Writings on the Trinity, Grace, and Faith (The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 21 | WJE)
Overview
In this collection of writings drawn from Jonathan Edwards’ essays and topical notebooks, the great American theologian deals with key Christian doctrines including the Trinity, grace, and faith. The volume includes long-established pieces in the Edwards canon, newly reedited from the original manuscripts, as well as documents that have never before been published and that in some cases reveal new aspects of his theology.
Top Highlights
“When we speak of God’s happiness, the account that we are wont to give of it is that God1 is infinitely happy in the enjoyment of himself, in perfectly beholding and infinitely loving, and rejoicing in, his own essence and perfections. And accordingly it must be supposed that God perpetually and eternally has a most perfect idea of himself, as it were an exact image and representation of himself ever before him and in actual view. And from hence arises a most pure and perfect energy in the Godhead, which is the divine love, complacence and joy.” (Page 113)
“What is striking about Jonathan Edwards’ writings on the Trinity is that there is none of this bifurcation between the doctrine of the Trinity and the Christian life of faith and practice. Everything Edwards wrote about the Trinity expresses the intertwining connectedness of the Trinity and the Christian’s experience of God as the Creator, Savior, and Sanctifier, and thus between the immanent and the economic Trinity.” (Page 3)
“Now the sum of God’s temper or disposition is love, for he is infinite love; and as I observed before, here is no distinction to be made between habit and act, between temper or disposition and exercise. This is the divine disposition or nature that we are made partakers of (2 Pet. 1:4); for our partaking or communion with God consists in the communion or partaking of the Holy Ghost.” (Page 122)
“What can [be] more properly called the image of a thing than the idea?” (Page 117)
“Edwards does occasionally use the terms ‘substance’ and ‘substantial’ in his discussion of the nature of God, but the meaning behind them has changed from seventeenth-century usage. As Wallace E. Anderson astutely noted, Edwards’ ‘predecessors thought of substance as the owner of properties; while Edwards thought of substance as the doer of deeds.’9 For Edwards, the being of God as well as the essential nature of things in general was no longer articulated in terms of self-contained substances but rather in terms of dispositions, activities, and relations. Before we turn to the Trinity, it is necessary to outline Edwards’ new way of understanding the nature of reality.” (Page 6)
About Sang Hyun Lee
Sang Hyun Lee is Kyung-Chik Han Professor of Systematic Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary.