1.1.4 Outline of the Steps of Examination

In the corpus of Edwards material we have three basic types or genres of writings from which we may gain understanding of his trinitarian views. The first are the so-called Miscellanies, which were musings in which Edwards read and thought with his pen. These are a treasure trove of rich research material. See the helpful introductions to the four volumes of the “Miscellanies” in the Yale edition of The Works of Jonathan Edwards. These are The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 13: The “Miscellanies” a-500 (Edited by Thomas A. Schafer. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 18: The “Miscellanies” 501 - 832 (Edited by Ava Chamberlain. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 20: The “Miscellanies” 833-1152 (Edited by Amy Plantinga Pauw. New Haven: Yale University, 2002), and The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 23: The “Miscellanies” 1153-1360 (Edited by Douglas A. Sweeney. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). It should be noted that there is some debate among Edwards scholars as to how much “weight” should be given to the “Miscellanies” since they were never meant to be published by Edwards himself (from a personal conversation with Dr. Samuel Logan, president of Westminster Theological Seminary, Fall 2000). However, a careful reading of the “Miscellanies” will reveal that a fair amount of the material from these notebooks made its way into Edwards’s published treatises and sermons. So the best description of the “Miscellanies” is that they were semi-private.
These should generally be given chronological priority since we find Edwards ruminating on various philosophical and theological issues long before they appear for public consumption. However, they are provisional.¹ The second type of material from which we may draw are his treatises or discourses, such as his “The End for Which God Created the World.”“The End for Which God Created the World,” Ethical Writings, 405 - 536. See Paul Ramsay’s helpful remarks regarding Edwards’s use of the concept of “emanation.” According to Ramsay emanation can be read in one of two ways, as either a biblical notion regarding God’s will or communication or in a Neo-Platonic sense regarding correlation with creation, 433 note 5. Interestingly, Stephen R. Holmes, in his God of Grace & God of Glory, takes the “Two Dissertations,” comprised of “The End for Which God Created the World” and “True Virtue” as his programmatic outline in discerning the key to understanding Jonathan Edwards’s thought as a whole.
In fact, we will use this essay as a sort of metaphysical/theological outline or programmatic statement into which we will “plug” various elements from his other materials. Doing this will highlight the inherent coherence of Edwards’ overall thought. Another discourse we will look at is the Essay on the Trinity and the Treatise on Grace . Finally, there are also appropriate sermons from Edwards’ preaching ministry, the most important of which is the series of sermons that was posthumously published under the title, A History of the Work of Redemption. Jonathan Edwards, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 9: A History of the Work of Redemption (Edited by John F. Wilson. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). Tantalizingly, Edwards initially turned down the offer of the presidency of (now) Princeton University because he wanted to work on a new type of systematic theology written in an historical mode, presumably based in some measure upon his series of sermons by the same name. Unfortunately he died from a small pox vaccination shortly after arriving at Princeton, NJ in 1758. See Edwards’s letter to the Princeton trustees in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 16: Letters and Personal Writings (Edited by George S. Claghorn. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 727.


We propose to examine Edwards’ doctrines of the Trinity and the unitary operation of the human soul in the above materials by placing these doctrines firstly within the context of the development of the doctrines in the theology of the Christian church where we will look at the so-called psychological model of the Trinity, first formulated by Augustine and largely influential in the West and the social model, developed in the East primarily by the Cappadocian Fathers² and then we will look at Edwards’ understanding of the human soul within the context of the Medieval debate between the three schools of thought on the subject, the Thomistic- intellectualist school, the Scholastic-voluntarist position and the Augustinian-voluntarist tradition. ³ Then we will situate his doctrines of the Trinity and the unitary operation of the human soul within his overall theological system (as we have already mentioned, we will do this using “The End for Which God Created the World” as the background canvas upon which we will paint the details of Edwards’ artful formulations) and so will briefly discuss Edwards’ idealism (with its concomitant notion of emanation and remanation, God as “being in general” and the concept of being as perceived being), and the essential Trinitarian nature of the divine attributes.

