Examining the theological ethics of Jonathan Edwards, William Danaher Jr. shows that Edwards's doctrine of the Trinity both was foundational to Edwards's thought and is the necessary framework for understanding the theological and moral vision expressed in his writings. This Trinitarian interpretation identifies what distinctive contribution Edwards makes to contemporary Christian ethics, particularly concerning the nature of virtue, the will, sin, evil, and love. The Columbia Series in Reformed Theology represents a joint commitment by Columbia Theological Seminary and Westminster John Knox Press to provide theological resources from the Reformed tradition for the church today. This series examines theological and ethical issues that confront church and society in our own particular time and place.

Scholars and laypersons alike regard Jonathan Edwards (1703-58) as North America's greatest theologian. The Theology of Jonathan Edwards is the most comprehensive survey of his theology yet produced and the first study to make full use of the recently-completed seventy-three-volume online edition of the Works of Jonathan Edwards. The book's forty-five chapters examine all major aspects of Edwards's thought and include in-depth discussions of the extensive secondary literature on Edwards as well as Edwards's own writings. Its opening chapters set out Edwards's historical and personal theological contexts. The next thirty chapters connect Edwards's theological loci in the temporally-ordered way in which he conceptualized the theological enterprise-beginning with the triune God in eternity with his angels to the history of redemption as an expression of God's inner reality ad extra, and then back to God in eschatological glory.The authors analyze such themes as aesthetics, metaphysics, typology, history of redemption, revival, and true virtue. They also take up such rarely-explored topics as Edwards's missiology, treatment of heaven and angels, sacramental thought, public theology, and views of non-Christian religions. Running throughout the volume are what the authors identify as five basic theological constituents: trinitarian communication, creaturely participation, necessitarian dispositionalism, divine priority, and harmonious constitutionalism. Later chapters trace his influence on and connections with later theologies and philosophies in America and Europe. The result is a multi-layered analysis that treats Edwards as a theologian for the twenty-first-century global Christian community, and a bridge between the Christian West and East, Protestantism and Catholicism, conservatism and liberalism, and charismatic and non-charismatic churches.

This dissertation is a theological analysis of the trinitarian shape of Jonathan Edwards' aesthetics of beauty. The contributions of this dissertation lie chiefly in three areas. The primary aim of this study is to advance the burgeoning field of the study of Jonathan Edwards by elucidating his views of beauty. In so doing, I present him as a rich source for the theological engagement of beauty, which could serve not only the field of Edwards studies, but also that of theological aesthetics more broadly.

Winner of the 2013 Christianity Today Book Award for Theology/Ethics Scholars and laypersons alike regard Jonathan Edwards (1703-58) as North America's greatest theologian. The Theology of Jonathan Edwards is the most comprehensive survey of his theology yet produced and the first study to make full use of the recently-completed seventy-three-volume online edition of the Works of Jonathan Edwards. The book's forty-five chapters examine all major aspects of Edwards's thought and include in-depth discussions of the extensive secondary literature on Edwards as well as Edwards's own writings. Its opening chapters set out Edwards's historical and personal theological contexts. The next thirty chapters connect Edwards's theological loci in the temporally-ordered way in which he conceptualized the theological enterprise-beginning with the triune God in eternity with his angels to the history of redemption as an expression of God's inner reality ad extra, and then back to God in eschatological glory. The authors analyze such themes as aesthetics, metaphysics, typology, history of redemption, revival, and true virtue. They also take up such rarely-explored topics as Edwards's missiology, treatment of heaven and angels, sacramental thought, public theology, and views of non-Christian religions. Running throughout the volume are what the authors identify as five basic theological constituents: trinitarian communication, creaturely participation, necessitarian dispositionalism, divine priority, and harmonious constitutionalism. Later chapters trace his influence on and connections with later theologies and philosophies in America and Europe. The result is a multi-layered analysis that treats Edwards as a theologian for the twenty-first-century global Christian community, and a bridge between the Christian West and East, Protestantism and Catholicism, conservatism and liberalism, and charismatic and non-charismatic churches.

While Jonathan Edwards scholars have increasingly recognized the central role that the Trinity played in his thought, no work brings together Edwards' central texts on the Trinity and interprets and applies them to contemporary theological issues. This book reveals how the doctrine of the Trinity transformed Edwards' ministry and how the Trinity can inform current evangelical thought, life, and ministry. Key primary texts, interpretation, and application of Edwards' trinitarian theology are all presented here. Part one features Edwards' chief trinitarian writings and provides an in-depth analysis on his doctrine. Part two sets Edwards' trinitarianism in historical context. Part three demonstrates how Edwards employed the Trinity in his sermons, in spiritual formation, and in other areas of doctrine.

This book offers a new reading of Jonathan Edwards’s virtue ethic that examines a range of qualities Edwards identifies as “virtues” and considers their importance for contemporary ethics. Each of Edwards’s human virtues is “receptive” in nature: humans acquire the virtues through receiving divine grace, and therefore depend utterly on Edwards’s God for virtue’s acquisition. By contending that humans remain authentic moral agents even as they are unable to attain virtue apart from his God’s assistance, Edwards challenges contemporary conceptions of moral responsibility, which tend to emphasize human autonomy as a central part of accountability.

Jonathan Edwards lived in an age in which the doctrine of the Trinity was sometimes openly repudiated and more often quietly ignored. But as this important book shows, Edwards in fact took care to creatively fashion the Trinity into the centerpiece of his Christian life and work. Through her pursuit of Edwards's writings, especially his lifelong intellectual diary, Amy Plantinga Pauw traces the way Edwards established the basic outlines of his trinitarian thought when he was only twenty years old, and how the doctrine continued to run like a subterranean river throughout his famed career as a pastor and teacher. Recognizing the centrality of the Trinity in Edwards's thought both nuances our understanding of his Puritan inheritance and challenges the narrowness of Edwards's enduring legacy as the preacher of "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God."