Jonathan Edwards and the Life of God: Toward an Evangelical Theology of Participation

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Introduction

On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in Me, and I am in you.

—John 14:20

In the midst of renewed interest in the theology of America’s greatest theologian/philosopher,[1] many attempts have been made to elucidate an overarching motif or meta-thematic center for the theology of Jonathan Edwards. Divine sovereignty, grace, metaphysical ontology, typology, piety, the covenant history of redemption, divine glory or beauty, ethics, Reformed apologetics through the appropriation of Enlightenment philosophy, and many other motifs have been touted. This range points to the rich and ambidextrous nature of his theology. One scholar has suggested that the overarching trope might be Edwards’ reconception of the doctrine of God in the form of radical relationality, that is God as an erotic being, which contains within itself the structural theological trajectory that underwrites the whole history of redemption and uncovers the teleological consummation of creation as doxological participation in and unity with the Trinity.[2] This attempt remains among the most credible. Within the context of the ongoing renaissance of Edwardsian scholarship, I wish to make the modest proposal that union is a significant driving force in Edwards’s Trinitarian theology,[3] if not its overarching trope, and that his theology essentially tells a from eternity, to eternity story of three unionsin the Spirit: the eternal union within the Trinity of the Father and the Son in the Holy Spirit, the union in history of the human and divine natures of Christ by the Spirit, and the union of the saints with God by the Spirit. The theme of union and especially the union last mentioned—participational union of the saints, or theosis—influences Edwards’s view of salvation to such an extent that it makes ecumenical dialogue possible on the matters of justification and sanctification. Furthermore, Edwards’s emphasis on union, his high pneumatology, and specifically his theology of an emphatically pneumatological union or theosis make him a candidate amongst Reformed theologians (even more so than John Calvin[4]) for the title "the theologian of the Spirit." I will contend that a drive exists within Edwards’s theology to honor the Spirit in all three unions, a drive shaped by both theological study and pastoral experience, that draws him into his particular views of justification and sanctification—particularly of progressive sanctification and assurance of salvation.

In A.M. Allchin’s book Participation with God, Allchin states that for the Welsh Anglican hymn-writer William Williams (1719–1791), as well as for other teachers of theosis, the doctrines of Trinity, incarnation and deification belong together in an indissoluble knot.[5] These three doctrines form an indissoluble helix in the participation theology of Jonathan Edwards, with the Holy Spirit prominent in each union. Now widely acknowledged to be Trinitarian, Edward’s theology centers on a God who, as Trinity, is the union of three persons, the supreme harmony of all reality. This God sent his only Son so that his divine nature might be brought into union with human nature by the incarnation, in order that he might accomplish the salvation of humans by bringing them into union with the triune God. Edwards’s massive theological and pastoral contribution is, as Marilyn McCord Adams says, not fuelled by the fires of hell but enlightened by the glory of the Trinity.[6] His theology and moral vision are preoccupied with the psychological and social analogies of the Trinity,[7] particularly by the role of the union of the saints with the inner life of the Trinity through the indwelling of the Spirit.[8] Edwards is, in fact, a theologian of participation par excellence. An important motif in his theology, the theme of beauty provides an apt illustration. Edwards defines beauty in terms of God’s triune harmony, in which the saints and creation participate. Inherent in the harmony of the communion of the Divine persons in the immanent Trinity, beauty is communicated to creation in God’s free creative act and by his redemptive work.

As noted above, what is most distinctive about Edwards’s understanding of all three of these great unions is his special emphasis on the role of the Holy Spirit in them. In Edwards’s thought, the Spirit is the nexus or communion of the Godhead, the facilitator of the divine-human (hypostatic) union in Christ, and the agent of the union of the saints with God. In effect, Edwards’s theology is a pneumatology. Whether in his doctrine of God (theology proper), his understanding of the incarnate Son of God (Christology), his doctrine of humanity (anthropology), his doctrine of salvation (soteriology), or his doctrine of future things (eschatology), he posits the Spirit as the union of all reality (the means of communion within God) in the incarnate God-Man as well as between God and the people of God and, therefore, between God and creation.

One could argue that doxology, glory or God’s self-glorification (some have said self-expansion), rather than union, is the primary motif in Edwards’s theology. However, the glory that is undoubtedly the end of God’s being and doing is inextricably linked to and a consequence of his love, which is manifest in the harmony or union of divine persons, the human-divine natures of the Son, and of humans and creation in God. God’s self-glorification has been addressed in both academic and popular treatments of Jonathan Edwards’s theology, but it has not always been linked to the Trinitarian and participational (or union-based) understanding of the self-glorifying God. By centering on the three unions, this book will confirm the profoundly Trinitarian nature of Edwards’s work, a theme that dominates the renaissance of research in the past twenty-five years. One could also argue, as Kyle Strobel does,[9] for the beatific vision as the central core of Edwardsian theology, which is certainly compatible with the union theme, providing the dynamic by which union occurs. Likewise, it is consonant with the theme of the prominence of the Spirit in Edwards’s theology because the Spirit is the happiness, harmony, and love that accompanies the mutual vision of the Father and the Son in the Trinity; it is the Spirit who effects the new beatifying illumination—the new sense of things—in converts and continues that transformation-through-contemplation dynamic that beatifies the saints now and throughout eternity.

