the dignity and maintained the rights of the Godhead, and acted as first and head and chief in the affairs of God’s kingdom” (p. 372). The divine power the Israelites experienced in their history was referred to by various names: “the angel of the Lord,” “the presence of the Lord,” “the name of the Lord,” “the strength of the Lord,”
1. Ibid., p. 158. 2. For an important, related statement, see “Miscellanies,” no. 1354, in The “Miscellanies,” nos. 1153–1360. For a treatment of JE on the Jews’ salvation, see Gerald R. McDermott, Jonathan Edwards Confronts the Gods: Christian Theology, Enlightenment Religion, and Non-Christian Faiths (New York, Oxford Univ. Press, 2000), ch. 8.
“the glory of the Lord,” and “the son of God.” For the people of Israel, the one designated by these names was not some less-than-divine power but rather their God and “the object of worship” (p. 376).
Edwards’ approach to the doctrine of the Trinity could not be more experiential. His contention is that Israelites’ actual experience of the same God as both the deity “in heaven” and also the deity in their historical life led them to “the notion of a distinction of persons in the Godhead.” A perception of both distinction and sameness is involved here. The Israelites saw that the God in heaven would somehow have to be distinguished from the God who was with them in the wilderness and “dwelt in the Holy of Holies.” God in heaven had to be a “different person” from God in the Holy of Holies. These two persons, however, are the same God. God, explains Edwards, “to prevent the Jews having any notion of two Gods, and to lead ’em to conceive of the infinitely near relation between that person that more immediately dwelt among them and the first person in the Godhead, as being in him and as having one nature and one substance, called him his ‘name,’ . . . signifying the relation that there is between him and his idea” (p. 378).
The people of Israel, according to Edwards, also knew that the first person of the Trinity sent the second person, who “acted under him as a messenger from him.” Further, they believed this second person in their history to be the Mediator between them and God the first person. The church of Israel knew that “the first person in the deity, had committed them to the care and charge of the angel of his presence, that he had set him over them to be in a peculiar manner their protector, guide and Savior, and head of their communication and supplies, and God’s people trusted in him as such” (p. 384). Edwards further contends that for the Israelites this Mediator or Savior was the one through whom the atoning of their sinfulness was made possible. It was through this Mediator that “such poor, weak, worthless, sinful, miserable and helpless creatures might have access to God” and that “they were recommended to his acceptance and favor.” The atoning work of this Mediator, in other words, included God’s “acceptance and favor” (i.e. justification) of sinners (pp. 386–87). And this divine Mediator, the Israelites knew, was the second person of the Trinity, having ontological equality with the first person but with a distinctive role in the affairs of redemption. In this way, Edwards placed the Israelites’ experience of atonement and justification within the workings of the economic Trinity, which in turn is rooted in the immanent life of God himself.
In the Israelites’ practice of sacrifice, Edwards contends, there was an experience of the atonement through the Mediator and thereby of an unmerited justification by God. The saints in Israel knew that their sacrifices were accepted by God “not on account of the value of their offerings as in themselves, but through that person called God’s name” who dwelt on the mercy seat in the Holy of Holies “as their Mediator, and through his worthiness,” and that that Mediator “did as it were cover the nakedness and deformity of the people, and recommended them by his excellency and beauty” (p. 389). So, too, the old testament saints “depended on the Angel that dwelt in the Holy of Holies as their Mediator and advocate” and offered their sacrifices “with respect to him and a dependence on him to make them acceptable.” Even more, the saints of Israel were “sensible that on this account the blood of their sacrifices was to be brought into that Holy of Holies and then sprinkled on the seat of this Angel, which God taught ’em to be the propitiatory, to be as it were most eminently the altar of atonement, the grand instrument of propitiation, because their Mediator and divine high priest dwelt there” (p. 405). Edwards writes, “[I]t was for the sake of that angel of God’s presence that loved, pitied and redeemed them out of Egypt, that God forgave the sins of the people” (p. 388). So all the elements of the atonement through the Mediator— “for the sake of the angel of the presence of God,” and “through his worthiness”—and of the justification of the sinner through the Mediator— “God forgave their sins,” and the people were made “acceptable”—were there for the old testament saints to experience.
Although the saints in old testament times experienced atonement and justification through the divine Mediator, they also knew that the “true, complete and final atonement” through the incarnate Son of God’s own suffering was yet to come in the future (p. 398). How, then, could old testament sinners’ justification through the atoning work of the Mediator be a true experience of salvation, if the “true, complete and final atonement” was yet to come? Here Edwards employs his theory of types. As Mason I. Lowance has pointed out, types, for Edwards, were not “mere ‘symbolic reflections’” but true representations that “participated in a scheme of adumbrations and fulfillment.”3 Edwards’ types, like Paul Tillich’s symbols, not only point to something else but also participate in the reality to which they point. So, according to Edwards, when Abraham offered up his son Isaac, he received Christ “in a figure, or eu parabolh, as it is in the original [Heb. 11:19]; i.e. he received the antitype of Christ slain and risen in that type of his son Isaac.” On this basis Edwards contends that “[i]f Abraham by faith received Christ and his sacrifice in that type, ’tis likely that the saints” in old testament times “received him in the type of the legal sacrifices” (p. 406).
The justification of old testament saints was a less complete or less final salvation than what was to come through the incarnate Messiah, but still it was a real and true participation in the complete and final atonement. In this way, Edwards asserts the centrality of the redemptive work of Jesus Christ without minimizing the redemptive work of the second person of the Trinity before the Incarnation. Thus, the old testament saints’ experience of justification and atonement presupposed, prefigured, or typified the final atonement through the incarnate Messiah while participating in it. Edwards explains that the old testament saints knew that “their legal sacrifices were only representations of that great future sacri- fice; the sufferings of the beasts they offered, and their consumption in the fire, an image of the future sufferings of the Messiah; and that the sacrifices were of value only as they were related to the Messiah’s suffering” (p. 405). Edwards went as far as to say that the guilt of the Israelites’ sins “remained as yet without a true atonement, though they were as it were left with the angel over the propitiatory”; their sins were “as it were laid upon” the divine Mediator in the old testament days. But the old testament saints knew that the incarnate Messiah would “make an end of sin by offering a sacrifice that should be truly propitiatory, and that this sacrifice was that of his own blood” (pp. 398, 405).
The promise of that future complete atonement and justification, Edwards claims, strengthened the old testament saints’ experience of being justified through the atoning work of their Mediator. Their knowledge of the divine Mediator “raised great expectations and desires in God’s people,” and “their dependence on these promises were the main comfort of the church in all these preceding ages.” The coming Messiah would make an end of their guilt “by his own suffering and offering himself as a sacri- fice of sin,” and henceforth there would “no more be a constant renovation of the remembrance of sin by repeated sacrifices” (p. 400). This promise, Edwards points out, was “‘the consolation of Israel’” (p. 401).
Edwards was intent on asserting that the Mediator’s work for the ancient Israelites, as a type of Christ Jesus, was “a real atonement and peace with God” (p. 394). Speaking about the types of Christ in the Old Testament as Edwards discusses them in The History of the Work of Redemption, John F. Wilson has noted Edwards’ conviction that “Christ was actually present among his people in manifestations to Israel.”4 Edwards observes in “Types of the Messiah” that “these shadows of atonement” in the Old Testament “are not merely called by the name of an ‘atonement,’ but they are spoken of from time to time as being an atonement, and are said to be appointed that they might be an atonement.”5 Thus, Edwards writes, “If any [think] that the revelations of the way of justification in the Old Testament are too obscure to lead the people to seek and depend upon justification in this way, it may be considered that ’tis certain and beyond dispute that there were many things of an evangelical nature that the church of God under the old testament were fully established in the belief of, and express and plain in their profession of, that the Old Testament itself was no more express and full in than in this way of justification.” Edwards concludes, “And thus I suppose the saints under the old testament trusted in Christ and were justified by faith in him” (p. 408).
justification, perseverance, and evangelical obedience
The issue of Christian practice is of particular importance to Edwards because for him, it is precisely through the actual Christian acts of believers that God’s ultimate end in creation—repeating his glory in time and space—is accomplished. But before we deal with this basic principle, we must first attend to the particular doctrinal issues that Edwards had to wrestle with in stressing the importance of Christian practice.
Edwards’ fundamental concern can be put this way: in emphasizing Christian practice, he did not want to diminish the truth of justification by grace through faith alone. He wanted to see Christian acts as essential in the “affair” of salvation without allowing the least room for works-righteousness. Edwards’ basic premise is “that the acts of a Christian life can’t be concerned in this affair any otherwise than as they imply, and are the expressions of faith, and may be looked upon as so many acts of reception of Christ the Savior.”6
In his “Controversies” notebook, Edwards stresses the different yet indispensable place of holiness in two covenants between God and humanity. The first of these is the covenant of works, made between God and Adam before the fall, which stipulated perfect obedience of the law as the condition of God’s blessings. The second is the covenant of grace, re-
4. The Work of Jonathan Edwards, 9, A History of the Work of Redemption, ed. John F. Wilson (New Haven, Yale Univ. Press, 1989), 130.
served by God to the elect, who accept God’s grace in Christ as the condition of redemption. Edwards’ concern in juxtaposing these two covenants is to point out that God’s justification of sinners through their faith in Christ does not nullify the Father’s delight in the holiness of his elect. Edwards explains that God has ordered that a holy qualification should be the condition of justification in the way of justification by Christ as well as in the way of justification by mere law. “Because God was holy, and delighted in holiness and hated sin, therefore he would appoint no way of justification but such as tended to promote holiness” (p. 365).
