Fullness Received and Returned: Trinity and Participation in Jonathan Edwards

2: Communication of Being Ad Extra

2 Communication of Being Ad Extr Ad Extra a Trinitarian Creation Previously, we examined Edwards’s postulation of an eternal movement of emanation and remanation in the eternal procession of the Spirit ad intra. This mode of self-communication of essence within God is the basis of the telos of created reality. In this chapter, we will look at how Edwards uses the doctrines of creatio ex nihilo and imago Dei to posit a similarity and dissimilarity between God and created reality. Beginning from the creation’s natural participation of likeness in the divine, we shall move on to analyze Edwards’s portrayal of the end for which God created the world—the church’s participation in the divine life. As he explains, “God is a communicative being. This communication is really only to intelligent beings: the communication of himself to their understandings is his glory, and the communication of himself with respect to their wills, the enjoying faculty, is their happiness. God created the world for the shining forth of his excellency and for the flowing forth of his happiness.”1 Here, we will see how the circle of emanation/creation and remanation/ redemption is but a temporal reflection of the dynamism within God. But first, we shall briefly study how Edwards links the action of the Trinity ad extra and ad intra through the divine counsels. OPERA INTERNUM AD EXTRA: The Bridge between the Immanent Trinity and Economic Trinity For Edwards, God’s immutable, divine nature secures the permanence of the divine decrees as well as their regulative function for both the divine and human.2 The triune God has freely willed to be bound to God’s own decrees.3 While Edwards admits that God’s decrees are eternal, they are to be distinguished from the divine attributes.4 Here, he reiterates the Reformed 51 stance that the divine decrees are modally distinguished from the divine will as possessing a relation ad extra.5 For Edwards, the modal divine attributes, in turn, are founded upon the real attributes of God—the Son and the Spirit.6 That is why the Son and Spirit are the fundamenta, causa, and ratio of the divine decrees.7 Nonetheless, due to God’s simplicity and the unity of essence, the ordering of the divine decrees is a rational distinction.8 The decrees themselves arise from these deliberative counsels within God—a Reformed construct that Edwards inherits. Œconomy of the Trinity: Communion of Will for Communication of Fullness AD EXTRA The notion of the divine counsels enables Edwards to ground the temporal opera ad extra of the Trinity in their eternal opera ad intra.9 He posits two levels of divine intratrinitarian counsels where the Father, Son, and the Spirit agree to order themselves in their general economical action in the world and particularly in the work of redemption.10 In the following section, we examine the first of these—the œconomical Trinity—and will study the covenant of redemption (pactum salutis) in the next chapter.11 “SOCIETY OF THE PERSONS OF THE TRINITY”: EDWARDS’S “SOCIAL” TRINITARIANISM Nowhere in Edwards’s writings is the foundational divine parity more evident than in his metaphorical description of the three divine persons as a “family” or “society” united in loving consent.12 In a manner consistent with the Puritan tradition, Edwards applies the analogy of the divine society or family to the œconomical Trinity. “The persons of the Trinity thus acting as a society in an established order is what divines call the ‘economy of the persons of the Trinity,’ comparing it to the order of a family.”13 It is at this level of the œconomy that Edwards brings the Father-Son relation to the fore.14 According to Edwards, this “œconomical” taxis comes about through neither an arbitrary nor teleologically expedient decision of the divine persons.15 It is grounded in the immanent Trinity in facto esse, particularly in Edwards’s Augustinian mutual-love analogy. “Indeed the eternal infinite happiness of the divine being seems to be social consisting in the infinitely blessed union and society of the persons of the Trinity so that they are happy in one another so God the Father and God the Son are represented as rejoicing from eternity one in another.”16 But Edwards’s notion of the divine society, 52 | Fullness Received and Returned though comprehending the familia, is not identical to it...