New England Dogmatics. Maltby Geltson

obey and serve him as their God’ (“Miscellanies” n. 884, WJE 20:144). See also: “Blank Bible,” WJE 24:702, 1125.

39. Edwards, “The Great Doctrine of Original Sin Defended,” WJE 3:141.

40. This move may well be as much an ecclesial manoeuvre as it is a theological one. Consider that the generation following Edwards’ death was marked by ecclesial difficulties consisting chiefly in a lack of authority. Mark Valeri argues that Edwards’ chief successor, Joseph Bellamy, in his True Religion Delineated, attempted to wed his theological determinism to the language of the “moral discourse of Enlightenment ethics,” convinced that the only hope for the doctrinal rehabilitation of New England was to demonstrate publicly the indispensability of divine authority to the virtue of the moral law. See: Bellamy, “True Religion Delineated,” 50, 51. See also: Valeri, Law and Providence, 42, 49, 51; Erskine to Bellamy: Jan. 26, 1753, HS document number 81199, Joseph Bellamy Papers, Boxes 187–90, Folders 2929–64, Case Memorial Library, Hartford Seminary, Hartford, Connecticut. According to Valeri, “Bellamy’s burden was to elucidate this axiom in a way that rendered experimental Calvinism ethically compelling” (Law and Providence, 50).

41. Park, The Atonement, xiii–x.

42. Edwards Jr, “On the Necessity of the Atonement,” 8–9. Compare with, “The atonement is the substitute for the punishment threatened in the law; and was designed to answer the same ends of supporting the authority of the law, the dignity of the divine moral government, and the consistency of the divine conduct in legislation and execution. By the atonement it appears that God is determined that his law shall be supported; that it shall not be despised or transgressed with impunity; and that it is an evil and a bitter thing to sin against God. The very idea of an atonement or satisfaction for sin, is something which, to the purposes of supporting the authority of the divine law, the dignity and consistency of the divine government, is equivalent to the punishment of the sinner, according to the literal threatening of the law.”

43. Bellamy, True Religion Delineated, 60. See also, “The design of the incarnation, life and death of the Son of God, was to give a practical declaration, in the most public manner, even in the sight of the whole intellectual system, that God was worthy of all that love, honor, and obedience, which his law required, and that sin was as great an evil as the punishment threatened supposed; and so to declare God’s righteousness, and condemn the sins of an apostate world, to the end [that] God might be just, and yet a justifier of the believer. And this he did by dying in our room and stead” (Bellamy, “An Essay,” 378; see also: West, Scripture Doctrine of the Atonement, ch. 2).

44. Bellamy, True Religion Delineated, 320–22.

45. Particular attention is paid to this observation in Crisp’s, “The Moral Government of God,” 85–90.

46. Crisp, “Penal Non-Substitution,” 145–48.

47. Ibid., 148.

48. Crisp, “Penal Non-Substitution,” 148–51.

49. Ibid., 152.

50. Crisp, “Penal Non-Substitution,” 153–57.

51. