God does not magnify himself: on Thomas Schreiner and Jonathan Edwards

Michael Jensen mentions Thomas Schreiner’s recent New Testament Theology: Magnifying God in Christ (Baker, 2008). Michael is right to be troubled by this interpretation of the New Testament: “Schreiner wants to argue that the anchoring theme of NT Theology is something like: God magnifying himself through Jesus Christ by means of the Holy Spirit. That is, God’s concern for God’s own glory is the driving heartbeat of the NT witness and mission. God’s self-referencing self-regard is what perpetuates his plans and his interaction with his creatures.”

I had a similar complaint when I recently read a friend’s essay on Calvin’s doctrine of God: Calvin was not an Edwardsean! This whole business of “God magnifying himself” or of God redeeming the world “for the sake of God’s own glory” is really pretty perverse.

Personally, I’ve read Jonathan Edwards’ The End for Which God Created the World a number of times, and I think it’s an amazing achievement of speculative philosophical theology. (I haven’t read any John Piper, but I’ve heard that he popularises the same argument.) At one point in my life, I was persuaded by Edwards’ argument: its logic is so tight and so compelling; its vision of an always-self-glorifying God seemed so charged with religious awe and solemn Calvinist reverence. It was only as I was reading the Fourth Gospel one day that it occurred to me that Edwards had made one small mistake: he had forgotten to include “Jesus Christ” in his definition of God. And of course this one mistake invalidates the whole elaborate procedure: if a doctrine of God is wrong here, it’s wrong everywhere.

According to the Fourth Gospel, the divine “glory” is manifest in Christ’s cross. This presents a very different picture of what it means for God to “glorify himself”: God does not “magnify himself” (literally “make himself bigger”, from the Latin magnus); rather he humiliates himself and makes himself smaller. God’s glory travels a path of abasement and lowly self-giving. God’s glory, in other words, cannot be understood apart from God’s humanity – the eternal decision in which he becomes God-for-us in Jesus Christ.

An Edwarsean interpretation of the New Testament, then – in which God’s interactions with humanity always serve the higher aim of God’s self-magnification – can only be said to represent a stunning theological misreading of the New Testament witness. It’s one of those rare instances in which you wish a biblical scholar had read a little less theology.

Learning from the past: George Marsden responds

A guest-post by George Marsden (responding to my recent post)

Since this has been an interesting ongoing discussion, I guess it would not be out of place for me to clarify what I said. Below is the text of what I said on the point in question. I did not use the core and husk image, but rather said that in a tradition there are some ideas that have shone through in a tradition in many times and places but these are sometimes “intertwined” with outdated social and political views of a particular time and place. Example: the beauty of Christ’s sacrificial love being intertwined with the belief that the Pope is the Antichrist. A brilliant exposition of the former resonates today, but a brilliant exposition of the latter does not.

These lectures were about what we can learn from Jonathan Edwards today. In my two biographies of Edwards (Jonathan Edwards: A Life, and A Short Life of Jonathan Edwards), I adopted just the stance that Ben cites from Rowan Williams. But in these lectures I was attempting something different. So my thanks to Ben for his good comments which I basically agree with, except with respect to what he thought I was trying to say. Here is what I said:

“What can we expect to learn from someone whose views on many important subjects seem so bizarre, outdated, and perhaps even offensive? Probably in this place [i.e. Princeton] where there is an appreciation for the long-term Christian heritage it will not take extensive argumentation to answer this question. If we excluded from our mentors all those who held views on some social or political issues that to many today seem bizarre or offensive, we would have to dispense with just about everyone in the history of the church as well as all the biblical writers and stick with just the wisdom of the very recent past and our own contemporaries – which is a truly depressing thought.

“Second, as I think will also gain general assent here, theologians present a special case. Theologian work within traditions and, although traditions are shaped and modified by historical contingencies, they also (by the nature of the case) contain elements that transcend the faddish outlooks of particular times and places. Hence they contain insights and challenges to our own assumptions and outlooks, just because they offer rays of wisdom that have shone in many other times and places.

“Nor is learning from the greatest proponents of a tradition an all or nothing enterprise. In our specific case of Edwards and the Reformed version of the Augustinian tradition there are some emphases – such as the eternal flames of hell, or God’s eternal decrees to election and reprobation – that some Reformed and other Christians today find very off-putting. But I think it is also most important not to be so off-put by these dimensions of the outlook of a great expositor or a tradition that we miss the truly grand insights of that expositor. As I said, I don’t think that point will require much argumentation at this seminary, where there is already appreciation for the likes of Edwards or Calvin, even among those who are not strictly Edwardseans or Calvinists.

