“Not only does the sun shine in the saints, but they also become little suns, partaking of the nature of the fountain of their light.”  - Jonathan Edwards 

Those who “know” me on the web know that before I came to Orthodoxy I was a staunch Edwardsian Calvinist. Other Orthodox often assume that this was a bigger leap than it actually was. They feel that because Arminian or “Biblicist” people make much of the free will, while Calvinism seems to deny it, it would have been a more natural progression from Weslyanism to Orthodoxy, for Orthodoxy believes strongly in human freedom of a sort. I haven’t studied much Weslyan theology but Charles’ hymns were among my favorite. What people possibly forget is that the Wesley brothers were friends with the Edwards. What they had in common, I have long felt, transcended their formulaic differences.

I did not read Edwards’ defense of Original Sin nor many of his other works. I dwelt constantly upon the teachings of the Religious Affections and to a lesser extent upon The End for Which God Created the World, which pictures God’s glory as rays emenating from his essence or waters flowing from a secret spring. Therefore it was Edwardsian doctrine even more than Weslyan hymns that prepared me to view Orthodox theology with understanding.

The primary reason: Edwardsian Calvinism has a well-developed doctrine of Regeneration that provides a bridge to Orthodox Theosis. Other Baptists and baptistic sects confess Regeneration as a fundamental doctrine of the faith, but usually they are largely unaware of what it means or what the greatest Regenerist theologian ever to write in the English language had to say about it.

My family, for instance, at first labored under the twin beliefs that

1) Salvation equals justification by faith alone and little else. (This means that salvation is a verdict God makes as judge that takes place in a moment in time…a moment that always corresponds exactly to a persons’ act of “placing their faith in Jesus” which in turn meant that you began to try to assume that Jesus’ merit had “covered your sins.” This led to a lot of circular reasoning: how do you know he did it? Because I believe he did it!)

2) Salvation, once accomplished in this (often elusive) moment in time could never be undone.

The problem in trying to live this way was that if, after your initial conversion, you started to want something more in your spiritual life, you were left either to the necessity of seeking a new, entirely different experience or to wonder whether your first one was the real thing. In other words, salvation under this system was not all that salvific unless all you wanted to be saved from was hell. The hell within was largely left untouched.

We were of course told that at “the moment of salvation” we were given all that pertains to life and godliness - the Holy Spirit dwelling within us. How to connect to this mysterious unknown person of the Godhead who had so intangibly and without sign taken our bodies as his temple was a perplexing, and to a serious seeker, agonizing question.

For my family and me, it really seemed that Jonathan Edwards solved all this. And to a large extent I still believe he  did. As we will see, there is one important distinction within Orthodox theology that my poor dear Teacher did not appear to understand, and it is for this reason that his condemnations of free will are so devestating.

 I will try to sum up the stages of thinking he took us through.

First and most importantly, his teaching came to us as if in response to a few verses of scriptures that had become very important relative to the needs we were sensing within us. Jim Johnson,  a dear family friend, my Aunt Elaine, my parents and sister and myself and a few others, among the others in our Baptist Church, began to be occupied with the question of “finding God.” We constantly quoted to one another the verses that urge us to seek God with all our hearts and the accompanying promise that we would find him. We passed in and out of Keswick theology (which demands a second, sanctifying experience of grace distinct from justification, but which pictures such second grace as being filled with the Holy Spirit much like a pitcher of water or worse like a demon-possessed person) without being much helped by it. Thus when Jonathan Edwards came and introduced the idea that this seeking was a necessary component even in salvation, we were ready to hear it.

Jonathan Edwards, although he believed in and preached justification by faith, experienced mystical visions in the spirit that seem similar to those eccstacies which Orthodox saints in their earlier stages of theosis speak of. The language he uses to describe it…or to veil it… is strikingly similar to certain Orthodox accounts I have read. The effect in his writings is that the search for a true inward experience of God as the root of salvation takes center stage. “For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision, neither high profession nor low profession, neither a fair story (of initial conversion) nor a broken one, avails any thing; but a new creature.” And he was not content with an experience of God that would fade with time and leave a person no better than before. He believed in a kind of experience that would be the root of defining and permanant alteration in a person’s soul.

