CHRISTINA N. LARSEN
THAT JONATHAN EDWARDS HELD to a doctrine of eternal generation is without question. Upholding a psychological model of the Trinity throughout his life, Edwards maintained that the Father eternally generates the Son as the very image of his glory in order that he might gaze upon the divine glory in beatific delight. The doctrine is of vital importance to Edwards insofar as, in his glory-centered theology, it is ultimately as the eternally generated divine idea that the Son is the visibility of divine glory both within and without the divine life. Although Edwards offers no special treatment of eternal generation, his understanding of it is readily grasped in his writings on the Trinity. It stands at the forefront of his ongoing attempt to confront Enlightenment critiques of God’s triunity and Christ’s full divinity, and it perceptibly influences the major contours of his theological program. It is no exaggeration to say that, in these writings, Edwards finds the doctrine of eternal generation central to the church’s confession: the Father’s eternal happiness in his glorious Son stands at the beginning and end of all things, and the creature’s participation in this loving apprehension of the divine glory in the Son is that for which she was made. After offering a brief overview of the basic theological importance of the doctrine of eternal generation in Edwards’s early account, then showing how this entails Edwards’s careful qualification of the “fitness” between the Father’s eternal generation of the Son and the relationship between the Father and the Son in redemption history, this chapter argues that Edwards’s late discussion of Christian religious experience functions according to a different view of this generation that undermines, however inadvertently, Edwards’s early concern with the doctrine. Edwards’s early interests are evident in his “Discourse on the Trinity” and Miscellany 1602, and his later discussions appear in Religious Affections.
“DISCOURSE ON THE TRINITY”
Written over the course of the 1730s, the unpublished “Discourse on the Trinity” remains Edwards’s most thoroughgoing meditation on the Trinity and, consequently, his most substantive articulation of the eternal generation at the center of triune life.1 The Discourse opens in confession of God’s infinite happiness:
When we speak of God’s happiness, the account that we are wont to give of it is that God 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.2
Here Edwards finds God’s infinite happiness central to discussion of the divine life, with the eternal conception of a divine idea—a perfect image of himself engendering infinite divine love—standing at the beginning of Edwards’s attempt to speak of it. In fact, the beginning of the “Discourse” takes the form of an a priori apologetic, with divine happiness as his argument’s presupposition. Given this form, Edwards takes time to elucidate his use of faculty language before any explicit mention of the Son as the person generated. He must first establish that divine happiness necessarily involves God’s imaging of himself, if it is as infinitely free as the church confesses, before he goes on to address the Father, Son, and, eventually, Spirit directly. In nuce, Edwards first reckons that if God is infinitely happy in himself, God must have self-understanding or an idea of himself as the object of his delight: “the sum of his inclination, love and joy is his love to and delight in himself” because “the sum of the divine understanding and wisdom consists in his having a perfect idea of himself.”3 For Edwards, the divine happiness is free—entirely independent of causes external to the divine life—because the eternal divine idea is the perfect image of the divine glory.
After establishing that the divine idea’s perfect imaging is central for the freedom of divine happiness, Edwards concludes, in a spirit of doxological fervor, that this happy life must consist in the life of at least two equally divine persons within the Godhead. It is in this celebration of equality that Edwards’s commitment to eternal generation finally comes to the fore. He finds that God having a perfect idea of himself must be the Father’s eternal generation of a Son who is his equal in every way, with this equal personhood being basic to the divine idea’s ability to image the divine glory perfectly:
Therefore as God with perfect clearness, fullness and strength understands himself, views his own essence (in which there is no distinction of substance and act, but it is wholly substance and wholly act), that idea which God hath of himself is absolutely himself. This representation of the divine nature and essence is the divine nature and essence again. So that by God’s thinking of the Deity, [the Deity] must certainly be generated. Hereby there is another person begotten; there is another infinite, eternal, almighty, and most holy and the same God, the very same divine nature. And this person is the second person in the Trinity, the only begotten and dearly beloved Son of God. He is the eternal, necessary, perfect, substantial and personal idea which God hath of himself.4
While not outlined explicitly, Edwards’s logic here is rather straightforward. Namely, if God were to behold and delight in an idea of himself that failed to image him in anything (e.g., nature, essence), then God’s happiness would not be in himself. It is because the Father eternally generates a second, equally divine person in the Son as his perfect divine idea that the Father eternally delights in beholding his glory made visible in the Son.
