Fullness Received and Returned: Trinity and Participation in Jonathan Edwards

6: Unio Cum Christo

6 Unio C Unio Cum Christo um Christo The Foundation of All Communion and Communication Just as the unio hypostatica is central to Edwards’s Christology, so the unio mystica is foundational to his soteriology. “By virtue of the believer’s union with Christ, he doth really possess all things. . . . I mean that God three in one, all that he is, and all that he has, and all that he does, all that he has made or done—the whole universe . . . are as much the Christian’s . . . because Christ, who certainly doth thus possess all things, is entirely his.”1 In this chapter, we will look at how Edwards uses the doctrine of the unio cum Christo as a synthetic, participatory category to embrace the various facets of salvation: regeneration, faith, justification, adoption, and sanctification. The chapter is organized based on his structuring of these aspects of salvation, with particular attention to justification. But before turning to those features, we will look at how Edwards relates the unio mystica to the unio personalis. Analogy between the UNIO HYPOSTATICA and UNIO MYSTICA Despite resorting to negative definitions, the Reformed tradition has consistently insisted on a clear line between the unio hypostatica and the unio cum Christo.2 In light of Edwards’s Spirit-mediated Christology, which we have examined in detail in the previous chapters, does he end up confounding the two? According to Edwards, the unio hypostatica is the analogans of the unio mystica, as there is between them a “likeness . . . though there be in the former great peculiarities.”3 In the incarnation, “the Logos dwelt in the human nature as in his body.” In the mystical union, however, it is the whole “Christ [who] dwells in his church as in his body”—a body made up of distinct persons.4 231 In terms of likeness, both Christ’s human nature and the church are recipients of the Holy Spirit.5 Unlike the unio hypostatica, the Spirit’s indwelling of Christ’s human nature is, according to Edwards, a “union of contact or influence.”6 This presence of the Spirit in the incarnation differs from the unio mystica, for it is the “Spirit of the Logos [who is] dwelling in [Jesus] after a peculiar manner and without measure.”7 Edwards distinguishes the Spirit’s indwelling between caput et membra as that of propriety and participation. Firstly, there is a quantitative distinction, whereby Christ possesses the Spirit perfectly.8 The saints, on the other hand, participate in the Holy Spirit by degree according to their individual capacities and states.9 Evidently, on Edwards’s suggestion that sanctification is of “everlasting duration,” the distinction between the Head and its members would seem to collapse into the totus Christus. In spite of Edwards’s insistence that “the time will never come when it can be said it has already arrived at this infinite” threshold, yet the infinite-finite distinction between Christ and the saints is occluded from the divine perspective. From God’s point of view, the “whole of the creature’s eternal duration, with all the infinity of its progress, and infinite increase of nearness and union to God . . . the creature must be looked upon as united to God in an infinite strictness.”10 That is why a peculiar manner of the Spirit’s indwelling in Christ is asserted. Appealing once again to the soul-body metaphor, Edwards points to a qualitative distinction.11 Christ’s human nature is related to the Spirit “as the head is the seat of the soul after a peculiar manner; ’tis the proper seat of the soul.”12 The Spirit is received by Jesus directly from the Father and is possessed as Christ’s own Spirit. Edwards marks this distinction between the Spirit had by Christians as “a filial spirit, a spirit of adoption” and Christ’s own Spirit as “the Spirit of the only-begotten of the Father.”13 Only Jesus Christ, as the Son of God, has received the Spirit from the Father.14 In contrast, the church is gifted with the Spirit from God mediately or derivatively, per filium.15 The filial Spirit that believers are given is the Spirit of the Son of the Father—that Spirit which first dwelled in the human Jesus.16 Not only must the Holy Spirit be received from and through the Son, it is had only in the incarnate Son.17 Salvation cannot be laid hold of through a Spirit that is independent of the Son...