ABSTRACT
At the heart of Edwards’s theology is a vision of the Trinity characterized by everflowing love and a tendency to communicate love both ad intra and ad extra. As we detailed in Chapter 3, Edwards believed that God is a dynamic fellowship of eternal love between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The love that characterizes the Trinity informs the shape and nature of his understanding of Christian redemption. We believe that Edwards’s trinitarian theology can contribute to a contemporary vision of the Christian life that can support the biblical and evangelical notion that Christian salvation is fundamentally about personal relationship with God and the transformation of human life. The powerful idea at the center of Edwards’s doctrine of salvation is that grace is the Holy Spirit. We know that sounds odd because we are so accustomed to thinking about grace in impersonal categories, such as a divine power, influence, and/or pardon. But for Edwards, grace is a divine person, the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is grace because the Spirit draws the believer into relationship with the Son and the Father on the one hand and with the community of saints, on the other hand. This chapter first sets forth Edwards’s theology of the Spirit as grace and then shows the way his trinitarian theology can fund a relational and transformational vision of the Christian life.
