THEOLOGY IN THE GAZE OF THE FATHER
Retrieving Jonathan Edwards’s Trinitarian Aesthetics
KYLE C. STROBEL
THIS CHAPTER OUTLINES Jonathan Edwards’s understanding of beauty for contemporary dogmatics.1 It falls into two parts. First, Edwards’s doctrine of God is outlined and developed, focusing on the inner relations of the triune God. Second, building on this initial discussion, a retrieval of Edwards’s doctrine is considered. I suggest that Edwards’s conception of beauty is fruitful to ground the task of trinitarian theology as a distinctively affective discipline. Knowledge of the God who is beautiful requires a relational movement of the heart to know and love within the movement of God’s self-revelation. In short, Edwards’s trinitarian aesthetics grounds theology as a contemplative discipline, ordered by the God of beauty, for the purpose of beauty. True theology is, as it were, sapiential theology; the task of “faith seeking beautification” as it is faith captivated by beauty.
DOCTRINE OF GOD
For Edwards, God is the fountain of all things, and therefore all flows from him and ultimately back to him (emanation and remanation respectively). In Edwards’s conception, God is not so loquacious as he is luminescent. Creation certainly pours forth speech, as the Psalmist declares (Ps 19), but it is written by the effusive overflow of God’s beauty. This speech is seen and not heard (or only heard as it is seen). The visual takes precedence in Edwards’s theology because of his doctrine of God, his understanding of the beatific vision, and its orientation for faith. One day believers will see “face to face” (1 Cor 13:12), so the spiritual sight of faith is the anticipation — through a glass darkly — of God’s beatific glory.
Edwards’s doctrine of God has three interrelated emphases: personhood, employing a psychological analogy;2 perception, as the Father gazes upon his perfect image and understanding; and affection, the flowing forth of the Holy Spirit as the will and love of God. By making personhood central, Edwards can emphasize the God of eternal beatific glory, the real focus of his account. In language I believe Edwards would have approved, his doctrine of God can adequately be called religious affection in pure act.3 This description assumes personhood, but the focus is elsewhere. Note how Edwards begins his work on the Trinity:
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.4
Edwards’s God is the God of happiness whose inner life is effusive love and perfection. This God has his own image ever before him, and a “pure and perfect energy” of love, complacence, and joy pours forth in an infinite fountain of delight. The architecture of this view is the beatific vision, functioning to exposit the God of religious affection. By invoking personhood in the manner he does, God the Father becomes pure mind, but only partakes in personhood perichoretically through the generation of the divine understanding and will — both necessary features of personhood.5
A BEAUTIFUL MIND
In Edwards’s musings on the mind, he develops a notion of excellency as an aesthetic category and reveals his notion of beauty with its specifically pneumatological focus:
As to God’s excellence, it is evident it consists in the love of himself . . . he exerts himself towards himself no other way than in infinitely loving and delighting in himself, in the mutual love of the Father and the Son. This makes the third, the personal Holy Spirit or the holiness of God, which is his infinite beauty, and this is God’s infinite consent to being in general. And his love to the creature is his excellence, or the communication of himself, his complacency in them, according as they partake of more or less of excellence and beauty; that is, of holiness, which consists in love; that is, according as he communicates more or less of his Holy Spirit.6
Here, void of the technical discussion of the processions, Edwards invokes psychological imagery, expositing the Spirit as the holiness, love, and beauty of God. As Edwards notes in the “Discourse on the Trinity” itself, “A mind is said to be holy from the holiness of its temper and disposition. . . . As all creature[ly] holiness is to be resolved into love, as the Scripture teaches us, so doth the holiness of God himself consist in infinite love to himself. God’s holiness is the infinite beauty and excellency of his nature. And God’s excellency consists in his love to himself.”7 Likewise, when arguing that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit all share the same honor, Edwards writes, “The honor of the Father and the Son is that they are infinitely excellent, or that from them infinite excellency proceeds. But the honor of the Holy Ghost is equal, for he is that divine excellency and beauty itself.”8
In mooring his account to the happiness and delight of God, Edwards develops the procession of the divine idea, first offering the qualification, “Though the divine nature be vastly different from that of created spirits, yet our souls are made in the image of God: we have understanding and will, idea and love, as God hath, and the difference is only in the perfection of degree and manner.”9 God is infinite, and therefore he exists in simplicity and pure act. Nonetheless, this does not mean that it is somehow meaningless to talk about God understanding and willing. God is love, a notion that grounds plurality within God as an essential feature of his life. If God is love, then God must have an object of his loving. This object is the divine idea or understanding. Because God is a simple being in pure act, his self-knowledge is a procession of the divine essence, leading Edwards to claim, “I do suppose the Deity to be truly and properly repeated by God’s thus having an idea of himself; and that this idea of God is a substantial idea and has the very essence of God, is truly God, to all intents and purposes, and that by this means the Godhead is really generated and repeated.”10 As a spiritual, infinite, and eternal being, this idea creates a duplication of the divine essence.11
Up to this point Edwards has described the Father, or the divine mind, and the proceeding forth of the divine understanding. Now, he states, “there proceeds a most pure act, and an infinitely holy and sweet energy arises between the Father and Son: for their love and joy is mutual, in mutually loving and delighting in each other.”12 Edwards continues, “This is the eternal and most perfect and essential act of the divine nature, wherein the Godhead acts to an infinite degree and in the most perfect manner possible. The Deity becomes all act; the divine essence itself flows out and is as it were breathed forth in love and joy.”13 The pure actuality of God’s life is the procession of the Spirit as the divine will, love, holiness, and beauty. Edwards explains how these processions end up grounding the relations within the Godhead:
though the Holy Ghost proceeds both from the Father and the Son, yet he proceeds from the Father mediately by the Son, viz. by the Father’s beholding himself in the Son. But he proceeds from the Son immediately by himself by beholding the Father in himself. The beauty and excellency and loveliness of the divine nature, though from the Father first and originally, yet is by the Son and nextly from him. The joy and delight of the divine nature is in the Father by the Son, but nextly and immediately in the Son.14
Troubled by anti-trinitarian subordination, Edwards wants to protect the Son’s dignity and equality. Whereas the Spirit flows forth from the Father originally, it does so by the mediation of the Son. The Son’s act in the procession of the Spirit is secondary, but immediate. “For though it be from the Son by his beholding the Father,” Edwards explains, “yet he beholds himself in himself.” The Son’s gazing upon the Father “is nothing else but his existing: for ’tis nothing else for an idea of a thing to behold that thing that it beholds, but only for an idea to exist. The idea’s beholding is the idea’s existing.”15 The Son’s very existence is his beholding of the Father, and embracing that the Father is in him, and he is of the Father.
