From North Africa to Byzantium and to New England: Augustine, Maximus and Jonathan Edwards on the meaning and shape of Christian salvation

Three theologians from different localities, traditions and centuries are surprisingly similar in their theological and spiritual emphases. Augustine and Maximus have much in common with the eighteenth-century Reformed Protestant theologian, Jonathan Edwards. The common thread that draws these theologians together is found in their theology of the will and the affections, and in the manner in which their soteriological anthropology engaged with the patristic doctrine of deification.Each developed a theology of the will and the affections, which communicated intentionality (in that Christians through grace were capable of reforming and transforming their life), and which was framed by and climaxed in their notions of deification. The doctrine can be seen to function in the soteriological anthropology of each theologian to allow eschatology to inform the issue of Christian ethics and morality in the Christian’s present life. One result is that Christian issues of ethics and morality become a theocentric concern, not an anthropocentric one, demarcating Christian moral theory from secular and philosophical moral theory. With regard to Edwards, this can be seen to be the reason why the doctrine appealed to him in his eighteenth-century Enlightenment context. He perceived as false the ever growing rationalism in Reformed Protestant thinking, which, by imposing a dichotomy between knowledge and reason on the one hand and experience and practice on the other, creates a tension which continues to impact theological thinking today.