Jonathan Edwards on ‘Harmony and Consent’ as Essential to Human Identity

Abstract

What essentially is human identity? Recent scholarship has observed the centrality of the doctrine of the Trinity for Jonathan Edwards’ wide range of thought. Given this premise, Trinity would lead Edwards also to isolate the idea of the ‘person’ as the locus of human identity simply because we bear the imago Dei. Furthermore, since he identifies the essential characteristic of the divine Persons as relationality, and specifically for the pure acts of love by members of the Trinity, the human self is to be identified essentially with the term ‘person’ possessing in lesser degree the same relational capacity belonging to the divine Persons. Specifically, Edwards identifies ‘consent and harmony’ as the characteristic manner of that relational act that occurs in the Trinity, and therefore recurring in that relation between God and the human person from the beginning to the consummation of redemptive history.