Edwards’s account struggles (and he recognized this) to turn the corner from one divine mind with understanding and will, to three divine persons partaking of one singular divine essence. It is here that Edwards turns to perichoresis, asserting, “the whole divine essence is supposed truly and properly to subsist in each of these three — viz. God, and his understanding and love — and that there is such a wonderful union between them that they are after an ineffable and inconceivable manner one in another; so that one hath another, and they have communion in one another, and are as it were predicable of one another.”16 He continues, “the Father understands because the Son, who is the divine understanding, is in him. The Father loves because the Holy Ghost is in him. So the Son loves because the Holy Spirit is in him and proceeds from him. So the Holy Ghost, or the divine essence subsisting in divine love, understands because the Son, the divine idea, is in him.”17
Furthermore, in God’s self-revelation in Jesus, his image, he is doing more than simply passing along information about himself. God is beautiful, and in the Son and Spirit beautifies his people by harmonizing them with his own life of beauty. This entails communion with the Father, in the Son, by the Spirit, and as such is a partaking of God’s love, holiness, and beauty.18 The Father and Son exist within the Spirit as the bond of love — a bond that exists as the affection and pure action of the divine mind. In the economy this love overflows to the elect, and by receiving the Spirit believers receive God’s own holiness, love, and beauty — an infusion, Edwards tells us, that reorients the human person by pulling them up within the divine life.19
In this account, Edwards ends right where he begins — with a God who is infinite happiness, delight, and joy. God’s life is, as it were, the truly religious life; God’s life is one of affection, delight, and the vision that “happifies.” God is the great contemplative, we can say, captivated with truth divine by consenting in union with Truth itself — the Logos. As Edwards claims, God’s excellency “is the highest theme that ever man, that ever archangels, yes, that ever the man Christ Jesus, entered upon yet; yea, it is that theme which is, to speak after the manner of men, the highest contemplation, and the infinite happiness, of Jehovah himself.”20 God’s life serves as the archetype for perfect knowledge and therefore casts knowledge in a specifically affectionate and contemplative mold. This is why religious affection is a central issue for Edwards’s understanding of Christian life, knowledge, and conversion. To know God, one must know him as God knows himself — by gazing upon his perfect image in the affection and beauty of the Spirit.
While the preceding emphasis on perception and affection assumes beauty, we still have not defined it. Here, briefly, it is necessary to hone in on Edwards’s definition of beauty and excellency. In his work on religious affection, Edwards claims that “God is God, and distinguished from all other beings, and exalted above ’em, chiefly by his divine beauty, which is infinitely diverse from all other beauty.”21 Edwards’s conception of beauty entails a description of God’s own life, a life that is, in some sense, sui generis. This is why divine beauty is “infinitely diverse” from other notions of beauty. Yet beauty is the very category Edwards utilizes to link humanity to the life of God.22 Beauty is, in some sense, the common ground between God and his creatures; the difference is the degree of virtue and greatness of being — concepts linked in Edwards’s thought.23
God is beautiful, therefore, as he is personal and as he partakes in the “consent, agreement and union of being to being” within his own life.24 Primary beauty, what Edwards will also call spiritual beauty, is persons uniting in love.25 Spiritual beings are the primary instance of beauty, whereas physical beauty points beyond itself to the primary.26 Edwards takes it for granted that “this is an universal definition of excellency: The consent of being to being, or being’s consent to entity. The more the consent is, and the more extensive, the greater is the excellency.”27 Consent, as will become clear, is a work of the will within persons to unite personally to another. In nature, by contrast, the phenomenon of union or agreement happens among objects, shapes, and so on.28 Recall the threefold focus of Edwards’s doctrine of God: personhood, perception, and affection; these are all key attributes of beauty. Edwards’s God is the God of beauty, within his own life, because he is the pure actuality of persons perceiving in the consent of love. On this understanding, for God to be beautiful, God has to be triune. As Edwards states explicitly:
One alone, without any reference to any more, cannot be excellent; for in such case there can be no manner of relation no way, and therefore, no such thing as consent. Indeed, what we call “one” may be excellent, because of a consent of parts, or some consent of those in that being that are distinguished into a plurality some way or other. But in a being that is absolutely without any plurality there cannot be excellency, for there can be no such thing as consent or agreement.29
This is why the Spirit is the beauty of God. Beauty, properly perceived, is consent, proportion, and affection, and the type and degree of beauty is determined by the nature of the being’s consenting. The Spirit is the consent of the divine life and the infinite proportion of love between Father and Son. This is divine beauty, the infinite consent of love as the pure actuality of God’s life. Edwards outlines this life of love accordingly:
There must have been an object from all eternity which God infinitely loves. But we have showed that all love arises from the perception, either of consent to being in general, or consent to that being that perceives. Infinite loveliness, to God, therefore, must consist either in infinite consent to entity in general, or infinite consent to God. But we have shown that consent to entity and consent to God are the same, because God is the general and only proper entity of all things. So that ’tis necessary that that object which God infinitely loves must be infinitely and perfectly consenting and agreeable to him; but that which infinitely and perfectly agrees is the very same essence, for if it be different it don’t infinitely consent. Again, we have shown that one alone cannot be excellent, inasmuch as, in such case, there can be no consent. Therefore, if God is excellent, there must be a plurality in God; otherwise, there can be no consent in him.30
God’s pure actuality is the Spirit’s consenting spiration, serving as the union between Father and Son. As an infinite being of virtue existing as the pure actuality of the Spirit’s consent between Father and Son, God is infinite beauty. The infinite greatness of the divine being, the pure actuality of God’s goodness and love, and his infinite consent as the procession of the Spirit establishes God’s life of beauty. By locating beauty in the procession of the Spirit, Edwards binds beauty together with goodness, holiness, love, and consent. As the foundation and fountain of these realities, the Spirit’s work in the economy carries these over to creatures. By having this Spirit one is now in a relation of beauty with God that requires affection and contemplation to be true knowledge of God. As holiness itself, infused into the nature of a person, the Spirit creates freedom to consent in affection, in ever greater and greater ways, to the life of God.
SPIRITUAL KNOWLEDGE AND THE WAY OF BEAUTY
By embracing a notion of beauty as being’s consent to being, the archetype of which is God’s own life, Edwards casts spiritual knowledge into the mold of this trinitarian beauty. To know God is to be caught up in a vision of the Son in the union of the Spirit, just as in the archetype. The Reformed of this period employed the archetypal/ectypal distinction to uphold the Creator/creature distinction, but also to delineate the task of theology as a distinctively relational enterprise.31 All knowledge of God sifted into the two broad categories of archetypal (God’s self-knowledge) and ectypal (any creaturely knowledge of God). For the Reformed High Orthodox, ectypal knowledge was often broken down into three categories, knowledge by union, pilgrim knowledge, and beatific knowledge.32 Jesus has knowledge of God by union, believers have pilgrim knowledge of God, and the glorified saints will have a beatific knowledge of God in glory.33
Even though knowledge by faith (pilgrim) and knowledge by vision (beatific) were separate categories, that did not stop Reformed thinkers from orienting the knowledge by faith to the knowledge by vision. The visual is emphasized by many Reformed thinkers for this very reason: pilgrim knowledge was heading somewhere, and the destination formed the mode of the journey. John Owen claims that “no man shall ever behold the glory of Christ by sight hereafter, who doth not in some measure behold it by faith here in this world.”34 Faith is a kind of beholding for Owen, and he is clear that the spiritual sight believers have in this world is exactly that, a kind of sight. Edwards, perhaps more than his fellow Reformed theologians, merged the pilgrim with the beatific, so that regeneration places a person on a beatific journey that never ceases. In Edwards’s case, the barrier between pilgrim and beatific collapses, and each category merges with the other. In Edwards’s thought, all spiritual knowledge is a form of vision, and all vision entails a pilgrimage into the never-ceasing fountain of God’s beauty.
