Fullness Received and Returned: Trinity and Participation in Jonathan Edwards

Introduction

Introduction The emanation or communication of the divine fulness, consisting in the knowledge of God, love to him, and joy in him, has relation indeed both to God and the creature: but it has relation to God as its fountain, as the thing communicated is something of its internal fulness. . . . In the creature’s knowing, esteeming, loving, rejoicing in, and praising God, the glory of God is both exhibited and acknowledged; his fulness is received and returned. Here is both an emanation and remanation. . . . So that the whole is of God, and in God, and to God; and he is the beginning, the middle, and the end. –Jonathan Edwards, CONCERNING THE END FOR WHICH GOD CREATED THE WORLD Echoing the Apostle Peter, Jonathan Edwards claims that “being partakers of the divine nature” is not only a soteriological benefit that is “peculiar to the saints,” but also “one of the highest privileges of the saints.”1 Human participation in the divine life is, therefore, a central theme in Edwards’s soteriology and a defining motif in his overall theological thinking.2 This project seeks to present an internally coherent picture of Edwards’s doctrine of participation in God as a uniquely Reformed-Puritan construct, at once traditional yet creative.3 Secondary Literature on Edwards’s Soteriology In his monograph, Anri Morimoto compares Edwards’s soteriology of participation in God with the various doctrines of grace in medieval Catholicism.4 Michael McClymond outlines, in an essay, similarities between the soteriologies of Gregory Palamas and Edwards.5 He attends to Edwards’s construal of participation in God as a form of Christianized Neoplatonism 1 mediated through the Cambridge Platonists. While Morimoto helpfully situates Edwards’s theology of grace within the context of the larger pre-Reformation Latin tradition, and McClymond has briefly outlined the parallels between Palamas and Edwards, no systematic and broad account of Edwards’s doctrine of participation in the divine life has been attempted thus far. This project is an initial attempt to fill the lacuna and, in doing so, to locate the key secondary interpretations of Edwards’s thought—that is, his Trinitarianism and aesthetics—in relation to his soteriology of participation in God.6 Method and Theological Perspective My approach, while not denying Edwards’s philosophical originality, concentrates on his creative retrieval and synthesis of theological motifs both from his own Puritan-Reformed-Augustinian tradition and the larger Western theological tradition.7 The method is not, however, oriented toward the genetic-historical, but rather focuses on the synthetic-comparative. The primary thrust of the project aims to systematically draw together Edwards’s various ideas related to participation in God. Because human participation in God is inextricably linked to Trinitarian self-communication, I argue that Edwards’s motif of exitus et reditus, or, in his nomenclature, emanation and remanation, is the key to explicating this dialectic (table 1.2).8 A Brief Outline of Chapters The chapters following this introduction are arranged around three interrelated loci: the doctrines of the Trinity, Christ, and salvation. As I shall show, the ground of possibility for Edwards’s doctrine of participation in God is his doctrine of self-communication within God. In chapter 1, I discuss Edwards’s understanding of the self-communication of essence and persons within the ontological Trinity. The focus is on the procession of the Spirit as an eternal movement of procession and return ad intra. Chapter 2 works out this emanation and remanation theme in creation and redemption as grounded in the Trinitarian internal processions and divine counsels. The Holy Spirit, as the bond of love between Father and Son, is the basis for the willed egress of creatures from God in creation and their return to God in redemption. Chapter 3 bridges Edwards’s doctrines of the Trinity and Christology. We investigate his Trinitarian construal of the pactum salutis by which the Son compacted with the Father in the Spirit to become incarnate. As this selfcommunication of the Son in human form was the work of the Trinity ad extra, 2 | Fullness Received and Returned we look at how the Father and Spirit inseparably and distinctly participate in incarnating the Son. In the next two chapters, the focus shifts to Christology proper. Chapter 4 centers on the relation between the divine Word and his assumed human nature. The central question is this: How does Jesus as man participate in the being and operations of...