¹ Edwards allowed himself to be called a Calvinist, as he said ‘for distinction's sake’, though he ‘utterly disclaimed a dependence on Calvin’, and did not feel that one could ‘justly’ charge him with ‘believing, just as he [Calvin] taught’. J. E., , Freedom of the Will, Ramsey, Paul, editor (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), p. 131Google Scholar. This is the edition of Edwards’ A Careful and Strict Enquiry into the Modern Prevailing Notions of that Freedom of Will Which is Supposed to be Essential to Moral Agency, Vertue and Vice, Rewards and Punishment, Praise and Blame (1754) which will be used in this exposition. (FW)

² Robert W. Jenson provides a trenchant discussion of ‘Arminianism’ in his recent study of Edwards. He explains that the ‘Arminianism’ with which Edwards contended does not, strictly speaking, correspond to the specific principles advocated by J. Arminius. Rather, it refers to ‘a religious and theological mood in which Arminius had been the most notorious instance in Puritan memory’. It was the name given in New England to the kind of popular religion that has appeared variously as ‘semi-Pelagianism’, ‘synergism’, or today as ‘American culture-religion’. ‘Arminianism’, he writes, ‘was Protestantism carried not by the Reformation's demand for greater fidelity to the gospel's radically upsetting promises, but by the exactly opposite concern that the promises not upset bourgeois satisfaction’. Jenson, R. W., America's Theologian: A Recommendation offonathan Edwards (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 53–55Google Scholar.

³ This expression of ‘Arminianism’ was typified for Edwards in writers such as Thomas Chubb, Daniel Whitby, John Taylor and George Turnbull.

⁴ J.E., FW, pp. 164–165. Edwards explains what he means by cause:‘The word is often used in so restrained a sense as to signify only that which has a positive efficiency or influence to produce a thing, or bring it to pass. But there are many things which have no such positive productive influence; which yet are causes in that respect, that they have truly the nature of a ground or reason why some things are, rather than others; or why they are as they are, rather than otherwise… Therefore I sometimes use the word “cause”, in this inquiry, to signify any antecedent, either natural or moral, positive or negative, on which an event, either a thing, or the manner and circumstances of a thing, so depends, that it is the ground and reason, either in whole, or in part, why it is, rather than not; or why it is as it is, rather than otherwise; or, in other words, any antecedent with which a consequent event is so connected, that it truly belongs to the reason why the proposition which affirms that event, is true; whether it has any positive influence, or not. And in an agreeableness to this, I sometimes use the word “effect” for the consequence of another thing, which is perhaps rather an occasion than a cause most properly speaking.’ FW, pp. 180–181. There is some similarity between Edwards and Hume in the manner in which each understood causation. However, too much should not be made of this. Edwards does not entirely depart from either Scholastic understandings of causation, nor from the more mechanistic notions of causation current in the previous century. He does wish, however, to broaden the range of phenomena which may be understood as causally connected, as becomes apparent in his application of causation to the moral sphere.

⁵ Cf. Ramsey, , ‘Ed. Intro.’, J.E., FW, p. 9Google Scholar.

⁶ Norman Fiering notes that George Lyon, the French historian, described Edwards' work as ‘essentially a philosophy of causality’, that causation is the pivot of his entire philosophical system. Fiering, , Jonathan Edwards' Moral Thought and Its British Context (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1981), p. 284 (JEMT)Google Scholar.

⁷ Winslow, Ola Elizabeth, Jonathan Edwards, 1703–1758 (New York: Collier, 1960), p. 274Google Scholar.

⁸ Fiering. JEMT, p. 277. Cf.J.E., ‘Miscellanies’, on ‘The Divine Decrees…’ in which Edwards' theological thought closely parallels Hobbes' Determinism: ‘The foreknowledge of Cod will necessarily infer a decree; for God could not foreknow that things would be, unless he had decreed they should be…’, in J.E., , The Works of President Edwards in Six Volumes, Reprint of the Worcester edition (London: Wibey and Putnam, 1843–1847), Vol. 2, pp. 522Google Scholar.

⁹ Edwards raises, independent of Hobbes, the issue of natural and moral determinism as being essential to the doctrines of God's foreknowledge, his eternal decrees, and the reliability of God's covenantal promises, FW, pp. 239–269. Cf.J.E., ‘Miscellanies’, No. 29; Cf. comments in Ramsey, ‘Ed. Intro’. FW, p. 36, Edwards' intention is to give the older Calvinist notion of the eternal decrees, original sin, limited atonement and the perseverance of the saints, a new philosophical grounding, see, FW, ‘Conclusion’, pp. 430ff. This was, in a sense, the apologetical aim behind much of Edwards' work in these treatises, to recommend to his colonial contemporaries (and his British readers) these doctrines of the older Calvinist creed set forth in a new philosophical framework.