Holiness or obedience is involved and achieved in both covenants, but in different ways. The covenant of works, Edwards observes, entails “an obeying or yielding to the voice of mere authority demanding a due and just offering to be made from us to God,” while the covenant of grace involves “obeying the voice of God’s grace in making an offer of a great benefit to us, calling and inviting of us to accept of it” (p. 364). Holiness is involved in both cases. “All the difference is, in the one [the saint] complies with holiness in what he gives to God, in the other he complies with holiness in what he receives and accepts from God” (p. 362). Edwards’ assumption in all this, of course, is that the act of faith, or accepting God’s grace in Christ, is the exercise of divine disposition in the regenerate soul, which is also manifest in holy acts. But the believer is justified by virtue of his or her union with Christ through faith and not because of the holy acts that will inevitably follow justification. Therefore, the expectation that the believer should live a holy life is not “in the least inconsistent with the great doctrine of free justification by faith without works of the law” (p. 365).
Edwards’ emphasis on holiness as the inevitable consequence of justi- fication leads him to consider the perseverance of believers as inseparably related to faith. He admits that in the first act of faith, a sinner is “actually and finally justified. . . . But yet the perseverance of faith is not excluded in this affair; it is not only certainly connected with justification, but it is not to be excluded from that on which the justification of a sinner has a dependence, or that by which he is justified.” Perseverance, furthermore, “can’t be excluded out of this congruity” with “an interest in Christ’s righteousness,” for “this congruity depends on its being an abiding union.”7 Perseverance, in other words, is an integral element in the union between the believer and Christ, and the subsequent justification of the sinner.
God in Christ, Edwards maintains in “Miscellanies,” no. 695, has given us “a surety that might stand and persevere, and one that has actually persevered through the greatest imaginable trials.” For this reason, “eternal life won’t be suspended on our perseverance by our own poor, feeble, broken strength.” Under the first covenant of works, Adam was not given the gift of perseverance, according to Edwards. But under the covenant of grace, Christ, the second Adam, “has persevered not only for himself, but for us; and has been sealed to confirmed, persevering and eternal life as our head.” Edwards concludes “that the saints shall surely persevere will necessarily follow from that, that they have already performed the obedience which is the righteousness by which they have justification to life, or it is already performed for them and imputed to them: for that supposes that it is the same thing in the sight of God as if they performed it.”8
So the benefit of Christ that is offered to the sinner includes a persevering redemption.
To Christ’s offer the sinner must make a positive response, which has a natural fitness to Christ’s offer and union with Christ. Since the union with Christ is an “abiding union,” the believer’s receptive act of faith must have an abiding character. Edwards’ dispositional conception of grace again plays a key role here. “[A] sinner, in his first justification, is forever justified,” he writes; “future faith and repentance are beheld in that justi- fication, as virtually contained in that first faith and repentance” in the sense that “the continuance of that habit and principle in the heart, that has such an actual repentance and faith, in its nature and tendency, is now made sure by God’s promise.”9 Habit or disposition, for Edwards, is an abiding principle of action that has a mode of reality apart from its exercises. Just as Christ’s redemption is an abiding and persevering one, so is the habit of grace, which is none other than the indwelling Holy Spirit. Habit or disposition is the law that a certain type of act shall be exerted when a certain type of occasion arises. Therefore, that to which a habit or disposition is disposed is a reality in the mode of virtuality.
Edwards uses precisely this logic to point out that future acts of faith, or a saint’s perseverance, are contained in the first act of faith. “God, in the act of justification, which is passed on a sinner’s first believing, has respect to perseverance, as being virtually contained in that first act of faith,” writes Edwards in Justification by Faith Alone. Put another way, “a persevering faith” may influence in providing the natural fitness for a union with
Christ “before it has actual existence, because it has existence already implicitly and virtually. The first act of faith virtually implies a perseverance in faith.” So God looks upon perseverance “as being as it were a property in that faith that then is” and “as though it already were there.” This is so because the future acts of faith are connected with the first act “by divine constitution”—that is, by the divinely established habit of grace in the believer.1 Justifying faith, for Edwards, is “persevering faith,” which implies “persevering holiness of life” (p. 360). Persevering faith and holiness are, of course, made possible by the abiding presence of the Holy Spirit in the regenerate and by the abiding benefits of Christ.
Having emphasized the dispositional nature of faith and its implication for the abiding character of Christian practice, Edwards quickly adds that justification still is by the act of faith alone and not by the actual holiness of the regenerate. He asserts that “God justifies the ungodly as he justifies
84 Editor’s Introduction
1. Ibid. The logic of grace as a disposition involved in JE’s discussion of faith and perseverance is also behind JE’s discussion of the fate of those persons who have the new disposition but have not had the occasion to exercise it in faith. In “Miscellanies,” no. 27b, JE discusses such a situation: “Supposing a man [who has the disposition] dies suddenly and not in the actual exercise of faith, ’tis his disposition that saves him” (Works, 13, 214.) The same principle applies to an infant who has the new disposition but never gets the occasion to exercise it. Such an infant still can be saved, according to JE, because “the disposition is all that can be said to be absolutely necessary” (ibid., 213).
The underlying logic here, I would submit, is that that to which a disposition is disposed is already a virtual reality apart from its exercises, and that it is now a certain reality that a person with the disposition to love and believe in Christ will certainly love and embrace Christ when the appropriate occasion arises. What functions here is the same logic that is involved in JE’s contention in regard to faith and perseverance: future acts of faith and repentance are virtually contained in that first act of faith and repentance. And this is so because “the continuance of that habit and principle in the heart that has such an actual repentance and faith in its nature and tendency, is now made sure by God’s promise.” So, if an infant with the divine disposition dies without having had an actual act of believing in Christ, it is still a present actuality that the infant shall believe when the appropriate occasion arises in the infant’s future life. This is what God looks at, considers the infant as united with Christ, and thus saved. And JE believed that deceased infants will live on everlastingly and exercise their disposition in actually embracing “the man Christ Jesus” in the new heaven and new earth (“Miscellanies,” no. 182, in Works, 13, 328).
In light of JE’s own conceptions of disposition and actuality, Gerald McDermott’s statement that, for Edwards, “faith is subsumed by the category of disposition” may be too strong and probably should be qualified (McDermott, Jonathan Edwards Confronts the Gods, p. 134). To the extent that faith is an exercise of a disposition, disposition has a kind of priority. On the other hand, faith as an actual exercise of a disposition has a greater actuality and reality than the virtual reality of faith to which a disposition is inherently disposed. “Grace,” writes Edwards, “is said to be perfected or finished in holy practice, as therein it is brought to its proper effect” (Works, 2, 435). In other words, grace as the act of faith “perfects” grace as a disposition. It should also be remembered that the end for which God created the world, according to JE, is accomplished through the actual acts of repeating God’s glory in time and space, and not just through the disposition to do so. For some with the holy disposition (such as deceased infants), the actual exercises of that disposition may not occur until they are in the new heaven and new earth.
persons without any habitual”—i.e. actually abiding—“holiness,” and goes on to say, “Justification is so far from being consequent on habitual holiness and actual perseverance in it now . . . that both actual perseverance and habitual holiness are benefits that are the fruits of that act of faith by which persons are first justified” (p. 371). Although justification is inseparably related to perseverance, it is still by faith and not by works.
Now we turn to Edwards’ treatment of the relation between a believer’s Christian acts and justification by faith alone. Here the question is what value a Christian’s good works possess before God. And here again, as was the case with perseverance, Edwards does not wish to compromise the doctrine of justification by faith alone. At the same time, Christian practice is of utmost importance to his way of thinking.
His basic position is clear: Christian good works are acceptable to God only if they are viewed in relation to the imputation of Christ’s righteousness. Justification by faith, therefore, is a continuing basis of the Christian’s acceptability to God. Edwards writes that “God’s respect to our virtue as our amiableness in his sight, and his acceptance of it as rewardable, are entirely built on our interest in Christ already established,” and God’s acceptance “is not antecedent to justification, but follows it, and is built entirely upon it.” So, “if we are beheld as we are in ourselves, or separate from Christ,” believers’ continuing sinfulness “infinitely outweighs” any amount of goodness in their Christian actions.2 God would indeed reward Christian acts of obedience, explains Edwards, but such acts are rewardable “for Christ’s sake only, and not for the excellency of their works in themselves considered, or beheld separately from Christ.” This is so because “our good deeds and virtuous acts themselves are in a sense corrupt” and are “intermingled” with sin. The excellency of Christian acts are a “secondary and derivative loveliness as it were” because such excellency before God is entirely “founded in, and derived from Christ’s righteousness and worthiness.”3
Having stressed that the acceptance of good works depends upon Christ, Edwards also points out the genuine and even heightened goodness of those acts as seen in Christ. When Christian acts are viewed as the acts of those in union with Christ, “the guilt of their persons is all done away, and the pollution and hatefulness that attends, and is in, their good works is hid.” Christian acts, in this respect, become acceptable to God. But there is something else that happens. “Their relation to Christ adds a positive value and dignity to their good works, in God’s sight,” writes Edwards. “That little holiness, and those faint and feeble acts of love, and other grace, receive an exceeding value in the sight of God, by virtue of God’s beholding them as in Christ.” And we can hear Edwards speaking as a pastor-theologian when he says that “God will probably reward the little, weak love, and poor and exceeding imperfect obedience of believers in Christ, with a more glorious reward, than he would have done Adam’s perfect obedience.” But he goes a step farther. “This preciousness, or high valuableness of believers is a moral fitnessto a reward, and yet this valuableness is all in the righteousness of Christ, that is the foundation of it.”4
Edwards sees God as taking real delight in the believer’s good works—but only in relation to Christ, never in and of themselves.