By employing the archetypal/ectypal distinction, the later Reformed were able to affirm that only God has perfect knowledge of himself. But this does not somehow make knowledge of God impossible. Archetypal knowledge gives the form and orientation for all ectypal knowledge — a form that becomes decisively Christocentric. In the condescension of the Logos, the image of the invisible God, human persons can truly know God. For Edwards, archetypal knowledge is necessarily affectionate, as the Father gazes upon the Son and the Spirit billows forth between them as love. Therefore, there is no true knowledge of God that is not affectionate, because ectypal knowledge takes on the contours of the archetypal. Heaven is a world of love, as Edwards never tired of saying, because God is the fountain of love at its center. The vision of God’s beauty fuels this world of love and captivates the hearts of all who have eyes to see. This is the darkened vision of faith that drives religious affection in sanctification, and, necessarily, will be the form of all theological work.35
Ectypal knowledge, formed according to the pattern of the archetype, is knowledge in love, and knowledge that beautifies. According to this pattern, something is known as it is perceived, and right perception necessitates a movement of the heart to embrace in beauty. Truth, then, is the foundation for goodness and beauty, both of which flow forth from the perception of the “true” (understanding that the “true” here is being itself, i.e., God). This is the baseline for Edwards’s doctrine of illumination, religious affection, virtue, and the beatific vision. Just as the Father’s self-knowledge is the procession of the Son, known affectively within the Holy Spirit, so also is all ectypal knowledge known in the Son by the Holy Spirit. Edwards claims, “Jesus Christ, who alone sees immediately, [is] the grand medium of the knowledge of all others; they know no otherwise than by the exhibitions held forth in and by him.”36 In Christ, believers gaze on the finite, created image of the infinite, uncreated Logos that the Father gazes upon eternally. Both Father and believers gaze upon the Son within the Spirit; both, within that same Spirit, experience the emanating forth of the divine idea in the clear perception of truth, which the Father knows immediately and infinitely, and believers know mediately and finitely in the Son.
GAZING UPON THE SON
Ectypal theology establishes a specifically christological mediation of all knowledge of God. By casting knowledge of God into this ectypal mold, knowledge of God takes on the contours established by God’s interpersonal knowing as pure, infinite mind. God is known relationally, and therefore God is only known in the loving union of the Spirit. In this specifically relational register, Edwards unveils that “being’s consent to being” is synonymous with “mind’s love to mind.”37 Just as the future vision of God entails knowing as you are known (cf. 1 Cor 13:12), so does all knowledge of God entail a reciprocal self-knowledge. The way of wisdom necessitates knowledge of God and knowledge of self in relation to God. True wisdom is to know oneself in a certain kind of relation to the Father in the Son, knowing the Father in the Son by the Spirit with a new identity, and being wrapped up in the beauty of God that beautifies.
God’s infinite beauty is his infinite love to himself, and this beauty is the pattern of all, such that the perfection of creatures is perfection in the beauty and love of God.38 As noted above, beauty is cast in a trinitarian mode because it is the procession of the Spirit to bind the Father and Son together in love.39 As archetypal knowledge, God’s own self-knowledge is knowledge within beauty and love: “As to God’s excellence, it is evident it consists in the love of himself. . . . But he exerts himself towards himself no other way than in infinitely loving and delighting in himself, in the mutual love of Father and the Son. This makes the third, the personal Holy Spirit or the holiness of God, which is his infinite beauty, and this is God’s infinite consent to being in general.”40 This reality of God’s inner life establishes the pattern of the economy. Jesus is the one beheld as “Son” by the Father in the Spirit of love, and Jesus is the Son deemed beautiful as he is caught up in the beautifying knowledge of God, a knowledge of who the Father is and who he is in relation to the Father.
Just as the Father gazes upon the Son in the Spirit in the inner life of God, so too in the economy; but now this gaze provides the context for our theologizing. In Matthew’s account of Jesus’ baptism we are told that “as soon as Jesus was baptized, he went up out of the water. At that moment heaven was opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased” (Matt 3:16 – 17). The heavens were open to Jesus, a comment claiming more, no doubt, than the parting of clouds. The Father calls from heaven that this is his Son whom he loves, in whom he has pleasure, while the Spirit descends like a dove to rest on Jesus.41
According to Edwards’s understanding, the dove is the Holy Spirit as the pleasure and belovedness of the Father’s gaze upon his Son. In this scene, sonship and beauty are wrapped together in one. This picture in the economy images the processions, such that the Father gazes upon the Son with the Spirit of love binding them together. We, however, stand on the other side of Jesus. We look upon the one who has the heavens open to him, and if we have seen him we have seen the Father.42 This sight is only possible within the Spirit, because true sight of Jesus is not passive gazing, but necessitates a movement of the whole person.43 The Spirit both illumines Christ and reveals him as beautiful. To see Jesus truly, therefore, is to see Jesus for me. This entails the recognition that Jesus is the one sent from God, he is the true Son, as well as the recognition that he is beautiful. In the self-revelation of God in his Word, we can proclaim, with Psalm 27: “One thing I ask from the LORD, this only do I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to gaze on the beauty of the LORD and to seek him in his temple” (Ps 27:4). In Christ we are caught up in the temple of the Lord, dwelling with him all the days of our lives, to gaze upon his beauty. In him we are partakers of the beauty that binds him with the Father, as Jesus prayed, “that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us” (John 17:21).
As the Father beholds his Son in the pleasure of his Spirit, so too do we gaze on the Son in the Spirit. There is a symmetry made apparent in the sending of his image that the Father beholds from all eternity. In this Spirit “we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit” (2 Cor 3:18). But we are not only external to the Son, captivated by a vision of his life and beauty, but we are bound up in his life by the Spirit. We do not remain external to the beauty that captivates us, but we are made beautiful as we partake in his beauty.
Along these lines, Edwards notes that in the economy there is a new image of the Trinity that emerges: the Son takes the place of the Father, and the church takes the place of the Son.44 The Spirit is the same Spirit of beauty and holiness that binds them together in love. As in the immanent Trinity, so in the economy; the Son as Father pours forth love to the church, in whom he sees himself. The church, in the place of the Son, pours forth the consenting love of the Spirit as she sees herself caught up in the life of God. But this image only goes so far. In being united to the Son, the church is ushered before the Father in Christ’s priestly office, so she knows that, in Jesus’ words, “the Father himself loves you because you have loved me and have believed that I came . . . from the Father and entered the world” (John 16:27 – 28) and that “I am in My Father, and you are in me, and I am in you” (John 14:20). In his ascension, “Christ did not enter a sanctuary made with human hands that was only a copy of the true one; he entered heaven itself, now to appear for us in God’s presence” (Heb 9:24).
Christ is the one to whom we consent in the beauty and love of the Spirit, a beauty and love that first embraces us: “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19).45 In being embraced by Christ, we are united with the Father in a filial union of love within the Son and by his Spirit. We are children wrapped up in the life of the Son as we have the Spirit, such that we spiritually appraise all things and have the very mind of Christ (1 Cor 2:14 – 16). Our call is not simply to gaze on the beauty of Christ, to see Christ as beautiful, but to be caught up into this beauty itself — that our whole being would consent to his, and that we would partake in his filial relationship with the Father. A believer’s identity as “child” and the beauty she partakes in are bound together in the life of the Son, and therefore must be bound together in the work of Christian rationality. What unfolds from this is an understanding of Christian rationality caught up in the grace of God. Theology, in this mode, is sapiential theology — theology done within and by the gaze of the Father on his people within his Son; it is here that we say, “in the sight of God we speak in Christ” (2 Cor 2:17). In the Son, the church hears that this is my beloved child in whom I am well pleased, and therefore theological proclamation reverberates in response to this Word.46
BECOMING BEAUTIFUL: THE CALL OF THE THEOLOGIAN
With this as our backdrop, it is now possible to focus on retrieving something of Edwards’s doctrine. It is not imperative that we employ every aspect of what Edwards was trying to do. Retrieving doctrine, as I am suggesting here, is not to recreate a mosaic piece by piece, but rather to take the large image and abstract it away from its individual tiles. This should be done, I believe, in a way that is not foreign to Edwards’s account, but we should not hesitate to leave aside some of the idiosyncratic notions that are gratuitous for our purpose. Rather than retrieving Edwards’s aesthetics for its own sake, therefore, I assess his trinitarian aesthetics to help outline the task of the theologian. Depicting beauty as he does requires a specific kind of relation between the knower and the known, and it is this relation I am looking to retrieve.