The “Discourse” then offers five scriptural “proofs” in somewhat hurried support of the Son as the eternally generated idea of the Father. First, Scripture finds the Son to be not just “in” the image of the Father but the image itself, and on Edwards’s reckoning an idea is “the most immediate representation, and seems therefore to be a more primary sort of image.” It is for this reason that Christ, the Son incarnate, is the “most immediate representation of the Godhead.”5 Second, identifying the Son as the idea of the Father’s glory explains the scriptural references to God’s infinite “love to and delight in” the Son because God’s delight in his idea is his delight in his Son.6 Third, the Father’s eternal generation of his perfect idea in the Son clarifies scriptural descriptions of Christ as the “face of God” (Exod 33:14) or the “angel of God’s presence, or face” (Isa 63:9) because both refer to the way in which God is beheld or looked upon. Edwards cannot think of what “can be so properly and fitly called so with respect to God as God’s own perfect idea of himself, whereby he has every moment a view of his own essence” as his own idea, which “is eminently in God’s presence.”7 Fourth, Edwards finds this account to “agree with” Scripture’s reference to Christ as the “brightness” of divine glory, both because it is by the Son as the divine idea that God delights in his own glory and because, insofar as God is the luminary, it is fitting that it is his idea that is his light: “For what is so properly the light of a mind or spirit as its knowledge or understanding?”8 And finally, Scripture calls Christ the “wisdom,” “logos,” and “amen” or “truth” of God, all terms that Edwards believes refer only to God’s idea or understanding of himself.9
Such is Edwards’s basic account of eternal generation in the early pages of the “Discourse.” It relies heavily upon a particular psychological model that Edwards finds to illuminate a breadth of scriptural discussion in a time of heated Enlightenment debate.10 However, even without getting into Edwards’s subsequent discussion of the Spirit’s procession, it is clear that, dogmatically, what remains critical for Edwards is to establish that the Father’s eternal generation of the equally divine Son is integral not merely to the fullness but also to the sufficiency of divine happiness. Ultimately, the irreducible happiness of the divine life centers Edwards’s most basic account, and goes on to center Edwards’s discussion of the glory of the Son as the very happiness of the creature.11
MISCELLANY 1062
Edwards’s Miscellany 1062, “[Observations concerning the] Economy of the Trinity and the Covenant of Redemption,” is often recognized as a significant pensée. It was likely written between 1742 and 1744, not long after the initial parts of the “Discourse.” The miscellany begins with the recognition
that there is a subordination of the persons of the Trinity, in their actings with respect to the creature; that one acts from another, and under another, and with a dependence on another, in their actings, and particularly in what they act in the affair of man’s redemption. So that the Father in that affair acts as Head of the Trinity, and Son under him, and the Holy Spirit under them both.12
However, after recognizing the equal glory of the Son as the image of the Father’s glory, it immediately goes on to insist that, in their subordination,
the other persons’ acting under the Father don’t arise from any natural subjection, as we should understand such an expression according to the common idiom of speech; for thus a natural subjection would be understood to imply either an obligation to compliance and conformity to another as a superior and one more excellent, and so most worthy to be a rule for another to conform to, or an obligation to conformity to another’s will, arising from a dependence on another’s will for being or well-being. But neither of these can be the case with respect to the persons of the Trinity.13
The miscellany is relevant to Edwards’s understanding of eternal generation insofar as it sets out to distinguish between what is established in the Father’s generation of the Son and what is foreign to it, though (in a qualified sense) derivative of this generation because it is “fitting” to this generation. Edwards hopes to both maintain the equality of the Father, Son, and Spirit within the divine life and maintain that the subordination of the Son to the Father in redemption history does not diminish the Son’s identity as the perfect image of divine glory and the object of divine happiness. Here, it is Edwards’s commitment to the Father’s eternal generation of the Son as the perfect image of his glory that grounds Edwards’s distinction of what one might call three levels at which the divine life can be discussed: namely, the level of processions, the level of economy, and the level of redemption.
Beginning at the level of processions, Edwards first establishes that the Father’s eternal generation of the Son in no way entails the Son’s subordination to the Father. Rather, the Son is equal to the Father in every way because he is the Father’s eternally generated image. Echoing the early “Discourse” (without recourse to the language of “idea”), Edwards finds that it is as the “brightness” of the Father’s glory—“the very image of the Father and the express and perfect image of his person”—that the Son exists. As this image, the Son is equal to the Father “in glory and excellency of nature”—so much so that “the way that the Father enjoys the glory of the Deity is in enjoying him.” While Edwards does not draw out the Son’s significance for the freedom of divine happiness as he does in the early “Discourse,” he nevertheless insists that it is because the Son is this perfect image that “the Father’s infinite happiness is in him.”14
Edwards upholds a sense of the Son’s “dependence” on the Father at this level, “because with respect to his subsistence he is wholly from the Father and begotten by him,” but he prefers to speak of the “priority” rather than the “superiority” of the Father because the Son’s dependence does not include an “inferiority of Deity.” As the perfect image, “The whole Deity and glory of the Father, is as it [were] repeated or duplicated: everything in the Father is repeated or expressed again, and that fully, so that there is properly no inferiority.” For this reason, Edwards insists that there is not even a qualified sense of “natural subjection” implied in the Father’s generation of the Son because this procession “is no voluntary but a necessary proceeding, and therefore infers no proper subjection of one to the will of another.”15 Edwards is quite concerned to safeguard the Son’s equal glory and divinity with the Father at the level of natural, unwilled processions, so he finds that the only difference between them is the merely logical priority of the Father as the person who generates the Son for eternity. There is a clear insistence that any other difference—or even a misunderstanding of this difference!—would be catastrophic for the equal glory of the Son.