The case for the importance of union (harmony and consent) as a motif of Edwardsian theology is strengthened by the fact that the three unions are profoundly interrelated in his theology. These unions guide its vast narrative sweep from the emanation of grace and glory that results from the union of the three persons in the one Godhead in eternity past, in creation and the redemption of fallen humanity and creation through the incarnate Son, all the way to the remanation of glory and grace back to him in redeemed, beatified humanity in union with Christ and restored creation. The essential concepts in each of the three unions tie them together, as does the commonality of the agency of the Spirit in each: the union of the Father and the Son in the communion (or Love) of the Holy Spirit. That is, the immanent Trinity gives rise to the acts of the persons of the economic Trinity in undivided union by the Spirit in such a manner that the missions of the revealed Trinity correspond with the processions in the eternal Trinity, with the ultimate end of enhancing his own supreme glory. Crucial to the enhancement of the glory of God through the creation and redemption of creation is the incarnation of the Son, which involves the union of the divine and human natures in the one person of the Son by means of the Holy Spirit (Edwards’s is a Spirit Christology rather than a perichoretic one[10]). The Son is suited for the creation of the cosmos by his orientation in eternity past towards becoming incarnate (or as Barth says, incarnandus, oriented towards union with humanity); his role in bringing about its redemption is enabled by his actually becoming human in time, again, by the mediating agency of the Spirit. However, the redemption of the creation and the resultant glorification of God is contingent upon the union of redeemed human beings with the Son, by the Spirit. In Edwards, the role of the Spirit is not only to apply the atonement that Christ accomplished but also to be the Gift, which is the goal of the saving advent of Christ. By giving that Gift to the people of God, they are brought—by the Spirit’s infusion into them and their incorporation into the Bride of Christ—into immediate union with the immanent Trinity. When the church is glorified at the end of history, God will have glorified himself because the church is glorified in the glorified Son, and all will be glorious harmony in the cosmos. The glorious union of the saints with God, in Christ, by the Spirit, will be eternal; at the same time, however, it will be eternally progressive, always moving towards complete likeness to Christ but never arriving (in mathematical terms, asymptotic) at identity as Christ. In the eschatos (last) Adam, the church will reign over a cosmos that eternally reflects God’s own harmonious and beautiful Trinitarian union, which, having emanated from him, now remanates back to him in an even more glorious state, having been redeemed in Christ.

The emphasis Edwards lays on the person and work of the Spirit in each union signals his greatest contribution to the subject of union in the Reformed heritage. However, I will argue that this great pneumatological emphasis will eclipse his Christology and, specifically, a more incarnational approach to soteriology and its telos – that of restoring humans to be fully human, and thus become also his greatest liability. This book stands in a series of recent works on the theme of union or participation in other Reformed theologians—including Julie Canlis on Calvin (Calvin’s Ladder) and Adam Neder on Barth (Union with Christ in the Theology of Karl Barth)—and will interact with them on these matters.

I will seek also to build on the work of the recent authors contributing to the resurgence of Edwardsian studies in the last decade: Sang Hyun Lee, Steve Holmes, Steve Studebaker, Amy Plantinga Pauw, Oliver Crisp, Michael McClymond, Gerry McDermott, Robert Caldwell, William Danaher, Michael Gibson, and Kyle Strobel. The works most relevant to the subject matter of this book include Amy Plantinga Pauw’s beautifully written The Supreme Harmony of All;[11] William Danaher, Jr.’s work toward the clarification of Edwards’s view of the Trinity and his Trinitarian ethics;[12] Robert Caldwell III’s writings on the Spirit as the bond of union within and beyond the Trinity;[13] the work of Michael McClymond,[14] as well as the Theology written with Gerald McDermott;[15] the writings of Kyle Strobel, which offer further clarity on the Trinity and a theological (rather than philosophical) and profoundly Trinitarian reinterpretation of Edwards’s theology;[16] and finally, an outstanding essay on the incarnation by Seng-Kong Tan.[17] The questions that I will consider surrounding Edwards’s Trinitarian participation include: Which model of the Trinity (the first union) did Edwards’s espouse, Western or Eastern? If Western, was it Augustinian or an advance on Augustine employing philosophical idealism under the influence of Locke and Malebranche (Paul Helm and Danaher)? How different is Augustine’s model compared to that of the Cappadocians? Did Edwards adopt a dispositional ontology? Was he monist or panentheist? Was his soteriology influenced by Roman Catholic thought, given his reference to the infusion of the Spirit (Anri Morimoto[18] and Ray Yeo[19])?

It is my hope that this study will increase awareness of the theological and philosophical brilliance of Edwards, specifically his somewhat surprising contribution to the theme of union or participation in the life of God. Recognizing that others have written on similar themes, I will offer my own reflections to clarify some of the knots in Edwards’s theology by critically examining his work. I do not wish to luxuriate in Edwards but rather to bring his thought into the scrutiny of the participation theology of patristic and Reformed theologians before and after him. In this way, I hope to move beyond Edwards toward a satisfactory, evangelical theology of participation that is true to the gospel.