¹⁰ Edwards, Jonathan, Original Sin, Holbrook, Clyde A., editor (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970)Google Scholar. The full title of the treatise is, The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended; Evidences of its Truth produced, and Arguments to the Contrary answered. It was published first in 1758, after Edwards' death. (OS).

¹¹ Edwards, Jonathan, A Dissertation on the Nature of True Virtue, in The Works of President Edwards, Vol. IIGoogle Scholar. The treatise was first published in 1765, but Edwards refers to it close to the end of Original Sin as lying completed and ready for publication. (TV).

¹² Edwards, Jonathan, Treatise on Grace, in Selections from the Unpublished Writings of Jonathan Edwards, of America, Grosart, Alexander B. (Edinburgh, 1865)Google Scholar. (TG). This work was published ‘for private circulation’ in Edinburgh over a hundred years after Edwards' death. The treatise apparently was written during his Stockbridge years, that is, at some time after 1751.

¹³ Edwards, Jonathan, A Dissertation Concerning the End for Which God Created the World in The Works of President Edwards, VoI. IGoogle Scholar. (DCE) The treatise was first published in 1765. Miller dates its beginning in the Spring of 1755. Miller, Perry, Jonathan Edwards (New York: Delta), p. 285Google Scholar.

¹⁴ Augustine, On Grace and Free Will, ch. 32. Cf. discussion of the Augustinian connection to Edwards in Ramsey, ‘Ed. Intro.’, FW, p. 41.

¹⁵ J.E., FVV, pp. 137ff.

¹⁶ This line of thought is, perhaps, most fully developed in the Edwards' TG, pp. 19–36.

¹⁷ See: Edwards, ‘Miscellanies’: in which he says that conversion is ‘nothing but God's causing such an alteration with respect to the mind's ideas of spiritual good’. Fiering, , J.E. 's Moral Thought, p. 290Google Scholar. See also, ‘Miscellanies’ No. 284 and 665.

¹⁸ See: Norman Fiering, ‘The Rationalist Foundations of Jonathan Edwards' Metaphysics’, Hatch, Nathan O. and Stout, Harry S., editors, Jonathan Edwards and the American Experience, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 73ffGoogle Scholar.

¹⁹ Edwards' foundational-coherentist approach is also discernible in his early papers such as ‘On Being’ and ‘The Mind’: Edwards, Jonathan, Scientific and Philosophical Writings, Anderson, Wallace E., editor (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), pp. 202–207Google Scholar; 332ff.

²⁰ Perry Miller, in particular, notes with great enthusiasm, this Edwardsian teaching. Miller does not perceive, however, the christological paucity of Edwards' anthropology, deriving, as Edwards insists, from humanity observed in isolation from divine grace, in light of its failure to obey the law and adequately to honor God. See: Miller, J.E., pp. 277–278. J.E., FW, pp. 109–110, where Edwards insists that humanity must be understood ‘in their own nature, without the interposition of divine grace’. He believes that grace can be divided from nature in such a way as to establish humanity's true nature as depraved in itself, aside from any gracious actions God may from time to time take to oppose humanity's sinful tendency. What is notably lacking in Edwards is the conception that humanity (and God) must be interpreted not in abstraction from grace, nor in terms of prior legal or philosophical assumptions, but in light of Jesus Christ, as Son of God and Son of Man.

²¹ In TV, Edwards elaborates on his understanding of sin. ‘All sin has its source from selfishness, or from self-love, not subordinate to a regard to being in general.’ TV, p. 64. ‘True virtue’, Edwards writes, ‘most essentially consists in BENEVOLENCE TO BEING IN GENERAL’ as opposed to any particular affections or benevolence for a portion only of being. Thus, sin is that lack of regard of being in general, that elevation of self-interests, or private benevolence or affections for only specific objects within the continuum of being, over being in general. TV, p. 8. Such a state of sin is closely related to a lack of ‘relish’ or ‘taste’ for ‘this beauty, consisting in general benevolence’. But this ‘relish’ is given by God. TV, pp. 12–13. True virtue, as that which is directly opposed to sinful partial benevolence, ‘chiefly consists in LOVE TO GOD; the Being of beings, infinitely the greatest and best’. TV, pp. 15ff.

