The precise meaning of words is and has been extremely important in the life of the church. Throughout church history, orthodoxy has hinged on small changes in meaning from one term to the next. Perhaps one of the most significant examples of this phenomena was the development and usage of the terms used of the Trinity in the 4th century.

The immediate context for the development of Trinitarian language began with Arius. Arius was a priest in Alexandria who taught that Jesus was not eternal and that there was a time in which he did not exist. According to Arius, Jesus created all things and is preeminent, but is not eternal, and therefore, not God. The Council of Nicaea met in 325 and condemned and exiled Arius. It also produced an extremely important creed. This is not the Nicene Creed we know today. That creed was a product of the Council of Constantinople in 381 and is perhaps more accurately titled the “Niceno-Constantinopalitan” creed. The creed of Nicaea reads:

We believe in one God Father Almighty maker of all things, seen and unseen:

And in one Lord Jesus Christ the Son of God, begotten as only-begotten of the Father, that is of the substance (ousia) of the Father, God of God, Light of Light, true God of true God, begotten not made, consubstantial (homoousias) with the Father, through whom all things came into existence, both things in heaven and things on earth; who for us men and for our salvation came down and was incarnate and became man, suffered and rose again the third day, ascended into the heavens, is coming to judge the living and the dead:

And in the Holy Spirit.

But those who say, “There was a time when he did not exist,” and “Before being begotten he did not exist,” and that he came into being from non-existence, or who allege that the Son of God is of another hypostasis or ousia, or who is alterable or changeable, these the Catholic and Apostolic Church condemns.

The church had definitively dealt with the threat of Arianism, but the resolution was one that did not exclude Monarchianism. Nearly sixty years later, the church was faced with condemning the Monarchian teaching that emphasized God’s oneness at the expense of his threeness. This includes various forms of modalism (Sabellianism being the most notable) that fall under Monarchianism’s larger heading. The Nicaean Creed of 325 stated that the Father and the Son were of one substance (homoousias) and that anyone who alleged different hypostases or ousiai stood condemned.

Many in the East (led by Basil of Ancyra) rejected the identification of the Father and the Son’s ousiai because it sounded too much like the Sabellian teaching. As a result, they began using the term homoiousias as a substitute. The addition of the iota in Greek changed the meaning of “one substance” (homoousias) to “like substance” (homoiousias).

The church lacked the language needed to express the distinctions within the Trinity while maintaining the one essence (homoousias) of God understood in a non-Sabellian fashion. At Nicaea (325), hypostasis and ousia were synonyms. Holding to a distinction of either within the Godhead was heresy. Between Nicaea (325) and Constantinople (381), however, the church, through the efforts of Athanasius, Gregory of Nyssa, Basil, and Gregory of Nazianzus (the latter three are collectively known as the Cappadocian fathers) settled on a new meaning for the term hypostasis. Hypostasis came to be used for “persons” whereas ousia remained in use as “essence.” The church now recognized the Father and Son as distinct hypostases (persons) in one ousia (essence) related by perichoresis, or “full mutual indwelling of the three persons in the one being of God.”¹

Men were condemned at Nicaea (325) for proclaiming a distinction of hypostases in relation to the Godhead, but a distinction using the same word, albeit a completely different meaning, was solidified as orthodox in 381 at Constantinople.

1. Letham, Robert. The Holy Trinity (Phillipsburg: Presbyterian and Reformed, 2004), 178. The actual term perichoresis was not in use at the time of Athanasius and the Cappadocians, but it’s idea was widely accepted.↩

The aseity of God is the doctrine of God’s simplicity. Plainly stated, it teaches that God is not made of parts. When we say things such as “God is good” we do not mean that “good” exists outside of God, but that he actually is good (commutatively, good is God). It is at this point that Alvin Plantinga raises a concern which eventually leads him to deny God’s aseity. If God’s properties do not exist outside of him meaning that God is identical with his properties, God is therefore a property and cannot be a person. In order to maintain God’s personality, Plantinga sacrifices God’s aseity. Scott Oliphint summarizes the issue:

According to Plantinga, the notion of God’s simplicity is “a dark saying indeed.” It goes back, he thinks, to Parmenides, according to whom reality was “an undifferentiated plenum in which no distinctions can be made.” Plantinga has good reason to see the doctrine as “dark.” He is convinced that if God were identical with his properties, then, ipso facto, God would be a property. If Plantinga is right, then simplicity is indeed a dark saying in that its implications wind up denying the Christian God.¹

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1. Oliphint, K. Scott. Reasons for Faith: Philosophy in the Service of Theology (Phillipsburg: Presbyterian and Reformed, 2006), 94-95.↩

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.

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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.↩

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.
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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.↩

As we suggested in our latest post, advocates of the libertarian reconciliation project (LRP) and the compatibilist reconciliation project (CRP) each offer different accounts of divine sovereignty and human freedom.

As we also previously averred, we believe that the CRP holds out the most promise for a successful reconciliation of the prima facie tension that exists between divine sovereignty and human freedom since it is (1) internally consistent (i.e., it forms a self-consistent set), and (2) externally consistent with the biblical data (as this post will labor to demonstrate).

Further, the specific proposals treated as generally representative of the LRP seem to be burdened with insurmountable difficulties (as we will also hope to see in this post).¹
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1. As noted in the previous installment, we must remember that the LRP (as well as the CRP) can be represented by an indefinite number of specific proposals, so the failure of a particular reconciliation attempt does not by itself discredit its project type. We have used the proposals set forth by Cottrell, Marshall, and Pinnock (as cited in the previous post) since we believe them to be generally representative of many of the standard arguments put forth by other advocates of the LRP. Nevertheless, even if their specific arguments can be discredited, this would not fatally damage the LRP since other proposals from this project might be able to overcome the problems noted in this series of posts↩

Throughout history Christians have debated the questions surrounding God’s sovereignty and human freedom and especially how these concepts relate to one another. As David Basinger has succinctly pointed out, Christians have normally wished to affirm both of the following tenets:

The problem of affirming both tenets simultaneously, however, creates a prima facie conflict. If one first assumes T1 (i.e., that humans are causally and therefore morally responsible for certain states of affairs), it is difficult to see how God can bring about the exact state of affairs he desires in every case, and therefore difficult to affirm that he is totally in control of everything in any meaningful sense (as T2 affirms). A similar dilemma occurs in relation to human freedom if one first assumes T2.²
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1. David Basinger, “Divine Control and Human Freedom: Is Middle Knowledge the Answer?,” JETS 36/1 (March 1993): 54.↩
2. Ibid., 54↩