So what is the overarching image of this mosaic? It is a vision of the beautiful known through spiritual sight in the Son by the uniting love and holiness of the Spirit. This pushes the theological task into a distinctively affective and contemplative mode, as it is moored in the affection and contemplation of the Son. Therefore, more narrowly, theology is understood as the task of the human person coram deo; recognizing that theologizing in the presence of God is always also within the gaze of God.47 Faith seeking beautification is faith working within the love of God as you are caught up within God’s own beauty. It is not an extrinsic gazing on a God beautiful but distant, but the recognition that God’s beautifying gaze is the foundation of your identity and being. Within the beautifying gaze of God we find the call for sapiential theology, locating the task of the theologian within the harmony of God’s life, for the harmony of God’s church in the world. By focusing on beauty, the emphasis rests on the movement of the whole person to God (rather than the intellect or will alone); by focusing on beautifying, the emphasis is on theological knowledge as spiritual knowledge (knowledge in the Spirit), and entails a new identity as one who now knows God as he knows himself (but through the limitations of our creatureliness).
For the remainder of this paper, therefore, let me use three biblical terms to describe the gaze in which we work. God beholds his people as children, as bride, and as saints. “Sapiential theology,” as noted above, requires that this is not simply true of God’s perception, but that the theologian is the one coming to know herself within the truth of these identifiers as well; faith seeking beautification requires this. To receive the truth of this gaze, we could say, means that we must receive it along the same contours as Christ — knowing ourselves as those known by the Father. This is more than imitation, but is knowing the Father in the Son, and knowing oneself in the Son as well. This kind of knowledge is upheld in the love of the Spirit, just as one’s threefold identity as child, bride, and saint is upheld in the union of love with the Son.
We could contrast this with what we might call “disciple theology,” which is the rationalism of fundamentalism.48 This is pre-ascension theology — theology done without the high priestly work of Christ.49 I call it disciple theology because it depends on extrinsic or what Edwards would call “natural” rationality, and it is pre-ascension theology because it fails to recognize the shift in identity that takes place in the ascension. In the ascension, believers radically shift from disciples to adopted children, bride, and saints.50 In other words, this kind of theology is purely rationalistic without an overarching call of contemplation; it is not caught up in the life of God but remains external to his grace. What follows, by contrast, is a brief explication of this threefold form of sapiential theology: theology as children who proclaim “Abba, Father”; theology as the bride affectionately beholding her lover; and theology as saints that inseparably binds theology and spirituality together.51 These are not three separate forms of theology or somehow distinct in their own right, but are three angles of one ultimate reality. In other words, doing theology in the gaze of the Father requires that one is knowing and being known, both by God and oneself, as child, bride, and saint.52
CHILDREN
Sapiential theology cannot be done on different grounds than God’s self-presentation in Christ, as if we are ushered before the cross for salvation and are sat down at a desk for theology. In salvation, the sonship of the Son is broken open to believers to partake in the life of the Son before the Father. This is why God sends the Son; he was on a “sonly” mission. Furthermore, the procession of the Logos is the Image of God in the incarnation who can claim that “anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). The Word sent forth in the economy reveals the Father, as the image of the invisible God, and true sight in faith is a real partaking of the Son’s own knowledge of God. Like the archetype, the ectype always ties together sonship with love and beauty. The Son stands in a filial relation to the Father that defines him. In the economy, it is Jesus’ identity as Son that is primary. He is the antitype of Israel, who was originally deemed God’s son called out of Egypt (Matt 2:15). He is the Son declared beloved at his baptism (Matt 3:16 – 17). He is the Son of man who has existed from eternity past at the right hand of God (Dan 7:13 – 14). His sonship in the economy is an extension of his filial identity in the immanent Trinity. Likewise, it is Jesus’ sonship that is broken open in adoption for believers to partake in his nature (2 Pet 1:4).
To embrace the call of the theologian is to grasp one’s identity as a child of the Father within Jesus’ sonship: knowing oneself as raised and ascended with the one who is at the right hand of God. After the resurrection, when believer’s lives are understood to be “hidden with Christ in God” (Col 3:3), they are no longer referred to as disciples, but as children and saints. Jesus’ immediate divine knowledge did not translate over into a rabbi with an incredible CV and reference (i.e., the Father);53 rather, the divine knowledge is revealed in the Son as the Son. This is not a contingent form of the economy, but a necessary feature of God’s immanent life. To know this God, one must share the filial relation of the Son to the Father — explicated in Scripture with the related images of adoption and marriage. The theologian, in this sense, is one who knows themselves within the filial gaze of God; she is the one who hears this is my beloved child in whom I am well pleased, and in response proclaims “Abba, Father.” To know God as my God, one must know God as Father and themselves as child. This is the proper ground for theological reflection, because it is here that one is caught up within the beauty of God to proclaim the truth of this beauty from within.
BRIDE
The second delineation overlaps significantly with the first. The soteriological frameworks of adoption and marriage share the same family emphasis, but marriage shifts the metaphor to a more erotic register. For our purpose, this is a helpful place to ground the distinctively affective nature of the theological task. For Edwards, knowledge is bound together in love, but what this binding reveals is that God is beautiful and beautifying.54 This means that the theologian’s primary task is a spiritual task; it is, as Paul says, a task of spiritual appraisal — as those who have “the mind of Christ” (1 Cor 2:10 – 16). Ectypal theology is spiritual theology, and as such, it is theology in the relation of beauty — of mind consenting to mind in love — and is distinctively affective.55
Affective knowledge is a way to speak meaningfully about the holistic nature of the theological task.56 The ascent of knowledge is, necessarily, an ascent into love, and any ascent into love is equally an ascent into beauty. To know beauty one must be caught up in it, consenting to it internally. As von Balthasar states so well, “Before the beautiful — no, not really before but within the beautiful — the whole person quivers. He not only ‘finds’ the beautiful moving; rather, he experiences himself as being moved and possessed by it.”57 Affectionate knowledge, in this sense, is captivated knowledge, but also, continuing in the sphere of beauty, it is deeply personal. As Calvin notes, “it is certain that man never achieves a clear knowledge of himself unless he has first looked upon God’s face, and then descends from contemplating him to scrutinizing himself.”58 This is more than an assent to truth, but the captivation of a lover, and entails the peace of one known as beloved.
In the sphere of beauty, and this is seen in the theologians who emphasize beauty, the adoption image tends to be superseded by the marital one. When the Son sends the Spirit, he is sending his love. The gaze of the Son upon his bride is not a passive gaze, but a generative one; the groom so loves the church that his love binds her to himself in a substantial union.59 Christian theology is done within this gaze, the gaze, Edwards notes, that leads one to conclude “that he, though Lord of the universe, is captivated with love to them, and has his heart swallowed up in them, and prizes ’em.”60 The work of the theologian, therefore, while still laborious, should be the labor of a poet, overcome with and by love, and therefore unable to keep silent.
The gaze of Christ upon his church creates the space to do theology in a sapiential mode — a mode that follows the contours of sonship and bride, and as we will see, saint.61 It is theology done while being captivated by the God without, and the realization that this God is within. The theologian’s foundation for herself is outside of herself, but includes the awareness that this God has descended to her depths. To be captivated by this God is to know the unity of beauty and love with knowledge, to proclaim with the Psalmist that “deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls; all your waves and breakers have swept over me” (Ps 42:7). It is within this interiority that one comes to grasp that God gives himself in his revelation, and to know God in this self-revelation is to be known in him (1 Cor 13:12).62
Theology done as bride is churchly theology that embraces Christ as the true lover of the Song of Songs, calling to the depths of the human person to be known, cherished, and captivated by God.63 This does not sanctify specific emotions — as if affection detailed the texture of specific existential responses to God, but is the calling forth of the whole person that can be only understood utilizing relational and erotic terminology.64 This focus orients theology to the call and formation of God through union to the Son in love.
