Jonathan Edwards on the Trinity
The American physician-poet Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. once observed that the famous eighteenth-century theologian and revivalist Jonathan Edwards believed not in a Trinity but in a Quaternity—and that for Edwards the fourth person was “Justice.” Holmes was active during the late nineteenth century, when Edwards’ trinitarian credentials were in doubt: supposedly there were manuscripts his descendants were withholding that betrayed his later heterodox leanings. Was the great Edwards slouching towards Unitarianism? As the full extent of Edwards’ writings was made available in the succeeding decades and centuries, it became apparent that he, while no heretic, did espouse a fascinating, expansive vision of God’s trinitarian nature and activities, a vision rooted in the Reformed tradition but one that also challenged and changed that tradition with elements of idealism, occasionalism, and a spiritualizing typology.
This course presents an opportunity to read and discuss some of Edwards’ own formulations on God as three-in-one, from early essays such as “Discourse on the Trinity” that addressed the Trinitarian Controversy of the early eighteenth century, to notebook entries and sermons considering the “offices” of the three persons and the aesthetic and relational nature of God and of sainthood, to Edwards’ participation in the pneumatological renaissance of the evangelical revival period, to unfinished “great works” such as “A History of the Work of Redemption,” to his search into world religions to glimpse the echoes of what for him was “true” religion.
There are no prerequisites for this course. All readings will be made available for download through the Jonathan Edwards Center website, edwards.yale.edu.
Preliminary List of Primary Readings by Edwards:
“Discourse on the Trinity” (selections)
“Equality of the Persons of the Trinity”
“Notes on the Mind” nos. 1 and 40–45
“Images of Divine Things” no. 19, 58, 97, 121, 155; “Miscellanies” nos. 362 and 370
“Miscellanies” nos. 94, 702 and 710
“Miscellanies” no. 1062, “Economy of the Persons of the Trinity”
“Treatise on Grace”
The Threefold Office of the Holy Spirit
“Miscellanies” nos. 1351, “Extracts from the Travels of Cyrus,” and 1359, “Extracts from Dr. Cudworth”
Suggested and Selective Secondary Reading:
Crisp, Oliver. “Jonathan Edwards on the Trinity.” Jonathan Edwards Studies 4:1 (2014): 21-41.
Hamilton, S. Mark. “Jonathan Edwards, Dispositionalism and Spirit Christology.” Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology 38:2 (Fall 2018): 122-142.
Hastings, W. Ross. “Jonathan Edwards on the Trinity: Its Place and Its Rich but Controversial Facets.” The Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 59:3 (Sept 2016): 585-600.
Pauw, Amy Plantinga. The Supreme Harmony of All: The Trinitarian Theology of Jonathan Edwards. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans Pub., 2002.
Redwood, John. “Atheists Assailed.” In Reason, Ridicule, and Religion: The Age of Enlightenment in England, 1660–1750. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976. Pp. 29–48.
Studebaker, Steven M. and Robert W. Caldwell, III. The Trinitarian Vision of Jonathan Edwards: text, context, and application. Amherst, N.Y.: Cambria Press, 2011.
Strobel, Kyle C. “The Nature of God and the Trinity.” In Douglas A. Sweeney and Jan
Stievermann, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Jonathan Edwards. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2021.
Yazawa, Reita. Covenant of Redemption in the Trinitarian Theology of Jonathan Edwards: The Nexus Between the Immanent Trinity and the Economic Trinity. Eugene, O.R.: Wipf & Stock, 2019.
Joseph T. Cochran, Ph.D., is Instructor of History, Purdue University Northwest, and General Editor and Columnist, The Anxious Bench. He can be reached at cochrajt@pnw.edu.
Dr. Kenneth P. Minkema is the Executive Editor of The Works of Jonathan Edwards and of the Jonathan Edwards Center & Online Archive at Yale University, with appointments as Research Faculty at Yale Divinity School and as Research Associate at the University of the Free State, South Africa. He offers seminars in early American and early modern religious history, as well as reading courses in all periods of American religious history. From 2004 through 2009, he served as the Executive Secretary of the American Society of Church History. Besides publishing numerous articles on Jonathan Edwards and topics in early American religious history in professional journals including The Journal of American History, The William and Mary Quarterly, The New England Quarterly, Church History and The Massachusetts Historical Review, he has edited volume 14 in the Edwards Works, Sermons and Discourses: 1723-1729, and co-edited A Jonathan Edwards Reader; The Sermons of Jonathan Edwards: A Reader; Jonathan Edwards at 300: Essays on the Tercentennial of His Birth; and Jonathan Edwards’ ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God’: A Casebook. He has also co-edited The Sermon Notebook of Samuel Parris, 1689-1694, dealing with the Salem Witchcraft crisis, and The Colonial Church Records of Reading and Rumney Marsh, Massachusetts. Finally, Dr. Minkema is currently part of a team that is preparing Cotton Mather’s ‘Biblia Americana’ for publication.
