Jesus Creed
Book Review by Jim Salladin: Strobel, Kyle. Jonathan Edwards’s Theology: A Reinterpretation (T&T Clark Studies in Systematic Theology).
[Also see Kyle Strobel’s review of an Edwards book here and another of Kyle’s books here.]
The current interest in Jonathan Edwards has created a flurry of new books outlining the Northampton pastor’s theological vision. One of the most provocative is Kyle Strobel’s Jonathan Edwards’s Theology: A Reinterpretation. The book began its life as a Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Aberdeen, and this published version seeks to present a new “interpretive key” to grasping Edwards’s thought. That is, Strobel believes previous accounts of Edwards’s theology have missed a central idea that in turn explains the rest of his thinking. Strobel’s contribution aims to trace a metanarrative of Edwards’s thought, by naming this central idea, and showing its interpretive power in explaining the rest of Edwards’s theological vision.
Strobel argues that the interpretive key that unlocks the thought of Jonathan Edwards is that Edwards framed his doctrine of God in terms of “personal, beatific-delight”. These three categories become doorways into particular emphases in Edwards’s doctrine of God, and together they summarize the pure act that defines the Trinity. The first category, “personal”, allows Strobel to explore Edwards’s unique approach to the psychological model of the Trinity as well as his creative employment of perichoresis tradition. Edwards’s God is personal because God has both understanding and will. Edwards’s God is tri-personal because God (the Father), God’s understanding and will (the Son and the Spirit respectively) are joined in a communion such that each of the three are “in” the others, and thereby share personal attributes. The second category, “beatific”, allows Strobel to explore the interaction, or act, between the persons of the Trinity. The Father and the Son are eternally joined in mutual love and delight, along the lines of the beatific vision. The beatific vision is often viewed as the goal of the saint, but Strobel argues that in Edwards it is the dynamic of the Trinity before it is anything else. As the Father and the Son mutually contemplate each other in this beatific vision, the delight shared between them is the Holy Spirit. This delight is Strobel’s third key category for summing up Edwards’s doctrine of God, and it highlights the centrality of affections to the Edwardsean doctrine of God. When all of three of these categories join together, they present a picture of Edwards’s God in pure act: God is a Trinity of persons, joined together in an act of beatific delight.
This approach to Edwards’s doctrine of God is the centerpiece of Strobel’s book. And in prioritizing this doctrine of God, Strobel wants to assert that Edwards is a theologian before he is a philosopher, or anything else. The first chapter explains this reading of Edwards by expositing his Discourse on the Trinity in polemical context. Behind the scenes of Edwards’s Discourse, argues Strobel, lies Samuel Clarke’s attack on the traditional doctrine of the Trinity. Edwards’s personal, beatific-delight approach to the Trinity was designed to counter this attack. Chapters 2 and 3 explore how God as personal, beatific delight explains God’s end in creation, and how God brings that creation to consummation in heaven. With these macro-perspectives in place, chapters 4 to 6 show how the saints’ salvation is a finite participation in God’s personal, beatific-delight. This rounds out Strobel’s top-down effort to demonstrate the inner coherence of Edwards’s theological vision.
Strobel’s approach to Edwards provides a number of formidable contributions to Edwards studies. I will highlight three. The first is the way Strobel emphasizes the polemical shape of the Discourse on the Trinity. It is well known and well rehearsed that the Trinity in Edwards’s day was under fire in intellectual circles. Strobel uses this fact to draw out texture and colour in Edwards’s argument. In particular, Strobel shows how Edwards was well aware of Samuel Clarke’s arguments against classical Trinitarianism, and that this awareness explains some of Edwards’s theological decisions in the Discourse. Edwards was certainly a polemicist, and this emphasis in Strobel’s approach is helpful.
Secondly, and closer to the heart of Strobel’s aim, the book helpfully demonstrates the inner logic between Edwards’s theology proper and his soteriology. Too often theologians treat these as disparate fields of discourse, with little direct connection between them. Readers of Edwards have long appreciated that this is not so with the Northampton pastor. Strobel’s account of God as personal, beatific-delight provides a new map that charts the path from the doctrine of God to the doctrine of salvation.
And this leads to the third key contribution: Strobel helpfully draws out some of the idiosyncrasies of Edwards’s doctrine of God, and therefore of his overall theology. Edwards was an inheritor of his tradition, and never intended a fundamental departure from it. But we must not use this fact must to obscure his creativity within and modification of his tradition. Strobel’s framework both grounds him in tradition and simultaneously draws out unique elements in a valuable way.
With these contributions come weaknesses. The most significant is Strobel’s rather harsh account of other approaches to Edwards’s thought. Strobel is arguing that his approach is new and correct where others are mistaken, and surely there is nothing wrong with that. However, at times the book can sound dismissive toward other scholarly works, which is not required. Similarly, Strobel presents himself as very confident of his thesis’ superiority. Again, it is not a problem to claim to be right. But when combined with the polemical sharpness, it can ironically undermine persuasiveness. This is regrettable, because Strobel’s argument deserves a hearing without the accompanying distraction.
Overall, this is a book that should be read by all those interested in Jonathan Edwards’s grand theological vision. Whether Strobel’s “interpretive key” will become a standard part of scholarly consensus is not really the point. It may be overly ambitious to expect such consensus when dealing with a thinker like Edwards. However, ambitious theses drive learning. And not least for this reason, Strobel’s Reinterpretation is a welcome contribution to the field.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In