After establishing the equality of the Father and Son at the level of processions, Edwards distinguishes a second level for discussing their relationship, the level of economy, wherein their “order of acting” in the economic work of divine glorification is determined by their “mutual free agreement.”16 (Given that the divine decision for glorification precedes the divine decision to do so in a work of redemption, this second level is distinct from the order of acting established in the covenant of redemption.) Edwards finds the second level to go beyond the level of processions in two key ways. First, whereas the eternal generation does not involve the Son’s subordination to the Father, “decency” to the level of processions “requires” the Son’s subordination in his acting “from” and “in a dependence on” the Father in the voluntary, willed “actings” of the economic work of glorification. Such an ordering was unwarranted prior to the decision for self-glorification. However, the ordering embraced to fulfill this glorification is nonetheless in some sense fitting to the processions wherein the Father “is first in the order of subsisting” because it is “fit that the order of the acting of the persons of the Trinity should be agreeable to the order of their subsisting.” Second, this economic level is neither eternal nor a necessary emanation from the level of procession but is initiated by a “mutual free agreement.” While “the persons of the Trinity all consent to this order, and establish it by agreement, as they all naturally delight in what is in itself fit, suitable and beautiful” because “decency requires it,” it remains an ordering that is freely willed by all three divine persons insofar as none is necessarily subject to another in either will or act: “It is not proper to say decency obliges the persons of the Trinity to come into this order.”17 Because of the mutuality of the decision to act according to this order, the equal glory of the persons is maintained.
Edwards’s third level for discussing the relationship between the Father and the Son is the level of redemption. In a way, the miscellany is primarily focused on distinguishing the order of acting at this level—the order established in the covenant of redemption—from the order of acting established at the level of economy. Edwards argues for this distinction to support his fundamental concern that the Son’s humiliation is not seen as naturally following from his procession from the Father but as befitting the end of divine glorification.18 While the covenant is designed to establish the fitting means of achieving divine glorification, it goes far beyond the level of economy by introducing a subordination that includes an inequality of glory between the Father and Son. Given Edwards’s continued support of their equality, it is hardly surprising that his talk of this subordination proceeds with remarkable caution.
Edwards admits that the ordering of this third level is “in several respects agreeable” to the order of economy because the logically prior Father is not subject to the Son. However, Edwards finds he “must distinguish between the covenant of redemption, that is an establishment of wisdom wonderfully contriving a particular method for the most conveniently obtaining a great end,” and the prior “establishment that is founded in fitness and decency and the natural order of the eternal and necessary subsistence of the persons of the Trinity” because it is the work of redemption that requires an “obedience that implies an humiliation below his [the Son’s] proper divine glory.”19 Moreover, such a humiliation is not a mere byproduct of this covenantal ordering; rather, humiliation lies at the center of it: “no other subjection or obedience of the Son to the Father arises properly from the covenant of redemption” except for “that which implies humiliation, or a state and relation to the Father wherein he descends below the infinite glory of a divine person.”20 Edwards is clear that the only reason such an inglorious ordering finally achieves divine glorification is because it is only the Son’s freely chosen humiliation of glory that merits for those he redeems. The Son’s humiliation is befitting of the work of glorification because it is not directly befitting of his procession from the Father within the divine life.21
Because of this, although the covenant of redemption is similar to the agreement of the second level in its free inauguration of a further level of Trinitarian ordering that is in some sense fitting to the level that precedes it, the covenant is qualitatively different: the subordination of glory it introduces into the relationship between the Father and the Son is not directly grounded in the “fitness and decency and the natural order” of the eternal generation.22 Any sense of fitness between the Son’s subordination of glory and his eternal generation from the Father is derivative. Insofar as this subordination is “agreeable” to the level of economy, it is derivatively agreeable to the level of processions. But it remains distinct from the fitness at the level of economy because it ultimately takes its shape in fitness to the redemptive work that glorification requires. Edwards’s refusal to find the Son’s humiliation as fitting to the divine processions is no less than his attempt to acknowledge the paradox at the heart of this affair: the notion that the Son might somehow be less than the Father at any point of the work of glorification verges on denying the eternal happiness of the divine life from whence it flows.
There is plenty to say about the concept of fitness that pervades Edwards’s theology.23 However, in the miscellany it is critical to discern how Edwards deploys the concept toward the end of maintaining a rather difficult dialectic. Consider the carefulness with which Edwards finds the Father–Son relationship at the levels of economy and redemption to be fitting to the Father’s eternal generation of the Son at the level of processions because they are only in a qualified sense derivative of this generation (though fitting because they are truly derivative in this qualified sense!).
On one hand, both of the Son’s freely willed subordinations to the Father go beyond the equality that is eternally the Son’s as the perfect image of the Father’s glory, yet both are celebrated as “fitting” or “agreeable” because, either directly (at the level of economy) or by derivation (at the level of redemption), they pattern their shape after the logical priority of the Father in his eternal generation of the Son, and are ultimately taken towards the end of declaring the divine glory ad extra. Because the Father’s eternal generation of the Son is the ground for the Father’s logical priority in the Son’s subordinations, the Son’s obedience does not in the end obscure or, worse, collapse the generation at the heart of this glory. Instead it reveals the glory of the divine life wherein the Son is in no way subordinate to the Father. On the other hand, it is only because these subordinations are freely willed that Edwards finds them truly fitting. While these subordinations are either directly or derivatively befitting to the eternal generation, both must be freely willed by the Father and the Son. If either subordination were to be included in this generation, then the Son’s equality with the Father would be compromised, he would not perfectly image the Father, and the divine happiness would not find its object in him.
