Preaching
the History of Redemption Accomplishes It:
A
Study of Edwards’s and His History of the Work of Redemption
Introduction
Some works of the
intellect fascinate as they simultaneously intimidate.
Jonathan Edwards’s
A History of the
Work of Redemption (hereafter referred to
as HWR) is just such a work. When I once asked a friend and close
reader of Edwards to tell me something about this 30-sermon series, a work
living somewhere on the horizon between a vast sermon and a treatise, the
response was, “Well, it’s the whole thing, you know.” Which is true, in a way; it is an attempt to tell the whole
history of redemption from beginning to end, as God sees it. So Edwards: “The work of Redemption is
a work that God carries on from the fall of man to the end of the world”[i]. It is thus not surprising that another
close reader of Edwards like Amy Plantinga Pauw could begin a talk on Edwards
by stating, “Jonathan Edwards was a theologian of the grand narrative.”[ii]
This very fact is what brings most readers of Edwards either to a state of
profound respect or utter frustration.
Grand narratives are not the kind of thing you take for light reading on
the beach, and most of us today are suspicious of (and let’s confess,
intimidated by) anyone who claims to tell “the whole story.”
Edwards himself is
responsible (at least in part) for fascinating and intimidating.
In his letter to the Princeton
trustees, he famously remarked, “I have had on my mind and heart… a great work,
which I call
A History of the Work of Redemption, a body of divinity in an entire new method, being thrown into the
form of a history, considering how the affair of Christian theology, as the
whole of it, in each part, stands in reference to the great work of redemption
by Jesus Christ; which I suppose is to be the grand design of all God’s
designs, and the summum and ultimum of all the divine operations and decrees; particularly
considering all parts in the grand scheme in their historical order.” If this were not enough, his is a
multi-tiered method, “carried on with regard to all three worlds, heaven, earth
and hell: considering the connected, successive events and alterations, in each
so far as the Scriptures give any light; introducing all parts of divinity in
that order which is most scriptural and most natural: which is a method which
appears to me the most beautiful and entertaining, wherein every divine
doctrine, will appear to greatest advantage in the brightest light, in the most
striking manner showing the admirable contexture and harmony of the whole.”[iii]
Edward’s grand
design is a body of divinity that will in its very form most aptly show forth
God’s grand design.
The work of
redemption is to be “thrown into the form of a history”; and this history is
the languaging forth of God’s greatest work.
We might say that history is for Edwards a language.
At the very least, history is for
Edwards something that would provide the framework for his theology.
He was not alone in this
[iv].
Nevertheless, Edwards thoroughly
Trinitarian approach to history ensured that he understood it as “the language
of God’s redemptive love… an extension of the intertrinitarian love… in essence
the communication of God’s redemptive love in Christ.”
[v]
But my fascination
with Edwards work does not begin with his intentions. Although it is tempting to imagine that we have been handed
some proleptically experienced Ür-text, some Platonic pot that God has thrown
and that Edwards is groping towards, the reality is that Edward’s HWR actually began as a series of sermons. It is a whole history preached. The only other indications of where
this new method might have gone if Edwards would have lived longer is his
letter to the Trustees, and his three notebooks on the HWR. What
we have to work with is an ever so slightly redacted sermon series.
But what a sermon
series!