My primary conversation partners will be the Cappadocian Fathers, Calvin, modern Trinitarian theologians (especially Karl Barth), and others who have made corrective contributions regarding Edwards’s work. Though Edwards was ahead of his time in many ways, he was nevertheless a product of his own age with its particular limitations. Specifically, Edwards was a New England Puritan, keenly aware of those theological roots while seeking to move beyond them by contextualizing the gospel in light of the newly dawned age of Reason. His influences included continental scholastic Reformed theologians Frances Turretin (1623–1687) and Petrus van Mastricht (1630–1706) as well as Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke and Nicholas Malebranche. Though Edwards always sought to think under the final authority of Scripture, he undoubtedly shows a commitment to the use of reason in ways that led him to be unafraid to make exploratory journeys beyond what had been said in the Tradition, especially with regard to the doctrines of the Trinity, Christology, and pneumatology. In significant ways, he has blessed all who follow him with insights that enrich our contemplation of God and the Christian life. In dialogue with other theologians, I will seek to offer perspectives that may enrich, and possibly correct, his theology. Having lived after Edwards, these theologians benefit from a longer tradition. At times, I will access the Tradition in order to offer ideas from theologians that Edwards may not have fully engaged or perhaps did not engage at all, for reasons unknown.

For all Edwards teaches us concerning the importance of the Trinity in Christian theology, as well as the consonance between who God is in Godself with who he is in the economy of salvation, the model he borrowed and refined is problematic in many ways; certain theologians, such as Oliver Crisp, even argue that it is untenable. Instead of working primarily from what is seen in the historical revelation of the Son and the Spirit as recorded in Scripture, Edwards relies too heavily on the psychological analogy of the Trinity (to the extent that the psychological analogy borrowed from Augustine and the Western tradition becomes a psychological account in Edwards’s work, according to Holmes and Danaher), embellished by a philosophical Idealism borrowed from Locke and Malebranche. In doing so, he fails to express the fullness and freedom of the perichoretic personhood (as opposed to a perichoresis of attributes) of the persons-in-relation of the Trinity in appropriate ways that might have been corrected had he relied more fully on the insights of the Cappadocians concerning this issue. Certainly, the work of theologians like Jürgen Moltmann, T. F. and James Torrance, Colin Gunton, and Miroslav Volf can help us to journey beyond Edwards in this regard. Much is at stake in the theology of personhood—Divine and human—including an avoidance of the confusion of human and divine persons in theosis, a problem Edwards did not escape.

For all Edwards’s attention to the theme of God as love (according to his triune nature), he retains a view of particularistic election that limits the benefits of the love of God to relatively few humans within the countless masses of humanity. I hope to move beyond that perspective by giving consideration to Karl Barth’s view that election—God’s election to be for humanity, leading to the vicarious participation of Christ in and for humanity—becomes the best news of the gospel.

For all Edwards’s attention to detail with regard to the union of the Divine and human natures of Christ in the incarnation, his emphasis on the Spirit leads him to describe a Christ who can appear ahistorical[20] and unconnected to the humanity he came to redeem. By interacting with John Calvin and John Owen as well as Karl Barth, we will move beyond Edwardsian Christology to discover a Christ who did not live merely to die but whose assumption of humanity led him into a vicarious life, death, and resurrection by which he becomes the hope for humanity and creation.

Even for all Edwards conveys concerning the union of the saints with God by the Spirit—evoking a lively understanding and expectation of conversion—his version of union can appear to be isolated from the reality and vicarious nature of the first great union of God the Son with humanity, for humanity. Bringing Christology and pneumatology together in soteriology is important, most of all because the Father, as Irenaeus was wont to say, has two hands—those of the Spirit and those of the Son. As I will show, this approach is important for pastoral reasons as well.

For all the ways in which Edwards’s refreshingly aesthetic approach to theology complements his rationality—and for all the ways in which his pneumatological view of participation leads to the expectation of great joy in the Christian life—I will contend that his spirituality takes an unfortunate inward turn. His overly pneumatic and therefore surprisingly anthropocentric orientation, with respect to signs of salvation, leads to great uncertainty in the lives of the saints claiming to be in union. In certain sectors of the evangelical heritage, the saints have suffered greatly from this Edwardsian influence. Karl Barth, in his more Christocentric approach, helps us move toward a more joyful assurance of salvation. Helpful though Edwards’s surprising emphasis on the Christian life as theosis is, his heavy emphasis on sanctification by the Spirit over justification in Christ contributes to this lack of assurance. Other theologians in the Reformed tradition, such as John Calvin and Karl Barth, will assist us in moving beyond Edwards to discover a balanced theology and spirituality of participation in Christ, by the Spirit. I am especially interested in bringing Edwards into critical dialogue with Karl Barth on the theme of participation, especially since—as a champion of christological participation—Barth acts as a counterbalance for Edwards. Barth’s more incarnational grounding for union is an ideal foil for assessing the legitimacy of Edwards’s particularly pneumatic version of participation, given that Edwards grounds his view of human participation by the Spirit on the hypostatic union or participation of the Son in humanity, which, as noted above, has been criticized for its ahistorical tendencies.

The relationship between justification and sanctification, as well as the actual dynamics and limits of progressive sanctification within human experience, have proved to be thorny issues with widely varying schools of thought. Through this study, I hope to shed some light on the pathway of pilgrims as we struggle with what salvation—particularly the idea of sanctification in the Christian life—looks like. To put it another way, I wish to explore and seek to clarify what it means to be human. No doctrine seems more mired with ambiguity in the Protestant tradition than the when, how, and how much of sanctification, and none causes more angst. Perhaps input from Jonathan Edwards, the great theologian of the Spirit and student of human subjectivity—along with Karl Barth, the great theologian of the Son and champion of contemplative Christocentricity—may together assist in clarifying this doctrine by bringing together, to once more reference Irenaeus’s analogy, the two arms of the Father in the work of redemption.