The meaning of the believer’s good works is taken up again in Edwards’ interpretation of Jas. 2:24, “You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone.” Edwards argues that the word “justify” is used differently here from in Paul. “To be justified is to be approved and accepted: but a man may be said to be approved and accepted in two respects; the one is to be approved really, and the other to be approved and accepted declaratively.” Therefore, “justification is two-fold; ’tis either the acceptance and approbation of the judge itself, or the manifestation of that approbation, by a sentence or judgment declared by the judge, either to our own consciences, or to the world.” The good works of a Christian are accepted by God in a “declarative” or “manifestative” way. Only in this limited sense can a Christian can be said to be justified by works. It is also in this sense that Christian good works are “necessary” and that “we are accepted on account of obedience as well as faith.” But faith still is fundamental. “[T]he necessity of works that [ James] speaks of,” Edwards comments, “is not as having a parallel concern in our salvation with faith; but he speaks of works only as related to faith, and expressive of it; which after all leaves faith the alone fundamental condition.” Works are “the acts or expressions of faith.”5 Following his Reformed predecessors, Edwards wanted to sharply distinguish justification from sanctification as well as see the two as inseparably related.
the nature and meaning of christian practice
What, then, is the nature of Christian practice? What are the signs and marks of truly Christian actions? This volume includes four short writings that speak directly to these questions. The first is the notebook “Signs of Godliness,” published here for the first time, which Edwards began a few months before he became the full pastor of Northampton in February 1729. In the first pages of the notebook Edwards makes a distinction between “the mere immanent exercises of the inclination and spirit of the mind” or “the internal breathings of love to God and exercises of faith in Christ,” on the one hand, and, on the other, the “properly voluntary actions, that is, those acts, whether internal or external, that are immediately caused by preceding acts of the inclination and will, at whose command it arises,” and whereby “some effect” is “produced.” The critical difference appears to be that the purely immanent acts do not involve an action of the will. Both the immanent and properly voluntary acts, however, may be “a sure evidence of sincerity” (p. 474).
There are “two sorts of signs of godliness”: internal and external. The internal signs are “such as seeing and knowing God and spiritually understanding divine things” and can be “known directly by reflecting upon ourselves and inquiring what we experience within ourselves.” The external signs are “bringing forth fruit, doing good works, keeping God’s and Christ’s commandments universally and perseveringly, . . . being of a Christian temper and behavior towards ourselves and our fellow creatures.” These external signs are “signs of these signs of faith and love, etc.”—that is, signs of the internal signs. Both the internal and external signs are “expressly given in Scripture as signs by which we are to try our sincerity by, and . . . wherein godliness more radically consists” (pp. 494–95).
Having explained what he means by “good works,” Edwards lays down two basic principles that must govern the discernment of true piety. The first is that the religious experience of others cannot be a reliable guide for discerning the true signs. “Scripture,” writes Edwards, “is a more sure guide in this matter than experience; . . . many, by making others’ experiences their guide in this matter, are misled—others that are not accounted godly are not so.” Scripture “is the highest rule: for experience is a subordinate rule that is to be tried by it, and by which we are to judge of it” (p. 505). In the notebook on “Signs of Godliness,” Edwards does not elaborate on this principle, nor does he give any illustrations of the experiences that are unreliable as signs of true piety. But his point here is thoroughly discussed later in Religious Affections, where he engages in a lengthy survey of the “negative signs” that may or may not be true signs of piety.
The other basic principle Edwards develops in “Signs of Godliness” is that all genuine good works presuppose the underlying new disposition to do good works. “’Tis true it is the heart that God looks at; godliness lies in the disposition of the heart,” Edwards observes, “but godliness consists not in an heart to purpose to fulfill God’s commandments, but in an heart actually to do it” (p. 476). This principle is the direct implication of Edwards’ doctrine of grace. Given his concept of disposition as an active tendency and his doctrine of grace as the infusion of a new disposition, his emphasis on the necessity of Christian practice as the consequence of conversion is understandable. In his discussion of the Christian practice as the twelfth and “principal” sign of godliness in Religious Affections, Edwards writes, “The tendency of grace in the heart to holy practice, is very direct, and the connection most natural close and necessary.”6 According to the logic of Edwards’ conception of disposition, the holy disposition in the regenerate person cannot but exert itself in holy practices whenever the occasion arises.
Working with these two principles, Edwards fills the pages of “Signs of Godliness” with an extended list of concrete guidelines for Christian practice and the biblical passages from which he draws them. These guidelines, comprehending both internal and external actions, include “keeping Christ’s commandments,” “universal obedience” (i.e. in all areas of one’s life), “persevering through temptations and difficulties,” “mortifying our sensual and fleshly lusts,” “denying ourselves and selling all for Christ,” “bridling and well-using our tongues,” “believing the difficult, the spiritual and abasing doctrines of Christianity,” “a meek and forgiving spirit and practice,” “mercy and liberality to the poor,” “being faithful to God in our own sphere, our particular calling, in that which God has assigned as our particular work,” and “spiritually seeing and knowing God and Christ and understanding divine things.”
The second writing that has to do with Christian practice, also published here for the first time, is Edwards’ notebook on “Christ’s Example.” He began writing this at about the same time he began working on “Signs of Godliness,” between August 1728 and February 1729. “Christ’s Example” lists the concrete attitudes and actions of Jesus as described in the Gospels. Reading this notebook, one cannot fail to sense the depth of Edwards’ love and affection for the figure of Jesus of Nazareth. By turning to Christ as the example of the Christian’s sanctified life, Edwards points to him as the Mediator of both justification and sanctification. Further, Christ mediates sanctification not just by giving new commandments but by providing the living, concrete model of sanctified existence. Edwards, like Calvin, here pursues the classic theme of imitatio Christi, except that neither Calvin nor Edwards think of the imitation as having a meritorious character, as did some in the medievalist tradition.
Jesus’ love for and friendship with others are noticed by Edwards in several ways. The concern that Jesus showed toward others while he was dying on the cross seems almost “strange,” and it is a witness to the degree of his friendship with them. Jesus’ washing the feet of his disciples would seem “unnatural and indecorous, were there not a peculiar and inimitable love, sweetness and condescension, wonderfully tempered with that superiority and lordship which he maintained over them” (p. 514). Jesus’ love and friendship knew no bounds. For instance, he “did not despise the Gentiles, as the rest of the Jews did.” He “civilly and kindly treated the Samaritans, contrary to the custom of the Jews, and was so engaged in seeking their spiritual good that he as it were forgot and neglected his food when he was weary and hungry” (p. 519).
Edwards also highlights Jesus’ humility and disdain for fame. “Christ would not work miracles for ostentation.” After astonishing people with mighty works of healing, Jesus delighted “to withdraw and be alone in the woods and mountains and retired places . . . , with a neglect of the praise and admiration of man” (p. 514). Jesus’ befriending of publicans and sinners shows that he “did not make an ostentation of his peculiar holiness nor eminence.” In the story of Jesus’ visit to the home of Mary and Martha, Edwards again sees his lack of pretension. Instead of emphasizing Jesus’ praise of Mary and his disapproval of Martha, Edwards points to Jesus’ “disregard of the honor of the world.” Others with high position and status “would have expected to be waited upon with a great deal of ceremony,” but Jesus “had rather see one sitting at his feet, entertaining his gospel in their heart” (p. 515).
The third writing on Christian practice is a brief piece called “Directions for Judging of Persons’ Experiences.” This document is a list of what to look for when examining other persons’ spiritual experiences. In this list, one can sense the urgency facing a pastor-theologian who, most likely in the midst of fervent revivals, must somehow respond to the inquiries of his parishioners concerning the validity of their conversion.
Edwards did not subscribe to the typical Puritan morphology of conversion, according to which the fixed pattern and stages of the regeneration process were clearly delineated. He does discuss early in the document the nature of the sinner’s conviction of sin in a manner somewhat similar to preparationism. But the list of directives as a whole does not adhere to any morphology. What is more noteworthy in this document is that the main concerns expressed in the directives correspond to the content of the positive signs in Edwards’ later, more definitive work on the subject. His directives in this document—that regenerate persons’ spiritual experiences must be “solid, substantial, deep inwrought into the frame and temper of their minds”; that the true spiritual experience must include “a sense of that divine, supreme, and spiritual excellency of Christ”; that the converted person’s joy of God in Christ arises not from “what God has done for them” but rather “truly and properly joy in God and in Christ”; and so forth—all directly correspond to the essential concerns that found final expression in Religious Affections. Furthermore, Christian practice, which Edwards designates the “principal sign” of holiness in Religious Affections, receives a special emphasis in the latter part of the list of directives.7
The fourth of the writings in this volume that deal directly with Christian practice is the section on “The Nature of True Virtue” from the “Controversies” notebook. Written sometime in late 1753 or early 1754, this collection of entries provided basic material for the dissertation The Nature of True Virtue, which Edwards probably finished in late 1756.8 A complete analysis of Edwards’ view of true virtue cannot be attempted here, but we can note an interpretive problem concerning true virtue and focus on the connection between true virtue and the end for which God created the world.