For this reason, the good news for Edwards is that the Father and the Son, not by necessity but as the very wisdom of God, have freely willed these subordinations for the free display of the divine glory abroad! That Edwards goes to great lengths to establish a level of economy prior to the level of redemption only stresses how foreign the Son’s full subordination is to the fullness of the divine life, even if it is, in a qualified way, fitting to it towards the end of divine glorification.24 Throughout the miscellany, what remains essential and essential to the Son’s identity is established at the level of unwilled processions in the eternal generation wherein the Son, as the perfect image of the Father, is the Father’s equal and, consequently, is the brightness of the Father’s glory in which he eternally delights. Only this Son can shine forth this brightness into the world.25
Religious Affections
Published in 1746 after being preached as a sermon series in 1742–43—a few years after Edwards’s work on the Trinity in the initial pages of the “Discourse,” and more or less contemporaneous with his composition of Miscellany 1062—Religious Affections offers Edwards’s mature reflections on Christian religious experience in response to the New England awakenings. One of Edwards’s most important texts, its discussion of the creature’s apprehension of divine glory in redemption history contrasts with the miscellany’s discussion insofar as Religious Affections is more concerned with unfolding redemption history’s evocative significance than with exploring its constitutive significance as the working out of divine glorification in the Son’s humiliation. Here, it is the Son’s identity as the image of divine glory that grounds the possibility of the creature’s sight of this glory, true Christian experience consisting in the creature’s loving apprehension of the divine image in the incarnate Son.26 While Religious Affections relies implicitly upon a psychological model of the Trinity wherein the Son images the divine glory within the divine life as the Father’s eternally generated idea, in its concern to address the Son’s evocative significance it relies upon a view of this generation that is markedly different from Miscellany 1062 and the early parts of the “Discourse.” Religious Affections finds a different psychological logic at work—a logic that does not obviously satisfy the concerns of Edwards’s early account.
Edwards’s underlying stress throughout Religious Affections is that it is ultimately a loving apprehension of the glory of divine holiness in Christ that constitutes the genuine religious affection in which true Christian experience consists. However, to make this claim he distinguishes creaturely apprehension of the divine glory in God’s natural attributes from apprehension of the divine glory in God’s moral attributes, aligning each kind of attribute with a distinct part of the divine image in the creature:
As there are two kinds of attributes in God, according to our way of conceiving of him, his moral attributes, which are summed up in his holiness, and his natural attributes, of strength, knowledge, etc. that constitute the greatness of God; so there is a twofold image of God in man, his moral or spiritual image, which is his holiness, that is the image of God’s moral excellency (which image was lost by the fall); and God’s natural image, consisting in men’s reason and understanding, his natural ability, and dominion over the creatures, which is the image of God’s natural attributes.27
While the creature cannot apprehend the moral attributes apart from the natural attributes, as the locus of divine holiness it is the glory of God’s moral attributes that evokes the creature’s loving apprehension, restoring the diving image within her and, consequently, enabling her creaturely participation in the glory of the divine life. Fundamentally, this is because “a love to divine things for the beauty and sweetness of their moral excellency, is the first beginning and spring of all holy affections.”28
In this account of Christian experience, Edwards distinguishes between a natural and graced apprehension of the divine glory in order to address the importance of love and delight in God in such a way that accounts for the total difference the Spirit’s regenerative work makes for the creature’s experience of God. Here, a full, graced apprehension of the divine glory in Christ is a loving apprehension made possible by the indwelling of the Spirit as a vital principle of love patterned after the Spirit’s procession within the divine life. Beyond a mere intellectual assent, this full apprehension of the divine glory in Christ consists in a “sense of the heart, wherein the mind don’t only speculate and behold, but relishes and feels.”29 Such an apprehension transforms the creature because, once the will is inclined, the creature’s entire being turns toward God in love; her previously hardened heart is exchanged for the heart of flesh whereby she shares in the divine glory, united to him in heart and mind by his own understanding and love of himself.30
An apprehension of the divine glory in the natural attributes is possible apart from an apprehension of the moral attributes whereby the beauty of divine holiness is seen, but such a natural apprehension condemns precisely because it does not perceive the beauty by which the hearts of fallen creatures are transformed. For Edwards, only a graced apprehension is inescapably transformative due to its involvement in the creature’s heart—where the Spirit’s regenerative work takes place. And then only a graced apprehension engenders the creature’s participation in the divine glory because this participation is mediated by the Spirit’s unition of the creature and Christ in a bond of love.31
Throughout Religious Affections, Edwards stresses that both the manifestation of the natural attributes and the beauteous manifestation of the moral attributes (divine holiness) are found in Christ alone and therefore can be apprehended in him alone—he is the image of divine glory after all. However, it is difficult to reconcile the psychological logic operative in Religious Affections with the psychological logic assumed in the early “Discourse” and Miscellany 1062 because, in the later logic, the Son is the eternally generated divine image wherein the divine glory is apprehended, but it appears that he is this image as something like a natural divine image that locates something like a moral divine image in the Spirit.