It is the ipseity of
HWR that challenges me as reader and pastor. It is the single and compelling idea:
preach thirty sermons over a period of Sundays utilizing a single verse of
Isaiah, and in those thirty sermons tell the whole history of the work of
redemption. Edwards’s apparent
operative assumption is not simply that this history is worth writing down; it
is actually worth speaking forth, to a living, breathing, and hopefully awake
congregation. Such an approach to
preaching is at first breathtaking, then mind-boggling, and in the end virtually
unimaginable. Who does such
things? Yet the tendency and
inclination underpinning such a sustained and major project is compelling, both
in idea and reality. Again, Pauw
states the point clearly. Although
it is fashionable to be suspicious of grand narratives, “a pastoral narrative
without some vision of God’s grand purposes for the whole of creation can leave
Christians wallowing in the mundane parochialisms of their particular
locations.”[vi]
Furthermore, it is
now recognized that Edwards formulated his theology of history as a direct
result of his profound experience during the “little revival”, and preached
this sermon the year immediately preceding the “big revival”, or Great
Awakening, that swept through Northampton and much of New England. I do not want to make too much of this
historical reality, or ascribe too much causality, eg. Edwards preached these
sermons and they led to the Great Awakening; nevertheless, the interplay
between the Awakenings, what Edwards called “pourings out of the Spirit at
special seasons of mercy”, Edwards preaching, and his resulting theology of
history as centered in repeated revivals, is worth our attention. I can at the very least argue, together
with Avihu Zakai, that Edwards wrote his history in light of and based on his
experience of revival, and intended his writing to influence future
revivals. So Zakai:
His distinct redemptive
mode of historical thought- the doctrine that the process of history depends
exclusively on God’s redemptive activity in time and not on human power and
autonomy – is necessary not only to the discussion of his sense of time and his
vision of history as they appear in the HWR, but also to an understanding of
the significance he conferred upon the Great Awakening of 1740-1743 within
salvation history, and of his zeal in defending it against every adversary[vii].
Edwards’s
conscious shift towards the historical in his work as preacher, as well as his
intended body of divinity thrown in the form of a history, has challenged me to
explore the inter-relationship between his homiletical method and his theology
of history. To preach the gospel
is to tell the story of how we are part of a larger story, part of a redemptive
history that includes Israel and the church, and a future that includes Christ,
the resurrection, and the redemption of all things. If we can readily say that for Edwards history is redemption
and redemption is history, and this an outgrowth of Edwards’s essentially
Trinitarian theology, then we can also with some confidence declare what
Edwards, given his particular understanding of what the preached word is and
what it accomplishes, hesitated to say, that preaching the history of
redemption is itself accomplishing redemption. What follows is an attempt to substantiate this claim.
Edwards’s
Philosophy of History
Avihu Zakai has
provided the most readable and helpful recent work on Edwards’s philosophy of
history.
Zakai recognizes, as do
many Edwards scholars, that Edwards was so mightily engaged in rightly forming
his theological project that his thought was constantly developing.
There were nevertheless certain
trajectories that remain constant over the course of his work.
His philosophy of history is one such
developing trajectory.
“During his
long search to understand the nature and meaning of divine agency in the order
of history, he came to the conclusion that revivals, being ‘special seasons of
mercy’ or grace, constitute a unique dimension of sacred time, or epochs of
time,
kairos, in history” [viii]. Edwards first experienced a personal
revival as a young adult, and later concluded that revival is a central moment
in sacred time, and this a considered observation of events in his local
congregation as well as events within the broader history of God’s redemptive
work.
Edwards’s
philosophy of history develops hand-in-hand with his homiletical strategy.
Sermons were the touchstone of Edwards
thought.
Wilson Kimnach observes,
“After theology, Edwards thought most about expression; what language is, how
it operates on the mind, and how its resources might be variously exploited”
[ix].
Edwards begins with what he inherits,
the Puritan format of doctrine-improvements-applications.
Edwards continues to use this method
and process, but the
HWR shows how
Edwards’s developing trajectory results in a sermon that takes the form of a
treatise. “The sermon form
[became] so flexible that the sermon was dissolving under the pressure of long,
long thoughts”[x]. The sermon becomes a sustained
treatise, and this form of expression becomes the vehicle whereby Edwards could
preach the history of the work of redemption and just so accomplish it. John F. Wilson aptly remarks that
Edwards’ “preaching of his ‘history’ was part exposition of the work of Redemption,
[and] part production of its story”[xi].
So how does
Edwards understand history itself as a book to be read as the basis for
preaching a history of the work of redemption?
Edwards in his half-filled notebook entitled “Types”
(Andover Collection), developed a theory of “vertical types,” which were “the
divine idiom”, history and nature as books in which types can be read.
[xii] Typological readings of Scripture
have basis within the Christian tradition dating as far back as the church
Fathers, and Edwards’ contemporaries, especially more conservative preachers,
read Scripture typologically.
