The Rise of the Edwardsean Theory of the Atonement and the ‘Missing’ Account of the Younger Edwards’s Reception

Jonathan Edwards is considered the most innovative theological-philosophical mind in America. While much of his system has been mapped out, there still remains some debate over his atonement thinking. The traditional departure view claims that Edwards’s son, Jonathan Edwards Jr. shifted from a received penal approach to a moral government approach. Recently, some have suggested that perhaps Edwards Sr. had left the door open. While there have been genetic studies in the past, very few of them take the time to do a “close reading” of how the transitional thinkers characterized the elder Edwards’s system. Furthermore, a comparative analysis of Petrus van Mastricht’s Theologia Theoretico-practica (1699) is largely overlooked despite Edwards’s high view of this systematic theology. This thesis provides a comprehensive analysis of how Edwards Jr. received his father’s atonement thinking in light of his mentoring relationship with Joseph Bellamy, Samuel Hopkins, and his own father’s materials in coordination with Van Mastricht. The key findings of this research indicate that Edwards Sr. had a robust theological vision received from Dutch Reformed Orthodoxy. Specifically, if Van Mastricht’s infralapsarian focused atonement theory emphasizing union is the core, then the subsequent layers of Edwards’s thinking find exposure in his engagement with the British moral philosophers. Since the theological formulations of Edwards Sr. are in conversation with moral philosophy, this dissertation gave a greater weight to how Bellamy, Hopkins, and Edwards Jr. characterized their mentor’s system. Edwards Sr.’s students focused on different aspects of their mentor’s project. This thesis shows that Edwards Jr. was attempting, in his own writing, to mediate the moral philosophical project of Hopkins on the one hand and Bellamy’s engagement with the larger epistemological project of Edwards Sr. on the other. In short, Edwards Jr. is not a follower of a Grotian Moral Government Theory, but rather a chief receiver of an Edwardsean Theory of the Atonement. The application of this research for systematic and historical theology indicates that the Edwardsean Theory of the Atonement is a mosaic of satisfaction, penal, and governmental theories. Specifically, Edwards had proposed a consistency between the act of atonement and the pure act subsistence of the Trinity. In short, the atonement is a shadow of the internal subsistence and yet a real salvation for the elect based on its origin in the perfect idea and persons of the deity. This has the result that, like the governmental theory, there is a high degree of interest in framing the atonement as having an ultimate end in the glorification of God by affirming the dignity of his nature (similar to satisfaction), and a subordinate end in redeeming the elect specifically (similar to penal). In keeping with an Edwardsean vocabulary, the redemption of the elect is implied in the glorification of God’s nature—they are really one and the same thing. The mechanism of this reconciliation is unio cum Christo the Mediator’s willingness to exchange happiness for misery. This was a real atonement because it was predicated on the real idea in God that sent the Son to atone for created beings. This makes a temporal atonement tandundem to be idem because of two factors. First, the temporal exchange depends on the eternal intra-trinitarian subsistence to make them a just equivalence. Second, Christ’s merit and satisfaction are said to differ relatively but not essentially. The merit to happiness and the satisfaction to punishment are the same. The exchange is contingent upon the Son freely standing “in the room” of the sinner’s misery. The Son metaphysically touches the actual guilt of the sinner and the legal guilt on the other somewhat like a Venn-Diagram.