The interpretive issue has to do with the apparent contradiction between the way Edwards relates the love of benevolence and the love of complacence in the “Treatise on Grace,” on the one hand, and the “Controversies” notebook and The Nature of True Virtue, on the other. In his biography of Edwards, A. V. G. Allen observed that in The Nature of True Virtue Edwards appears to give priority to benevolence over complacence as the primary ground of virtue, while in the “Treatise on Grace,” which Allen assumed was written later, love of complacence is more primary. Allen accused Edwards of self-contradiction.9
7. In Religious Affections, JE maintained that regenerate persons can discern their own spiritual condition by examining their hearts as well as their external practice. But they cannot make a similar judgment about others, because “they can neither feel, nor see, in the heart of another.” He did agree that when others exhibit Christian good works, the saints should “receive them cordially into their charity . . . as their brethren in Christ Jesus.” JE insisted, however, that the saints’ judgment about the spiritual status of others “is at best uncertain” (Works, 2, 181–82).
We now know that, contrary to what Allen thought, the “Treatise on Grace” was written sometime between 1739 and 1743, anywhere from a decade to a decade and a half before both the section on “The Nature of True Virtue” in the “Controversies” notebook and The Nature of True Virtue itself were composed. Even with a corrected chronology, however, interpreting how benevolence and complacence are related in Edwards’ thought remains an exceedingly subtle and complex task. I can only suggest here one possible approach to the question. Edwards’ treatment of benevolence and complacence in The Nature of True Virtue may not contradict his statement in the “Treatise on Grace” but rather elaborate, supplement, and expand it. Indeed, the love of benevolence and the love of complacence for Edwards were always complementary and coordinate concepts.
We must begin with “Miscellanies,” no. 530, one of Edwards’ earliest re- flections on benevolence and complacence. The basic argument in this entry is that “self-love,” or a “man’s love of his own happiness or pleasure,” is not inconsistent with—and is necessarily involved in—the love of God. Edwards remarks that the love of God includes the love of both benevolence (“an inclination to [another’s] good”) and complacence (“a disposition to desire or delight in beholding the beauty of another”). And Edwards maintains that “there necessarily accompanies a love of benevolence, a love of appetite, or complacence,” adding that complacence is “always in proportion to a love of benevolence.”1 Although Edwards did not elaborate in this entry on the intricate relationship between benevolence and complacence in the love of God, it is nevertheless clear that already in the early 1730s he considered both loves interrelated and thus inseparable components of love to God.
Approximately a decade after writing “Miscellanies,” no. 530, Edwards discusses again, this time in “Treatise on Grace,” love to God and the two loves of benevolence and complacence. In the “Treatise,” the emphasis is on the regenerate person’s love of God, which involves the “soul’s relish of the supreme excellency of the divine nature” that only the indwelling of the Holy Spirit makes possible. “Divine love [is] the essence of all Christianity,” and “the first thing in divine love, and that from which everything that appertains to its rise, is a relish of the excellency of the divine nature,” writes Edwards. “So that the first effect of the power of God
1971), p. 10; Norman Fiering, Jonathan Edwards’s Moral Thought and Its British Context (Chapel Hill, Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1981), p. 127; Virginia A. Peacock, Problems in the Interpretation of Jonathan Edwards’ “The Nature of True Virtue” (Lewiston, N. Y., Edwin Mellen Press, 1990).
in the heart in regeneration, is to give the heart a divine taste or sense” (pp. 173, 174). The issue foremost in Edwards’ mind here is how perception of the divine excellency, and thus the love of God, of which the unconverted person is totally incapable, becomes possible. Related concerns include the regenerate soul’s actual experience of God, the difference of such experience from that of the unregenerate person, and the absolute necessity of God’s saving grace in the sinner’s regeneration.
In this context, Edwards discusses benevolence and complacence, stating that “of these two, a love of complacence is first, and is the foundation of the other—i.e. if by love of complacence be meant a relishing a sweetness in the qualifications of the beloved, and being pleased and delighted in his excellency.” This is so because “a person must first relish that wherein the amiableness of nature consists, before he can wish well to him on the account of that loveliness, or as being worthy to receive good.” Edwards further explains that “this relish is the foundation of love of benevolence, or desire of the good of the beloved.” And he clearly identifies the regenerate’s love of God as being for the sake of “the excellency of his own nature, and not any benefit we have received, or hope to receive, by his goodness to us” (p. 175). The point Edwards is anxious to make in the “Treatise on Grace” is that without a relish of the divine beauty and a disinterested love to God for such beauty in itself (complacence in God), one could neither know what to wish for in “wishing well” to God and in seeking God’s “highest good” (benevolence to God), nor know how to wish well to others (benevolence to created beings). As Roland Delattre has written of Edwards’ philosophy, “Benevolence can, in fact, reach no further than the range and quality (i.e. the perfection or the beauty) of being in which delight is taken.”2 The way the love of complacence functions as the “foundation” of the love of benevolence is highlighted here. However, the necessary involvement of both benevolence and complacence in Christian love that Edwards speaks of in “Miscellanies,” no. 530, is neither contradicted nor denied.
In The Nature of True Virtue, Edwards’ approach is quite different from the one in “Treatise on Grace.” Especially in the early part of True Virtue, Edwards’ method is strictly logical and meta-ethical analysis. As Norman Fiering has noted, Edwards argues here “on the basis of deductive reasoning alone.” Through logical analysis, Edwards asks not only what true virtue is but also why virtue is virtue. As Fiering again observes, “[N]either the epistemological question of how we know a good act when we see it, nor the psychological question of how good actions are motivated” is considered.3 The relationship between benevolence and complacence is taken up on this abstract level. And as we shall see, Edwards’ logical analysis is not for the sake of analysis alone but rather to demonstrate in the language of philosophy the theological truth of God’s centrality in true virtue.
Edwards begins The Nature of True Virtue by citing the “common opinion” that virtue is a form of love and also of beauty. But what does the virtuous love? “It is a plain inconsistence to suppose,” explains Edwards, “that virtue primarily consists in any love to its object for its beauty.” This is so because the beauty of mind is none other than virtue itself, and thus to say that virtuous love is the love of beauty in the object amounts to saying that virtue consists in love of virtue. And to say that virtue is love of virtue is simply “going in a circle”; in this way, “we never come to any beginning or foundation.” Thus, Edwards points out, “if the essence of virtue or beauty of mind lies in love, or a disposition to love, it must primarily consist in something different both from complacence, which is a delight in beauty, and also from any benevolence that has the beauty of its object for its foundation.”4 One must go beyond beauty and virtue to get at the reason virtue is virtue, and beauty is beauty.
Edwards therefore asserts that “there is no room left for no other conclusion” than that the primary object of virtuous love is “Being,simply considered.” Being or existence, in other words, is the foundation of virtue. Edwards further notes that for the love of benevolence, or the propensity to wish well for others, according to “common opinion,” “beauty in the object is not always the ground,” and that “benevolence doth not necessarily presuppose beauty in its object.” He then combines this definition of benevolence with his axiom that virtuous love has “Being, simply considered” as its primary object, and declares that “virtue primarily consists in that affection of heart to being, which is exercised in benevolence, or inclination to its good.” By the term “primarily” Edwards means that “the first object of a virtuous benevolence is Being, simply considered.”5
From this conclusion Edwards deduces that “Being in general” is also the object of virtuous benevolence, and, even more, “the thing it has an ultimate propensity to, is the highest good of Being in general.” This im- plication logically leads to a second: “[I]f Being, simply considered, be the first object of a truly virtuous benevolence, then that being who has the most of being, or has the greatest share of existence . . . will have the greatest share of the propensity and benevolent affection of the heart.”6
God, in other words, is the central object of true virtue. And benevolence to individual created beings is truly virtuous to the extent that such benevolence is consistent with benevolence to Being in general and to the highest being. Starting with the “common opinion” of moral philosophers of his day and using logical analysis, Edwards has shown that without benevolence to God there simply is no true virtue.
Having shown the centrality of God in true virtue, Edwards expands his abstract meta-ethical analysis and brings up the experiential factors in the love of God into his discussion. He now looks at true virtue as it actually is, without doing away with the results of meta-ethical analysis. Edwards begins by asserting that “the second object of virtuous propensity of heart is benevolent being.” In other words, there is another ground besides “Being, simply considered” for virtuous benevolence. Virtuous benevolence in a being is “the secondary ground of pure benevolence.” Why is this true? Edwards takes three approaches in answering this question. First, he takes the commonsensical view that a being who is attracted to a particular value can only agree with and consent to another being who is attracted to the same value. He writes, “When anyone under the influence of general benevolence sees another being possessed of the like general benevolence, this attaches his heart to him, and draws forth greater love to him, than merely his having existence.” Edwards also states that “he that has a simple and pure good will to general entity or existence must love that temper in others that agrees and conspires with itself” and that “a spirit of consent to Being must agree with consent to Being.” Such terms as “sees” and “temper” indicate that Edwards has gone beyond logical deduction. In speaking about the actual experience of “seeing” a being with virtuous benevolence, he appears to give a kind of priority to complacence, as he did in “Treatise on Grace,” where the actual experience was also the main context. Thus Edwards asserts that the secondary object of virtuous benevolence (i.e. benevolence in the object) “is one thing that must be considered as the ground or motive to a purely virtuous benevolence.”7
Edwards’ second approach in arguing that benevolent being is a ground of virtuous benevolence is to begin with the consequence of his metaethical analysis itself, namely, that being or “Being, simply considered” is the primary ground of true virtue. A benevolent being loves another benevolent being, explains Edwards, “because so far as the being beloved has love to Being in general, so far his own being is, as it were, enlarged; extends to, and in some sort comprehends, Being in general: and therefore he that is governed by love to Being in general, must of necessity have complacence in him, and the greater degree of benevolence to him, as it were out of gratitude to him for his love to general existence.”8 A person with a benevolent disposition loves “Being, simply considered” and consequently most loves “Being in general.” A benevolent being, by so loving Being in general, is ontologically “enlarged,” and “extends to” and “comprehends” Being in general. Thus, if one considers “Being, simply considered” as the primary ground of benevolent love, a benevolent being has to be seen as deserving the love of virtuous benevolence. Benevolence in a being is a ground of virtuous benevolence, or, ontologically speaking, of love.