SAINTS
The final aspect of the theologian’s identity within the gaze of God is saint. As Paul wrote to the delinquent church of Corinth, “To the church of God which is at Corinth, to those who have been sanctified in Christ Jesus, saints by calling” (1 Cor 1:2, pers. trans.). The theological task is only fully achieved as one is caught up in the harmony of God’s life, a harmony only possible by a deeply relational captivation of one’s heart. This is to be sanctified in Christ, the sanctified One. “Both the one who makes people holy [namely, Christ] and those who are made holy are of the same family” (Heb 2:11).65 Saintly theology, if I can put it that way, must not simply describe this reality from without, but from within. Edwards notes that “a true saint” is one who has his mind “captivated and engaged by what he views without himself,” in such a way that that reorients his identity around Christ. In his words, “to stand at that time to view himself, and his own attainments: it would be a diversion and loss which he could not bear, to take his eye off from the ravishing object of his contemplation.”66 Sapiential theology, therefore, is saintly theology; it is Christian rationality from within the holiness of the Spirit and the righteousness of Christ. This is theology that serves the spiritual integrity of life in God, all the while embracing its task as pilgrim-theology.67
Sapiential theology is a distinctively spiritual task that is caught up in the “beauty of holiness.” This means that Christian spirituality and theology are bound together, and to attempt one without the other is to destroy them both. In terms of theology, and this is evident everywhere in the academy, theology without spirituality becomes mapping exercises and a discussion of how theology should be done without actually getting around to doing it.68 The texture of this theology is from the outside looking in rather than from within for the sake of worship. For spirituality, again, the results are all too obvious. We are confronted with a spiritual impulse that is doctrinally ignorant and a practice that is random at best and sub-Christian at worst. Overall, as von Balthasar was so quick to note, “The impoverishment brought about by the divorce between the two spheres is all too plain; it has sapped the vital force of the Church of today and the credibility of her preaching of eternal truth.”69
Sapiential theology founded upon the trinitarian gaze of beauty and glory, two themes often found hand in hand, is a theology of contemplation.70 As such, sapiential theology, theology of the saints, is theology at prayer.71 It is contemplative because it seeks to set one’s “mind on things above” (Col 3:23), and it is prayerful because the “things above” are the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who have revealed themselves in the economy and called us into this life of love. Talking about classic works of ancient theology, von Balthasar notes, “Theology was, when pursued by men of sanctity, a theology at prayer; which is why its fruitfulness for prayer, its power to foster prayer, is so undeniable.”72 Theology in this register is known by its love and its ability to direct the church in love; it is not known by its credentials (although it may, in fact, have them). Like Paul, these theologians look at their own CVs and declare, “I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. . . . I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ” (Phil 3:8 – 9).73 In this way, saintly theology focuses on the truth that our status as saints is outside of ourselves, even though it is given over to us in the Spirit.74 As von Balthasar goes on to note:
True theology, the theology of the saints, with the central doctrines of revelation always in view, inquires, in a spirit of obedience and reverence, what process of human thought, what modes of approach are best fitted to bring out the meaning of what has been revealed. . . . Any intellectual procedure that does not serve this purpose is assuredly not an interpretation of revelation, but one that bypasses its true meaning and, therefore, an act of disobedience.75
CONCLUSION
In conclusion, sapiential theology can be described as being caught up in the grace of God such that one knows himself within the Lord.76 This movement into love is an embrace of the truth of God’s gaze — that we are seen and known as children, bride, and saints — and are therefore beautiful as we partake in his beautifying life. This puts contemplation at the heart of theology, so that the theological task is not simply faith seeking understanding, but faith seeking beautification. This is not a separate category of knowledge outside of our rationality, but is our rationality caught up in grace. This rationality entails a knowing and being known that is revealed in the life of the Son. The act of faith is an embrace of the Father in the Son by the Spirit so that faith seeks beautification, and beautification proclaims the goodness of the beloved.77 Theology before this God, therefore, must take on the posture it will take in eternity. To close, then, let me narrate this posture from Edwards’s own words:
All shall stand about the God of glory, the fountain of love, as it were opening their bosoms to be filled with those effusions of love which are poured forth from thence, as the flowers on the earth in a pleasant spring day open their bosoms to the sun to be filled with his warmth and light, and to flourish in beauty and fragrancy by his rays. Every saint is as a flower in the garden of God, and holy love is the fragrancy and sweet odor which they all send forth, and with which they fill that paradise. Every saint there is as a note in a concert of music which sweetly harmonizes with every other note, and all together employed wholly in praising God and the Lamb; and so all helping one another to their utmost to express their love of the whole society to the glorious Father and Head of it, and [to pour back] love into the fountain of love, whence they are supplied and filled with love and with glory. And thus they will live and thus they will reign in love, and in that godlike joy which is the blessed fruit of it, such as eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor hath ever entered into the heart of any in this world to conceive [cf. 1 Corinthians 2:9]. And thus they will live and reign forever and ever.78
1. Several people gave me helpful feedback on this article. Special thanks to Oliver Crisp, James Merrick, Jamin Goggin, Kent Eilers, and Ty Kieser.
2. Whereas this view assumes something like a psychological analogy in his development of the Trinity, it would be a mistake to categorize it as such. One of the reasons for this is that it is unclear, to me at least, that Edwards is employing an analogy at all. Edwards utilizes the category of personhood to delineate the threefold reality of the divine essence (something like mind, understanding, and will). But Edwards is clear that this is not an analogy. This is just what it means to be personal: God or human. Edwards claims, “Though the divine nature be vastly different from that of created spirits, yet our souls are made in the image of God: we have understanding and will, idea and love, as God hath, and the difference is only in the perfection of degree and manner.” Jonathan Edwards, “Discourse on the Trinity,” in Writings on the Trinity, Grace, and Faith (ed. Sang Hyun Lee, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 21; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 113. (Hereafter, volumes from the Yale edition will be listed “Y” with volume number [e.g., Y21], the name of the work, and then the page number.) While Edwards collapses God and humanity within the broad category of “personal creatures,” he reinforces his Creator/creature distinction through his use of infinity.
3. Oliver Crisp has argued, persuasively in my mind, that Edwards’s doctrine of God should be understood in light of the actus purus tradition. See Oliver Crisp, Jonathan Edwards on God and Creation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); idem, “Jonathan Edwards and the Divine Nature,” JRT 3 (2009): 175 – 201.
4. Y21, “Discourse on the Trinity,” 113.
5. I have dealt with this aspect of Edwards’s thought at length in my book, Jonathan Edwards’s Theology: A Reinterpretation (T&T Clark Studies in Systematic Theology; London: T&T Clark, 2013), esp. 23 – 71.
6. Y6, “The Mind,” 364.
7. Y21, “Discourse on the Trinity,” 123.
8. Ibid., 135.
9. Ibid., 113. Edwards makes this claim right after admitting that the divine understanding is well beyond our own reason, leading one to expect that what follows will be tentative. Edwards’s following claim, quoted above, is decisively less tentative than one might think. Elsewhere, Edwards does claim, “Thus we have briefly insisted upon the glorious — infinitely glorious — perfections of that God which we profess. All that we can say is but clouds and darkness to the reality: the attributes of God, these infinite perfections, cannot be set forth by the eloquence of an angel, much less by mortal tongue” (Y10, “God’s Excellencies,” 424). Likewise, Edwards utilizes the hidden and infinite nature of God’s life to argue that God is all the more beautiful because of these things, claiming that the more hidden the beauty, the more satisfying, and the more complex the beauty, the more hidden (Y6, “Beauty of the World,” 306).