²² Holbrook, Clyde, ‘Ed. Intro.’, OS, p. 36Google Scholar.

²³ J.E., OS, p. 274.

²⁴ Ibid., pp. 381–382.

²⁵ Ibid., p. 275.

²⁶ Rufus Suter, though his analysis is sketched rather simplistically, is generally correct when he says that Edwards is particularly foreign and strange to ‘modern’ culture on his conception of the continuity of humanity with the sin of Adam. For Edwards, he explains, the sin of Adam was most real, while the present, specific sins of humanity are merely evidences of this primary sin. This is because, as Suter explains correctly, for Edwards, the world of the spirit is more real than the physical world. ‘The Strange Universe of Jonathan Edwards’, Harvard Theological Review, 54 (April, 1961) 2, pp. 125–128CrossRefGoogle Scholar. However, we are reminded that Edwards' lack of ‘modernity’ is to his credit.

²⁷ Edwards' treatise on Original Sin is largely an answer to Taylor's, JohnThe Scripture-Doctrine of Original Sin Proposed to Free and Candid Examination (1738)Google Scholar, which represented a formidable attack on the ‘Calvinist’ position.

²⁸ J.E., OS, p. 397.

²⁹ Ibid., p. 398.

³⁰ Ibid., pp. 397–398.

³¹ Ibid., p. 403.

³² Ibid., p. 404.

³³ Miller, J.E., pp. 257–258. Jenson, , America's Theologian, pp. 141ffGoogle Scholar.

³⁴ Fiering, JEMT, p. 319.

³⁵ J.E., FW, p. 420. Cf. p. 372.

³⁶ lbid., p. 374. Ramsey notes that there is some question concerning this. Edwards refers to Hobbes in ‘Notes on Natural Science’, which was written while he was still at Yale. ‘Ed. Intro.’, FW, p. 14. See also: J.E., Scientific and Philosophical Writings, ‘Things Considered an[d] Written fully about’, pp. 235, and ed. notes, Anderson, pp. 53–59, 78.

³⁷ Ibid., p. 182.

³⁸ Ibid., p. 182.

³⁹ Ibid., pp. 182–183. This principle which runs through Medieval Scholastic thought and much of Protestant Scholasticism was retained also both in Rationalism and in Locke's Empiricism.

⁴⁰ J.E., TV, p. 18.

⁴¹ Ibid., p. 48.

⁴² Ibid., p. 15.

⁴³ Ibid., p. 16.

⁴⁴ Ibid., p. 18.

⁴⁵ Ibid., In another context, as George Rupp has noted, Edwards indicates that God's being is coextensive with reality itself. This implies that ‘whatever ontological status finite individuals may have is derivative from that divine reality’. Granted. But, the precise relationship of God's being and finite reality is not altogether clear, though Edwards, in his essay ‘The Mind’, asserts that finite reality has its ‘substance’ in that it is a ‘stable idea’ in the mind of God. Such an assertion, Rupp believes, excludes any notion of a consubstantial ‘ether’ in which both God and finite reality have their being. Rupp, George, ‘The “Idealism” of Jonathan Edwards’, Harvard Theological review, 62 (April, 1969) 2, pp. 209ffCrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also: Whittemore, Robert C., ‘Jonathan Edwards and the Theologyof the Sixth Way’, Church History. Vol 35 (1966), pp. 60–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Whittemore carefully traces Edwards' idea that ‘space is God… all the space there is without the bounds of the creation, all the space there was before the creation, is God Himself, p. 60. However, Edwards’ is a static notion of space, as Whittemore explains. After discussing the interpretation of Edwards' thought, in reference to ontology, represented by Ellwood and Miller, Whittemore concludes that Edwards' ontology stresses Being largely to the exclusion of Becoming, and must therefore be regarded as standing in the Medieval or Scholastic tradition, pp. 69–79. This is not necessarily so.

⁴⁶ Ibid., p. 18. He continues: ‘And God has sufficiently exhibited himself, both in his being, and his infinite greatness and excellency: and has given us faculties, whereby we are capable of plainly discovering his immense superiority to all other beings, in these respects.’