Concerning the relationship between justification and sanctification, the Orthodox and Roman Catholic traditions often tend to conflate the two, making justification not so much about a declaration of righteousness as the infusion of righteousness and any sense of ultimate justification conditional upon sanctification (Vatican II and the work of Nouvelle Theologie has brought some change in this regard). In reaction to the Catholicism of his day, Luther stresses the immediate and declarative nature of justification for those who believe, at times neglecting the importance of sanctification as a twin grace that serves to validate claims of justification by people professing to believe in Christ. Calvin offers a corrective to Luther’s approach by dealing with sanctification before justification in his Institutes and especially by emphasizing that both of the twin graces (duplex gratia) are a logical consequence of the filial category of union with Christ (unio Christi). In a nutshell, Calvin’s view contends that saving faith unites the sinner with Christ—a belief that is grounded in the prior uniting of Christ with sinful humanity by the incarnation such that being in Christ, the believer receives the twin graces of being accredited righteous (justification) and being inaugurated on the transformation journey (sanctification) through union and communion with Christ. In this way, justification and sanctification are seen to be distinct but inseparable gifts of grace to the believing sinner. How can a person be in Christ, and Christ in that person, without transformation? In Calvin, transformation is centered on living into union with Christ—in his death through Spirit-enabled mortification and in his resurrection and ascension through Spirit-empowered vivification. The Christian life is seen as a journey of growth in character virtues, patterned after Christ as the image of God towards the recovery of humans as fully human. Although Barth follows Calvin with respect to understanding the twin graces as participation in Christ (adding to that the third grace of vocation), like Luther he makes more of justification than realized sanctification and views Christian life as an again and again crisis encounter with Christ. Relying on a motif that is more contemplative than introspective, Barth’s understanding of the Christian life looks away from the self to Christ as the One who stands in our place and possesses all virtue for us in his vicarious incarnation and ascension. He is not enamoured with the idea of habitus or the belief that humans might develop virtue on their own; he sees the essence of Christian life as prayer and ethics.

On the matter of sanctification in its progressive or experiential aspect, controversy abounds. Even within Protestantism, multiple views exist concerning how and when it happens, as well as what roles divine and human action play in it. These include a kind of pessimist suppressionism, Augustinian activism or realism, Wesleyan perfectionism, Keswick and various other passivist versions birthed out of the Holiness and Pentecostal movements that involve various forms of post-conversion crisis, along with a multiplicity of triumphalist expectations. Regrettably, sanctification is often isolated from the question of the humanity of humans. Many of these ways of understanding sanctification focus heavily on overcoming sin and sinful lifestyles (sin management) with very little attention to what it means to live life in all its richness as a human being made in the image of God. Deeply pietistic, they are not world-affirming spiritualities, which has led to a significant weakness within evangelical spirituality and preaching. The gospel is preached as if humans are disembodied souls needing to avoid hell or prepare for a heaven isolated from earthliness.

Just what does Jonathan Edwards add to these discussions? For one thing, Edwards demonstrates what it means to be a sensual being, responding with warm and rich affections to the beauty of creation in ways that make us human. His general depiction of a human being living in a series of unions is both holistic and glorious. It begins with an intimate, holy, and harmonious union with God who indwells us by the Spirit; for Edwards, the Spirit is the bond of communion in God. The human being in union with God is thereby in union with other people in union with God in the church, in ways that are characterized by harmony. These humans, being in the last Adam, will have eyes to see the beauty of creation in its harmonious relationship with God. Responsibly exercising their stewardship of creation, they will seek to bring about the shalom God intends for it in harmony with all fellow humans, who will see their work as participation with the work of God in the world, bringing in the new creation.

And, for all the help and wonder Edwards’s conception of God evokes, it also creates questions that expose the need for moving beyond his work. For example, the Neoplatonic way in which Edwards constructs this theology leads us to the question: Was Edwards panentheistic (see Crisp)? The question may also arise concerning the clarity of the divine-human distinction in Edwards’s version of deification or theosis. Arising as it does from within a psychological model of the Trinity, the improper articulation of personhood creates this problem, and the eschatological vision of the saints being glorified in asymptotic fashion perpetuates it. In the end, Edwards’s way of making the divine-human distinction entails the gradual beatification of the saints in heaven; while they draw ever nearer to the likeness of Christ, they never quite achieving this, remaining human rather than divine. Our way beyond this conundrum requires a clarification of what it means to be human and a discussion of personhood human and divine, in which we shall be accompanied by the Trinitarian theologians mentioned above. We will also be aided by biblical scholarship, which through its attention to the historical narrative and intentions of God, helps us discover a more earthy view of heaven and resurrected saints.

What is the purpose of this book? To travel with Edwards on a journey of discovery concerning the three unions of his theology. To invite a pilgrimage into contemplation of the very life and love of the Father and the Son in the Holy Spirit; to move into wonder at the emanation of the Father’s love expressed in the gift of the Son and the sending of the Spirit in order that we, as regenerated humanity in union with God by the Spirit, might be participants in the remanation of the love and glory of God back to him through our pilgrimage to heaven and towards ever-increasing likeness to God. Kyle Strobel speaks of Edwards’s broad vision of the Christian life as a pilgrimage to heaven,[21] and I wish to invite contemplation of the sweep of the journey in which our pilgrimage takes place—the from eternity to eternity journey of the triune God in which redeemed humanity is engaged. That is, the love-inspired pilgrimage of God from heaven to earth, in order that our pilgrimage towards heaven may be conformed to that divine pilgrimage in Christ and by the Spirit.