10. Y21, “Discourse on the Trinity,” 114.
11. Notice Edwards’s turn to our own experience with spiritual ideas to buttress his point: “If a man had a perfect reflex or contemplative idea of every thought at the same moment or moments that that thought was, and of every exercise at and during the same time that that exercise was . . . and so through a whole hour: a man would really be two” (ibid., 116).
12. Ibid., 121.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., 143.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid., 133.
17. Ibid. Edwards admits that there is room to push back on his account, but he is able to simply ask, How does your account of God fare against mine? The orthodox, he notes, have always asserted one divine essence, along with one understanding and one will (see ibid., 134 – 135). If God has an understanding and a will, and if Edwards’s biblical material is convincing, this understanding was made incarnate in Jesus Christ, and this will is given over for believers to commune with God.
18. “This is the divine partaking or nature that we are made partakers of (II Pet. 1:4),” Edwards claims, “for our partaking or communion with God consists in the communion or partaking of the Holy Ghost” (ibid., 122).
19. “When men are regenerated and sanctified, God pours forth of his Spirit upon them, and they have fellowship or, which is the same thing, are made partakers with the Father and Son of their good, i.e. of their love, joy and beauty” (ibid., 124). The claim that God “pulls creatures up” into the divine life is my own language to describe this reality. This does not undermine the creature/Creator distinction, but should be read in terms of communion or fellowship.
20. Y10, “God’s Excellencies,” 417.
21. Y2, “Religious Affections,” 298 (my emphasis).
22. See Y10, “God’s Excellencies,” 415 – 435.
23. Roland A. Delattre, Beauty and Sensibility in the Thought of Jonathan Edwards: An Essay in Aesthetics and Theological Ethics (The Jonathan Edwards Classic Studies Series; Eugene, OR: Wiph & Stock, 1968), 30 – 35. For a critique of Delattre’s model, see Kin Yip Louie, The Beauty of the Triune God: The Theological Aesthetics of Jonathan Edwards (Princeton Theological Monograph Series; Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2013), 82 – 83. Edwards notes that “God’s beauty is infinitely more valuable than that of all other beings . . . viz. the degree of his virtue and the greatness of the being possessed of this virtue” (Y8, “True Virtue,” 551).
24. Y8, “True Virtue,” 561.
25. This is why the word “consent” is used, which is used in a way that directly relates to the will. In his notes on excellency, Edwards states, “When we spake of excellence in bodies, we were obliged to borrow the word ‘consent’ from spiritual things. But excellence in and among spirits is, in its prime and proper sense, being’s consent to being. There is no proper consent but that of minds, even of their will; which, when it is of minds toward minds, it is love, and when of mind towards other things it is choice. Wherefore all the primary and original beauty or excellence that is among minds is love, and into this may all be resolved that is found among them” (Y6, “The Mind,” 362).
26. Y8, “True Virtue,” 561 – 63.
27. Y6, “The Mind,” 336. Paul Ramsey notes, “God’s peculiar excellency is his ‘beauty within himself, consisting in being’s consent with his own being, or love of himself in his own Holy Spirit; whereas the excellence of others is in loving others, in loving God, and in the communications of his Spirit’ ”(Y8, “Edwards on Moral Sense,” 701).
28. Y8, “True Virtue,” 565.
29. Y6, “The Mind,” 337.
30. Y13, “Miscellanies 117: Trinity,” 283 – 84.
31. See Michael Scott Horton, Lord and Servant: A Covenant Christology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2005), 17; and Willem J. van Asselt, “The Fundamental Meaning of Theology: Archetypal and Ectypal Theology in Seventeenth-Century Reformed Thought,” WTJ 64 (2002): 325.
32. I explore a Reformed notion of the beatific vision in the chapter “Jonathan Edwards’s Reformed Doctrine of the Beatific Vision,” in Jonathan Edwards and Scotland (ed. Ken Minkema, Adriaan Neale, and Kelly van Andel; Edinburgh: Dunedin Academic, 2011), 171 – 88.
33. Francis Turretin uses the ectypal distinction to develop a threefold division in theology: natural, supernatural, and beatific. In his words, “the first is from the light of reason, the second from the light of faith, and third from the light of glory.” Francs Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology (ed. James T. Dennison; trans. George Musgrave Gige; Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1992), 1:5.
34. John Owen, The Glory of Christ (The Works of John Owen, vol. 1; ed. William H. Goold; London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1965), 288.
35. Note how Edwards orients knowledge by faith: “The knowledge which the saints have of God’s beauty and glory in this world, and those holy affections that arise from it, are of the same nature and kind with what the saints are the subjects of in heaven, differing only in degree and circumstances: what God gives them here, is a foretaste of heavenly happiness, and an earnest of their future inheritance” (Y2, “Religious Affections,” 133).
36. Y18, “Miscellanies 777, The Happiness of Heaven Is Progressive,” 428.
37. Y6, “The Mind,” 362. These are, of course, identical, but are made more personal with an explicit focus on “mind” and “love” rather than “being” and “consent.”
38. Ibid., 363. Perceiving being, Edwards continues to clarify, is the only proper being. Being, of course, is a term Edwards utilizes to describe God. God is persons, and therefore being itself is personal. Personal being, what Edwards sometimes calls simply “spirit” or “spiritual being,” is perceiving being — mind loving mind. The divine essence — true being — is the Father perceiving the Son and the Son perceiving the Father, and the infinite pure actuality of love and delight pouring forth between them.
39. “When the true beauty and amiableness of the holiness or true moral good that is in divine things, is discovered to the soul, it as it were opens a new world to its view. This shows the glory of all the perfections of God, and of everything appertaining to the divine being: for, as was observed before, the beauty of all arises from God’s moral perfection. . . . He that sees the beauty of holiness, or true moral good, sees the greatest and most important thing in the world, which is the fullness of all things, without which all the world is empty, no better than nothing, yea, worse than nothing. Unless this is seen, nothing is seen, that is worth the seeing: for there is no other true excellency or beauty. Unless this be understood, nothing is understood, that is worthy of the exercise of the noble faculty of understanding. This is the beauty of the Godhead, and the divinity of Divinity (if I may so speak), the good of the infinite Fountain of Good; without which God himself (if that were possible to be) would be an infinite evil: without which, we ourselves had better never have been; and without which there had better have been no being. He therefore in effect knows nothing, that knows not this: his knowledge is but the shadow of knowledge, or the form of knowledge, as the Apostle calls it” (Y2, “Religious Affections,” 273 – 74).
40. Y6, “The Mind,” 364.
41. David Bentley Hart insightfully notes, “a distinctively Christian understanding of beauty is contained in trinitarian theology, whose nature is intimated with exquisite brevity in the words of the Father at Christ’s baptism. The most elementary statement of theological aesthetics is that God is beautiful: not only that God is beauty or the essence and archetype of beauty, nor even only that God is the highest beauty, but that, as Gregory the Theologian says, God is beauty and also beautiful, whose radiance shines upon and is reflected in his creatures (Oration 28.30 – 31).” David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 177.
