What do you get when you take a cavernous and constructive theologian – Jonathan Edwards – and cross him with the analysis of a shrewd and out-of-the-box theologian? You get Oliver Crisp's recent book, Jonathan Edwards among the Theologians. Crisp's short but argument-rich text rewards careful reading and does not fail to stir, stimulate and provoke.
For years now, Crisp has been mulling over some of Edwards’ most fascinating contributions. In his latest work, Crisp is keen not merely to engage Edwards, but to show that he may be more complex – perhaps even bordering in places on heterodox – than the millennial masses, clad in ‘Jonathan Edwards Is My Homeboy’ t-shirts, might realise. Out of the gate, Crisp challenges the somewhat-common perspective that Edwards is a traditional Reformed thinker. ‘Edwards’, Crisp asserts, ‘was not really a confessional theologian.’ Rather, he was at his core a gap-filler: ‘he holds in tension a pronounced biblicism on the one hand and a penchant for metaphysical speculation on the other’ (p. 82). There is truth here. More than many thinkers of the Christian tradition – say John Calvin – Edwards felt blissful freedom to probe the intellectual grey areas of the faith. In my view, he took pains to work within biblical guardrails, but he also felt free to say many things the Bible did not explicitly say. Of course, as Douglas Sweeney has rightly shown in his excellent – and course-correcting – Edwards the Exegete (Oxford, 2016), the Bible was above all else the thing for Edwards – more than speculation, more than philosophical analysis, more than tradition.
This biblical homing instinct led Edwards, in Crisp's view, to some surprising stances. In Crisp's most provocative chapter he suggests straightforwardly that ‘Edwards also embraces a doctrine of panentheism’ (p. 75). This is a strong statement; the chapter in which it falls, ‘Arminius and Edwards on Creation’, came into the world as a conference paper that, while catalysing to read, leaves us eager for more substantiation. Crisp's argument depends in considerable part on the ‘Miscellanies’, which were not published and polished works of theology, but Edwards’ intellectual sketchbook.
Crisp is right to explore such matters, as he does elsewhere on the question of whether Edwards held to theosis (he argues that the Northamptonite did – see p. 161). Gifted with an expansive pen, Edwards had the rare capacity to frame doctrine in bigger, wider terms. When Edwards wrote that the Christian will experience an ‘infinite increase of nearness and union to God’, he could have meant what some mean by theosis, but he might also have been articulating the depths of the fathoms-deep doctrine of union with Christ.
Crisp also pushes us to think more about Edwards’ trinitarianism. As Crisp rightly points out, Edwards leans heavily on perichoresis to ground the unity of divine being, a leaning that leaves us puzzling through how one divine person can ‘constitute one necessary aspect of another divine person if that person has many distinct attributes not shared between the two’ (p. 59). Whatever one's stance on perichoresis, we can concur with Edwards that affirming the unity of the Godhead does not compromise the threeness of the divine persons, or at least, it should not. As Edwards understood, we must have oneness to arraign the sole Lord of the cosmos aright, but we must have threeness to be genuinely Christian, and not glancingly so.
Because Edwards worked on his system at different levels, with different document types, tracing out exactly what he believed, what connections he made and what strings he left unstrung is no easy task. Crisp may come to some provocative conclusions – and he does, leaving us asking for more proof in a few places – but Edwards, as I have been at pains to say, is the kind of high-flown thinker that prompts such speculation. Jonathan Edwards among the Theologians is a worthy, weighty and mind-taxing work of scholarly inquiry. It leaves us pondering what it means to be biblical; what it means to be confessional; what it means to base one's intellectual life in scripture; and where we are called to embrace mystery, instead of thinking twenty thoughts not expressly laid down in holy writ.
