There are two conversations in the studies of Jonathan Edwards that have not yet intersected. First is the conversation considering John Locke’s influence on Edwards. Few today maintain that Locke’s impact on Edwards was as thoroughgoing as Perry Miller’s portrayal: Edwards’s reading of Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding was the “central and decisive event of his intellectual life” (1949, cf. Moody 2005). Rather, now it is acknowledged that Edwards was eclectic in the sources and thinkers that he appropriated (e.g., McClymond & McDermott 2012, Marsden 2003). Still Alan P. F. Sell convincingly argues that Locke is simply part of the intellectual milieu of the eighteenth-century, English-speaking church; if he was not making a direct impact on a particular divine, then he frequently was making an indirect one (1997). There is little question that Locke directly influenced Edwards on issues such as epistemology, saving faith, and the sense of the heart (Marko 2024, Martin 2019, Smith 2005), just to name a few. Second is the conversation considering the influences of Edwards’s Trinitarian thought. There, Edwards’s eclectic borrowings make scholars more tentative in their arguments regarding who influenced him. Plantinga Pauw, for instance, can only listen for “resonances” between Edwards’s Trinitarianism and that of a certain group of Puritans (2002, cf. Knight 1994). Another study compares Edwards’s Trinitarian thought to that of William Sherlock and Samuel Clarke with the stated assumption that Edwards has those thinkers and the controversies surrounding them in mind when writing about the Trinity (Studebaker and Caldwell, 2016). Yet another study casts most of Edwards’s corpus, including his Trinitarian writings, as a response to deistical attacks on the Christian Faith (McDermott, 2000).
In this paper, I will argue that some of Edwards’s Trinitarian writings are building upon and responding to Locke’s arguments promulgated in The Reasonableness of Christianity, the latter’s work targeting deists and embattled Christian sects. This is not to say that Locke was the only one advancing the ideas and arguments that he did, but there is good reason to think his work was the root cause of certain aspects of Edwards’s treatment of the Trinity.
This paper will be accomplished in three parts. Part I will offer a historical overview of Locke and the debates to which he was responding and those in which he became embroiled. In Part II, I will briefly lay out Locke’s arguments for two fundamental articles of the Christian faith and some corresponding principles. In Part III, I will show how some of Edwards’s writings on the Trinity are a response to Locke’s The Reasonableness of Christianity.