42. The Christ whom Edwards presents to his audience is the “excellent” Christ, recalling that excellence is an important aesthetic term. It is a position taken from a close meditation on Heb 1:3, which claims that Christ is the radiance of the Father’s glory and the exact representation of his nature. Christ himself, of course, affirmed that no one has ever seen the Father, but then qualifies this statement to claim that no one, except the one who is from God, referencing himself (John 6:46). Likewise, Jesus claims that anyone who has seen him, has seen the Father (14:9), and that eternal life is knowing both the Father and Jesus Christ whom he has sent (17:3). Christ is the revelation of God to his people, people with eyes but cannot see and ears but cannot hear. Just as Jesus healed the blind and the deaf, so too does the Spirit open ears and illuminate eyes to the spiritual depths of God’s revelation of himself in the Son. Believers truly see God the Father in the Son as they are caught up in the movement of the Spirit to bind them to the life of God. The pattern of God’s life is eternal and infinite happiness that is known and experienced within the pure actuality of love. God’s economy is an emanation of this life; that he might allow the beauty of his life to overflow to creation. In Edwards’s words, “How good is God, that he has created man for this very end, to make him happy in the enjoyment of himself, the Almighty, who was happy from the days of eternity in himself, in the beholding of his own infinite beauty: the Father in the beholding and love of his Son, his perfect and most excellent image, the brightness of his own glory; and the Son in the love and enjoyment of the Father. . . . ’Twas not that he might be made more happy himself, but that [he] might make something else happy; that he might make them blessed in the beholding of his excellency, and might this way glorify himself” (Y14, “Nothing upon Earth Can Represent the Glories of Heaven,” 153).
43. What I am thinking of here will follow along the trajectory of Matthew Levering’s exposition of Augustine: “In seeking to speak about the Trinity, who is the one God, Augustine at the same time seeks to remember and understand and love rightly, and in so doing to become what the trinitarian missions aim to make him, namely a participant in the trinitarian acts. The work of theological understanding, proceeding as it does from faith and love, cannot be separated from the movement of restoring and perfecting the imago dei. Put another way, theological understanding belongs within the context of supernatural friendship — and the restoration and perfection of the imago dei, which includes the intellectual acts of the soul, has to do with establishing and enhancing this spiritual friendship” (Matthew Levering, “Friendship and Trinitarian Theology: Response to Karen Kilby,” IJST 10 [2007]: 50).
44. “In this also there is a trinity, an image of the eternal Trinity; wherein Christ is the everlasting father, and believers are his seed, and the Holy Spirit, or Comforter, is the third person in Christ, being his delight and love flowing out towards the church” (Y13, “Miscellanies 104, End of the Creation,” 273).
45. Edwards notes that there is an ordering to seeing the loveliness of Christ and the love he has for them: “They don’t first see that God loves them, and then see that he is lovely; but they first see that God is lovely, and that Christ is excellent and glorious, and their hearts are first captivated with this view . . . and then, consequentially, they see God’s love; and great favor to them” (Y2, “Religious Affections,” 246).
46. With Barth, “Theology itself is a word, a human response; yet what makes it theology is not its own word or response but the Word which it hears and to which it responds. . . . In short, theology is not a creative act but only a praise of the Creator and of his act of creation — praise that to the greatest possible extent truly responds to the creative act of God.” Karl Barth, Evangelical Theology: An Introduction (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1963), 16 – 17.
47. This is to reject the notion that we can break up the disciplines of theology in various academic programs, sifting systematic, practical, moral, and spiritual theology in different directions. Rather, these are bound together in beauty, as they are caught up in God’s life. These aspects of theology are called to witness — to harmonize — with this beauty of God, a beauty that refuses to let the spiritual, practical, moral, and systematic part ways.
48. Ellen Charry argues, “Sapiential truth is unintelligible to the modern secularized construal of truth. Modern epistemology not only fragmented truth itself, privileging correct information over beauty and goodness, it relocated truth in facts and ideas. The search for truth in the modern scientific sense is a cognitive enterprise that seeks correct information useful to the improvement of human comfort and efficacy rather than intellectual activity employed for spiritual growth. Knowing the truth no longer implied loving it, wanting it, and being transformed by it, because the truth no longer brings the knower to God but to use information to subdue nature. Knowing became limited to being informed about things, not as these are things of God but as they stand (or totter) on their own feet. The classical notion that truth leads us to God simply ceased to be intelligible and came to be viewed with suspicion.” Ellen Charry, By the Renewing of Your Minds: The Pastoral Function of Christian Doctrine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 236.
49. Bernard claims that “the Son makes us disciples. The Paraclete comforts us as friends. The Father raises us up as sons. . . . The first teaches us like a master. The second comforts like a friend or brother. The third embraces us as a father does his sons.” Bernard of Clairvaux, Bernard of Clairvaux: Selected Works (New York: Paulist, 1987), 117. In this sense, because fundamentalist theology is pre-ascension, it is theology without the Spirit (hence its extrinsic rationalizing and biblicism).
50. This explains why Paul rejects, entirely, the word disciple. This does not mean that we rid ourselves of the term entirely, but only that we move it into the realm of ecclesiology. Discipleship, following Jesus’ command to make disciples of all nations, is a call to be the church and to call people into the church.
51. One might argue that this loosely follows Bernard’s division: “The first food, then, is humility. It purges by its bitterness. The second is the food of love, which consoles by its sweetness. The third is the food of contemplation, solid and strengthening” (ibid., 105). While humility, love, and contemplation serve as helpful glosses on child, bride, and saint respectively, I am not using them as a progression but as three angles of one united reality.
52. One of the advantages of the child and bride images is that they quickly reveal themselves to be communal rather than individual. By the time Paul starts writing, for instance, “brother” and “sister” were now the primary terms by which Christians recognized each other. In a similar sense, “bride” is a term referring to the church as a whole, thereby making it difficult to understand in an overly individualistic manner.
53. The language of CV is not arbitrary. Here, I am thinking of Philippians 2 and the descent of Christ. This is an important image against the backdrop of the Roman understanding of honor and status. The notion of CV might be the closest to depicting what Paul is representing here, as well as in the next chapter when he presents his own CV. The notions of cursus honorum vs. cursus pudorum come into play here. See Joseph Hellerman, Reconstructing Honor in Roman Philippi: Carmen Christi as Cursus Pudorum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
54. Since primary beauty is only available in the Spirit, the notion of beauty is inseparable with union, love, and holiness. Human persons are so constituted as to receive and be embraced by this reality of God’s life, and theology must mirror this. One of the problems with fundamentalist notions of theology is that they fail not only on the side of revelation (employing an overly reduced account of God’s self-giving) but also on the side of anthropology (assuming that humans are only rational agents).
55. “According to this model, the relation of trinitarian persons to one another, and the relation of God and humanity, are relations constituted by knowledge and love. Knowledge, like love, is a unitive force . . . thus knower is bound to known, love to the beloved, and knowledge and love are united to one another.” A. N. Williams, “ ‘Contemplation’ in Knowing the Triune God,” in Knowing the Triune God: The Work of the Spirit in the Practices of the Church (ed. James J. Buckley and David S. Yeago; Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 2001), 123.
56. What I am thinking about here is well articulated by von Balthasar: “Augustine and Bernard usually describe this dimension with the categories of the voluntative and the affective, as opposed to the purely intellectual and the theoretical, but this is only partly accurate. What an older theology so designated, for want of other categories, may be more correctly understood using the more central categories of the existential and the personal, which allow one to see the act of faith at its roots as the attitude and behaviour of the total person as determined by God and his revelation of grace. . . . Only when by ‘will’ and ‘affect’ we understand the engagement of the person in all his depth — only then does intellectual faith become a genuine answer to God’s disclosure of his depth as person; for God too does not primarily communicate ‘truths’ about himself, but rather bestows himself as absolute truth and love.” Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics; I. Seeing the Form (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2003), 165 – 66.
57. Ibid., 247. The notion of experiencing oneself within the beautiful is a particularly important notion here that will tie together the task of theology and spirituality.