Consider the way in which Edwards’s later additions to the “Discourse” insist that the Son is the attribute of divine understanding that locates the Spirit as the attribute of divine love. Nearing the end of the “Discourse,” Edwards suggests that the totality of divine attributes is best understood as the communion of two truly distinct person-attributes, the Son as the divine idea summarizing the attribute of understanding and the Spirit as the divine love summarizing the attribute of love:
There are but these three distinct real things in God; whatsoever else can be mentioned in God are nothing but mere modes or relations of existence. There are his attributes of infinity, eternity and immutability: they are mere modes of existence. There is God’s understanding, his wisdom and omniscience, that we have shown to be the same with his idea. . . . There is God’s holiness, but this is the same—as we have shown in what we have said of the nature of excellency—with his love to himself . . .
It is a maxim amongst divines that everything that is in God is God, which must be understood of real attributes and not of mere modalities . . . if it be meant that the real attributes of God, viz. his understanding and love, are God, then what we have said may in some measure explain how it is so: for Deity subsists in them distinctly, so they are distinct divine persons. We find no other attributes of which it is said that they are God in Scripture, or that God is they, but Λογος and Αγαπε, the reason and the love of God (John 1:1 and 1 John 4:8, 1 John 4:16).32
In this passage, Edwards hopes to establish that creaturely discussion of the divine attributes is not a discussion of God’s qualities but of God himself, given that God is his attributes. However, the way in which Edwards allows for a distinction between attributes pertaining to the divine idea and attributes pertaining to the divine love is quite odd. Rather than denoting the one divine essence directly, here the attributes fall into two distinct categories denoting one or other of two distinct divine persons. And so, while the attributes are properly predicated of the divine essence (and, consequently, each of the divine persons) because “they have communion with one another,”33 there remains a sense that, as the eternally generated divine idea, the Son is the person-attribute who summarizes the natural attributes, and as the divine love, the Spirit is the person-attribute who summarizes the moral attributes.34
Because of this, when Religious Affections speaks of the creature’s full apprehension of divine glory in Christ’s manifestation of moral and natural attributes, it seems as if Christ’s significance as the incarnate Son is to supply a locus for the visibility of the divine glory in the Spirit (who summarizes the moral attributes) in order to restore the creature’s moral image. While it is possible to apprehend Christ without apprehending the Spirit (the apprehension that condemns), it is only possible to apprehend the divine holiness or other moral attributes in Christ by apprehending the Spirit within him. As the Son, Christ is the manifestation of the divine natural attributes (attributes of greatness) that provides the magnitude for the Spirit’s manifestation of the divine moral attributes, because the moral attributes have no magnitude of their own. Consequently, although it is true that all the attributes are predicable of all three divine persons, the creature ultimately looks upon the incarnate Son to see the glory of the natural attributes that he images as the divine idea as well as the glory of the moral attributes in the Spirit within him.35
Although it is as the divine idea and the divine love within a psychological framework that these attributes denote the Son and Spirit respectively, the eternal generation within this psychological logic is clearly different insofar as the Spirit perfects what appears to be the Son’s partial imaging of the Father’s glory. In the eternal generation, the Son, as the divine idea, images the glory of the natural attributes as something like a natural image that enables the Spirit, as something like a moral image of the glory of the moral attributes, to shine. While in his manifestation of the Spirit the Son might be said to reflect perfectly the image of the Father, this is unlike Edwards’s earlier account wherein the Son’s perfect imaging of the divine glory is in some sense the origin of the Spirit’s procession. Here, the Father’s happiness in the Son is not grounded in the Son’s perfect imaging, but the Son’s perfect imaging is grounded in the Father’s happiness in the Son.
Whether or not the latter pages of the “Discourse” attempt to move beyond Edwards’s initial understanding of the Son’s eternal generation, when the latter pages of the “Discourse” are read alongside Edwards’s discussion of moral and natural attributes in Religious Affections, the logic at work in Religious Affections certainly seems to conflict with Edwards’s initial view (of course Edwards’s recognition of this is impossible to know). Similar to Edwards’s initial view, his account in Religious Affections seeks to highlight a fitness between the Son’s eternal procession from the Father and the Son’s fulfillment of the work of glorification; by locating what is effectively the imaging of the moral attributes in the Spirit, Edwards demonstrates a tremendous fitness between the psychological underpinnings of the creature’s renewal and the Son–Spirit relationship at the level of processions. However, insofar as the Son perfectly images the Father by his Spirit in a manner very different from the early “Discourse” and Miscellany 1062, Edwards undermines his earlier concern to regard the Son as the eternally generated object of divine happiness that ensures the eternal freedom of divine delight.
