Edwards, Panentheist

1721 was a crucial year not only for Jonathan Edwards’s spiritual formation but for his metaphysics. According to John Bombaro ( Jonathan Edwardss Vision of Reality: The Relationship of God to the World, Redemption History, and the Reprobate , 12), it was from that date that Edwards “began to ‘see’ God’s being, telic purposes, and cosmic design ‘in everything.’” Instead of having “to reason through the apparatus of logic to ascertain the connection between, say, a flower and God’ purpose and presence with relation to that flower,” he now “‘sensed’ the spiritual reality through which the flower possessed meaning and existence,” the spiritual reality was nothing less than the Divine being itself. As Edwards put it, he came ot the conclusion that “God and real existence are the same.”

This entailed a teleological modification of Calvinist theocentricity:

“Edwards pushed the theocentric train characteristic of Calvinistic thought to its limit by making a theocentrism of ends the foremost regulative principle of his philosophical theology.” Correcting Sang Hyun Lee’s claims ( The Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards ) about the central importance of Edwards’s “dispositional” ontology, Bombaro argues that “a theocentric metaphysics of finality – not dispositions – comprises the bedrock of Edwards’s vision of reality.”

This insight overcame Edwards’s “youthful doubts and disenchantment with the doctrine of God’s self-glorifying, sovereign disposition of the created order.” His question became “How does one reasonably explain the ‘vision’ of God transcendent/God immanent with relation to the created order?” His ” philosophical answer is presented in the technical idea of divine comprehensiveness . For Edwards, the idea of God’s comprehensiveness, the notion that God’s very existence encompasses created reality itself, metaphysically explains both why and how God and His glory and purposes are ‘seen’ in everything.” This vision was Trinitarian, and it was, in Edwards’s view, Scriptural (Acts 17:28). And he believed “it provided an accommodating explanation of providence and natural theology, as well as a ‘reasonable’ . . . answer to why God created the world” (13).

Bombaro defines panentheism as the view that God is not identical to everything but rather that God is ” in all things, or all things are in God.” Despite his sometimes pantheistic rhetoric, Edwards is, Bombaro thinks, finally a panentheist. He quotes this passages from Edwards’s Two Dissertations : “God . . . comprehends all entity, and all excellence in his own existence. The first Being, the eternal and infinite Being, is in effect, Being in general ; and comprehends universal existence . . . God is not only infinitely greater and more excellent than all other being but he is the head of the universal system of existence; the foundation and fountain of all being and all beauty – of whom , and through whom , and to whom is all being and all perfection; and whose being and beauty is as it were the sum and comprehension of all existence and excellence” (81).

Bombaro glosses: “‘Comprehend’ not only means God possesses infinite knowledge and understanding, but that His being actually encompasses all existence.” He not only “grasps mentally” but also “includes or embraces” all things within Himself. In Miscellany 880, Edwards says, “God is the sum of all being and there is no being without his being. All things are in Him, and He in all” (81).

Disposition is an adjunct to this vision of divine comprehensiveness: “Edwards quickly came to the conclusion that there must be a perfecting disposition within God to supply the impulse by which he communicates the idea of His perfections eternally . Such a disposition could not be any thing or power apart from God, and so he reasoned that God’s essence must consist of a disposition or a set of dispositions . . . . he was now to conceive of God as a communicative, self-enlarging being, whose essence communicates its entire ad intra ‘fullness’ ad extra ” (13).

This puts Edwards into some conflict with the Calvinist emphasis on God’s freedom. Bombaro claims that for Edwards “not only must God create but He is in some non-absolute sense dependent upon intelligent perceiving minds in order for both that creation . . . and His being to have an ad extra reality and value. The telos of redemption limits God’s acts concerning creation by making it a relational process, not just amongst the economic Trinity, but also with other perceiving minds.” This isn’t, Edwards thinks, in conflict with divine freedom or aseity. God doesn’t need to create out of some lack, even if He must create “because of who and what He is.” The disposition to create is for Edwards a display rather than a limit on His omnipotence (92).

As Bombaro says, “even a hint of God’s dependence upon the creature for ad extra manifestation would have caused John Calvin and Theodore Beza not a little discomfort” (92). No doubt true, but it seems that Edwards could mollify if not eliminate their concerns. If God comprehends all things, if the actions and dispositions of all things are “from, through, to, in” God, then God’s “dependence” on creatures is surrounded by and encompassed within the divine Persons’ dependence on one another. The Father’s purposes in the Son will be realized only if human beings respond and act in a certain way, but those actions and responses are provoked by the Spirit. God is in relation to creatures, but that genuine relation is encompassed by the divine relations.