⁴⁷ Aquinas advances the epistemic program that things invisible and eternal are to be discerned from things visible and sensible. However, within the frame of knowledge, Aquinas makes it clear that any sort of analogia generis will not do, because, as he writes, ‘Ad secundum dicendum quod similitude creaturae ad Deum est imperfect; quia etiam nee idem secundum genus repraesentat, ut supra dictum est’, Aquinas quotes Dionysius as saying, ‘Deum ex creaturis nominamus.’ [‘the language we use about God is derived from what we say about creatures.’] But, answers Aquinas, words which receive their meaning from creatures must necessarily refer primarily to creatures, and only secondarily to God. When one attempts to reason back to the nature of God's being on the basis of causality alone, this sort of analogy is inevitable, says Aquinas. And it is improper and inadequate. However, if God makes himself known in such a way that a particular word may be applied primarily to him, and only secondarily to creatures, then there is room for one to establish another sort of analogy. Thus we know God as ‘the Father of our Lord Jesus, from whom all fatherhood in heaven and on earth is named’, Aquinas writes, quoting Ephesians 3:14–15. Even though we know human fathers and speak of them first, in our experience, the primary reference for this analogy is God himself, as he has made himself known as Father of the Son. Significantly Edwards does not seem to see the danger of a use of analogy which finds its primary reference in the creature and which reasons back along the lines of causality. Although Aquinas' epistemological method is not altogether satisfactory, and indeed may lead one into an abstracted conception of the being of God based upon a nature-grace dichotomy, nevertheless his Scholasticism does attempt to safeguard against the kind of problems into which many Calvinist Scholastics fell. Aquinas, St Thomas, Summa Theologiae, McCabe, HerbertO.P., , editor (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1964), III. pp. 61–73Google Scholar; also see: VII, pp. 7ff. where Aquinas puts into practice his understanding of analogy in discussing ‘the name “Father”’ as applied to God. And, VII, Appendix I, 239ff.; Also, for striking similarities between Aquinas and Edwards on knowledge of God, see, Aquinas, , The Summa Contra Gentiles, The English Dominican Fathers, transl. (London: Burns Oates & Washboume, Ltd., 1924), I. chs. III-XXVIIIGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁸ Ramsey comments favorably on Edwards' use of ‘analogy which has its point of departure in what we know of human volition’. ‘Ed. Intro.’, FW, p. 26. Fiering notes similarities between Edwards' ‘ontological theories’ and Aquinas, as well as similarities Edwards shares with ‘Protestant Scholasticism and Platonism’.J.E.'s Moral Thought, pp. 325–326. What one needs to hear in Edwards, in terms of analogy, is a clearer sense of God's own full disclosure of his Being-as-Trinity in relation to humanity, which is precisely what occurs in the event of revelation, as God becomes flesh by the power of the Spirit. By virtue of this analogia relationis we understand God himself as the prime analogate, rather than creaturely existence. Of particular interest in this context, see: Jüngel, Eberhard, The Doctrine of the Trinity: God's Being is in Becoming, Harris, Horton, trans. (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1976)Google Scholar. Also, Barth, Karl, Church Dogmatics, I.I. and II.I., and Barth's 1937–1938 Gifford Lectures, The Knowledge of God and the Service of God According to the Teaching of the Reformation, Haire, J.L.M. and Henderson, Ian, trans. (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1938), pp. 32ffGoogle Scholar. Edwards considers the nature of analogy between the natural world and the Creator in TV, p. 27. He follows here the tradition which, in turn, followed in the wake of Newton, as English divines attempted to discern the harmonious patterns of creation and to project these back upon the Creator. Frank E. Manuel traces this tradition among the Boyle lecturers (including Samuel Clarke), who, ‘during the first decades of the eighteenth century’, ‘reached unprecedented levels of banality’. Manuel, , The Religion of Isaac Newton, The Fremantle Lectures, 1973 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), pp. 34–35Google Scholar. Cf. Koyré, Alexander, Newtonian Studies (London: Chapman and Hall, 1965), pp. 201ffCrossRefGoogle Scholar. There is some similarity between this Newtonian inspired tradition and the older quest for vestigia trinitatis, which Barth details in Church Dogmatics, I.1., pp. 333–347.