CONCLUSION
This brief overview of eternal generation in Edwards’s “Discourse,” Miscellany 1062, and Religious Affections shows how central the doctrine is to his theological program. The Father’s eternal generation of the Son is basic to Edwards’s understanding of the glorious happiness of divine life—as the eternally generated image of divine glory, the Son completes his work of glorification as the very happiness of the creation. Edwards’s glory-obsessed theology is not able to speak of God or his works without speaking about the eternal generation in which God knows his own glory, or the Son’s mission (that critically follows from this generation) in which God, in his wisdom, freely gives his glory to be known. Not least because, without speaking about the eternal reality of this generation at length, the irreducible happiness of the glorious divine life—and the possibility of creaturely happiness!—that stands at the heart of who God is would not weight his creaturely confession of God’s glory as it ought.
Edwards’s initial understanding of eternal generation in the “Discourse” is vital to his discussion about God because it establishes that the Son is the divine idea who, as the Father’s equal in all things, perfectly images the divine glory and grounds the total freedom of the divine happiness that remains at the center of divine life. And then Miscellany 1062’s careful delineation of three levels for speaking of this life is vital to his discussion because it establishes the wisdom of God in the fitness of the work of divine glorification, while at the same time establishing the utter gratuity of the Son’s freely willed subordination given the foreignness of any inequality in his eternal generation from the Father. The slightest inequality in this generation would cause the glory at the beginning and end of this glorification to vanish.
Finally, while Religious Affections functions according to an account of the Son’s imaging in the eternal generation that is quite opposed to Edwards’s early view, even this points toward the end of insisting that it is because the Son’s mission is befitting to his eternal imaging of the Father’s glory that the work of glorification succeeds. Here, Edwards’s understanding of eternal generation is vital to his discussion of God’s works because the Spirit’s evocative application of salvation to creatures is achieved by the Spirit as the Spirit of the eternally generated Son. In other words, it is in Christ alone as the eternally generated natural image that the Spirit’s moral imaging of the Father’s glory provides its transformative vision.
Clearly, for Edwards the doctrine of eternal generation is central to the church’s confession. Nonetheless, the conflict between his early and late writings is real. And given the centrality of the doctrine to his theological program, this is devastating to the ability of his program—as it stands—to speak intelligibly about the singular glory of divine life that stands at the beginning and end of all things. Insofar as the logic implicit in Edwards’s later writings undermines his initial grounding of the freedom of divine happiness in the Son’s perfect imaging, it not only alters his understanding of the Son as the visibility of divine glory in redemption history, but it also unravels his understanding of the ground of this freedom and, with it, his context for understanding the perfect equality of the Son.
While the later logic might appear to facilitate Edwards’s lifelong hope to elevate the Spirit as the “sum of all good things,” it is not obviously a cogent enough view to illuminate another way of understanding the freedom of divine happiness (the memorable starting point of Edwards’s theology).36 What does it mean that the Son and Spirit function as person-attributes within a divine faculty psychology when the strongly volitional person-attribute provides the object for divine understanding instead of the intellective person-attribute? Regardless of whether Edwards’s distribution of the creature’s apprehension of glory between the imaging persons is finally guilty of separating inseparable operations, or fails to escape any manner of ills to which psychological models are prone, because Edwards allows another account of eternal generation to function behind the scenes of his discussion of Christian experience, his doctrine of God does not evolve but evaporates.
The lamentable tragedy of Edwards’s untimely death is often rehearsed by appreciative critics who wish to see how his anticipated masterworks might have developed—or withdrawn—his embryonic innovations. It is not fair to say that, in the end, Edwards’s theology fails because it is not internally consistent. While admitting the mystery of which he writes, he was himself far from satisfied with where he left things in the “Discourse”:
I don’t pretend fully to explain how these things are, and I am sensible a hundred other objections may be made, and puzzling doubts and questions raised, that I can’t solve. I am far from pretending to explaining the Trinity so as to render it no longer a mystery . . . but in time, with reason, may [be] led to say something further of it than has been wont to be said, though there are still left many things pertaining to it incomprehensible.37
We have a copious number of occasional writings that belie the underlying conviction that the doctrine of God in his glory must, however implicitly, structure all creaturely talk about him and his works. But we do not have a mature masterwork, so we do not know whether Edwards might have modified his psychological speculation and pulled together a better-ordered discussion of this glorious God in the end. What can be said is that, for Edwards, the eternal generation is central to the church’s confession because, in one way or another, the Father’s eternal happiness in his glorious Son stands at the beginning and end of all things.38
1. The literature on Edwards’s Trinitarianism is vast. See diverse interpretations in (and in the literature cited by) Oliver D. Crisp, “Jonathan Edwards on the Trinity,” Jonathan Edwards Studies 4, no. 1 (2014): 21–41; Amy Plantinga Pauw, The Supreme Harmony of All: The Trinitarian Theology of Jonathan Edwards (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002); and Kyle C. Strobel, Jonathan Edwards’s Theology: A Reinterpretation (London and New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2013), 23–71.
2. Jonathan Edwards, “Discourse on the Trinity,” in WJE (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957–), 21:113–44 (113).
3. Ibid., 114. In Edwards’s psychological model, this “inclination”—or disposition—is none other than the Spirit as the divine love. For a sample of the lively discussion surrounding what might be termed Edwards’s pneumatological dispositionalism, see especially Robert W. Caldwell III, Communion in the Spirit (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2008); Oliver D. Crisp, Jonathan Edwards on God and Creation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 14–56; and Sang Hyun Lee, The Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).