2.0 Jonathan Edwards Within the History of Developing Doctrine

2.1 The Doctrine of the Trinity

2.1.1 Augustine and the “Psychological” Model of the West

The so-called “psychological” model of the Trinity was first formulated by St. Augustine, bishop of Hippo in North Africa, in his De Trinitate⁴ where he discusses analogies or vestiges of the Trinity within creation, primarily the three mental triads of the mind knowing and loving itself,⁵ the mind remembering, knowing and loving itself, ⁶ and the mind remembering, knowing and loving God.⁷ In each of these triads, “the Father is the mind or memory, who, by an eternal act of self-knowledge generates the Son according to knowledge. The Holy Spirit is illustrated by the mind’s self-love (the act of will) of its self-knowledge.”⁸ Perhaps the epitome of Augustine’s thinking in De Trinitate is his notion of the “mutual bond of love” model, which is a development on the psychological model in the direction of community, found in Book XV in which the Holy Spirit is the bond of love between the Father and the Son within the inner-Trinitarian community. ⁹ As Amy Plantinga Pauw has pointed out, up until the time of the Protestant Reformation, the West predominantly followed the psychological model of Augustine. Pauw, Supreme Harmony of All, 56 - 57. We should not ignore development within this tradition. For instance, Richard of St. Victor developed the model of the idea of the divine perfection of reciprocal love. See his “On The Trinity” in A Scholastic Miscellany: Anselm to Ockham (Edited by Eugene R. Fairweather. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1956), 324-331.

2.1.2 The Cappadocian Fathers, the Social Model and the East

Whereas the Western Church is perceived to have emphasized the oneness or unity of God, the East is seen as stressing the three-ness of the persons of the Godhead.¹⁰ The Cappadocian Fathers (Gregory Nazianzen, Basil the Great and Gregory of Nyssa) developed the three man Trinitarian model in which diversity and unity are illustrated by the example of the apostles Peter, James and John, who, though three distinct persons share a common human nature. ¹¹ In this model, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit “are each a distinct divine person who share an equal, but not a numerically identical essence.”¹²

This is not the place to offer a detailed evaluation of the two Trinitarian models save to say that when taken too far, the Western psychological model can tend towards Modalism and the Eastern social view towards Tri-theism. Later in this series, we will see that Jonathan Edwards works within the Augustinian psychological model of Trinity.¹³

1. For instance, Edwards’ grandson, Sereno Dwight, thought that Edwards had written his Freedom of theWill (Edited by Paul Ramsay. The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 1. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959) in a miraculously short period of a few months following his deposition from the pulpit of the Congregational church in Northampton, MA and his removal to the Indian missionary outpost of Stockbridge. An examination of the “Miscellanies” reveals that Edwards had been wrestling with various aspects of the freedom of the will long before the publication of the treatise on the subject. Additionally, Edwards often reworked issues with which he had publicly dealt but with which wasn’t fully satisfied, for example see his dissatisfaction with his treatment of the first sin of Adam. See Holmes, God of Grace & God of Glory, 33-45, for the developing or provisional nature of Edwards’s Miscellanies.↩
2. See Pauw, Supreme Harmony of All, 22 - 75, for a one discussion of the development of Trinitarian doctrine in the West and East. I side with Studebaker in his criticisms of Pauw’s discussion. See his Social Augustinian Trinitarianism, 12-77, for the larger context in which he differs from Pauw↩
3. Especially helpful here is Norman Fiering’s Jonathan Edwards’s Moral Thought and Its British Context and its companion volume, Moral Philosophy at Seventeenth-Century Harvard: A Discipline in Transition (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1981).↩
4. Augustine, The Trinity (The Works of St. Augustine: A Translation for the 21″ Century. Translated by Edmund Hill, 0. P. Edited by John E. Rotelle, 0. S. A. Brooklyn: New City Press, 2000).↩
5. Augustine, The Trinity, Book 1,200 - 282.↩
6. Augustine, The Trinity, Book X, 286 - 299.↩
7. Augustine, The Trinity, Book XIV, 383.↩
8. Studebaker, Social Augustinian Trinitarianism, 148-245.↩
9. Augustine, The Trinity, Book XV, 432.↩
10. This is an obvious generalization that can tend toward distortion, but it does contain a grain of truth nonetheless. “However,” as Amy Plantinga Pauw points out, “…the psychological analogy was not solely thee intellectual property of the West. The fourth-century Cappadacians made some use of the psychological analogy, and did so in a way that diverged radically from the tradition in the West,” Supreme Harmony of All, 57.↩
11. See Cornelius Plantinga, Jr.’s “Gregory of Nyssa and the Social Analogy of the Trinity,” (The Thomist 50 1986), 333 - 334 and “Social Trinity and Tritheism,” in Trinity, Incarnation and Atonement: Philosophical and Theological Essays (Edited by Ronald J. Feenstra and Cornelius Plantinga, Jr. Library of Religious Philosophy, vol. 1. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), 27-39.↩
12. Studebaker, “Jonathan Edwards’ Augustinian Trinitarianism,” 4. This is an unpublished paper written prior to his dissertation on the same topic.↩
13. Thus, pace Pauw, we do not see Edwards synthesizing the Western and Eastern views into a somewhat unstable mix. In this regard, as we have already stated, we follow Steve Studebaker’s analysis in his Social Augustinian Trinitarianism. Later we will see that Edwards holds to an analogical relationship between the Triune God and man involving understanding and will, which seems to fit best within psychological model.↩