An important point to make here is that Edwards calls virtuous benevolence to benevolent being “complacence.” Apparently he does so because complacence is by definition the love of an object for the qualification of it. Benevolence in a being, therefore, elicits complacence as well as virtuous benevolence. Even on a purely ontological level, complacence and benevolence coexist and reinforce each other. Complacence in an object, according to Edwards, brings about “the greater degree of benevolence.” He goes so far as to say that “loving a being on this ground”— that is, benevolence to Being in general in a being—“necessarily arises from pure benevolence to Being in general and comes to the same thing.”9
Love to being and thus to Being in general, in other words, is both benevolence and complacence.
The third approach Edwards takes in articulating why a benevolent being is an object of virtuous benevolence is to point out that beauty is present in a benevolent being, and thereby to make explicit what was implicit in the ontological argument. In this approach, Edwards states that a being’s benevolence to Being in general is “the thing wherein true moral or spiritual beauty primarily consists.” So a benevolent being has beauty in it and deserves both benevolence and complacence—the former be- cause, as we saw above, a benevolent being is ontologically united to Being in general, and the latter because complacent love by definition is love of an object because of the beauty in that object. “This spiritual beauty,” Edwards writes, “that is but a secondary ground of a virtuous benevolence, is the ground not only of benevolence but complacence, and is the primary ground of the latter.” This copresence of benevolence and complacence is described by Edwards also in the following way: “Therefore, he that has true virtue, consisting in benevolence to Being in general, and in that complacence in virtue, or moral beauty, and benevolence to virtuous being, must necessarily have a supreme love to God, both of benevolence and complacence.”1 The central object of benevolent love, in other words, is Being in general, in whom being and beauty are copresent. The object of true virtue, in the final analysis, is both benevolence and complacence. The virtuous love to Being in general, says Edwards, “is not in simple proportion of the degree of benevolent affection seen, but in a proportion compounded of the greatness of the benevolent being, or the degree of being and the degree of benevolence,” or beauty.2 Just as benevolence and complacence toward God cannot be separated, so too God’s being and beauty are inseparable. Therefore, the main conclusion of Edwards’ analysis of true virtue in the first two chapters of the treatise is that the central object of all true virtue is Being in general, and this object is at once being and beauty, thereby eliciting the loves of both benevolence and complacence.
At this point we should note the most pertinent aspects of the “Controversies” section on true virtue with regard to the issue of the relation between benevolence and complacence. In the published treatise, Edwards uses some of the materials from the “Controversies” notebook word for word. But with respect to the inseparability of benevolence and complacence, Edwards is much more explicit in the later, published text. For example, the “Controversies” and The Nature of True Virtue have an almost identical paragraph dealing with benevolence as the secondary object of virtuous benevolence. That paragraph in the “Controversies” states that “when a benevolent being sees another being having benevolence, this draws forth the greater benevolence toward him than merely his having existence.” It further states that “he that loves Being in general must there- fore of necessity have a greater love to him” (p. 320). But in the published text, Edwards amplifies the passage, adding that “he that is governed by love to Being in general, must of necessity have complacence in him, and the greater degree of benevolence to him.” When such a person with a love to Being in general sees benevolence in another being, that person sees it “as the beauty of the being in whom it is,” rendering the person perceived “worthy of esteem, complacence, and the greater good will.”3 In this way, The Nature of True Virtue in its final form emphasizes, more so than the earlier notebook, the commingling of the loves of benevolence and complacence in a person governed by benevolence to Being in general.
Another noteworthy aspect of the section on true virtue in the “Controversies” notebook is Edwards’ awareness of the inadequacy of benevolence and complacence for describing the regenerate person’s love of God—a love in which both benevolence and complacence are inseparably integrated. Toward the end of the “Controversies” section, we find Edwards stating that the nature of true virtue is not “exactly and fully” expressed by the word “benevolence” but rather by words like “love,” “charity,” or “agape,” which all denote “an union with the object; . . . a kind of enlargement of the heart, whereby self takes in existence in general.” Immediately following this comment, Edwards remarks that complacence is twofold. “There is complacence only in this enlargement and union. One that is united has a kind of delight in the object, which is a more primary exercise of virtue; but complacence in it as beautiful or virtuous is more secondary” (pp. 326–27). In short, ontological enlargement and beauty are both objects of the love of complacence. Obviously, in Edwards’ mind benevolence and complacence co-inhere.
To summarize: When the logical or meta-ethical question of why virtue is virtue is raised, the love of benevolence with “Being, simply considered” as its object is prior to complacence. But a purely logical analysis of true virtue leads to the conclusion that true virtue is benevolence to Being in general, or, more specifically, God and the whole of reality. And since Being in general, or God, has benevolence in him, the benevolent love of God is necessarily accompanied by a complacent love of God. When the love of God is discussed as an actual experience, however, complacence has a kind of priority, although such complacent love to God necessarily coexists with benevolence to God. In fine, benevolence and complacence are inseparable in the love of God and, therefore, in all dispositions and acts of true virtue.
The concluding sentence of Edwards’ analysis of true virtue at the end of the second chapter of the treatise confirms this conclusion. Edwards writes, “[I]t may be asserted in general that nothing is of the nature of true virtue, in which God is not the first and the last; or which, with regard to their exercises in general, have not their first foundation and source in apprehension of God’s supreme dignity and glory, and in answerable esteem and love to God as the supreme end.”4First of all, Edwards here does not even use the terms “benevolence” and “complacence,” implying that the two loves are inseparable and even coincide in the love of God. Second, true virtue is said to have as its “first foundation and source” an “apprehension of God’s supreme dignity and glory.” This statement highlights the priority of complacence in the love of God, and agrees with Edwards’ statement in “Treatise on Grace.” Here, though, the focus is on the actual experience of the love of God. Third, Edwards does not ignore the priority of benevolence to “Being, simply considered” that he gives in the abstract analysis of The Nature of True Virtue. The object of the regenerate person’s apprehension is God’s “dignity and glory.” According to Edwards, God’s dignity is his “worthiness,” which “consists in these things, greatness and moral goodness.”5 Hence Edwards carries through the point of his meta-ethical analysis, that the degree of being as such, or “greatness,” is the first object of true virtue.
I cannot pretend to have traced all the ways in which, for Edwards, benevolence, complacence, and the love of God are related. However, the above discussion at least suggests that his statements on the priority of complacence in “Treatise on Grace” and on the priority of benevolence in the early part of The Nature of True Virtue are not contradictory but rather represent different senses of the term “priority,” or different ways of looking at the matter—in actual experience, on the one hand, and in abstract analysis, on the other. Furthermore, if we compare “Miscellanies,” no. 530, and the published text of The Nature of True Virtue, the essential inseparability of benevolence and complacence in the love of God emerges as a view that Edwards held throughout his career.
Having reviewed the four documents in this volume that deal directly with Christian practice, I now turn to the question of the significance of Christian practice in Edwards’ theology. I have already noted that Edwards’ dispositional conception of grace necessarily entails an emphasis on the exercises of the new disposition in the life of the regenerate per- son. But this concern with Christian practice must also be viewed from a wider perspective. The fundamental framework that subsumes his dispositional conception of grace and Christian practice is his vision of the chief end for which God created the world. As we saw earlier, Edwards held that God created the world in order to repeat in time and space his own internal glory. In order to achieve this end, God created intelligent beings who, by his grace, could repeat his glory through knowing and loving that glory. Such human knowing and loving of God’s beauty necessarily results in holy actions. “God has made intelligent creatures capable of being concerned in these effects, as being the willing, active subjects or means, and so they are capable of actively promoting God’s glory.”6 God’s creation of intelligent creatures, or more specifically, God’s eternal election of the saints as “active subjects,” was precisely so that they could actively “promote” God’s end in creation. Christian practice, which serves that end, is the aim of both creation and election. Edwards writes, “[P]ractice is the aim of that eternal election which is the first ground of the bestowment of all true grace. . . . Christian practice is the scope and end of election.”7
Seen in this light, both the inevitability and the significance of Christian practice, for Edwards, are grounded in the inevitability of God’s attainment of his own end in creation and election.