In taking this pilgrimage with Edwards, readers may discover the following benefits:

1. A fresh understanding of the Christian God as the triune God—the God who is love and who, in the harmony of his triune being and in his action in the cosmos he created, reflects primal beauty and magnifies his own iridescent glory; the God who is personal and relational; the God who is in his inner life what he is in the economy of creation and salvation as revealed by the Scripture; the God whose revelation of himself is reliable, such that there is no God back of the God who Jesus has by the Spirit revealed him to be—no quaternity where we expected Trinity, no shady despot lurking behind what might somehow, in the end, turn out to be a persona or façade, that who God is in the economic Trinity is who he is in his inmost being; the God who may certainly be more than has been revealed in his immanent being but who cannot be other than the triune God revealed in Son and Spirit or less than what he has been revealed to be in the gospel of Jesus Christ; the God who is for humanity. In other words, I hope that readers will develop a fresh appreciation that the doctrine of the Trinity is not an optional or even necessary but subsidiary aspect of the Christian faith but rather its center, circumference, architectonic, and, in fact, the hermeneutical matrix for viewing theology—and therefore, all reality.

2. A fresh understanding of the gospel (the euanggelion) of the God who is, by the revelation of the economic Trinity, the God who is for us—that is, for all humanity, the God who in his Son has assumed fallen humanity, healed it, acted on its behalf, and taken it into the triune Godhead; the gospel that is filial rather than forensic in its first intent.

3. A fresh awareness that the heart of Christianity is participation in the life of God, not performance—an awareness that emphasizes both the strengths and the weaknesses of Edwards’s particular understanding of this participation, especially the incarnational participation of God the Son in humanity and the participation of humans in God by the Spirit, for a balanced understanding of salvation.

4. A fresh understanding of the human self—that human persons, like Christ, are persons-in-relation, not individuals; that human beings brought into union with Christ by the Spirit are thereby brought into the church to become ecclesial persons in relation with God and neighbour; that the telos of sanctification is the recovery of the image of God and to become fully human, even if, in the end, divinely human.

5. A fresh understanding of the Christian life—that assurance of salvation is grounded principally in who Christ is for us and only secondarily in who we are in Christ and the signs of conversion; that in Christian formation both ethics and internal affections matter for persons who are in Christ by the Spirit.

6. A fresh understanding of creation and our work in the world—that creation matters to God and that it should matter to the saints in union with God, both now and in the future new creation; that humans, being image-bearers, can participate in God’s work in the world.

7. A fresh understanding of heaven—that heaven is a wonderful world of love, but that it is also earthy in character; that humans will remain human in the world to come; that humans will be morally like Christ but will not become Christ metaphysically or be swallowed up into Christ or nothingness but rather will always be distinct as humans and not God—distinct as persons, albeit persons-in-relation to Christ, to other Christians, and to the cosmos.

While this is a frequently used appellation for Edwards, a specific reference to it is found in the title of W. Gary Crampton’s Meet Jonathan Edwards: An Introduction to America's Greatest Theologian/Philosopher (Grand Rapids: Soli Deo Gloria, 2004). Robert W. Jenson implies the same in America’s Theologian: A Recommendation of Jonathan Edwards (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).↵

Michael Gibson, The Happy Society: The Erotic Ontology of the Doctrine of God in Jonathan Edwards. http://vanderbilt.academia.edu/MichaelGibson/Papers/1447277/

The_Erotic_Ontology_of_the_Doctrine_of_God_in_Jonathan_Edwards, 2–3.↵

Brandon Withrow has confirmed the centrality of union in Edwards’s theology also, stating that union with Christ and justification by faith dominate his ruminations as hinging doctrines. According to Withrow, Edwards had an understanding of union with Christ that is vibrant, incarnational, and reminiscent of many theologians before him. See Brandon G. Withrow, Becoming Divine: Jonathan Edwards’s Incarnational Spirituality within the Christian Tradition (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2011), 4, 7. What incarnational means here and the extent to which Edwards’s theosis is incarnational is discussed later.↵

This popular attribution is referred to by Benjamin B. Warfield in an essay entitled John Calvin the Theologian (Presbyterian Board of Education, 1909). See www.graceonlinelibrary.org/biographies/john-calvin-the-theologian-by-benjamin-b-warfield/↵

A. M. Allchin, Participation in God (Wilton, CT: Morehouse-Barlow, 1988), 45.↵

Taken from her back page endorsement of the monograph, William J. Danaher, The Trinitarian Ethics of Jonathan Edwards, Columbia Series in Reformed Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2004), hereafter referred to as Danaher, 2004a.↵

A summation of Danaher’s monograph, Danaher, 2004a.↵

The role of the Spirit in Edwards’s theosis has been expounded at length by Robert W. Caldwell III, Communion in the Spirit: The Holy Spirit as the Bond of Union in the Theology of Jonathan Edwards, Studies in Evangelical History and Thought Series (Carlisle: Paternoster, 2006), hereafter referred to as Caldwell, 2006a. This was also a primary focus in my doctoral dissertation, Giving Honour to the Spirit: A Critical Analysis and Evaluation of Pneumatological Union in the Trinitarian Theology of Jonathan Edwards in Dialogue with Karl Barth, PhD diss., University of St. Andrews, Scotland, 2004.↵

