Edwards: Christology and Trinity

There were two good presentations on Edwards theology at ETS this morning.

The first, by Robert Caldwell of the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, focused on the role of the Spirit in Edwards’s Christology. Caldwell’s main point was that the Spirit is the mediator of the union of the divine and human natures in Christ. In this respect, Edwards stands out of the mainstream of Reformed Orthodoxy. Where the Orthodox would emphasize the differences between the hypostatic union and the union of believers with Christ, Edwards stresses the continuities, and the continuities between all divine-human unions and the perichoretic union of the Triune Persons. All these unions are mediated by the Spirit. This argument reminded me of the recent work of Thomas Weinandy ( The Father’s Spirit of Sonship , which I summarized a few weeks ago), and also raises pointedly the question of the necessity of the incarnation. Traditionally, the incarnation is seen as necessary as a response to sin, but Edwards says things that make the incarnation appear to be a necessity (or at least highly “fitting”) apart from the fall. He write, for instance, that because the Son is united to a human nature, “we have advantage for a more free and full enjoyment of him, than we could have had if he had remained only in the divine nature. So again, we being united to a divine person, as his members, can have a more intimate union and intercourse with God the Father, who is only in the divine nature, than otherwise could be.” This strongly implies that the incarnation would have happened as a means for the elevation and glorification of humanity, regardless of whether or not Adam fell.

Oliver Crisp of Notre Dame followed with a technical discussion of Edwards’s trinitarian theology. Crisp pointed to a number of particular themes. Contrary to the traditional view, which ascribes attributes to the shared divine essence, Edwards argued that certain attributes are “appropriated” to one or the other Person, such that the Son is the Wisdom, Omniscience, Knowledge, and so on of the Father, and the Spirit is the Holiness, Love, and so on. God’s other attributes, such as immutability, omnipresence, and so on are modalities of relation, and thus are not “real” attributes of God at all. The only “real” attributes are those that pertain to the existence of God as such, and thus the only “real” attributes are the Son and Spirit. Crisp, however, disputed recent Edwards scholars who claim that Edwards had no conception of a divine essence. He admitted that he was not sure how all this could work, argued that Edwards’s idealist Trinitarianism is incoherent as it stands, and warned that it is difficult in any case to construct an Edwardsian Trinitarian theology, since so much of his trinitarian work is buries in the Miscellanies.

Crisp gave detailed attention to Edwards’s rational idealist argument for the Trinity. It runs basically like this: God delights in Himself above all things; God, being God, has a perfect idea of Himself; the most perfect idea of a thing is identical to the thing itself, since it corresponds in all particulars to the thing, even in the fact that the idea has or is “substance”; thus, the perfect idea of the Father is a perfect reflection of Himself, and He delights in it fully, as fully as He delights in Himself; from this, Edwards argues up to the conclusion that this perfect idea is the Son, who must be equal to the Father in every respect.

There are serious problems with this line of argument:

a) It could be tritheistic. If the Father’s idea is a perfect image of Himself, and if a perfect idea is in every respect identical to a perfect thing, then it would seem that the Father’s image has to be a second divine essence. How can Edwards’s argument “individuate” the Son as a PERSON?

b) It could be modalist. If the Son is the Father’s perfect idea of Himself, and if the perfect idea is the thing itself, how can the Son avoid being the Father?

c) It could be infinitarian. If the Father delights in the perfect idea of Himself, could He not equally delight in a perfect idea of the idea of Himself, and in a perfect idea of the idea of the idea of Himself. You get the idea. How can we stop with only three Persons?

There was much more in Crisp’s detailed and careful treatment, but that gets the gist (I think).