This book offers a broad-based study of Jonathan Edwards as a religious thinker. Much attention has been given to Edwards in relation to his Puritan and Calvinist forebears. McClymond, however, examines Edwards in relation to his eighteenth-century intellectual context. In each of six chapters, he contextualizes and interprets some text or issue in Edwards within the emergent post-Lockean, post-Newtonian culture of the English-speaking world of the 1700s. Among the topics considered are spiritual perception, metaphysics, contemplation, ethics and morality, and apologetics.

Is the God of Calvin a fountain of blessing, or a forceful tyrant? Is Calvin's view of God coercive, leaving no place for the human qua human in redemption? These are perennial questions about Calvin's theology which have been given new life by Gift theologians such as John Milbank, Graham Ward, and Stephen Webb.J. Todd Billings addresses these questions by exploring Calvin's theology of `participation in Christ'. He argues that Calvin's theology of `participation' gives a positive place to the human, (...) such that grace fulfils rather than destroys nature, affirming a differentiated union of God and humanity in creation and redemption. Calvin's trinitarian theology of participation extends to his view of prayer, sacraments, the law, and the ecclesial and civil orders. In light of Calvin's doctrine of participation, Billings reframes the critiques of Calvin in the Gift discussion and opens up new possibilities for contemporary theology, ecumenical theology, and Calvin scholarship as well. (shrink)

Argues that contemporary discussion about God has a mistaken understanding of the classical Christian doctrines of God.

Jonathan Edwards has long been accorded a place in the front rank of colonial American writers; his aesthetics are now recognized as the primary characteristic of his theology; and his writings are judged worthy of extended literary analysis. Oddly, perhaps, no attempt has been made to discover if in his aesthetics Edwards attributes a particular significance to art. The discussion to follow contends that art as an instance of what he termed secondary beauty can perform a vital religious function by (...) enabling the saint to conceive, and subsequently receive or revive, the particular emotional sensation that constitutes the religious experience - which Edwards referred to as the sense of the heart. My purpose in what is to follow is not to survey and to analyze Edwards' writings as works of art but to probe his aesthetic theory in order to discern the import he assign to art. (shrink)

This book demonstrates the originality and coherence of Jonathan Edwards' philosophical theology using his dynamic reconception of reality as the interpretive key. The author argues that what underlies Edwards' writings is a radical shift from the traditional Western metaphysics of substance and form to a new conception of the world as a network of dispositions: active and abiding principles that possess reality apart from their manifestations in actions and events. Edwards' dispositional ontology enables him to restate the Augustinian-Calvinist tradition in (...) theology in a strikingly modern philosophical framework. A prime example of Edwards' innovative reconstruction in philosophical theology is his conception of God as both eternal actuality and a disposition to repeat that actuality within God and also through creation. This view is a compelling alternative to the traditional Western doctrine of God as changeless actuality, on the one hand, and the recent process theologians' excessive stress on God's involvement in change, on the other. Edwards' achievement was that he saw dynamic movement as essential to God's own life without compromising the traditional Christian tenets of God's prior actuality and transcendence. The author of this volume also explicates the way in which Edwards' dynamic reconception of reality informs his theories of imagination, aesthetic perception, the knowledge of God, and the meaning of history. This expanded edition includes a new preface and a new appendix titled "Jonathan Edwards on Nature.". (shrink)

The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the theological ethics of Jonathan Edwards from the perspective of his doctrine of the Trinity. To develop a Trinitarian account of Edwards' theological ethics requires two steps. The first is to retrieve the moral themes and concepts in Edwards' Trinitarian reflection, specifically his development of the psychological and social analogies. Edwards' psychological analogy discloses not only the nature of the Triune processions of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but also that the (...) moral life hinges on theosis, or "participating in the Divine nature" through the communication of the Holy Spirit. Similarly, Edwards' social analogy discloses not only the nature of the love that exists between the divine Persons, but also that the church's identity derives from its destiny to live for eternity in communion with the Triune God. Therefore the goal of the moral life is to love others in such a way that our interpersonal relationships embody the church's eschatological destiny. Through drawing comparisons with other paradigmatic Trinitarian formulations by patristic, medieval, and modern theologians, the distinctiveness of Edwards' Trinitarian reflection becomes clear. The second step in this study is to provide a Trinitarian interpretation of Edwards' major writings, specifically A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections , Freedom of the Will , Original Sin , Two Dissertations , and Charity and its Fruits . Providing a Trinitarian interpretation of these writings is essential for identifying what distinctive contribution Edwards makes to contemporary Christian ethics, particularly concerning the nature of virtue, the will, sin, evil, and love. (shrink)