3.0 Jonathan Edwards’ Doctrine of the Trinity
3.1 The Trinity in Edwards’ Overall Theology

Jonathan Edwards was a Trinitarian idealist.¹ That is, his philosophical idealism was developed in order to serve his Trinitarian theology. This philosophical tendency can be seen in his musings on “Of Being” and “The Mind”² which appear to be much like his other musings in the “Miscellanies” and in “The End For Which God Created the World.”³ A major element in idealism was the notion that being must be perceived to be. Addressing the question of the possible existence of nothing, Edwards writes,

And how it doth grate upon the mind, to think that something should be from all eternity, and nothing all the while be conscious of it. Let us suppose, to illustrate it, that the world had a being from all eternity, and had many great changes and wonderful revolutions, and all the while nothing knew; there was no knowledge in the universe of any such thing. How is it possible for the mind to imagine? Yea, it is really impossible it should be, and nothing know it. Then you’ll say, if it be so, it is because nothing has any existence anywhere else but in consciousness. No, certainly nowhere else, but either in created or uncreated consciousness.⁴

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1. This is the helpful expression of Stephen R. Holmes in God of Grace & God of Glory.↩
2. These can be found in Edwards’ Scientific and Philosophical Writings, 202 - 207 and 332 - 393.↩
3. “This can be found as the first of the “Two Dissertations” in Edwards’ Ethical Writings, 401 - 536. Stressing Edwards’ idealism is no way meant to underplay or deny his concern for redemptive history. His idealism was simply the metaphysic that under girded his theology. His philosophy was always in service to his theology. In fact, Edwards’ idealism was learned from Christian sources (Nicholas Malebranche, Henry More and the other Cambridge Platonists and John Locke) and was adopted and adapted by him to oppose the materialism of such thinkers as Thomas Hobbes. For more on this see Norman Fiering, Jonathan Edwards’ Moral Thought and Its British Context and its companion volume, Moral Philosophy at Sixteenth-Century Harvard: A Discipline in Transition . See also Wallace E. Anderson’s fine introduction to the Scientific and Philosophical Writings, 53 -143. To affirm that Edwards’s idealism was in service to his theology and that he learned it from Christian sources does not, of course, by itself, justify his embracing it. It is questionable whether idealism is useful as a Christian metaphysic.↩
4. “Of Being,” Scientific and Philosophical Writings, 203 - 204. See also George Rupp, “The ‘Idealism” of Jonathan Edwards.” (Harvard Theological Review 62 [April 1969]), 209 - 226.↩