If we push the issue even further, we see that God’s end in creation itself is rooted in God’s intra-trinitarian self-communication, in which God’s dispositional essence is exercised. God’s creation of the world is the spatio-temporal extension of his inner-trinitarian self-communication itself. Thus Edwards writes in “Miscellanies,” no. 1082, “this twofold way of the Deity’s flowing forth ad extra” through the incarnation and atonement of the Son and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the saints and their Christian practice, “answers to the twofold way of the Deity’s proceeding ad intra, in the proceeding and generation of the Son and the proceeding and breathing forth of the Holy Spirit; and indeed is only a kind of second proceeding of the same persons, their going forth ad extra, as before they proceeded ad intra.”8 Saints, through their Christian practice, participate in “the second proceeding” of the persons of the Trinity ad intra. In this way, according to Edwards, the saints through their good works in a sense participate in God’s own inner-trinitarian life: “’Tis in our partaking of the Holy Ghost that we have communion with the Father and
Son and with Christians: . . . this is the bond of perfectness, by which they are one in the Father and the Son, as the Father is in the Son and the Son in the Father.”9 The source and meaning of Christian practice cannot be grounded any more deeply than this.
Seen in this light, the justification of the sinner has an end larger than the salvation of sinful humanity. “The Scripture teaches that the way of justification that is appointed in the gospel covenant, is appointed, as it is, for that end, that free grace might be expressed and glorified.”1 The justification of the sinner by God’s free grace is none other than the further exercise of God’s original disposition to create beings out of nothing, so that God may communicate his internal beauty to and through them. Placing the history of the work of redemption in the larger context of God’s end of creation, John F. Wilson has written that “[T]he very end, intention, or purpose of God in the creation of the world and its return to God is the central theme of the whole.”2The redemption of fallen creatures through their justification by grace through faith, in other words, is grounded in something God is doing for his own purpose—nothing less than the repetition in time and space of God’s infinite glory.
The Justification Doctrine and God’s Chief End in Creation
I have suggested throughout this discussion that Edwards’ soteriology is to be viewed within the larger framework of God’s chief end in creation, which is to repeat his own glory ad extra. Now we may ask, Does this way of speaking about God’s chief end in creation in any way derogate, or at least make ambiguous, the significance of God’s redemptive work? Does the believer’s love of God’s excellency considered in itself—an act that promotes God’s end of repeating his inner-trinitarian love in time and space—in any way diminish the importance of the believer’s faith in God as the Savior of sinful humanity?
Thomas A. Schafer raised this question in his influential 1951 essay “Edwards and Justification by Faith” in the context of discussing the relation between faith and love in Edwards’ soteriology. Noting the centrality of believers’ love of God in Edwards’ theological perspective, Schafer wondered whether his God-centered conception of piety shortchanged believers’ love of and faith in God for what God has done for us, and consequently diminished the importance of the justification doctrine.
In the essay, Schafer first notes that Edwards himself had engaged in “what he later called a ‘miserable seeking’ to save his soul from hell; but what he looked back upon as his real conversion had no conscious relation to his personal destiny.”3Schafer then quotes from Edwards’ Personal Narrative: “The delights which I now felt in the things of religion, were of an exceedingly different kind from those before-mentioned, that I had when a boy; and what then I had no more notion of, than one born blind has of pleasant and beautiful colors. They were of a more inward, pure, soul-animating and refreshing nature. Those former delights never reached the heart; and did not arise from any sight of the divine excellency of the things of God; or any taste of the soul- satisfying and lifegiving good there is in them.”4“Here is the center of Edwards’ piety,” Schafer concludes, “a direct, intuitive appreciation, a ‘sight,’ a ‘sense,’ a ‘taste’ of God’s majestic beauty, a love of God simply because he is God, an exultant affirmation of all God’s ways.” “This, to Edwards,” Schafer adds, “is the meaning of faith.”5 It appears to be Schafer’s judgment that Edwards’ God-centered piety somehow weakens the place of doctrines dealing with God’s justifying grace for us. Schafer observes, “[T]here are many elements in Edwards’ religious thought which cause the doctrine of justi- fication to occupy an ambiguous and somewhat precarious place in his theology.”6
But a different reading regarding the place of the justification doctrine in Edwards’ theology is possible. We can argue instead that Edwards, in his conception of faith, effectively combines a sense and love of God’s excellency for what it is with an approbation and embrace of God’s redemptive work in Christ for our sakes. The section on “Justification” in the “Controversies” notebook has the following statement on the nature of faith:
Even a cordial acceptance of that rich and transcendent grace and love of God and Christ exercised and manifested in the salvation of Christ, implies a sight of the transcendent beauty of holiness and cordially embracing it. For he that truly and with all his heart embraces that glorious grace and love, sees the divine beauty of it as a moral perfection of God, or as that in which his moral excellency gloriously
3. Schafer, “Edwards and Justification by Faith,” p. 60. 4. Ibid. The passage quoted from the “Personal Narrative” can be found in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, 16, Letters and Personal Writings, ed. George S. Claghorn (New Haven, Yale Univ. Press, 1998), 794–95.
shines forth, and so approves and embraces it, and not merely as ’tis something that promotes his private interest. He that accepts God’s grace appearing in the salvation of Christ only as related to his interest, don’t sincerely and really accept anything that is divine. What he does comes to no more than accepting himself and approving of his own private interest, which is quite a different thing from cordially embracing that glorious attribute of God (p. 359).
And in his notebook on “Faith,” Edwards writes that “there is implied in believing in Christ not only and merely that exercise of mind which arises from a sense of his excellency and reality as a Savior, but also with that, what arises from the consideration of his relation to us and our concern in him, his being a Savior for such as we, for sinful men, and a Savior that is offered with his benefits to us” (p. 434). For Edwards, the act of loving and sensing God’s beauty for what he is and does, considered in itself, and the act of faith in God for what God has done for us, are inseparable. For one thing, love and faith are both the expressions of the same divine disposition in the saint. Furthermore, in Edwards’ view, one cannot truly know, experience, or have faith in anyone or anything without being inclined toward or loving that person or that entity at the same time. Emphasizing the inseparability of faith and love, Edwards writes in his notes on “Faith,” “If [faith] were conversant about a person only, ’twould be more properly called ‘loving’; if it were only about a gift, an inheritance, or reward, ’twould be more properly called ‘receiving,’ or ‘accepting,’ etc.” (p. 423). Edwards then offers the following definition as his synthesis of the two: “Faith is the soul’s entirely embracing and acquiescing in the revelation the Word of God gives us of Jesus Christ as a Savior for us, in a sense of his reality and goodness as such” (p. 434).
Edwards’ piety is an embrace of God in Christ based upon a heartfelt sense of the transcendent beauty of all that God is in himself and all that God has done through Christ for sinful humanity. What Edwards wants to reject is the kind of piety that loves God merely and only out of private interest. Such a self-interested love of God, says Edwards, “don’t sincerely and really accept anything that is divine.” A true approbation of the God who gave his only Son for our sakes is impossible without a true sense of the beauty of all that God has done, considered in itself. “Without a sense of the divine moral excellency of Christ,” he writes, “the soul can’t see [the] value of Christ’s mediation, the value of his offering, the preciousness of his blood or merit of his obedience, and therefore [have] no entire confidence in Christ’s sacrifice” (p. 434). So our love of God for what
God is and does, considered in itself, and our love of God for his love for us, are inextricably connected.
The same issue can be considered in terms of God’s end in creation. God’s ultimate end in creating the world is the repetition of his internal beauty in time and space. But this ultimate end comprehends and includes within it God’s work of saving sinful humanity. In Concerning the End for Which God Created the World, Edwards gives careful attention to the issue of how God’s creation of the world for his own glory is related to his seeking of the good of the creature. The chief and supreme end of creation is God himself—that is, to “enlarge” his own internal fullness by repeating or communicating it ad extra. In order to achieve this goal, God creates intelligent beings who are capable of knowing and loving him, and thereby of repeating his internal glory in time and space. Thus, “God is to be considered as first and original in his regard; and the creature is the object of God’s regard consequentially and by implication, as being as it were comprehended in God.”7
Edwards takes pains to point out that the good of the creature is not to be “set in opposition” to or in a “disjunction” with the good that God seeks for himself. “God in seeking his glory, therein seeks the good of his creatures.”8 The good of the creature, like the good of God himself, is an “ultimate end” in creation, or an end which is sought “for its own sake.” But for Edwards, a particular ultimate end can be more valuable than other ultimate ends. God’s seeking God’s own good in creation is the “chief or highest” ultimate end. The good of the creature is also an ultimate end, but it is an ultimate end that is “comprehended in” or “implied by” God’s chief ultimate end in creation.9
There is also a sense in which God’s own good and the good of the creature “may be looked upon as one.” “If the happiness of the creature be considered as it will be, in the whole of the creature’s eternal duration, with all the infinity of its progress, and infinite increase of nearness and union to God; in this view, the creature must be looked upon as united to God in an infinite strictness.” Considered in this way, there would be only one end in creation. But then Edwards says that “the time will never come when it can be said it has already arrived at this infinite height.”1 So the creation never becomes simply identified with the Divine Being, although
7. End of Creation, in Works, 8, 440–41. 8. Ibid., pp. 440, 459. 9. Ibid., p. 529. For JE’s important discussion of the history of redemption as “the means” to God’s end of “glorifying himself from eternity,” see Works, 9, 117–125.
it is forever becoming more and more like that being. God is essentially a consenting, and thus a relating, being. The world remains an “other” to which God consents, and which consents to God. God’s own good, sought through creation, and the good of the creature are still to be distinguished though not separated or put in opposition. They are, rather, inseparably linked. More accurately, the good of the creature is “comprehended in” God’s own good; but the latter is “first and original.”
