Jonathan Edwards is considered the most innovative theological-philosophical mind in America. While much of his system has been mapped out, there still remains some debate over his atonement thinking and how his successors may have adapted it into a species of Moral Government Theory. Oliver Crisp has observed that Edwards’s “most reflective work on this subject stays within the bounds of satisfaction and penal substitution versions of the atonement.”
While this is true with respect to The ‘Miscellanies’, A History of the Work of Redemption (hereafter, History) is another “reflective work” that reveals how Edwards’s atonement thinking was shaped to a large degree by Petrus van Mastricht’s Theologia Theoretico-practica (1699; hereafter, TPT).
This paper shows how key elements of Van Mastricht’s atonement thinking show up beyond History’s structure but in its narrative detail. To show this correlation between the Dutch theologian and his American reader this paper will develop the connection between Van Mastricht’s “The Mediator’s Redemption Itself” (TPT 1.5.18) and Edwards’s fourteenth sermon in History.
This comparison reveals three ways Edwards incorporated Van Mastricht into his atonement thinking making it more of a mosaic theory having a similarity to penal, satisfaction, and governmental theories.
1) Reformed Orthodoxy and the Enlightenment. This section shows how van Mastricht was a natural fit to engage Deism’s claim that the world is a closed system. Edwards found a kindred spirit in Van Mastricht who engaged the first iteration of Deism in Cartesianism. Yet, this was more than a fit, Edwards found permission to do theology using categories of moral philosophy to explain the atonement in History.
2) History and Dutch Federalism. This section shows how Edwards appropriated Van Mastricht’s understanding of the covenant of grace for the structure of History. This is an important move because it serves to address the Deistic claim that the universe is a closed system. Edwards proposes that everything in the world serves to glorify and reveal something of God’s hidden nature. Indeed, Edwards will make the bold claim that everything in the world has a consistent correspondence to God’s nature—even the atonement.
3) Van Mastricht and Edwards. This section shows how Edwards received Van Mastricht’s unique approach to the atonement, which is not quite like Richard Baxter on the one hand nor John Owen on the other. Edwards found in Van Mastricht’s “The Mediator’s Redemption Itself” (TPT 1.5.18) material to use in History that set him on a mosaic atonement theory that satisfies God’s nature and atones for the elect through union of the Mediator with the sinner.
This paper will provide readers with a greater understanding of Edwards’s atonement thinking as a development of Van Mastricht as it appears in A History of the Work of Redemption.