Edwards found a paradigm for a typological reading of Scripture in Scripture
itself, especially Hebrews 9.
He
found “texts of Scripture that seem to justify our supposing the Old Testament
state of things was a typical state of things and that, not only the canons of
the law were typical, but that their history and state and constitution of the
nation, and their state and circumstances, were typical.
It was, as it were, a typical world
(“Types”; Andover Collection).
Where Edwards
takes things one step farther is in developing his “vertical typology”, a
typology that finds not only types linking Old to New Testament, but also types
linking the “true” (that which is ideal and eternal) and the “real” world (the
subjectively experienced world we know).
Edwards’s development of a “vertical typology” emerges not only out of
the precedent Edwards observes in Scripture itself, but also out of his
engagement with the new science, and finally his consistently Trinitarian
thought.
As Amy Plantinga Pauw
notes, “th[e] image of the Son as the communication of divine wisdom funded
Edwards’s theology of preaching.
It
is also the basis for his pervasive use of typology”
[xiii].
The
HWR is replete with typological reflections, and these are themselves part
of the language of history, how it speaks, and this in no way different than
the Son as speech. Although this
sounds somewhat more Platonic than Christian, it was actually Edwards’s
substantial engagement with Newton’s vision of a single cosmos. Edwards himself had no illusions that
this search for a “vertical typology” would be palatable to everyone.
I expect, by very
ridicule and contempt, to be called a man of a very fruitful brain and copious
fancy, but they are welcome to it.
I am not ashamed to own that I believe that the whole universe-heaven,
earth, air, and seas- and the divine compilations and history of the Holy
Scriptures be full of images of divine things- as full as a language is of
words- and that the multitude of these things that I have mentioned are but a
very small part of what is really intended to be signified and typified by those
things; but that there is reason for persons to be learning more and more of
this language, and see more of that which is declared in it, to the end of the
world without discerning all.[xiv]
While Edwards
diligently develops this robust philosophy of history, Edwards also addresses
the emerging Enlightenment understanding of history.
I have already shown that for Edwards, nature is a typical
world, and history is typical time.
Because Edwards never gave up trying to unveil the external evidence of
Christianity in both space and time, it is not surprising that Edwards
challenged the Enlightenment’s secular understanding of history.
“Whereas for the Enlightenment mind
salvation has nothing to do with time and history, for Edwards the contrary was
the case- there is no possible explanation of history without God’s work of
redemption”
[xv].
This is Edwards the Puritan seriously
and profoundly involved as an apologist, speaking the language of the
Enlightenment and reading those leading it while developing completely
different conclusions based on the witness of Scripture and the church.
Edwards steadfastly seeks to bring
together salvation and history, the order of grace and the order of time, and
in this way make history equivalent to God’s plan for salvation and redemption
[xvi].
History
and the Self
Edwards’s
philosophy of history, constructed over against the Enlightenment
disassociation of redemption and history, but also broader and less
individualistic than the Puritan approach, distinguishes itself as particularly
well suited for establishing a relationship between history and the self. This is so precisely because Edwards
understands revival as integral to God’s work in history, and so makes history
personal.
“For Edwards
history is based upon a close and essential association between personal
experience and historical events; God’s redemptive activity in religious revival
affects the whole condition of human beings. Hence the personal sphere is informed by God’s saving and
redemptive grace. Individual
existence again acquires a central role in history. Edwards thus overcomes the sense of alienation from history,
and brings about… reconciliation between God and humanity. Throughout his sermons on the HWR,
Edwards thus passionately pleaded with his audiences to assume their historical
responsibility by taking an active part in understanding and advancing the
sacred cause of revival and redemption”[xvii]
Unlike
other histories, Edwards deals only obliquely with the biography of key
leaders, politicians, generals, and kings.
Nor does he chart the rise and fall of political and social
institutions.
Instead, Edwards
writes of the ebb and flow of religious revivals.
For example, in sermon 9, Edwards notes that the decline of
the “Jewish church” was made use of by God as preparation for Christ’s coming.
