Irene Petrou: Knowledge and Reason versus Experience and Practice: Jonathan Edwards and the Patristic Doctrine of Deification

Despite an absence of terminology for deification, in Jonathan Edwards’ writings, the patristic doctrine of deification framed many aspects of his theology. Five key themes can be identified in his theology that show his engagement with the doctrine was based in Scriptural Tradition: the Christian’s participation in the divine nature; Christ’s descent and ascent; the Patristic idea of ‘recapitulation’; the Christian’s union with God/Christ; and the progression of the Christian soul in eternity. His adaptation of the doctrine enabled him to account for both the spiritual and earthly concerns of the Christian life bringing together the transcendent and immanent qualities of the work of grace in a way that is not antithetical to, or incompatible with, the Reformed doctrine of justification by faith. The doctrine functioned in Edwards’ soteriological anthropology to allow eschatology to inform the issue of Christian ethics and morality in the Christian’s present life. One result is that Christian issues to do with ethics and morality become a theocentric concern, not an anthropocentric one, which for Edwards allowed him to demarcate Christian moral theory from eighteenth century secular and philosophical moral theory. This can be seen to be the reason why the doctrine appealed to him in his eighteenth-century Enlightenment context. He perceived the ever-growing rationalism in Reformed Protestant thinking, which had imposed a dichotomy between knowledge and reason, and experience and practice, to be a false one- a tension that remains and continues to impact modern theological thinking today.