“All gracious affections (of which true Christianity largely consists, this work argues) arise from a spiritual understanding, in which the soul has the excellency and glory of divine things discovered to it, as was shown before. But all spiritual discoveries are also transforming. They not only make an alteration of the present exercise, sensation, and frame of the soul; but such is their power and efficacy, that they alter its very nature: “But we all with open face, beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image, from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.” Such power as this, is properly divine, and is peculiar to the Spirit of the Lord…

Thus it is with those affections of which the soul is the subject in its conversion.The scriptural representations of conversion, strongly imply and signify a change of nature: such as being born again; becoming new creatures; rising from the dead; being renewed in the spirit of the mind; dying to sin, and living to righteousness; putting off the old man, and putting on the new man; being ingrafted into a new stock; having a divine seed implanted in the heart; being made partakers of the divine nature, &c.“

But it was not only in conversion, Edwards disclosed to us, that such things happen. For,

As it is with spiritual discoveries and affections given at first conversion, so it is in all subsequent illuminations and affections of that kind, they are all transforming. There is a like divine power and energy in them, as in the first discoveries: and they still reach the bottom of the heart, and affect and alter the very nature of the soul, in proportion to the degree in which they are given. And a transformation of nature is continued and carried on by them, to the end of life, until it is brought to perfection in glory. Hence the progress of the work of grace in the hearts of the saints, is represented in Scripture as a continued conversion and renovation of nature. So the apostle exhorts those that were at Rome, beloved of God, called to be saints—the subjects of God’s redeeming mercies—to be transformed by the renewing of their mind…

When I learned that the work of Grace in conversion is of the same kind as the work of Grace in what I had formerly called “sanctification” the unity of a person’s salvation appeared to me. I began to see salvation as a whole rather than as a moment in time. I did a little work on my own at this point and discovered that in the scriptures, salvation is first of all God’s work in rescuing people from any evil whatever, and secondly their experience of this work, and finally their experience of this work more specifically in regard to being dead in sins.

What was the nature, though, of this last salvation? Edwards had an answer that inflamed me with the delight of truth from the first moment that I read and understood it.

It is very true, that all grace and goodness in the hearts of the saints is entirely from God; and they are universally and immediately dependent on him for it. But yet (certain) persons are mistaken, as to the manner of God’s communicating himself and his Holy Spirit, in imparting saving grace to the soul. He gives his Spirit to be united to the faculties of the soul, and to dwell there after the manner of a principle of nature: so that the soul, in being endued with grace, is endued with a new nature: but nature is an abiding thing. All the exercises of grace are entirely from Christ: but are not from him as a living agent moves and stirs what is without life, and which yet remains lifeless. The soul has life communicated to it, so as through Christ’s power to have inherent in itself a vital nature. In the soul where Christ savingly is, there he lives. He does not merely live without it, so as violently to actuate it, but he lives in it, so that the soul also is alive. Grace in the soul is as much from Christ, as the light in a glass, held out in the sunbeams, is from the sun. But this represents the manner of the communication of grace to the soul but in part; because the glass remaining as it was, the nature of it not being at all changed, it is as much without any lightsomeness in its nature as ever. But the soul of a saint receives light from the sun of righteousness in such a manner, that its nature is changed, and it becomes properly a luminous thing. Not only does the sun shine in the saints, but they also become little suns, partaking of the nature of the fountain of their light. In this respect; the manner of their derivation of light, is like that of the lamps in the tabernacle, rather than that of a reflecting glass; which though they were lit up by fire from heaven, yet thereby became themselves burning, shining things. The saints do not only drink of the water of life, that flows from the original fountain; but this water becomes a fountain of water in them, springing up there, and flowing out of them. Grace is compared to a seed implanted, that not only is in the ground, but has hold of it; has root there, grows there, and is an abiding principle of life and nature there.

“Alive in Christ” took on a whole new meaning for me at this point. From that moment on all my searching for truth was informed by an insistence in my spirit that this was the heart of religion and that everything else I knew must be conformed to this truth. I think those Orthodox before me will understand now what I learned from Edwards and how it became a bridge to Orthodoxy.

I learned that the nature of saving Grace is nothing less than Christ through His Spirit being united to mine as a principle of life. This was the perfect bridge to grasping theosis a few years later. As I understand it after reading Lossky, grace itself is a sort of Presence of God and it is indeed in the uniting of the human nature to the divine that it becomes ours and transforms us. Where Edwards says that through the Sun (God) shining in us we would become “little suns,” Orthodoxy speaks less euphamistically and says that we become god by grace as God by Nature burns in our souls. (I wish I could compare direct quotes from Lossky but while I was writing Johnny pulled all my books off the shelf and I can’t find it.)