⁴⁹ Cf. Edwards, Jonathan, Basic Writings, Ola Elizabeth Winslow (New York: The New American Library, 1966), pp. 250–251Google Scholar. Winslow provides excerpts from Edwards' ‘homemade notebook’, ‘The Imagines of Divine Things, The Shadows of Divine Things’, edited by Perry Miller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948). In this notebook of private reflections, Edwards indicates something of the connection of the study of Scripture with the study of nature, and attempts to provide a hermeneutical safeguard in his conception of ‘natural theology’. One should read-off divine mysteries from nature, but, one must also read Scripture as an interpretive key to discern what nature is disclosing under its symbols. ‘Spiritual mysteries… are indeed signified and typified in the constitution of the natural world. The book of Scripture is the interpreter of the book of nature,’ declaring these mysteries signified and typified and making ‘application of the signs and types in the book of nature as representations of those spiritual mysteries’ p. 251.

⁵⁰ Carse has attempted to show that, for Edwards, ‘God is as the most apparent Christ is.’ But, his development of the Edwardsian Christology fails to understand this precise point, that knowledge of God was gathered on the basis of Edwards' philosophical presuppositions. And only after these presuppositions had shaped an ‘appropriate’ frame for the knowledge of God does Edwards turn to add to this the revealed propositions concerning the nature of God. Carse also fails to penetrate to the critical lack of connectedness between Edwards ‘Christ, as the preincarnate Son, the agent of creation, the redeemer and future judge, and Christ as the revelation of the Triune God. He indicates that Edwards ignored or rejected the traditional Trinitarian confessional statements because he saw them as inadequate. This is not quite accurate. Edwards' trinitarian thought, viewed as a whole, is closely related both to the Cappadocian Fathers and to certain elements of the Augustinian-Aquinine tradition. Carse, James, Jonathan Edwards and the Visibility of God (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1967), pp. 95–113Google Scholar.

⁵¹ J.E., FW, pp. 376–377.

⁵² Ibid., pp. 377–381.

⁵³ Ibid., p. 393.

⁵⁴ Ibid., p. 281.

⁵⁵ Ibid., p. 283.

⁵⁶ Ibid., p. 286.

⁵⁷ Ibid. pp. 289–290.

⁵⁸ Ibid., p. 290.

⁵⁹ Ibid., pp. 291ff.

⁶⁰ Ibid., p. 397.

⁶¹ In OS Edwards follows the argument laid down in FW, observing the mistaken notion of Taylor and others who imagine that God might be the ‘positive’ cause of human sin, in that God might ‘infuse’ or ‘implant’ into humanity a ‘bad principle’ and so become ‘the author of de pravity’. To the contrary, it is ‘only God's withdrawing’ from communion with ‘rebel-man’ which causes humanity to descend into ‘abominable wickedness’ as humanity is left to itself to follow its lower principles. J.E., OS, p. 383. See also: pp. 380–387.

⁶² J.E., FW, p. 399.

⁶³ Ibid., p. 405.

⁶⁴ Cf. Torrance, T. F., ‘Toward an Ecumenical Consensus on the Trinity’, Theologische Zeitschrift, 31 (Nov./Dez., 1975) 6, p. 346Google Scholar. Torrance, in his critique of Karl Rahner, closely parallels Moltmann's understanding of the proper order for conceptualizing the nature of the Triune God. Moltmann insists that one does not begin with some abstract prior conception of ‘monotheism’ and thereafter append to this a conception of Trinity. Rather one must begin with De Deo trino in order to understand the true meaning of De Deo uno. Moltmann, Jūrgen, The Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of God, Kohl, Margaret, transl. (London: Harper and Row, ET 1981), pp. 2–20Google Scholar.

⁶⁵ Ibid., p. 182.

⁶⁶ Cf. J.E., ‘Miscellanies’, on ‘Faith’, in which Edwards understands ‘faith’ in a propositional sense (as ‘belief of’) as somehow prior to, though indivisible from, ‘faith’ in a personal sense (as ‘belief in’). Faith and knowledge are grounded together, but in a manner which places faith in a propositional context from the start, although this context is given vitality by the supernaturally bestowed ‘spiritual taste and relish of what is excellent and divine’, in Works, Worcester edition. Vol. 2, pp. 601–602. A more adequate understanding of ‘faith’ would see ‘faith’ as ‘belief about’ as derived from ‘belief in’ or ‘trust in’, the propositional as subsequent in priority to the personal. This reflects the more fundamental shift which is necessary toward an understanding of revelation as God's personal event which confronts the person and creates ‘belief about’.

⁶⁷ Eberhard Jüngel's discussion of language and revelation parallels our understanding. He speaks of ‘a loss of revelation if revelation is commandeered by language on the patterns of the analogia entis per analogiam nominum’. He explains that when ‘revelation’ is understood in such a manner as to allow it to be forced into a prior ‘sense-structure’, the proper sense of revelation as God's event of self-disclosure is lost. Revelation becomes a special set of propositions granting further information, which is not generally available, but which may be ‘commandeered’ to the ends of an already assumed structure with its own ‘coherent standard of reference’, Trinity, p. 11.