“This gradual decline
tended to prepare the way for Christ’s coming…
it tended to make the glory of God’s power in the great effects of Christ’s
redemption the more conspicuous”[xviii]. Edwards continues to chart this rise
and fall of revivals, in chapter 11 making similar comment on the dispersion of
the Jews, in chapters 20 and 21 noting the special pouring out of the Spirit at
Pentecost. For Edwards, these
outpourings of the Spirit are to be celebrated, but Christians themselves
should expect to experience a suffering spirit (chapter 22), and that before
any work of God begins they should expect “a very dark time with respect to the
interests of religion in the world”[xix].
This
turn towards the personal is first of all to be commended, because it connects
the lived history of a people to the specific life of a community, and
subsequently to individual members of it.
Furthermore, this approach resonates with the preaching task itself, for
every sermon is always an address to a community of individuals. It is, furthermore, a source of
consolation. A grand historical
narrative preached as something that ultimately concerns each individual charts
a way out of the disorder and chaos that is a big part of people’s anxiety
about their lives. To know that even
the dark and suffering periods are part of God’s total work of redemption is a
source of hope if not always of comfort.
At
the same time, there are weaknesses here.
When the work of redemption is preached primarily as something that
restores human nature, and the self, rather than social and political systems,
something is left out. Revivals
then can turn the way of hyper-spiritualism, and can disregard the clear
witness of Scripture that God’s work of redemption includes social reform,
political reform, and the redemption of all things, unto creation itself. The grand narrative, even preached to
the individual conscience, can end up disenfranchising those who suffer under
the social and political systems God is working to redeem as the total work of redemption. The Trinitarian dimension of Edwards’
thought may themselves provide the resources for addressing these
concerns. It is to this issue that
I now turn.
Trinity,
History, and Preaching
Two
late 20
th century theological revivals, Trinitarian theology, and
the study of Edwards as “America’s Theologian” have, not surprisingly, been
brought together in a number of recent works.
Robert Jenson utilizes Edwards as a significant resource in
his constructive work as a theologian, and looks to him as an example of a
theologian who “did not merely maintain trinitarianism, [but] renewed it”
[xx].
Certainly Jenson is an early example of
a theologian who sees Edwards’ thought as profoundly Trinitarian, the Trinity
of God being “the Supreme Harmony of All”, and as such, a doctrine that could
stand up and breathe in the midst of what others considered to be the very
intellectual movement that would be the demise of quaint triune understands of
God- the Enlightenment.
Amy Plantinga
Pauw, in a book bearing this title,
The Supreme Harmony of All, expands on Jenson’s earlier observations, and so
helps us see how Edwards’ Trinitarian theology shaped his understanding of
Scripture, covenant, redemption, and Divine Excellency; indeed, he even
utilized it as a means of dealing with pastoral perplexities. This last category becomes the basis
for William J. Danaher’s fascinating work on the Trinitarian ethics of Jonathan
Edwards. Whereas Pauw and Jenson
look to the explicitly Trinitarian works and miscellanies of Edwards, Danaher
undertakes a somewhat revisionist task (more re-visioned than revised), and reads
a variety of pivotal but less expressly Trinitarian works of Edwards (Religious
Affections, The Freedom of the
Will, etc.) in light of Edwards’ basic
trinitarianism[xxi].
Edwards’ two
primary analogies for thinking the Trinity, the psychological and the social,
help us understand in exactly what way preaching history and the history of
redemption accomplishes that history
[xxii].
These analogies or “images” of the
Godhead are for Edwards “complementary linguistic idioms for narrating a basic
soteriological story line”
[xxiii].
We have already arrived at a place
where we can observe the complexity inherent in Edwards’ project, where
typologies and a distinct philosophy of history become themselves a crash
course in a new grammar.
Edwards’s
“grammatical” understanding of Christian speech about God is truer to the
character of language and language acquisition than traditionalist views.
The goal of learning a language is not
to be able to repeat correct paradigms, but to speak “beautifully” in a
multitude of particular, often unforeseen situations.
[xxiv] The multi-lingualism inherent in
speaking at least two analogies of the Trinity prepares a preacher for such a
task.
The two analogies
offer the opportunity to speak bilingually of God.