The supreme and highest destiny of elect persons is to repeat God’s internal beauty in time and space through a heartfelt sense of the beauty of God for its own sake. But accompanying this sense of God’s beauty for its own sake is the saint’s approbation and embrace of what God in Christ has done for the saint’s own good. In fact, the beauty of God’s own being has taken the form of the suffering love of Christ for the fallen creation. God’s love has become a justifying love. Edwards notes, “The communications of divine goodness, particularly forgiveness of sin, and salvation, are spoken of from time to time, as being for God’s goodness’ sake.”2
God’s love of his own glory for its own sake and God’s forgiving love of sinful human beings for their good are interconnected.
Schafer implies in his 1951 essay that Edwards’ conception of God’s emanation or communication of his beauty to the creatures, and the creatures’ return or repeating of God’s beauty through their love of that beauty for its own sake, somehow left out God’s salvation-history and justifying grace. Schafer writes, “God therefore takes real delight in the good principles and acts of the saints; not because there is ‘merit’ in them (that is really beside the point), but because the love wherewith they love him is simply his own love reflected and returned to him.”3 Edwards’ texts show that this is not the whole picture. God’s communication of love to sinful humanity takes the form of the suffering and justifying love of Christ. And God takes real delight in the love returned by believing sinners through their faith only because God sees them “in Christ,” whose merits have now been imputed to the believing sinners. Justification in Christ, therefore, is indispensable.
In short, Schafer is correct in suggesting that Edwards “went beyond the doctrine of justification, which had agitated the reformers, to the ‘real’ acts and relations which underlie it.”4 Edwards indeed took the justification doctrine beyond simple forensic language into the larger framework of God’s communication of his glory in time and space. But in do- ing so, Edwards did not, as Schafer implies, belittle the justification doctrine or its traditional forensic language, nor did he leave the justification doctrine’s place in his theology “ambiguous” and “precarious.” Rather, Edwards integrated the justification doctrine and its forensic language into his larger theological vision and thereby enriched and deepened the meaning and purpose of God’s justification in Christ.
Indeed, in this larger vision of Edwards’, justification is not simply for the sake of justified human beings but has an end beyond that. For Edwards, justification has “that end, that free grace might be expressed and glorified.”5 Justified in Christ, the believer’s imperfect good works are looked upon by God with a “real and proper delight.” Even more, God’s own life is “enlarged” in his glory through the good works of the Christians whom God justifies in Christ.
Edwards’ theology represents a fundamental reconception of God and God’s relation to the world. In Edwards’ view, God is essentially a dispositional being who is completely actualized within his internal trinitarian life. God is from eternity all that God has to be in order to be God. But the divine dispositional essence continues to exercise itself in time and space in a process of repeating and enlarging ad extra what already is infinitely perfect ad intra. For Edwards, then, unlike much traditional Western theology, God is in a sense “internally,” not just “externally,” related to the world. In Aquinas, for example, God affects the world, but what happens in the world does not affect God; God and the world are only “externally” related. For Edwards, what God does in the world neither increases nor changes God’s self-realization as God ad intra. Nevertheless, God’s selfcommunication to creatures, culminating in Christian good works, is the exercise of his original dispositional essence. Further, Christian good works repeat God’s internal glory in time and space in the sense that those good works (which are God’s self-communications and not purely human accomplishments) make God “happier” and “enlarge” his glory in time and space.
Edwards’ brilliance was to see that in the special sense of a finite though real repetition of prior divine perfection, what Christians do, by God’s grace, in this history and in this space, does matter, even to God himself, and is in this sense “internally” related to him. And the justification of the sinner—the imputation of Christ’s righteousness upon believing sinners and their imperfect deeds—plays an indispensable role in the larger drama of God’s enlargement and expansion of his inner beauty in time and space. For Edwards, to say that the good of the creature is “comprehended in” God’s more original and ultimate end of glorifying himself ad extra is not to demean the creatures but rather to elevate them, even to a participation in God’s own life.
WRITINGS ON THE TRINITY,
GRACE, AND FAITH
Notes
4. Conrad Wright, The Beginnings of Unitarianism in America (Boston, Beacon Press, 1966), p. 200.
5. Jonathan Mayhew, Sermons Upon the Following Subjects (Boston, 1755), p. 418n.
6. See William S. Babcock, “A Changing of the Christian God: The Doctrine of the Trinity in the Seventeenth Century,” Interpretation XLV, no. 2 (April 1991), 133–146.
7. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. John W. Yolton (London, J. M. Dent and Sons, 1961), Bk. II, ch. xxiii, no. 8.
7. End of Creation, in Works, 8, 433. 8. “The Mind,” in Works, 6, 362; “Miscellanies,” no. 117, in Works, 13, 248.
9. End of Creation, in Works, 8, 452.
1. “Miscellanies,” no. 94, Works, 13, 256–57. 2. Ibid., 257. 3. Works, 2, 298. 4. “The Mind,” in Works, 6, 337. 5. “Miscellanies,” no. 117, in Works, 13, 284.
1. “Miscellanies,” no. 308, in Works, 13, 393.
7. Throughout her dissertation, Pauw discusses the various ways in which the psychological and social analogies both complement and conflict with each other in JE’s writings. Pauw, “The Supreme Harmony of All.”
8. “Miscellanies,” no. 107, in Works, 13, 277–78; End of Creation, in Works, 8, 433–34.
9. “Miscellanies,” no. 94, in Works, 13, 262. 1. Ibid., 259; and “Miscellanies,” no. 194, in ibid., 335. 2. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles (Garden City, N. Y., Doubleday, 1955), Bk. I, ch. 22, pp. 118–120.
4. “Miscellanies,” no. 104, in Works, 13, 272. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid., p. 273.
8. “De Trinitate,” in Augustine: Later Works, trans. by John Burnaby, Library of Christian Classics, vol. VIII (London, SCM Press, 1955), XV, 47, p.176. Cf. Colin Gunton, “Augustine, the Trinity and the Theological Crisis of the West,” Scottish Journal of Theology 43 (1992), pp. 33–58.
9. “Miscellanies,” no. 370, in Works, 13, 441.
6. Stephen H. Daniel, “Postmodern Concepts of God and Edwards’s Trinitarian Ontology,” in Edwards in Our Time: Jonathan Edwards and the Shaping of American Religion, ed. Sang Hyun Lee and Allen C. Guelzo (Grand Rapids, Mich., Eerdmans, 1999), p. 55.
9. “Miscellanies,” no. 539, in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, 18, “The Miscellanies,” 501–832, ed. Ava Chamberlain (New Haven, Yale Univ. Press, 2000), 84.
2. See, for example, “Miscellanies,” no. 135, in Works, 13, p. 295. For a discussion of this issue, see Pauw, “The Supreme Harmony of All,” pp. 33–36.
3. See Pauw, “The Supreme Harmony of All,” pp. 24–26. 4. The Church Teachers: Documents of the Church in English Translation, ed. John F. Clarkson et al (St. Louis, B. Herder, 1955), p. 133. See Pauw, “The Supreme Harmony of All,” pp. 26.
1. Christopher Stead, Divine Substance (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1977), pp. 93–94. 2. Pauw, “The Supreme Harmony of All,” p. 36.
4. The Intellectual System of the Universe (London, 1678; rep. 1820), III, 144. 5. MS sermon on Hebrews 1:3. 6. “Miscellanies,” no. 143, in Works, 13, 298–99.
7. De Trinitate, XV, xvi, 28.
8. “Miscellanies,” no. 308, in Works, 13, 392. For the dating of JE’s MSS, see “Editor’s Introduction,” Table 2, in Works, 13, 91–109.
9. “Observations,” in Treatise on Grace, ed. Helm, p. 77. 1. Ibid., p. 78, 80. 2. Ibid., pp. 78–79.
3. Ibid., pp. 84–85. 4. Ibid., pp. 85–86. 5. Ibid., pp. 89–92.
6. Ibid., p. 93.
8. Scholars who have studied JE’s thought on the Trinity agree on this point. See Pauw, “The Supreme Harmony of All”; Jenson, America’s Theologian, pp. 91–98; and Herbert W. Richardson, “The Glory of God in the Theology of Jonathan Edwards: A Study in the Doctrine of the Trinity,” Harvard University Ph.D. diss., 1962.
9. “Miscellanies,” no. 448, in Works, 13, 495. Ed. italics and spacing. 1. End of Creation, in Works, 8, 452. 2. Jenson, America’s Theologian, p. 93. 3. “Observations,” in Treatise on Grace, ed. Helm, pp. 84–85, 89.
4. “Miscellanies,” no. 402, in Works, 13, 466. 5. See Jenson, America’s Theologian, pp. 94–95. 6. “The Wisdom of God, Displayed in the Way of Salvation,” in Worcester rev. ed., 4, 136. 7. “Miscellanies,” no. 614, in Works, 18, 146. 8. “Miscellanies,” no. 958, in Works, 20, 234.
9. “Miscellanies,” no. 94, Works, 13, 261.
1. End of Creation, in Works, 8, 413. Aside from the word “alone” near the beginning of the quote, the italics are the editor’s.