58. John Calvin, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1.1.2.
59. As Balthasar notes, “God’s gaze is not passive (otherwise it would not be a divine gaze); he does not merely ‘read off’ or ascertain: his gaze is creative, generative, originative, by his utterly free decree.” Hans Urs von Balthasar, Prayer (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1955), 40.
60. Y2, “Religious Affections,” 245.
61. It is here where we might heed Luther’s warning against theologies of glory, by recalling that Christ’s life revealed both God and the harmonization of creaturely existence within the life of God. The disfigurement of the cross must serve as the gestalt-shift that reorients beauty, or, to continue to harmony metaphor, the cross must serve as the note discordant to the world but the very note that the human heart must harmonize with to embrace the depths of reality. The theological contemplation this leads to is not ecstasy, but to society. A vision of God’s presence and life does not take one’s eyes off of others and the world, but creates the space within which to love God and love neighbor. This kingdom always remains somewhat foreign, however harmonized to it we become, it still runs contrary to our orientation. To forget this is to open oneself up to the temptation to reject foolishness and embrace a wisdom without foundation in reality. As put by Mark McIntosh concerning theologians and academic culture, “The danger is that we will attempt to blend in all too well; we will master the academic and ecclesiastical arts so proficiently that people will not notice how outrageous is the subject of our work. We may even manage, perhaps without realizing it, to substitute for the outlandishness of the Christian faith, a gray orderliness in which nothing unexpected ever happens or ever could. Mark A. McIntosh, Divine Teaching: An Introduction to Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), 3 – 4.
62. For Edwards, this entails a knowledge of God pro nobis: “He is graciously present with them, and when they see him they see him and know him to be so. They have an understanding of his love to them; they see him from love manifesting himself to them” (Y17, “The Pure in Heart Blessed,” 64). The focus of Edwards’s thought here is that believers not only see and know God, but know him as love to them and for them.
63. “Theology, therefore, participates in a special manner in the bridal holiness of the Church.” This theology, according to von Balthasar, is a “dialogue between bride and bridegroom in the unity and communication of the Spirit.” Therefore, “the purpose of contemplation is to cause the life of the bride to be transformed: glory is the splendor of holiness, which is not only mirrored in the bride, but takes her up into the ‘metamorphoris.’ ” Hans Urs von Balthasar, Word and Redemption (New York: Herder and Herder, 1965), 78 – 79.
64. It is interesting that this kind of terminology, used so readily in the tradition, has fallen out of favor. It could be that theology needs an erotic corrective in order to break it out of its comfortable academic slumber. For an interesting counter to this trend, see Belden C. Lane, Ravished by Beauty: The Surprising Legacy of Reformed Spirituality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
65. Edwards argues that “Christ’s beauty, for which his person is delighted in and chosen, is especially his holiness” (Y21, “Notebook on Faith, 121,” 458). Similarly, then, the saintly nature of the theological task is directly related to the beauty of believers who are caught up within Christ’s beauty in his Spirit.
66. Y2, “Religious Affections,” 252 – 53. Edwards’s specific point here concerns discerning the nature of true affection, but the point is relatable here.
67. Pilgrim theology is not something to supersede, but to receive as grace. A theology of glory, in a negative sense, is a rejection of the pilgrim nature of theology. Barth helpfully reminds us of this when he states, “It should be remembered that our knowledge is achieved as a pilgrim theology in the light of grace and not of glory, in the light of the parousia of Jesus Christ.” Karl Barth, The Christian Life: Church Dogmatics, vol. 4, part 4: Lecture Fragments (trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley; London: T&T Clark, 1981), 8.
68. Admittedly, something that could be said about aspects of this chapter.
69. Von Balthasar, Word and Redemption, 65.
70. A. N. Williams argues, “Augustine’s conception of the knowledge of God . . . encompasses both theology and spirituality, because he portrays it as the fruit of contemplation. A contemplative knowledge does not seek to establish truth by hard-won deduction, but rather to nourish understanding and ‘enable it to rise up to the sublimities of divine things.’ ” A. N. Williams, “ ‘Contemplation’ in Knowing the Triune God,” 125.
71. Barth, one of the great prayerful theologians, writes, “Dogmatics is possible only as an act of faith, when we point to prayer as the attitude without which there can be no dogmatic work.” Karl Barth, CD I/1, 23. Likewise, “The old saying, Lex orandi lex credendi, far from being a pious statement, is one of the most profound descriptions of the theological method. . . . The free and true theologian lives from it. In the invocation, in the giving of thanks, and in the petition, this turnabout is realized and the theologian is allowed to live out the freedom of thought which he enjoys as a child of God.” Karl Barth, The Humanity of God (Richmond, VA: John Knox, 1963), 90. Barth’s beautiful chapter “Prayer” in his Evangelical Theology, 159 – 70, should also not be ignored.
72. Von Balthasar, Word and Redemption, 84. “As time went on, theology at prayer was superseded by theology at the desk, and this brought about the cleavage now under discussion. ‘Scientific’ theology became more and more divorced from prayer, and so lost the accent and tone with which one should speak of what is holy, while ‘affective’ theology, as it became increasingly empty, often degenerated into unctuous, platitudinous piety” (ibid., 85).
73. An important connection with Philippians 2, as noted above.
74. The saints, declares Balthasar, “never at any moment leave their center in Christ. They give themselves to their work in the world, while ‘praying at all times’ and ‘doing all to the glory of God’ (1 Thess 5:17; 1 Cor 10:31). . . . Their thinking is an act that is ultimately performed in the service of their faith, of Christ’s revelation, which is its norm and guiding principle” (von Balthasar, Word and Redemption, 68 – 69).
75. Ibid., 69 – 70. The saints “wish to contemplate nature with no other eyes than those of Christ. They have no desire to know God as simply ens a se, but solely as the Father of Christ; the Spirit, too, not as an abstract world of universal laws and prescriptions, but as the Spirit of the tongues of fire, the Spirit who breathes where he wills” (ibid., 81). “Their one desire is to be receptive, men of prayer in other words. Their theology is essentially an act of adoration and prayer. . . . Christian dogmatics must express the fact that one whose thinking is dictated by faith is in a constant relationship of prayer with its object” (ibid., 82).
76. This self-knowledge is imperfect, as Bernard will remind us, placing the fourth level of love as loving oneself for the sake of God. “Happy is he who has been found worthy to attain to the fourth degree, where man loves himself only for God’s sake.” Bernard of Clairvaux, Bernard of Clairvaux: Selected Works, 195.
77. It does not take much imagination to see how Edwards’s conception of the Trinity, beauty, and knowledge serve as the foundation for his great work on the religious affections. It should also be clear why, in that work and elsewhere, Edwards posits a “sense of the heart” that is necessary to have true spiritual knowledge. This sense is not based on new information the person did not have before, nor is it based on new physical sight. Rather, the sense of the heart calls out the texture of real personal knowledge of God. It is knowledge only known in love, because God’s archetypal knowledge is always knowledge known in love. Edwards claims, “From what has been said, therefore, we come necessarily to this conclusion, concerning that wherein spiritual understanding consists; viz. that it consists in a sense of the heart, of the supreme beauty and sweetness of the holiness or moral perfection of divine things, together with all that discerning and knowledge of things of religion, that depends upon, and flows from such a sense” (Y2, “Religious Affections,” 272). Religious affection, for Edwards, locates anthropology within the revelation of God’s triune life, by orienting the human person to knowledge of God qua beauty. In the processions God has perfect and immediate self-knowledge, but that self-knowledge is always known in love, beauty, and delight. This is the form of all true knowledge of God.
78. Y8, “Charity and Its Fruits,” 386.