The social trinity analogy helps us speak of the incarnation
as that event within the life of God that incorporates humanity into God through
history itself.
For Edwards, this
historical incorporation takes place first of all and most obviously in Christ,
by his coming into history.
It is
further accomplished through special pourings out of the Spirit at seasons of
mercy
[xxv] The Spirit works through history for
the redemption of the world.
Various analogies present themselves to speak of this.
For example, if God is an eternal
society, then it seems to be “God’s design to admit the church into the divine
family as his son’s wife”
[xxvi].
This is one way of expressing the
social aspect of the Trinity.
Another speaks like this:
“God having from eternity
from his infinite goodness designed to communicate himself to creatures, to
unite himself to a created nature, and to become one of the creatures, and to
gather together in one all elect creatures in that creature he assumed into a
personal union with himself, and to manifest to them and maintain intercourse
with them through him”
[xxvii]
Either by way of marriage, or by
personal union with God in Christ, the Spirit effects this union into the
history God already has and is as the divine persons, Father and Son, and the
things they share together in the Spirit.
A
logical extension of the social analogy is a sacramentalizing of the world,
especially those events in the world that speak this newly acquired
language.
If history is the means
by which God from eternity seeks a personal union with his creatures, then the
world is sacramental.
So we can
say, preaching history is the liturgical form of recapitulating history.
To preach the history of the work of
redemption is certainly not (indeed cannot be) the only way by which the work
of redemption is accomplished, but for Edwards and many other Puritans of his
time (not to mention most Christian communities before and since) the preaching
of the Word is certainly one central way.
Sermons were central to the revival phenomenon.
They were the event, prepared carefully
by the pastor prior to worship, that prepared the hearers for conversion.
It is not a small leap to argue that
the sermon did not simply lead to the opportunity for redemption, but in its
divine effects accomplished and accomplishes redemption
[xxviii].
If
the social analogy is a beautiful melody that helps us sing the society that is
the Trinity, then the psychological analogy is the
basso continua[xxix]. God’s
sociality communicates something to us, but it is the psychological analogy
that teaches us what it is that God communicates. For Edwards, God is excellent, beautiful, full of infinite
happiness, perfect, and seeks to communicate these attributes, in himself, to
creatures. God’s knowledge of
Godself as these things is communicated to the church by way of the Trinity
itself:
The psychological
image of the Son as God’s Word still retained an important role in Edwards’s
theology of preaching and revelation.
All saving human knowledge of God attained through Scripture, prophecy,
and preaching depends ultimately on the Son, who is the internal act of God’s
own self-knowledge. Through the external
repetition of God’s disposition to self-knowledge, the saving knowledge
conveyed to the saints is not a bare “notional” knowledge of things of
religion: it is truly “Christ’s being in the creature in the name, idea or
knowledge of God’s being in them” (Pauw,
124)
This is the
Trinitarian work of redemption, which would remain impersonal and abstract if
not for the fact that God were also a social Trinity, including a flesh and
blood Son that lived fully divine, fully human. Here Christ is God’s idea of himself. This is a beautiful way of speaking of
God. But Edwards also speaks of
Christ as the one who takes central stage in the great history of the work of
redemption (chapters 14 through 19 of the HWR, one-sixth of the total sermon,
including chapter 17, a chapter that speaks directly the non-believer and
lukewarm, and offers comfort to the afflicted). If Christ is God’s idea of himself, then the social analogy
lets us see what a radical idea this reality was then and continues to be for
us now.
Finally,
if God is accomplishing a great work of redemption that centers in Christ and
is enlivened by the Spirit, but begins at the creation and continues until the eschaton, then the total history of this redemption is itself
a language worth learning. This
being the case, we now come to see why it is that Edwards, a richly Trinitarian
thinker with a profound commitment to the work of homiletics, would design and
construct a “body of divinity” “thrown into the form of a history.”
Edwards,
language, and preaching
Edwards
worked out his theology at two desks, the large self-modified wooden one in his
office
[xxx],
and the pulpit.
Much of this was
published, but an even more substantial body of material, the Miscellanies,
remained semi-public until many years after his death.
