1.0 Introduction

1.1 Research Question & Thesis

1.1.1 Preliminary Remarks

Jonathan Edwards’ trinitarian theology forms the bedrock of his theological endeavors.¹ This has not always been recognized, as Amy Plantinga Pauw states,

…these estimates of the centrality and originality of Edwards’ trinitarian thought have not won universal acceptance. Edwards A. Park insists that Edwards ‘paid a general, occasional, incidental attention to [trinitarian theories], but never made them the theme of his minute, thorough, prolonged investigation.’ Harvey Townsend claims to find nothing extraordinary about Edwards’ views on the subject. And John Gerstner declares that anyone ‘familiar with the history of the doctrine of the Trinity will see nothing aberrant in the Edwardsean formulation’.²

We would have to generally agree with Pauw. Having examined the materials that touch upon the subject of the Trinity, we believe Edwards might not be “extraordinary” or “aberrant” in his formulation of trinitarian doctrine. However, he does offer a unique expression of Reformed trinitarianism nonetheless.³ Given the wealth of material on Edwards in general and on his trinitarianism in particular, our goal in this series is to concentrate on one, albeit major, aspect of his trinitarian theology.

1.1.2 Thesis

The concern of this series is to discover just how Edwards formulated his doctrine of the Trinity and how that formulation also informed his discussion of the human soul, or what we will call the unitary operation of the human soul. The thesis of this paper is that Jonathan Edwards formulated his trinitarian doctrine in terms of what has come to be called the psychological model of the Trinity. Additionally, we believe his understanding of the human personality or soul followed suit and generally fell within the tradition of Augustinian voluntarism which tended to see the human soul as a unified whole and so Edwards eschewed traditional faculty psychology.⁴

1.1.3 Our Method of Inquiry

Our concern here is to treat Edwards himself as a unified whole. That is, we will not bifurcate Edwards’s theology from his metaphysics and so we will aim to treat Jonathan Edwards as the “artful theologian” that we was.⁵ Edwards’ formulation of Trinitarian doctrine will be seen to make the most sense when set within his metaphysical idealism⁶ with its notion of the necessity of the perception of being as essential to being per se and the concomitant idea of emanation and return. Emanation and remanation involve the replication of the triune God ad intra (including the covenant of redemption or pactum salutis)⁷ in his creation of the universe ad extra ⁸ which includes God’s permission of the Fall, the history of redemption and the consummation of history at the end of the ages.⁹ And Edwards’ understanding of the human soul will best be appreciated within this setting and within Edwards’s intellectual setting in which he participated in the discussions of moral philosophy taking place in Great Britain and on the continent.

