Seng-Kong Tan’s Fullness Received and Returned is a densely argued, thoroughly researched, contextually sensitive study of participation in the soteriology of Jonathan Edwards. Along the way, Tan deals with many of the central themes in Edwards’s theology. As with many recent studies of Edwards, Tan’s monograph demonstrates both Edwards’s creativity and his continuing relevance to contemporary theological and philosophical-theological discussions, in the Reformed world and beyond. A few highlights.
Throughout, Tan shows that Edwards, like Calvin, is a theologian of the Holy Spirit. Building on an understanding of Augustine’s analogy of love, for Edwards the Spirit is “the aesthetic principle in God, the culmination of the Trinity. The Spirit is ‘the beauty of the Godhead, and the divinity of Divinity (if I may so speak), the good of the infinite Fountain of Good.’ As God’s disposition is identical to God’s act, divine love is in perfect fruition in God. The Holy Spirit is thus ‘the end of the other two . . . the good that they enjoy, the end of all procession’” (15-16).
The Spirit is the love of the Father and Son, the mutual but not shared love, and that leads to a notion of mutual dependence between Father and Son. The love of Father and Son is such that “the Son has a sort of priority over the Father inasmuch as ‘the Father depends on him as his object.’ The Son is not only the subsistent term or eternal Object whom the Father sees, but also the eternal Object of Love. It is in the Beloved that the Father finds the divine love, joy, and happiness. ‘And therefore the Father’s infinite happiness is in [the Son], and the way that the Father enjoys the glory of the Deity is in enjoying him.’” But this enjoyment is enjoyment in the Spirit. As Tan says, “The Holy Spirit, as the divine Happiness, actualizes the eternal, beatific vision of God. The generation of the Son is God’s eternal visio, but it is only beatifica as the Spirit abides in the Son” (14).
As Edwards says, the Son is “only the infinite object of love, but he is also an infinite subject of it. He is not only the infinite object of the Father’s love, but he also infinitely loves the Father. The infinite essential love of God is, as it were, an infinite and eternal mutual holy energy between the Father and the Son, a pure, holy act whereby the Deity becomes nothing but an infinite and unchangeable act of love, which proceeds from both the Father and the Son” (16).
Edwards saw a strict correspondence between the self-communication of the Father and Son within the divine life and His “flow[ing] forth ad extra” in creation. And the Spirit is the common factor. Edwards says,”to speak strictly according to truth, we may suppose that a disposition in God, as an original property of his nature, to an emanation of his own infinite fullness was what excited him to create the world; and so that the emanation itself was aimed by him as a last end of the creation.” Tan argues that this disposition, which is “both the moving and final cause of the creation” is none other than the Spirit (55).
Consistently with this, Edwards held to a notion of creatio continua, according to which even the sheer solidity of solid objects was the result of the continuing work of God. There is no res extensa or substance upholding creatures: “Since created, physical entities have no underlying substance, solidity is non other than the divine, creative causality acting in created space. God, by Word and Will, causes and communicates ongoing existence to all physical beings according to the rules God has set. Hence, ‘that which truly is the substance of all bodies is the infinitely exact and precise and perfectly stable idea in God’s mind, together with his stable will that the same shall gradually be communicated to us, and to other minds, according to certain fixed and exact established methods and laws” (61).
Tan argues that this is not a Berkeleyian equation of being with being-perceived. Created things are “upheld solely by God,” but “it is not simply by God’s mental perception or regard.” Rather, again, pneumatology comes into play to work this out; “the Spirit so wills and realizes the contexts, relations, and characteristics between created effects ad extra so that created identity is recognized consequentially by both the divine being and created, sentient beings. In the light of the continual coming-into-being of all created realities, God ‘so unites these successive new effects that he treats them as one, by communicating to them like properties, relations, and circumstances; and so, leads us to regard and treat them as one’” (62). This is what Tan characterizes as Edwards’s “objective idealism.” Tan shows that Edwards, following Puritan theologians like John Owen, works out his Christology in a pneumatological vein as well.
On grace, “Edwards . . . explicitly and robustly rejects the idea that grace is something created. He insists that ‘the grace of God in men’s heart can hardly be called a creature. . . it is God himself. . . . Edwards regards grace as ‘God’s own beauty and excellency that is uncreated and eternal, which is not properly made but communicated, and is non other than ‘the Spirit’ of God” (282). At the same time, he argues that the Spirit operates like an infused habit (283). He considers the original state of man to be a “graced” state; there is no “pure nature.” For Edwards, the “concept of a pure nature . . . can only mean fallen nature” (286).
There’s much more. Suffice it to say that Tan has once again demonstrated how Edwards remains what he has long been – America’s theologian.
Peter J. Leithart is President of Trinity House.