The sermons were always public, in the
sense that they were preached.
In
both of these places, the desk and the pulpit, Edwards committed himself
towards ever more fully explicating the faith.
The miscellanies were his “shop”, and his sermons,
developing as they were over the course of his ministry, were the stage.
At
one level, if we are looking for an explicit theology of history and a finely
developed working out of preached history as it shapes the contemporary lives
of hearers, the
HWR disappoints. There is very little that is explicitly
theological in this sermon series, nor is there much that is explicitly
practical. Instead, it consists
largely of “historical narratives designed to introduce the Northamptonites to
a sense of how they should understand their own history in the perspective of
biblical and world history”[xxxi]. These sermons contain very little
direct instruction. Nor do the
sermons by and large preach preparation and admonish in the way many Puritan
sermons of the time do. Rather,
Edwards preaches the HWR with his
typological view always in mind, and so the sermon series goes on illustrating
one dispensation of history after another, chronologically.
The
great benefit of this sermon series is that it refuses to leave faith at the
level of personal experience.
In a
time when the revival phenomenon had recently swept around the country, Edwards
could have resorted to sermons designed to excite the emotions and lead to
further unusual outpourings of the Spirit.
Many of his contemporaries did exactly that.
Instead, Edwards preaches about revival
as the great, central repeated work over the course of history by which the
Spirit has worked an outpouring of God’s mercy on the world.
Edwards speaks the hearers into a story
(this a Trinitarian observation, not a narrative one), and in this avoids
blatant hyper-spiritualism and individualism.
Instead, “Edwards constantly urged his parishioners toward
grand perspective to help them overcome the pettiness and self-absorption that
went with their low horizons, which hardly reached to the next town”
[xxxii] By encompassing Scripture history,
“secular” history from the end of Acts until contemporary life in Northampton,
and continuing on to the great consummation of all things envisioned in John’s
Apocalypse, Edwards preaches a grand history that selects from resources that
include lived history, Scripture, tradition, nature, and even prophecy.
The work of redemption in this scheme
is at least global, and at times cosmic, in scope.
Furthermore,
this grand narrative is apologetic and authentic. As we have mentioned, it takes issue with the Enlightenment
secularization of history, and does so by sacralizing and uniting all of
history. Like the rest of Edwards’
more apologetic corpus, it takes up contemporary issues of philosophy,
psychology, and the like, and recasts them in the only context where the
preacher could finally hold sway in any event- the pulpit. Finally, Edwards’ HWR is apologetic
because it is beautiful. The grand
sweep is awe-inspiring. Even if
contemporaries were unable to attend the entire sermon series preached over so
many weeks, those in attendance certainly knew something tremendous was
happening. Even if the
Northamptonites missed the import of this series, others did not.
It may not be too
much to suggest that Edwards’ history was as influential as any other single
book in fixing the cultural parameters of nineteenth-century American
Protestant culture. It securely
anchored American experience in a cosmic setting, locating it by means of
reference to sacred Scripture and investing it with preeminent significance for
concluding the drama of Christian redemption. It legitimated the social experiment that was the new
American culture[xxxiii].
From
John Wilson we learn that the very work that attempts an apologetic for a
Christian conception of history is the same work that has a much more colored
history of influence on the American social experiment. It can and does sound like the
triumphalism critics of the “grand narrative” are so suspicious of. But, though this may have been an
outcome of the widespread reading and distribution of Edwards’ work, it likely
was not his intention. For
Edwards, because New England (and so also America) was the most blessed, it was
also the most guilty. In this way,
the triumphalism is no more triumphalistic than the Trinitarian work of
redemption as it relates to the house of Israel, to the early Christians, or to
the early church. Rise before the
fall and all that. We can
understand Edwards intending in this sermon the prophetic affliction of the
comfortable more than justification of triumphalism, just because redemption is
a work accomplished by God. We are
in sin, and it is only by great pourings out of the Spirit that we participate
in the divine life through revivals, etc.
There
are certainly weaknesses here.
