Jonathan Edwards on God and Creation by Oliver D. Crisp (review)

In this volume, Oliver D. Crisp, professor of systematic theology at Fuller Theological Seminary, ultimately delivers on his promise in the introduction to examine what New England Puritan Jonathan Edwards "thought about the relationship between the divine nature and the created order." He is intellectually masterful in his construction of a foundation on which to rest his eventual assessment of Edwards's God-nature relationship, and he uses a variety of primary sources to inform his work, drawing heavily upon The End of Creation.

But when I state that he "ultimately" delivers on the promise implied by the book's title, I am referring to the fact that he first leads the reader through such a dense thicket of seemingly disparate questions that one wonders when the subject of "God and creation" will ever emerge. It does, and the sinuous journey is revealed to be well worth the time, but there is a danger that some readers will give up long before the denouement.

He begins in chapter 1 by acknowledging and commenting upon the work of many other contemporary Edwards scholars, and in chapter 2 he builds upon their views and his own to provide an extremely nuanced and logical account of Edwards's ontology. He is very careful to distinguish Edwards's particular brand of theology from that of his Reformed influences; however, as noted above, his lengthy expositions about Edwards's efforts to explore "our understanding of the divine nature itself" (2), irrespective of the created order, steer the reader so far away from his stated thesis that it has almost been forgotten by the time he returns to it more directly in chapters 7 and 8. Crisp's book contains beautifully reasoned analyses of such topics as Edwards's doctrines of divine freedom and aseity in chapters 3 and 4, and he is right to state that a grasp of these and other aspects of Edwards's theology (which he also treats at length in chapters 5 and 6) is integral to an understanding of his later investigation of the book's supposed focus. But his forays into Edwards's scholarship could be somewhat curtailed without a corresponding diminution in complementary relevance to the overall theme.

Also, he continually refers to "creation," but it is clear that what he (and Edwards) really mean by "creation" is "humanity." Granted, this is largely a modern distinction, but creation (or "the created order," a term Crisp also uses) is not just human beings. A more fitting title for the book might have been Jonathan Edwards on God and Humanity, so as not to delude the eco-theologian who expects a discussion of Edwards's views on the relationship between God and all of the natural world, including non-human creation (an understandable expectation, given his famous propensity for seeing God in aspects of nature). Indeed, Crisp's emphasis on Edwards's Christian Neoplatonism leads him to an almost world-denying interpretation of Edwards's thought, as when Crisp writes, "The world exists as a divine idea that God 'emanates' moment by moment" (9). And since "no created thing has the power to persist through time," Crisp notes, "God creates the world out of nothing, whereupon it immediately ceases to exist, to be replaced by another world God creates with incremental changes built into it, so as to appear to be the next stage in a series of 'worlds' that exist seriatim in the divine mind's eye, so to speak" (9). Creation, in this interpretation, becomes more like the shadows on the famous Platonic cave than like the living, breathing realm we know.

Once one gets past the somewhat misleading title, however, the force of Crisp's intellect draws one into the intricacies of Edwards's innovative theological formulations. For example, Crisp describes Edwards's view of the theosis of the elect as an asymptotic relationship, "because, like an asymptote in geometry, the idea...