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Discerning the Spirit: ambivalent assurance in the soteriology of Jonathan Edwards and Barthian correctives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 September 2010

W. Ross Hastings
W. Ross Hastings*
Affiliation:
Regent College, 5800 University Boulevard, Vancouver BC, CanadaV6T 2E4rhastings@regent-college.edu
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Abstract

Assurance of salvation is a matter of perennial pastoral concern and theological controversy. After the Great Awakening, Jonathan Edwards developed a doctrine of assurance based largely on discerning the work of the Spirit in the affections and actions of the professed believer. One might have expected from this theocentric, trinitarian and surprisingly participational theologian a robust doctrine of assurance and a joyful, other-centred spirituality. Ironically, however, profound ambiguities persisted within it which will be shown to arise from the predominantly pneumatic nature of his version of theosis, a blurring of the distinction between justification and sanctification, and the power of his predominantly psychological analogy of the Trinity. This article will therefore first present the main features of Jonathan Edwards’ doctrine of the assurance of salvation. The second section will evaluate it by outlining factors in Edwards’ theology which might have been expected to produce a high level of certainty concerning assurance, and then those which might militate against this certainty. Whilst Edwards did at times espouse the social analogy of the Trinity, his theosis is constructed predominantly within the psychological analogy. Innovatively modified though it was, because Edwards works within this framework, he overemphasises the pneumatological union of the saints with God, at the expense of the incarnational union of God with and for humanity in Christ. This results correspondingly in an inordinate reliance for assurance on the Spirit's work within the realm of human subjectivity, over against objective christological realities. In short, Edwards’ theology of assurance is, in the end, individualistic and anthropocentric.

Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 63 , Issue 4 , November 2010 , pp. 437 - 455
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 2010

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References

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5 Ibid., p. 171. See also Danaher, William J., The Trinitarian Ethics of Jonathan Edwards (Columbia Series in Reformed Theology; Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2004), p. 136Google Scholar.

6 Charity and Its Fruits, YE, vol. 8, p. 133. This is similar to Barth's uniting (yet distinguishing) of the love of God and neighbour, but in Barth it is arrived at not in a pneumatic manner but rather on incarnational grounds. God has become neighbour to humanity in Christ by the incarnation and therefore all humanity is co-humanity (Church Dogmatics, I/2, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2nd edn. 1975), hereafter CD, p. 402.

7 Charity and Its Fruits, YE, vol. 8, p. 133.

8 Though there are not many explicit references to the Trinity in his reflections on conversion and assurance, as Amy Plantinga Pauw has affirmed, ‘What marks them as trinitarian is the persistent identification of the Holy Spirit with divine love and the pervasiveness of the core trinitarian vocabulary of love, consent and union’. Pauw, Amy Plantinga, The Supreme Harmony of All: the Trinitarian Theology of Jonathan Edwards (Grand Rapids, MI, and Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2002), p. 152Google Scholar.

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21 ‘Essay on the Trinity’, Treatise on Grace, pp. 118–9, 123–4.

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23 This emphasis is also the burden of Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God (1741), and the sermon, ‘True Grace Distinguished from the Experience of Devils’ (1752).

24 He did retain a modified form of it, however, conceding that for the majority of people the heart of the sinner is prepared by God ‘for the receiving of Christ by a sense of his sin and misery, and a despair of help in himself and in all others’ (Misc., no. 317, YE, vol. 13, p. 400).

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30 YE, vol. 4, p. 103

31 Misc., no. 741, YE, vol. 18, p. 367.

32 Jonathan Edwards, ‘An Essay on the Trinity’ in Treatise on Grace, p. 125.

33 Works (Banner), vol. 1, p. xlvi.

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43 Edwards counters this charge in ‘Unpublished Letter on Assurance and Participation in the Divine Nature’, YE, vol. 8, pp. 636–40.

44 Plantinga Pauw, Supreme Harmony, p. 135.

45 A phrase used by Plantinga Pauw, ibid., p. 159.

46 Ibid., p. 158.

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54 Ibid., p. 179.

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60 Plantinga Pauw, Supreme Harmony, p. 168.

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69 Hunsinger, ‘Dispositional Soteriology’.

70 Ibid., p. 110.

71 Jenson, America's Theologian, p. 83.

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74 I wish to thank Alan Torrance for inspiration, Bruce Hindmarsh for helpful comments, and Robert Hand for editorial assistance.