4. Edwards, “Discourse on the Trinity,” WJE, 21:116–17. WJE editor’s brackets.
5. Ibid., 117. Here, “Seeing the perfect idea of a thing is to all intents and purposes the same as seeing the thing; it is not only equivalent to the seeing of it, but it is the seeing it: for there is no other seeing but having the idea. Now by seeing a perfect idea, so far as we see it we have it; but it can’t be said of anything else, that in seeing of it we see another, strictly speaking, except it be the very idea of the other” (ibid., 118; WJE editor’s emphasis).
6. Ibid., 118.
7. Ibid., 118–19.
8. Ibid., 119.
9. Ibid., 119–20.
10. For an interpretation of Edwards’s use of Locke’s Essay in his model, toward the end of defending Reformed orthodoxy from Enlightenment critiques (specifically, in the “Discourse,” those of Samuel Clarke), see Paul Helm, “The Human Self and the Divine Trinity,” in Jonathan Edwards as Contemporary: Essays in Honor of Sang Hyun Lee, ed. Don Schweitzer (New York: Peter Lang, 2010), 93–106. For discussion of how this model addresses these critques, see Strobel, Jonathan Edwards’s Theology, 31–71. And for an overview of Edwards’s intellectual context that finds “it must be questioned whether Edwards’s reading of Locke was the central and decisive event in his intellectual life,” see Norman Fiering, Jonathan Edwards’s Moral Thought and Its British Context (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 13-47 (38). However Edwards might have understood himself as a defender of Reformed orthodoxy, his emphasis on the intellective generation of the Son clearly departs from the tradition’s general distaste with discussing the difference between the Son and Spirit’s processions at length. Chevalier Ramsay’s defense of eternal generation appears to bear a greater resemblance to Edwards’s psychological model than does the work of Edwards’s favored theologians, Francis Turretin and Petrus van Mastricht; see Jonathan Edwards, “1253. Trinity,” in WJE, 23:184–88. On this general distaste, see Richard A. Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: The Rise and Development of Reformed Orthodoxy, ca. 1520 to ca. 1725, vol. 4, The Triunity of God (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003), 376. For comparison of Edwards’s psychological model with Thomas Aquinas’s account of divine knowing and loving, see Thomas G. Weinandy, “Jonathan Edwards: ‘Discourse on the Trinity,’ ” in The Ecumenical Edwards: Jonathan Edwards and the Theologians, ed. Kyle C. Strobel (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 67–80.
11. As the divine image, Christ is “the great prophet and teacher of mankind, the light of the world, and the revealer of God to creatures” (Edwards, “Discourse on the Trinity,” WJE, 21:120). Edwards frequently meditates on the connection between the Son’s imaging of glory for the Father and his economic imaging for creatures. See, for instance, Jonathan Edwards, “321. Heb. 1:3,” in The Works of Jonathan Edwards Online, vol. 49, Sermons, Series II, 1734 (Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University, 2008), L. [1r]–17v. It is because Christ images this glory to creatures that Edwards’s discussion of the eternal generation does not ultimately occur apart from discussion of Christ in Scripture.
12. Jonathan Edwards, “1062. Economy of the Trinity and Covenant of Redemption,” in WJE, 20:430–43 (430).
13. Ibid., 430–31.
14. Ibid., 430.
15. Ibid., 430–31. WJE editor’s brackets.
16. Ibid., 431–32.
17. Ibid., 431. Edwards’s emphasis.
18. See especially ibid., 433–35.
19. Ibid., 437, 432, 438.
20. Ibid., 437.
21. See ibid., 436–38.
22. Ibid., 432. Edwards finds that “if there were any such thing as a way of redemption without the humiliation of any divine person, the persons would act in man’s redemption in their proper subordination, without any covenant of redemption” (ibid., 437) and that, because of the close connection between humiliation and covenant, the covenant of redemption is between the Father and the Son alone given that the Spirit does not undergo a further humiliation at the level of redemption. However, what is perhaps most interesting is that Edwards finds both that everything the Son does in his obedient fulfillment of the covenant before or after his humiliation is established at the level of economy, and that the Son’s temporary ruling on behalf of the Father, along with the Spirit’s temporary twofold subjection to the Son, are established at the level of redemption (ibid., 435, 438–43).
23. For discussion of Edwards’s aesthetics—wherein Edwards’s appeal to “fitness” facilitates his theological aims in light of his characteristically seventeenth- and eighteenth-century aesthetic, ethical, and metaphysical concerns—see especially Roland Delattre, Beauty and Sensibility in the Thought of Jonathan Edwards: An Essay in Aesthetics and Theological Ethics (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1968); and Fiering, Jonathan Edwards’s Moral Thought and Its British Context.
24. This is underlined by Edwards’s insistence that the level of redemption ceases as soon as the Son’s humiliation is complete, while the level of economy continues for eternity (see Edwards, “1062. Economy of the Trinity and Covenant of Redemption,” WJE, 20:434, 438–40). For Edwards’s further discussion of the Son’s subordination given his full equality with the Father, see especially Jonathan Edwards, “On the Equality of the Persons of the Trinity,” WJE, 21:146–48; and Edwards, “Of God the Father,” WJE, 25:144–54.
