Beautiful theology

Amy Plantinga Pauw, who teaches theology at Louisville Presbyterian Seminary, has written a sophisticated but quite accessible book about Jonathan Edwards's surprisingly rich musings on the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. Pauw is among the younger academics who over the past two decades have transformed Edwards scholarship into the most serious, most extensive and most important effort at theological retrieval in American history. Like others of this cohort, she makes full use of the splendidly edited Works of Jonathan Edwards, which have been appearing with accelerating regularity from the Edwards shop at Yale, under the direction of Harry Stout and Kenneth Minkema.

Pauw is also a master of the vast corpus of Edwards's unpublished writings--writings that include theological notes (the "miscellanies"), manuscript sermons and private commentary on scripture (Pauw herself edited the recently released vol. 20, The "Miscellanies": 833-1152). Because she has perused the books that Edwards himself read (many in Latin), she is able to show that Edwards, however creative in some of his formulations, was far from the isolated wilderness genius depicted in once-standard accounts. And with several of the younger scholars, along with veterans like Sang Hyun Lee, she is also fully committed to using Edwards not simply as an exceptional figure from the past, but also as a worthy interlocutor for contemporary theological discussion.

The great strength of this book lies in its picture of what Pauw describes as two distinctive lines of trinitarian reasoning that appear in a few of the sermons, treatises and letters known during Edwards's lifetime, but in much greater profusion in his unpublished work. The first of these models presents a psychological understanding more or less in the tradition of Augustine, where the Trinity is parsed as a harmonious unity of all-comprehending mind (Father), all-knowing wisdom (Son) and all-embracing love (Spirit).