“But beyond that, I want to argue that we can also gains some valuable insights and challenges to our culture and or cultural assumptions from the likes of Edwards. In order to do so we need to be alert to be able to sort out the lasting insights of the great minds of the past from the non-essential assumptions of another era with which those perennial truths may be intertwined. Learning to do that is, it seems to me, one of the great values of studying history. We try to understand another era not to simply dismiss it as curiously different and inferior to our own, but to be able to takes its peculiarities into account so that we can learn from its greatest thinkers.

“In fact sometimes we can gain some great insights from the profound thinkers of the past about our own times just because they lived in times so different from our own. Listening to them in their own contexts may have an effect similar to refreshing insights that we might gain from living for a time in a foreign country.”

George Marsden and Jonathan Edwards: on learning from the past

The American church historian George Marsden is currently delivering the Stone Lectures here in Princeton. (The lectures are being blogged – see the series of links here.) Marsden, author of the great biography on Jonathan Edwards, is creating a dialogue between Edwards’ thought and contemporary theological issues.

Although I admire Marsden’s work on American church history, I was very disappointed by the methodological framework which he set up in the opening lecture. He asked how we can learn from someone like Edwards, whose views are obviously outdated and offensive in many ways. Marsden’s answer was that we can access Edwards’ lasting insights by distinguishing between his great “perennial ideas” (e.g. his doctrine of the Trinity) and his outdated nonessential ideas (e.g. his biblical literalism, his millennialism, and so on).

I realise that Marsden was only sketching some brief remarks on historical method, but I think this represents a deeply flawed approach to the question of how we can learn from the Christian past. If we learn from the past by distinguishing the timeless “perennial core” from the nonessential (i.e. flawed) elements, then we’re acting as though our own commitments are the final arbiter of history — we’re assuming that history has found its goal in us. And one of the unfortunate side-effects of this approach is that we’re no longer in a position to be critiqued by history. This would explain the strange fact that Marsden didn’t find any contemporary critical significance in Edwards’ millennialism, his doctrine of progress, or his theology of the election of nations. (Seriously, isn’t all this just a little relevant to American identity and to US foreign policy?)

In contrast, the point of historical study (as Rowan Williams has compellingly argued in Why Study the Past?) is to encounter the past in all its irreducible strangeness — and yet to perceive this strangeness itself (not some timeless “core”) as something that was actually possible for the Christian church. In other words, we need to recognise even Edwards’ most unpalatable ideas as things that it was possible for a Christian to think and say. If we can do this, then we’re placed in a position where Edwards can challenge and question our own most basic assumptions about what counts as “Christian”.


As Karl Barth remarks in his work on 19th-century theology: “I have to count all these people as members of the Christian Church and, remembering that I and my theological work are in the Christian Church only on the ground of forgiveness, I have neither to dispute nor even to doubt that they, like me, were ultimately concerned with the Christian faith” (p. 28).

Once we perceive that a thinker like Jonathan Edwards was “ultimately concerned with the Christian faith,” it becomes impossible to distinguish between any timeless “core” and the mere “husk” of culturally-bound ineptitudes. Instead, by encountering the strangeness and offensiveness of Edwards’ ideas, we are encountering something new and unexpected about the nature of Christian identity itself. And this means that our own assumptions about Christian identity have also become less certain and less secure. Edwards is now not merely a curiosity or the source of a few timeless verities; now, he becomes a question to us.

A three-year-old's Calvinism

My three-year-old daughter had a little tantrum the other day, which led to this brief conversation between me and her:

—“Could you please stop that tantrum!”
—“No, I can’t stop!”
—“Would you please try to stop, then.”
—“Noooo Dad, I CAN’T try!”

So there you have it: the whole classical Calvinist system in a nutshell. To which Jonathan Edwards added his own cunning twist (a twist which both betrayed and perfected the old Calvinist system): “I really could do it if I tried; but I can’t try, so I can’t do it!”

Walking with Jonathan Edwards

Here’s a photo from Princeton:

From the Princeton cemetery

Jonathan Edwards

Archibald Alexander

Charles Hodge

Archibald Alexander Hodge

B. B. Warfield

Jonathan Edwards and beauty

“It was in the vocabulary of the language of beauty that Edwards expressed his most important theological and philosophical ideas.... For Edwards, [God] was the ‘foundation and fountain’ of all beauty. The triune God was seen to be a society of love and beauty. God’s Holy Spirit was beauty. All beauty, indeed all creation, was the overflow of God’s inner-trinitarian beauty. Beauty was, for Edwards, the very structure of being.”

—Louis J. Mitchell, Jonathan Edwards on the Experience of Beauty (Studies in Reformed Theology and History, New Series No. 9; Princeton: Princeton Theological Seminary, 2003), p. 105.