2. Ibid., pp. 422, 433, 437, 445. 3. “Miscellanies,” no 247, in Works, 13, 361. 4. End of Creation, in Works, 13, 527, 433.
5. “Miscellanies,” no. 1218, in Philosophy of Jonathan Edwards, ed. Townsend, p. 152; see also “Miscellanies,” 1153–1360.
6. “The Mind,” in Works, 6, 45. 7. “Miscellanies,” no. 107, in Works, 13, 277–78. 8. “Miscellanies,” no. 104, in Works, 13, 272.
3. End of Creation, in Works, 8, 531. 4. Ibid., 461, 527; “Miscellanies,” no. 662, in Works, 18, 200.
5. End of Creation, in Works, 8, 405–08, 413.
6. “Miscellanies,” nos. 241 and 397, in Works, 13, 357–58, 462–63.
7. “Miscellanies,” no. 220, in ibid., 345. 8. “Miscellanies,” no. 241, in ibid., 357–58. 9. Thomas A. Schafer, “Solomon Stoddard and the Theology of Revival,” in A Miscellany of American Christianity: Essays in Honor of H. Shelton Smith,ed. Stuart C. Henry (Durham, N. C., Duke Univ. Press, 1963), p. 353.
1. “Miscellanies,” no 397, in Works, 13, 462. 2. Ibid. 3. Works, 2, 206.
4. Works, 1, 158.
5. Works, 2, 201.
6. Cf. E. M. Burke, “Grace,” in New Catholic Encyclopedia (New York, McGraw Hill, 1967), pp. 658–72.
7. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae,trans. Cornelius Ernst (New York, McGraw Hill, 1972), Ia2ae, 110, 4, p. 121.
1. Cf. Burke, “Grace,” p. 668. 2. For the interpretation of JE’s idea of infused disposition as “a close correlative” of Thomas’ notion of the “intermediary habit,” see Anri Morimoto, Jonathan Edwards and the Catholic Vision of Salvation (University Park, Pa., Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1995), esp. p. 46.
3. “Miscellanies,” no. 27b, in Works, 13, 214.
4. Works, 18, 529, n. 3; Works, 8, 157. 5. Works, 2, 200.
6. Works, 8, 158; ed. italics. 7. Works, 18, 157; ed. italics.
8. Conrad Cherry, The Theology of Jonathan Edwards: A Reappraisal (Bloomington, Indiana Univ. Press, 1990), p. 41; Morimoto, Jonathan Edwards and the Catholic Vision of Salvation, pp. 44, 46. 9. Works, 2, 343, 200.
1. “Miscellanies,” no. 64, in Works, 13, 235. 2. “Of Atoms,” in Works, 6, 215–16.
3. “Miscellanies,” no. 1263, in Philosophy of Jonathan Edwards, ed. Townsend, pp. 184–93; see also”Miscellanies,” 1153–1360.
4. “Miscellanies,” no. 1263, in Philosophy of Jonathan Edwards, ed. Townsend, p. 186. 5. Ibid.
6. “Miscellanies,” no. 64, in Works, 13, 235. 7. “Miscellanies,” no. 481, in Works, 13, 523–24.
8. “Miscellanies,” no. 64, in Works, 13, 235. 9. “The Mind,” Works, 6, 390.
1. “Miscellanies,” no. 629, in Works, 18, 157. 2. “Miscellanies,” no. 539, in Works, 18, 85. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid., 86.
5. A Divine and Supernatural Light, in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, 17, Sermons and Discourses 1730–1733, ed. Mark Valeri (New Haven, Yale Univ. Press, 1999), 416. 6. Cherry, Theology of Jonathan Edwards, p. 48. 7. Works, 17, 416–17.
8. Works, 2, 280. 9. Works, 17, 416. 1. Works, 6, 336.
3. A Divine and Supernatural Light, in Works, 17, 413.
4. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. by John T. McNeill (Philadelphia, Westminster Press, 1960 ), III, xi, 1.
5. Works, 2, 455–60.
6. Works, 14, 55–64. 7. Justification by Faith Alone, in Works of Jonathan Edwards, 19, Sermons and Discourses, 1734– 1738,ed. M. X. Lesser (New Haven, Yale Univ. Press, 2001), 150–51; “Peccator Non Iustificatur,” in Works, 14, 60–61.
8. Works, 19, 150.
9. JE’s discussion of “sensible knowledge” appears at many places in his corpus. See, for example, Religious Affections, in Works, 2, 205–10; “Miscellanies,” no. 782, in Works, 18, 452–66; and The Threefold Work of the Holy Ghost, in Works, 14, 408–25. For an analysis of JE’s religious epistemology, see Lee, Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards, pp. 125–69.
1. Works, 2, 246, 250.
2. Justification by Faith Alone, in Works, 19, 161. 3. Ibid., pp. 157, 156, 158. 4. Ibid., pp. 158, 156; ed. italics.
5. Ibid., pp. 156, 158. 6. Ibid., pp. 159–60.
8. Justification by Faith Alone, in Works, 19, 211, 161.
9. Ibid., pp. 166, 189. 1. Thomas Coates, “Calvin’s Doctrine of Justification,” Concordia Theological Monthly 34(1963), p. 325.
2. Justification by Faith Alone, in Works, 19, 162. 3. Ibid., p. 164.
4. Works, 2, 203. 5. Institutes, III, xii, 1. 6. Ibid., III, xi, 7. 7. Works, 19, 164.
2. Justification by Faith Alone, in Works, 19, 159. 3. Summa Theologica, Q. 113, Art. 6, p. 1149. 4. Summa Theologica, 2a2ae. 2, 9, p.97, Blackfriars Vol. 31, Faith 2a2ae. 1–7. 5. Robert P. Scharlemann, Thomas Aquinas and John Gerhard (New Haven, Yale Univ. Press, 1964), p. 188.
6. Justification by Faith Alone, in Works, 19, 190–91, 215. 7. Summa Theologica, Q. 113, Art. 2, pp. 1146, 1145. 8. The expression “outside us” is Martin Luther’s. See Luther’s Works, vol. 26, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan (St. Louis, Concordia Pub. House, 1963), pp. 233–34.
9. Justification by Faith Alone, in Works, 19, 183, 240.
3. “Editor’s Introduction to ‘Types of the Messiah,’” The Works of Jonathan Edwards, 11, Typological Writings, ed. Wallace E. Anderson and Mason I. Lowance, Jr., with David Watters (New Haven, Yale Univ. Press, 1993), 166.
5. “Types of Messiah,” in Works, 11, 313. 6. Justification by Faith Alone, in Works, 19, 201.
7. Ibid., 201–02.
8. “Miscellanies,” no. 695, in Works, 18, 279, 281. 9. Justification by Faith Alone, in Works, 19, 204.
2. Justification by Faith Alone, in Works, 19, 212. 3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., pp. 214, 217; ed. italics. 5. Ibid., pp. 233–36.
6. Works, 2, 398.
8. See below, p. 312. For a discussion of the Two Dissertations, see Works, 8, 5–8. 9. Alexander V. G. Allen, Jonathan Edwards (Boston, Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1889), pp.358–60. For scholarly comment on this issue, see Paul Helm, “Introduction,” Treatise on Grace and Other Posthumous Writings, Including Observations on the Trinity (London, James Clark & Co.,
1. “Miscellanies,” no. 530, in Works, 18, 74–75; ed. italics.
2. Delattre, Beauty and Sensibility in the Thought of Jonathan Edwards, p. 110.
3. Fiering, Jonathan Edwards’s Moral Thought, 322. George Hunsinger, my colleague at Princeton Theological Seminary, initially brought this reading of The Nature of True Virtue to my attention.
4. The Nature of True Virtue, in Works, 8, 543–44. 5. Ibid., 544–45.
6. Ibid., 545. Following Fiering and Ramsey, I take JE’s “Being in general” to mean “the transcendent God plus his ordered creation.” Fiering, Jonathan Edwards’s Moral Thought, 326, and Works, 8, 31.
7. Works, 8, 546–47.
8. Ibid. 9. Ibid., 547. Ramsey has stated that, for JE, “in supreme love to God these loves coincide.” Ibid., 551, n. 5.
1. Ibid., 551. On this issue Roland Delattre (Beauty and Sensibility, 97) has written: “The love of being for its primary beauty is so firmly connected for Edwards with the love of being ‘simply considered’ that it comes to the same thing, since . . . primary beauty is itself the first principle of being.”
2. The Nature of True Virtue, in Works, 8, 548.
3. Ibid., 547.
4. Ibid., 560. 5. Ibid., 553.
6. “Miscellanies,” no. 1218, in Philosophy of Jonathan Edwards, ed. Townsend, p. 152; see also Works, “Miscellanies,” 1153–1360.
7. Charity and Its Fruits, in Works, 8, 294–95. 8. “Miscellanies,” no. 1082, in “Miscellanies,” 833–1152.
9. “Miscellanies,” no. 376, in Works, 13, 448. 1. Justification by Faith Alone, in Works, 19, 183. 2. “Editor’s Introduction,” in Works, 9, 38.
5. Schafer, “Edwards and Justification by Faith,” p. 61. 6. Ibid., p. 57.
1. End of Creation, in Works, 8, 534–35.
2. Ibid., p. 506. 3. Schafer, “Edwards and Justification by Faith,” p. 62. 4. Ibid., p. 64.
5. Justification by Faith Alone, in Works, 19, 83.