Kyle Strobel, Jonathan Edwards’s Theology: A Reinterpretation (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2013), hereafter referred to as Strobel, 2013a. Strobel elsewhere affirms that glory can be understood, without exaggeration, to be the central defining feature of Edwards's thought. However, in the same context, he states that Edwards's conception of glory finds its source deep in his Trinitarian theology and is woven through his thought as a whole. See Kyle Strobel, Jonathan Edwards and the Polemics of Theosis, Harvard Theological Review 105, no. 3 (July 2012): 259–79. The glory or beauty of God arises from the harmonious union of the three divine persons, thereby making the case that union comes first.↵

That is, the divine and human natures of Christ are brought into union by means of the Spirit’s mediation rather than by a coinherence of each nature in the other.↵

Amy Plantinga Pauw, The Supreme Harmony of All:The Trinitarian Theology of Jonathan Edwards (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), hereafter referred to as Plantinga Pauw, 2002a.↵

Danaher, 2004a.↵

Caldwell, 2006a.↵

Michael J. McClymond, Encounters with God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), hereafter referred to as McClymond, 1998a; McClymond, Salvation as Divinization: Jonathan Edwards, Gregory of Palamas and the Theological Uses of Neoplatonism, in Jonathan Edwards:Philosophical Theologian, eds. Paul Helm and Oliver Crisp (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003) .↵

Michael J. McClymond and Gerald R. McDermott, The Theology of Jonathan Edwards (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).↵

Strobel, 2013a.↵

Seng-Kong Tan, Trinitarian Action in the Incarnation, chap. 8 in Jonathan Edwards as Contemporary: Essays in Honour of Sang Hyun Lee, ed. Don Schweitzer (New York: Peter Lang, 2010), 127–50.↵

Anri Morimoto, Jonathan Edwards and the Catholic Vision of Salvation (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1995).↵

Ray Yeo, Contemporising Jonathan Edwards’s Theory of Spiritual Perception: Towards an Analytic Theological Psychology of Transforming Grace with Special Reference to Robert Roberts, PhD diss., King’s College, London, Spring 2013. This thesis is an attempt to revisit Jonathan Edwards’s theory of spiritual perception from the perspective of Robert Roberts’s work in the philosophy of emotions and other related philosophical sub-disciplines with the purpose of providing a contemporary account of spiritual perception and, by extension, a theological psychology of transforming grace. The contemporisation effort focuses on three main aspects of Edwards’s theory: the infusion of grace, the content of Scripture and spiritual delight. The weaknesses and limitations of Edwards’s original account in these three aspects were examined and a proposal to revise, update and deepen his theory in five major ways was provided in light of the issues raised (ibid., 4).↵

Plantinga Pauw, 2002a, 147.↵

See Kyle Strobel, Formed for the Glory of God: Learning from the Spiritual Practices of Jonathan Edwards (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2013).  ↵

1

A Journey of Participation

The good news of Christian salvation, which includes the various facets of justification, sanctification, glorification, and vocation or mission, is often expressed within popular evangelicalism in cold, forensic categories. In these terms, the gospel is presented as a means to being forgiven so that a person can obtain a righteous standing before God, gain heaven, and escape from hell. Often called the gospel of sin management,[1] this way of understanding salvation rings familiar for many Evangelicals. However, isolated from a relational ethos and transformed affections (loving Christ for Christ’s sake rather than for my sake, as Edwards suggests), it smacks of hedonism: Who would not want to avoid hell and take the heaven option? One’s first thought might be to imagine that Jonathan Edwards, a great forefather of the Evangelical movement, would be a proponent of this kind of gospel proclamation. After all, isn’t he best known for his sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God?

While New Testament authors undoubtedly do use forensic and individual categories and the satisfaction of a holy God is an important strand of their soteriological thought, these categories are subservient to a much grander theme and more antecedent purpose. God’s revelatory, saving purposes are first aesthetic—that is, they always result in the revelation (some Edwards scholars would say expansion) of divine beauty and glory. Second, this beauty originates in the harmony of the three Divine persons in communion and is enhanced by the coming into union of human persons with God, in God’s Son and by God’s Spirit. God viewed the eternal identity of humans not first as sinners but as person in communion with him, destined to become children in his family, the bride of the Son.[2] In short, the saving concerns of God are filial first and forensic second; the forensic is vacuous apart from the filial. The fulfilment of God’s purposes for humanity can be summed up in the word participation (koinonia). God has come into creation through the Son to participate in humanity by the Spirit, in order that humans in Christ might participate in the divine love, life, and glory, by the Spirit. As such, God is concerned with persons and their participation in his life and love and glory.

Through the Son’s participation in our humanity by the incarnation—and, consequently, in his vicarious life, death, and resurrection—God has indeed dealt with the forensics of sin and guilt. However, note that because of the manner in which it was effected, salvation is dependent on participation, beginning with God’s participation in our humanity (the hypostatic union). Propitiation depends on participation, that is, Christ’s full participation in humanity. Following our participation or union with Christ (unio Christi) by the Spirit, through regeneration, appropriation takes place; we avail ourselves of the twin graces of justification and sanctification (the duplex gratia). Union with Christ, as Calvin emphatically notes, is logically prior to the twin graces; to use another term, it is prior to the forensics.

