Jonathan Edwards and the Life of God Quotes

“The goal of theosis is not to remove humanity but to make humans more human, like the one human for the many, the man Christ Jesus. This anticipates what human persons will become in the eternal future in heaven, or heaven-come-to-earth, which we will revisit shortly.”
― W Ross Hastings, Jonathan Edwards and the Life of God: Toward an Evangelical Theology of Participation

“Communal and personal practices must be understood as a way to make space for the work of God in us; they must be immersed in prayer, and they must be contemplative in their orientation. Intimacy with Christ and contemplation of Christ in these practices is primary, and while virtue that forms in the person pursuing knowledge of and likeness to Christ by the Spirit will most surely happen, it is the secondary thing. Virtue will never be seen in isolation from participation in the person and actions and virtues of Christ.”
― W Ross Hastings, Jonathan Edwards and the Life of God: Toward an Evangelical Theology of Participation

“As Plantinga Pauw so aptly puts it, “Edwards’s philosophical Idealism exacerbated the prevalent theological anthropocentrism of his day.”
― W Ross Hastings, Jonathan Edwards and the Life of God: Toward an Evangelical Theology of Participation

“The Christian life is less a “journey,” as with Calvin or Edwards, as it is an “again and again” awareness of utter dependence and a looking away from one’s interior life to Christ.”
― W Ross Hastings, Jonathan Edwards and the Life of God: Toward an Evangelical Theology of Participation

“The fact that justification is a concrete historical actuality in Christ causes Barth to relegate the realm of individual experience to the level of anhypostatic abstraction.”
― W Ross Hastings, Jonathan Edwards and the Life of God: Toward an Evangelical Theology of Participation

“Sanctification, in all of its aspects—conversion, assurance, and progressive sanctification—is described by Edwards in the language of consent and union, as a holiness[14] enabled by the Spirit’s power and intimacy expressed primarily as loving relationality.[15]”
― W Ross Hastings, Jonathan Edwards and the Life of God: Toward an Evangelical Theology of Participation

“The language of conversion and sanctification in Edwards is Trinitarian—of participation in God, of beatific knowledge, of love, consent, and union with God by means of the infusion of the Spirit in the regenerate soul. In his emphasis on holiness, Edwards elevates the profile of the Spirit as harmony and community and by the primary place of love in his view of Christian life.”
― W Ross Hastings, Jonathan Edwards and the Life of God: Toward an Evangelical Theology of Participation

“In a convert, progressive sanctification is expected to transpire through passionate knowledge of God and a growing intimacy with God that will be authenticated in community, through harmonious relationships in marriages, families, society, and the church.”
― W Ross Hastings, Jonathan Edwards and the Life of God: Toward an Evangelical Theology of Participation

“Barth writes that “in the language of the New Testament, koinõnia or communicatio is a relationship between two persons in which they are brought into perfect mutual coordination within the framework of a definitive order, yet with no destruction of their two-sided identity and particularity but rather in its confirmation and expression.”
― W Ross Hastings, Jonathan Edwards and the Life of God: Toward an Evangelical Theology of Participation

“That is, a communion of divine persons who have one will and one knowledge because each is in the other, interpenetrated and inter-animated without loss of identity, who can, by grace, draw human persons into that communion without loss of identity as humans and persons. This theosis more closely reflects what the New Testament envisions.”
― W Ross Hastings, Jonathan Edwards and the Life of God: Toward an Evangelical Theology of Participation

“The doctrine of ‘deification’ in Maximus is based upon the fundamental patristic presupposition that communion with God does not diminish or destroy humanity, but makes it fully human.”
― W Ross Hastings, Jonathan Edwards and the Life of God: Toward an Evangelical Theology of Participation

“It is not that Edwards did not use the social analogy; his understanding that God as the Persons of the Father, Son, and Spirit equate to mind, idea, and love in his psychological analogy (as Caldwell insists). It is just that Edwards does not use the social analogy when describing participation of the saints in God and therefore pays the price for seeking to make a Spirit who defines the essence of the Godhead the same Spirit that indwells and becomes the vital principle of the nature of regenerate human beings.”
― W Ross Hastings, Jonathan Edwards and the Life of God: Toward an Evangelical Theology of Participation

“Illumination grants the convert a new vision of the excellency of divine things, and infusion of grace imparts a new affection for those things.”
― W Ross Hastings, Jonathan Edwards and the Life of God: Toward an Evangelical Theology of Participation

“the ultimate goal of the universe is not soteriological but doxological;”
― W Ross Hastings, Jonathan Edwards and the Life of God: Toward an Evangelical Theology of Participation

“Knowledge is characteristically more than a cognitive activity in Edwards; knowledge transforms.”
― W Ross Hastings, Jonathan Edwards and the Life of God: Toward an Evangelical Theology of Participation

“For Edwards, therefore, salvation means participation in the emanating fullness of God by the impartation of God’s very essence as knowledge and love to humanity.”
― W Ross Hastings, Jonathan Edwards and the Life of God: Toward an Evangelical Theology of Participation

“The Spirit’s mission. The Spirit is sent by the Father and the Son for the work of the incarnation; the Spirit’s acting ad extra to create (as the Spirit of the Father) and then enhypostatically unite the person of the Logos to human nature (as the Spirit of the Son) corresponds with how the Spirit proceeds eternally from the Father and the Son ad intra as well as with the fact that the Son is not generated apart from the procession of the Spirit. The Spirit’s mission corresponds to the Spirit’s procession, and it is the nature of the Spirit to facilitate the eternal generation of the Son within the one God, who can therefore enhypostatize the human nature into the one person of the Logos.”
― W Ross Hastings, Jonathan Edwards and the Life of God: Toward an Evangelical Theology of Participation

“As Tan suggests, “Jesus is the Christ because his unity with the Logos is brought about by this indwelling of the Spirit.”
― W Ross Hastings, Jonathan Edwards and the Life of God: Toward an Evangelical Theology of Participation

“Consistent with Edwards’s Chalcedonian dyophysitism, the incarnation involves a new relation being brought about between the Father and the Son incarnate as Jesus Christ, as well as the union of the divine nature of the Son with his human nature.”
― W Ross Hastings, Jonathan Edwards and the Life of God: Toward an Evangelical Theology of Participation

“In sum, the distinctiveness of the mature theology of Jonathan Edwards lies in its Trinitarian theology of union, which is focused around three spiritual unions: union within the immanent Godhead, union of the two natures of Christ, and union of the believer with God.”
― W Ross Hastings, Jonathan Edwards and the Life of God: Toward an Evangelical Theology of Participation

“What he found to be most remarkable about the awakening was the creation of new unity in the churches, which is not surprising given his penchant for perception of the beauty of spiritual consents.”
― W Ross Hastings, Jonathan Edwards and the Life of God: Toward an Evangelical Theology of Participation

“doctrines of Trinity, incarnation and deification belong together in an indissoluble knot,”
― W Ross Hastings, Jonathan Edwards and the Life of God: Toward an Evangelical Theology of Participation

“The Cappadocian Fathers therefore bequeathed the legacy of  “a concept of God, which exists as a communion of free love out of which unique, irreplaceable and unrepeatable identities emerge, i.e. true persons in the absolute ontological sense.”
― W Ross Hastings, Jonathan Edwards and the Life of God: Toward an Evangelical Theology of Participation