25. There is certainly significant debate surrounding the extent to which Edwards embraces an emanationism in his discussion of the divine disposition to pour forth of the divine glory. Some even identify a tendency in Edwards’s work to speak of the Father’s eternal generation of the Son as in some sense the first emanation of the divine disposition to pour forth of the divine glory through which the glory then emanates ad extra (see Michael David Bush, “Jesus Christ in the Theology of Jonathan Edwards” [PhD diss., Princeton Theological Seminary, 2003]). It is no doubt true that Edwards finds the divine decrees fitting to the divine happiness in the pouring forth of the divine glory ad extra, however it seems significant that Edwards does not dispose of the language of decree in this discussion. Despite his language of emanation, his focus on the fitness of the divine decrees appears fixated on stressing the happiness of divine glorification—a happiness that a crude voluntarism might eclipse, yet a necessary emanationism might render inconsequential. Edwards’s commitment to the voluntary nature of the decrees is clearly pronounced in this very discussion of the Son’s humiliation wherein the divine freedom to choose is decisive: “For ’tis only that obedience which the Son voluntarily and freely subjected himself to from love to sinners . . . that merits for sinners” (Edwards, “1062. Economy of the Trinity and Covenant of Redemption,” WJE, 20:438). Perhaps Katherine Sonderegger’s recent use of disposition to knit more closely together the concepts of divine will and divine nature is not entirely dissimilar to Edwards’s approach (I owe this comparison to Philip Ziegler). See Katherine Sonderegger, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, The Doctrine of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015), 249–54, 309–26, 474–90.
26. See, for instance, Jonathan Edwards, WJE, 2:270–74, 297–300, 324–28, 392–96.
27. Ibid., 256.
28. Ibid., 253–54. On the creature’s end as her economic participation in the divine glory poured forth, see especially Jonathan Edwards, Dissertation I: Concerning the End for Which God Created the World, in WJE, 8:404–36. On Edwards’s innovations in Reformed discussion of the beatific vision wherein this participation is fully realized, see especially Strobel, Jonathan Edwards’s Theology, 149–33.
29. Edwards, Religious Affections, WJE, 2:272, Edwards’s emphases.
30. For discussion of the central role this spiritual sense of the heart holds in Edwards’s anthropology, see especially John E. Smith, “Religious Affections and the ‘Sense of the Heart,’ ” in The Princeton Companion to Jonathan Edwards, ed. Sang Hyun Lee (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 103–14; and Strobel, Jonathan Edwards’s Theology, 153–90, 214–24.
31. Edwards draws out this distinction sharply: “But the saints and angels do behold the glory of God consisting in the beauty of his holiness: and ’tis this sight only, that will melt and humble the hearts of men, and wean them from the world, and draw them to God, and effectually change them. A sight of the awful greatness of God, may overpower men’s strength, and be more than they can endure; but if the moral beauty of God be hid, the enmity of the heart will remain in its full strength, no love will be enkindled, all will not be effectual to gain the will, but that will remain inflexible; whereas the first glimpse of the moral and spiritual glory of God shining into the heart, produces all these effects, as it were with omnipotent power, which nothing can withstand” (Edwards, Religious Affections, WJE, 2:264–65). For Edwards’s discussion of these two apprehensions, see especially ibid., 253–66.
32. Edwards, “Discourse on the Trinity,” WJE, 21:131–32. Kyle Strobel argues that Edwards’s views develop over the course of the “Discourse,” presenting a compelling case for reading the divine attributes as the divine persons at this juncture (see Strobel, Jonathan Edwards’s Theology, 23–71, 234–42).
33. Edwards, “Discourse on the Trinity,” WJE, 21:133. See also 21:132–34.
34. For discussion of the relationships between the divine attributes, divine essence, and divine persons in Edwards, and how Edwards’s quite unusual commitment to divine simplicity compares to that of his favorites Turretin and Mastricht and others, see especially (and the literature cited by) Crisp, “Jonathan Edwards on the Trinity”; Phillip Hussey, “Jonathan Edwards’s God: Simply Relational or Relationally Simple?” (unpublished paper, 2016), 1–27; Sabastian Rehnman, “Is the Distinction Between Natural and Moral Attributes Good? Jonathan Edwards on Divine Attributes,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 27, no. 1 (2010): 57–78; and Strobel, Jonathan Edwards’s Theology, 234–42. Seng-Kong Tan argues that Edwards adopts Turretin’s “mediating” understanding of the Son as autotheos (Seng-Kong Tan, Fullness Received and Returned: Trinity and Participation in Jonathan Edwards [Minneapolis: Fortress, 2014], 5-7, 357-58).
35. For further discussion of how the Son functions as the divine greatness for the goodness of the Spirit throughout the scope of Edwards’s theology, see Joseph C. Williamson, “The Excellency of Christ: A Study in the Christology of Jonathan Edwards” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1968), 67–119.
36. Edwards, “Discourse on the Trinity,” WJE, 21:136.
37. Ibid., 134. WJE editor’s brackets.
38. I am grateful to Ivor Davidson, the late John Webster, and Steven Duby for their conversations during the writing of this chapter.