Christina Larsen’s volume provides a robust treatment of the divine Son’s theological location in Jonathan Edwards’ work, especially as it is connected to his approaches to divine freedom. She exposits Edwards’ thought in terms of its covenantal and evocative (i.e., calling forth) ‘registers’, highlighting both Edwards’s historic novelty and contemporary utility along the way.
Couched especially within historic discussions of divine freedom (e.g., whether creation and redemption are necessary, or inevitable, or if God is indifferent) and divine economy (e.g., how the gracious work of God ad extra relates to his blessedness ad intra), her fundamental thesis is: ‘Edwards’s Christology is his working out of his distinctive conviction that God’s blessing of, and delight in, creatures is fundamentally a blessing of the Son that follows freely from the depths of the divine life as an inevitable expression of the glory that is the proper good and perfect blessedness of the loving fellowship of the Father and the Son in the Spirit’ (p. 2; cf. pp. 6, 9, 37, 41, 49, 68, 152, 153, 172).
The argument proceeds by establishing the definitional parameters (in the introduction) and the historical contexts of Edwards’s account of divine freedom and the life of God (chapter 1). From this foundation, she surveys Edwards’s theology of the ‘Son’s preparatory work’ (i.e., the history of redemption prior to the incarnation) in chapter 2, glorification in humiliation (i.e., incarnation and hypostatic union) in chapter 3, glorification in graciousness (i.e., communication of goodness to the church) in chapter 4, glorification in consummation (i.e., the consummation of redemption) in chapter 5 and a conclusion that gestures toward contemporary significance.
By focusing on the person of the Son in his covenantal work of redemption, Larsen provides a helpful addition to an underappreciated corner of Edwards scholarship and a helpful lens on several well-worn discussions about Edwards. The book is not only conceptually broad, touching on several different topics (e.g., from God’s life in himself and the divine decrees, to particular redemption and theological aesthetics), but also methodologically diverse, attending to (1) the world behind the text of Edwards (i.e., his developments in relation to the tradition), (2) the world in front of the text (i.e., potential contributions to today) and (3) the world of the text (i.e., themes within his own writing). Reflective of distinct disciplinary approaches within the study of ‘historical theology’, Larsen’s book contributes to each of these discussions and yet leaves questions from each of these circles.
Larsen provides a nuanced understanding of Edwards’ location within the Reformed tradition with regard to his understanding of divine freedom. She claims that he is ‘simultaneously less original … in terms of his impulses and aims, yet more original in terms of where he ends up’ (pp. 3, 156). While Edwards retains many similar motivations to historic Reformed Orthodoxy, he ends up affirming the inevitability of divine self-communication and the completion of the Son’s blessedness in his ad extra work of glorification – both of which resist the majority report from Reformed Orthodoxy on divine freedom. Larsen maps several related debates within the secondary literature throughout the volume, but rarely provided extensive comparative content from the tradition itself. So questions remain for Larsen (and the rest of us) about whether such a position should be considered genuinely ‘Reformed’, or ‘in continuity with Reformed Orthodoxy’. For example, what are the necessary and sufficient conditions, or the formal and material commitments, of belonging to the Reformed tradition and standing in continuity with Reformed Orthodoxy?
Larsen’s most explicitly retrieval-oriented claims appear in the final chapter. Building off the aforementioned novelties and developments in Edwards’s thought, Larsen claims that Edwards’s work ‘inspires resources for current discussion’ about (1) the divine being and divine economy and (2) the beauty of God himself and God’s work. She spends enough time to gesture at points of contribution to contemporary accounts of the divine decrees, divine freedom and theological aesthetics. However, as she concedes, she only gets us as far as recommending claims that ‘begin to suggest what we might confess’ (p. 164). So questions linger large for the contemporary theologian interested in resourcing Edwards’s thought. For example, if we want to adopt these positions, how beholden are we to the ‘covenantal and aesthetic ontologies’ that Larsen sees within Edwards’s theology? Yet these lingering questions about the rather promissory nature of the volume are not so much a critique, as an expression of anticipatory interest in Larsen’s own work that follows up and extends the final chapter in this volume.
Finally, Larsen’s analysis of Edwards’s thought utilised two registers: covenantal and evocative. The evocative register is broken down further into three motifs: (1) the structure motif, (2) the beautification motif and (3) the diverse excellencies motif. As conceptual categories to aid in reading comprehension, these distinctions have helped my own reading of Edwards and sensitivities therein. Yet, there are a number of questions circulating around these categories. For example, are these simply heuristic tools for readers, or is Larsen claiming something stronger about Edwards’s intentional use of these categories (see her claims that Edwards ‘deploys’ these registers/motifs on pp. 6, 52, 58, 59, 84, 113, 118, 140, 151)? Further, I wonder about the disproportionate and distinctive nature of these registers. So, for example, the covenantal register appeared in every chapter, but the ‘divine excellencies motif’ of the evocative register only receives sustained attention in chapters 3 and 5. Further, while she recognises that these often work ‘hand in hand’ (151), the relationships (i.e., distinctiveness, porousness, etc.) between each of the motifs and between the evocative motifs with the covenantal register are only expanded (a bit too briefly) in one section of the fifth chapter.
In sum, Larsen provides us with a broad sweeping and broadly engaging volume on the significance of the divine Son in discussions of divine freedom and divine beauty. Those interested in Edwardian historical theology (of various stripes) will find a capacious and careful treatment herein.