⁶⁸ J.E., TV, p. 23.

⁶⁹ There is some problem, generally speaking, in leaving behind various aspects of Edwards' thought, as though he ‘outgrew’ them. The chronological record does not allow us to imagine that Edwards' thought developed consistently in this manner. Miller is right in saying that Edwards' theology cannot simplistically be divided into contrasting early and later periods. Miller, J.E., pp. 44–45. Some of Edwards' sermons and discourses, in which he indicates the ‘Covenant of Redemption’ were written in close chronological proximity to statements which reflect a Trinity held together in mutual divine love. His private notes at various stages of his life also reinforce his assumption that the ‘Covenant of Redemption’ is possible only between separate persons, persons conceived as independently contracting subjects. J.E., , ‘Miscellanies’, ‘Concerning the Deity of Christ and the Doctrine of the Trinity’, in The Works of President Edwards, Vol. VIII, pp. 273–296Google Scholar. And yet, there is little doubt that Edwards did indeed mature beyond his conception of the Trinity purely in the terms of the pactus salutis. His trinitarian thought after 1746 is much more fully occupied with a conception of God which stresses the distinctiveness of the divine persons, while attempting to understand some sense of their essential relatedness. And, by 1751, one senses an understanding of the inner life of the Trinity which is remarkably similar to the Cappadocian Fathers, especially Gregory of Nyssa. Thus, it may be safe to say that, in this instance, Edwards' understanding did change from his earlier to his later years.

⁷⁰ J.E., TG, pp. 19.

⁷¹ Ibid., pp. 19–20.

⁷² Ibid., p. 21 (italics added).

⁷³ Ibid., pp. 21–22.

⁷⁴ Ibid., pp. 23–24; pp. 34–35.

⁷⁵ Edwards also approaches the doctrine of the Trinity in his revival treatises through his reflection on the divine Spirit. Edwards' understanding of the Trinity, in this context, springs from a ground of deep devotion, his experience of delight in the sovereign God. Those who understand his thought, in this context, merely as an expression of ‘Pietism’, though it certainly includes this aspect, fail to recognize Edwards' continuity with a rationalist devotional strain which runs back through Puritan Calvinism and, which has much in common with the Trinitarian thought of Aquinas. See: Aquinas, , Summa Theologiae, Vol. VII, appendix 2, ‘The Holy SpiritGoogle Scholar: Love’, pp. 252–258. Edwards would be characterized by what Brauer has termed ‘rationalistic piety’. Brauer, Jerald C., ‘Types of Puritan Piety’, Church History, 56 (March, 1987) 1, pp. 39–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷⁶ J.E., TG, p. 43.

⁷⁷ Ibid., p. 43.

⁷⁸ Ibid., p. 43.

⁷⁹ Ibid., p. 44.

⁸⁰ Ibid., p. 45.

⁸¹ In this regard Edwards follows the general line of development which entered Patristic theology via the Cappadocians, in which the Father alone is regarded as arche, pege, or aitia, the source of divinity. Along with this development went the distinction between the divine energeiai and the divine ousia. In contrast to the Cappadocians, on this point, stands Athanasius, who understood the Trinity, the ‘whole Godhead’ as the mon-arche. As Torrance has commented, ‘while the Son is certainly of the Father he is not thought of as derived or caused, for he is Son of the Father as the Father is Father of the Son’. See: Torrance, Thomas F., Theology in Reconciliation: Essays towards Evangelical and Catholic Unity in East and West (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1975), pp. 252–253Google Scholar.

⁸² J.E., TC, p. 46.

⁸³ Ibid., p. 47.

⁸⁴ Ibid., p. 47.

⁸⁵ Edwards' thought here parallels developments in An Unpublished Essay of Edwards on the Trinity, ed. Fisher, particularly on pp. 77–99; and 118–124.

⁸⁶ J.E., TG, p. 47.

⁸⁷ Ibid., p. 48.

⁸⁸ Ibid., p. 49.

⁸⁹ Ibid., p. 49.

⁹⁰ Ibid., p. 49.

⁹¹ Ibid., p. 50.

⁹² Ibid., p. 50.

⁹³ Ibid., p. 50.

⁹⁴ Ibid., p. 51.