Because Edwards’ understanding of history is so focused on revivals, he
fails in his preaching to address social and political systems. Even if Edwards breaks Northampton out
of its provincialism, the self-absorption that would often and still does
paralyze congregations, he still leaves them imagining a narrative that is
mostly about a collective conversion of individuals, rather than the individual
conversion of institutions or social entities. But this is not necessarily surprising. Public preaching is usually in the end
address to individuals. Even the
earliest preaching we have (from the book of Acts) although it preaches about
collective sin, still seeks the individual conversion of hearers.
Not
only that, but the final end and drift of all Edwards’ work in this sermon is
this- to work out in a history a theology that takes seriously the redemption
of the world as the working out of the relationships inherent in the
Trinity. Revivals and individual
conversion are part of something much larger, a whole history of redemption that is the result of the relationship
between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
The Trinity and history preach, and when preached, participate.
[i] Jonathan
Edward,
A History of the Work of Redemption
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 116.
[ii] Paper given
at the Library of Congress, 2003; currently a quote only from private
correspondence, may not be used without permission from author
[iii] Jonathan
Edwards,
Letters and Personal Writings (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 727-728
[iv] p. 487,
other writers also thought history was the battlefield on which modernity would
be fought
[v] George
Marsden,
Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 488.
[vi] Amy
Plantinga Pauw,
The Supreme Harmony of All: The Trinitarian Theology of
Jonathan Edwards (Grand Rapids, MI:
Eerdmans, 2002), 8.
[vii] Avihu
Zakai,
Jonathan Edwards’s Philosophy of History: The Reenchantment of the World in the Age of Enlightenment
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 2.
[ix] Jonathan
Edwards,
Sermons and Discourses 1720-1723: Works, Volume 10, edited by Wilson H. Kimnach (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1992), editor’s introduction, xiii.
[xii] Not to
over-simplify the philosophical point at work here, but independent proofs do
not need to be made as to why both nature and history can be read typologically.
Since history is simply nature in time,
both can be read, if indeed they are books, as one book through which God
communicates.
They are together a
“divine idiom.”
[xiv] Jonathan
Edwards,
Typological Writings (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 152.
[xv] Zakai,
Phil.
Hist.,150; elsewhere Zakai says, “Whereas
for the Enlightenment mind salvation has nothing to do with time and history,
for Edwards the contrary was the case- there is no possible explanation of
history without God’s work of redemption” (150)
[xx] Robert W.
Jenson,
America’s Theologian: A Recommendation of Jonathan Edwards Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1988), 91.
[xxi] In fact,
Danaher fills a
lacunae noticed by Pauw
in her earlier work. “His
apocalyptic and millenarian speculations, his dispositional metaphysics, his
polemics on the freedom of the will… his revivalism, his ardent interest in
hell torments- must ‘be looked upon as appendages to this great work [the work of redemption] or things which…. subserve that grand design” (Pauw, 185)
[xxii] The
social analogy emphasizes the Trinity as a society, a communion grounded in
love.
Edwards’ weakness here is a
concentration on the love between Father and Son, with little attention to the
work of the Holy Spirit within the society that is the Trinity.
The psychological analogy emphasizes
the relation between the persons of the Trinity by referring to such concepts
as understanding, word, and idea, as well as will, holiness, and beauty.
One example will suffice: “The Son is
the deity generated by God’s understanding, or having an idea of Himself and subsisting
in that idea.
The Holy Ghost is
the deity subsisting in act, or the divine essence flowing out and breated
forth in God’s infinite love to and delight in Himself” (Pauw, 48).
[xxiv] See Pauw
for a variety of explications of this.
[xxv] Edwards’s
customary and beautiful way of stating this.
[xxvi] William
J. Danaher Jr.,
The Trinitarian Ethics of Jonathan Edwards (Louisville,
KT: John Knox Press, 2004), 85.
[xxvii] Jonathan
Edwards,
The Miscellanies: 501-832 (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 389 (no. 744)
[xxviii] In
fact, this sacramental understanding of preaching adheres more closely to
Edwards’ fundamental insight, that redemption is imputed and not attained by
seeking it.
The preached word
participates in the Trinitarian work of redemption.
[xxx] See
picture, Marsden, 448.