Furthermore, in participation with Christ by the Spirit, human persons participate together with other humans in God’s grand narrative of creation, the fall, redemption of creation, and its consummation, in which all glory will redound to the triune God. Participation of being, that is, our union with Christ by the Spirit, leads to participation of doing. We participate in God’s work in the world in relationship to God, our fellow humans, creation, and creation’s telos, which is the glory of God.

In other words, the primary category for Christian soteriology is a relational one. The harmony, holiness, and happiness of the inherently personal, relational, and self-communicating triune God overflow into the creation and redemption of human persons created in God’s image so that they may, in Christ, become one with God as sons and daughters. By participating in the harmony, holiness, and happiness of the Trinity, they fulfil their destiny as image bearers, stewarding creation in participation with God for the enhancement of the revealed glory of God. As wonderful as the justification, sanctification, vocation, and glorification of the people of God may be, these activities are a logical consequence of a greater theme—the prior love of a God who is love and who, in Christ, became one with humanity, desiring to bring human beings into union with himself through the Son, by the Spirit. While a Christian life lived well does not neglect the confession of sin and the lifestyle of repentance, it is, at its core, lived out within a series of loving, reverberating, and harmonious unions.

First, the Christian life originates out of the holy, loving, harmonious comm-union of the immanent Trinity, which overflows (ekstasis) into the self-communication and self-giving acts of the economic Trinity in creation and in the giving of the incarnate Son through a union of the divine and human natures, that by his vicarious life and atoning death, he might enable believing fallen humans to be reconciled to God in union with him. This union becomes known in human experience through the giving of the regenerating and adoptive Spirit—the bond of love within the Trinity, the bond uniting the human and divine natures of Christ, and therefore, the bond between the Christian and God. Because it is shared with all other Christians, this union is also a loving union with the people of God, the church. It extends toward humanity in the mission of the church and then toward non-human creation, which itself already reverberates with a beauty that reflects its triune Creator. In the full renewal that accompanies the glorification of the children of God at the consummation of all things, creation will join the Bride of Christ in glorifying the Bridegroom—the Son—in a universe remanating back to the triune God the ever-expanding glory due him. This is, in fact, the gospel according to Jonathan Edwards.

Even with respect to the atonement of Christ, Edwards has an aesthetic and relational emphasis, distinct within his Puritan-Reformed heritage. As McClymond and McDermott state, This return to Christ’s beauty is one of several ways that Edwards’ theology of the atonement differed from that of his predecessors. Referring to the work of Steve Holmes, they suggest that while the Western theological tradition had stressed the atonement as a legal transaction, and post-Reformation Protestants had emphasized the juridical and declarative dimensions, Edwards highlighted the aesthetic, rational, and personal aspects of the passion. Edwards’ mercantile metaphors—Christ purchasing heaven and the Holy Spirit for the elect—commonly appeared in the context of personal union with Christ through the indwelling Spirit.[3] Edwards sees the passion event as the pinnacle and major part of Christ’s atonement, the brightest effulgence of Christ’s beauty and amiable excellency.[4] Much more than an abstract forensic negotiation with God, or even an act of obedience by which he fulfilled Adam’s part all over again,[5] it is an act of romantic love couched within the metaphor of Edwards’s Bride-bridegroom theosis.[6]

The filial nature of the atonement is further evidenced in that the goal of the atonement is the infusion of the Gift of the Spirit, the Love of God, in regeneration. Even more important than the observation that the gospel of the filial, the aesthetic, and the doxological is the gospel according to Jonathan is that it is the gospel according to Jesus.

A Journey of Three Unions, with Johannine Precedent

The idea that the gospel involves discovering joyful union with the inner life and love of the Trinity gains its credibility from the ministry of Jesus as John describes it. At the heart of Jesus’ passion discourse in John 14, he states: On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in Me, and I am in you (John 14:20). By on that day, Jesus means the day of the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost. Through the indwelling of the Spirit, the disciples would be granted illumination to understand the three great unions of Christian theology and find themselves participating in or receiving the benefits of those unions. Moreover, they would grasp the crucial part the Spirit plays in each of these unions. The richness of Jonathan Edwards’s theology can be encapsulated within the richness of the three unions of the gospel as expressed in this Johannine text.

By beginning to grasp the union of the Persons of the Father and the Son in the Spirit, the disciples would obtain a new way of thinking about the one God they knew as Yahweh. Second, by gaining insight into the reality that they were in Christ (reflected in Jesus’ phrase in Me), they would realize that He who had walked among them as their Master was, in fact, the fully Divine Son of Yahweh who had entered fully into humanity to become its new representative, the eschatos Adam, as a fully human and fully Divine person. They would understand that they were in Christ because Christ had become one with them. After his resurrection, they would construct the doctrine of the incarnation in retrospect, realizing that this had happened at the moment of his birth on earth (the moment of the incarnation), which they knew had been enacted by the brooding work of the Holy Spirit. Third, they would realize on the Day of Pentecost the import of the words, I am in you. That is, the incarnation and the Son’s being and acting on behalf of the humanity he had assumed—his vicarious life, death, resurrection, and ascension—prepared the way for God to actually indwell his believing people by the giving of the Gift of the Holy Spirit. They were not merely to be forgiven sinners; they were to become God’s habitation, his saints, the Bride of the Son. By that Gift of the Spirit, Christ would, by means of the perichoresis of the Divine persons of the Trinity, also indwell his people. As Paul later says, the Spirit is, after all, the Spirit of Christ (Rom. 8:9). The context of the verse in John 14 also makes this abundantly clear. First, Jesus tells his disciples that he is going to ask the Father to give them the other advocate, the Spirit of truth; the One who is presently with them will soon be in them (vv. 16-17). In verse 18, Jesus states, I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. This coming is, quite clearly, not a reference to his second coming but to the imminent coming of the Spirit, poured out as the Gift of the Father after the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus on the Day of Pentecost, to make Christ present in them.