1. This assessment is confirmed by the amount of secondary literature that is currently available on Edwards’ trinitarianism. Among the vast literature, see George P. Fisher’s introduction to An Unpublished Essay of Edwards on the Trinity (New York, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1903), 3 - 74. See also Amy Plantinga Pauw, The Supreme Harmony of All: The Trinitarian Theology of Jonathan Edwards (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002) and her “Heaven is a World of Love: Edwards on Heaven and the Trinity” (Calvin Theological Journal 35 1995): 392 - 401; Herbert Warren Richardson, The Glory of God in the Theology of Jonathan Edwards: A Study in the Doctrine of the Trinity (Ph. D. diss. Harvard University, 1962); Krister Sairsingh, Jonathan Edwards and the Idea of Divine Glory: His Foundational Trinitarianism and Its Ecclesial Import (Ph. D. diss. Harvard University, 1986); Steve Studebaker, Jonathan Edwards’ Social Augustinian Trinitarianism: A Criticism of and an Alternative to Recent Interpretations (Ph.D. diss., Marquette University, 2003); Stephen R. Holmes’ God of Grace & God of Glory: An Account of the Theology of Jonathan Edwards (Grand Rapids, Ml: Eerdmans, 2001) and Sang Hyun Lee, ed. The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 21: Writings on the Trinity, Grace and Faith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).↩
2. Pauw, Supreme Harmony, 15.↩
3. Pauw, Supreme Harmony, 15-21. It is interesting to note that Edwards had an essay on the Trinity that did not get published until 1903 and that his “Miscellanies” which dealt with the subject were not published until the last few years. Interestingly there was much conjecture in the nineteenth century about the orthodoxy of Edwards’ trinitarian views.↩
4. There is, of course, debate in the secondary literature as to what Trinitarian model Edwards is following in his various writings. Amy Plantinga Pauw argues that he shifts back and forth between the psychological model which has its basis in the work of Augustine’s De Trinitate and the social model of the Trinity developed in the eastern wing of the church, especially in the work of the Cappadocian fathers (Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory Nazianzen). Michael Jinkins, in A Comparative Study in the Theology of the Atonement of Jonathan Edwards and John McLeod Campbell (San Fransisco, CA: Mellen Research University Press, 1993), 209-218, points to what he perceives to be an inconsistency in Edwards in his adoption of the Augustinian psychological trinitarian model and his use of covenant or federal theology. In other words, Edwards’ use of the psychological model implies unity and his use of covenant theology (especially the notion of the covenant of redemption or the pactum salutis) implies the possibility of disparate wills in the inter-Trinitarian community. More recently, Steve Studebaker, argues in his Social Augustinian Trinitarianism that Edwards follows Augustine in that Augustine offers several analogies of the Trinity in his work De Trinitate and that his formulation in book 15 concerning the Holy Spirit as the bond of mutual love between the Father and the Son would allow Edwards to stay within the Augustinian framework while affirming some sort of community in the Trinity (as opposed to the typical understanding of Augustine which reduces his analogy to modalism). This would seem to allow Edwards to follow Augustine and still use covenant theology without the implication of disparate wills). It does not seem necessary that Edwards’ use of covenant theology be inconsistent with his adaptation of the psychological model of the Trinity.↩
5. This expression comes from Michael J. McClymond, Encounters with God: An Approach to the Theology of Jonathan Edwards (New York, NY & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 3-8, and is meant to address a trend in Edwardsean scholarship that appears to have begun with Perry Miller’s publication Jonathan Edwards (Edited by Joseph Wood Krutch, et al. The American Men of Letters Series. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,1949) in which Edwards as a philosopher or student of science (or more recently, as rhetor) is divorced from his theology or faith. As McClymond reminds us, Edwards’ metaphysical and scientific interests were in service to his theology.↩
6. The nature of Edwards’ metaphysic has been debated in academic circles for some time now, but we are convinced of his idealism, even though he was also influenced, to some extent by the thought of John Locke. For examples of his idealism, see his “Of Being,” and “The Mind,” Scientific and Philosophical Writings (Edited by Wallace E. Anderson. The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 6. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980), 202 - 207 and 332 - 393 respectively. See the fuller development of his idealism in “The End for Which God Created the World” which is the first of “Two Dissertations” in Ethical Writings (Edited by Paul Ramsay. The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 8. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 405 - 536. The secondary literature is immense. Some of the more significant entrees would be Wallace E. Anderson’s helpful introduction to the Scientific and Philosophical Writings, 53 -143; George Rupp’s “The Idealism of Jonathan Edwards (Harvard Theological Review 62 [April 1969]): 209 - 226, and Rufas Suter, “A Note on Ptatonism in the Philosophy of Jonathan Edwards” (Harvard Theological Review 52 [1959]): 283- 284. For Edwards relationship to Locke, see Paul Helm, “John Locke and Jonathan Edwards-A Reconsideration” (Journal of the History of Ideas 7 [1969]): 51-61, Norman Fiering, Jonathan Edwards’s Moral Thought and its British Context (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press,1981) and William Morris Sparkes, The Young Jonathan Edwards: A Reconstruction (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2005). Stephen Holmes in God of Grace has argued that Edwards was a Trinitarian idealist. We concur.↩
7. See Edwards’ An Unpublished Essay of Edwards on the Trinity (Edited by George P. Fisher. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1903) and Treatise On Grace and Other Posthumously Published Writings, Including Observations on the Trinity (Edited by Paul Helm” Greenwood, NC: Attic Press, 1971).↩
8. See “The Ends for Which God Created the World,” Ethical Writings. 405 - 536.↩
9. See Edwards’ Original Sin (Edited by Clyde A. Holbrook. The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 2. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), A History of the Work of Redemption (Edited by John F. Wilson. The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol.9. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); and “Heaven is a World of Love,” which is sermon 15 in the series “Charity and Its Fruits,” Ethical Writings, 366 - 397.↩