I spoke earlier of Edward’s misunderstanding. All these quotes have been taken from the same section in his book on the Religious Affections. The point of that section is to prove that: “Another thing, wherein gracious affections are distinguishedfrom others, is, that they are attended with a change of nature.”

Because of the centrality of this explanation, the whole weight of salvation was made to rest upon this change of nature. Edwards wrote a treatise on the will of which I read only a little. There he says that people are indeed free in a manner of speaking and bound in a manner of speaking - they are as free as it is possible to conceive of derived beings, that is, creatures, as being. (Orthodox theology, partly in agreement with the assumptions here and largely in disagreement with the conluscions, teaches that in the later stages of salvation or theosis we are supposed to take on characteristics of uncreated existance…though not by nature, only by grace.) Edwards’ explanation was comforting only in the sense that one didn’t have to feel there was any point at which the argument broke down. For the sake of the beloved truth about salvation which Edwards had taught me, I needed his formulation of soteriological questions to stand up to any challenge. However when it came to practically living these teachings, this is the point at which there was a short-circuit.

How was I to make the connection between my nature and me? Was there in fact no “me” in distinction to my nature? Or was I all and only nature? (Orthodox theology teaches that personhood, from which we have largely fallen, implies freedom in regard to nature…human nature is intended to be subjugated to the Image of God in which the human person is formed.) I did not, of course, formulate the questions so well at that time. I merely struggled with the difficulty of trying to seek salvation when I was at every moment dependant on God’s good will to provide me with an impulse of grace in my nature. Eventually this broke down to those horrible doubts about whether or not God actually has good will towards me and this is the tragedy of the Calvinist belief in election.

Upon coming to Orthodoxy I was confronted by this idea of theosis, that we must seek to become “god” or divine by grace. Father Stephen has recently put up a post in which he shows that all Christians believe the same thing when you examine the meaning of their teachings. This is certainly true of Jonathan Edwards as far as concerns the transformation of human nature in salvation. Unfortunately he was not able to make for me the distinction between nature and person and therefore was not able to speak to me on the salvation of the person. This affected his teaching on human freedom. Well he knew that “will is a function of nature” as Vladimir Lossky explains. And as nature, for Edwards, is what is directly affected by grace in salvation, any good will on our part is dependant upon our salvation. To an Edwardsian Calvinist there can be no idea of free choice leading out in the search for salvation. Free choice can only be a function of nature informed by grace and therefore it always follows after.

Now I’ve finally come full circle, I believe. I don’t understand Orthodox theology the way I thought I unerstood Edwardsian theology. However I do know that the answers are here. Freedom is something behind will, something that urges it on and sometimes even transcends it. For most of us there is a breakdown between freedom and will. I have not come to believe in the same “free will” I left behind long ago. Rather, I have come to understand that the perfection and marriage of freedom and will is something I have to look forward to when I am perfected in salvation. In the meantime whenever I become confused, there is absolutely no reason why I cannot simply sit down and do that which we were all impelled to begin over a decade ago: seek for God with all your heart and you will find him. And indeed this is another point at which Orthodoxy manifestly excells even the excellent Edwards: for it provides clearly defined steps in this seeking.

Edwards, and to an even greater extent A.W. Tozer, and I am sure other great Protestants have indeed climbed the mountain of theosis. Of Tozer it was said that when he went into his study he spent the greater part of the day lying silently on his face, “gazing on God” and would emerge with his face shining like Moses on the mountain. The difference is that in Orthodoxy those who go before us cut steps into the rock. Any Orthodox Christian, not merely the great ones, can follow in these steps: the sacraments, the icons and the whole ceremony of Church worship, the tradition of Orthodox “obedience,” but most of all the deeply explored tradition of Orthodox prayer, culminating in the Jesus Prayer.

So I thank God for Edwards and my other former teachers: For the truth they labored to rediscover that had been lost to them; for the lengths they went to in the effort to express that truth to such as me; and at last because I am sure their prayers in heaven guided me to such parts of their work as would eventually hand me over to the care of the Holy Orthodox Church.

I copied the Edwards quotations from this website.