The two great Christological and participational movements reflected in the phrases You are in me and I am in you are expressed in Pauline language by the prepositional phrases that express the very heart of the gospel: in Christ (ninety times) and Christ in you (see Col. 1:27). In his second epistle, Peter expresses them in his own way. The second union, the Christ in us reality, is reflected by a Petrine phrase that has become the celebrated text of participation theology (2 Pet. 1:4). Peter speaks of believers as those who participate in the divine nature (NIV) or who are made partakers of the divine nature (NASB, KJV). However, this reality is only a possibility—first, because of the prior participation of the Son in our humanity and his vicarious righteousness and second, for those who have availed themselves of it by believing the promises of the gospel. In verse 1, he speaks of the participants in the divine nature as those who through the righteousness of our God and Saviour Jesus Christ have received a faith as precious as ours (2 Pet. 1:1).

Post-Apostolic Development

With regard to the union of the Son with humanity, the church formed by these apostles would one day articulate the doctrine of the hypostatic union with the careful language of the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed. However, the full legacy of the apostles to whom Jesus spoke these words—ultimately expressed to the apostolic community, the church—involves the articulation that two great movements enable human beings to become one with God. First, God the Son became one with us so that, second, we might become one with Him. That is, two movements involve union, or participation. First, God has come into union (participating fully) in our humanity by the incarnation; and second, by the Spirit’s wooing, regeneration, and incorporation of humans, he brings them into union or participation with God by faith. A few generations after the apostles, one member of the apostolic community, Athanasius (296–373 c.e.), became the great defender of the full deity of Christ, expressing this truth in a startling way: For God became man so that men might become a god.[7] While this might sound misleading to our modern Western ears—tantamount to monism or Mormonism and maybe even a threat to monotheism or divine simplicity—this is not what Athanasius means. Rather, becoming a god means to share in the divine nature, to be a child of God, to participate in an I-Thou relationship with God. Similarly, Irenaeus’ reflections on theosis have been summed up in the words, if the Word has been made man, it is so that men may become gods.[8] By this, Irenaeus means that as a result of the incarnation of the Son, humans can become sons and daughters of God, partakers of the divine nature; though ontologically distinct from God, they share in the essence of God’s love. John of Damascus describes this as the image of God being restored in redeemed humans so that they might become partakers of divinity without ceasing to be human.[9] Thus, participation does not make us less, but more human. Basil the Great, one of the Cappadocian Fathers, speaks of the importance of the Holy Spirit in the process of divinization when he says: Through the Spirit we acquire a likeness to God; indeed, we attain what is beyond our most sublime aspirations—we become God.[10] Basil does not mean that the church becomes a fourth person of the Trinity but that we are in relational union, of one family with God, sharing his energies rather than his essence.

In a similar vein, John Meyendorff summarizes the work of arguably the greatest Orthodox theologian of deification, St. Maximus the Confessor, by defining the concept known as theosis (or deification) as total participation in Jesus Christ.[11] This rendering remains truest to the original expression of John 14:20. Maximus is sensitive to the issue of the ontological boundary between God and humans, which is reflected in his statement, All that God is except for an identity in being, one becomes when one is deified by grace.[12] Maximus distinguishes between the unknowable essence and the energies of God while stressing that the energies are not thereby less than God. Rather, they are God, not lessened, but freely revealed.[13] The Orthodox do not believe that distinguishing between the essence and energies of God is a denial of the simplicity of God. In the Orthodox tradition, the energies represent that which God in freedom chooses to reveal of himself, and the participation of the church in the energies is understood as a miracle of God’s free grace. Maximus is most notable for the manner in which he addresses the problem of participation, blurring the categories of God and humanity by paralleling the participation of God in humanity in the incarnation of the Son and the participation of humanity in God. As we evaluate Edwards’s version of theosis, we shall see the importance of keeping these unions together. By borrowing from Cyrilline Christology, Maximus represents the "unconfused perichoretic union of the divine and human natures of Christ, which serves as a prototype or apologetic for the unconfused perichoretic union that will take place between the cosmos and God through humanity’s unconfused perichoretic union" with God. As Clement Wen notes:

Whereas Christ’s divinity theandrically experienced humanization, Christ’s humanity theandrically experienced the deification upon which all deification, before or after Him, would find its base. Thus, Maximus wrote that: "[Christ] acts theandrically, being at the same time both God and man, sufferings showing that he is what we have become, and by performing wonders demonstrating to us what we are to become. It is in this sense, then, that Elena Vishnevskaya can say of Maximus’ theology that: The perichoresis of God and the believer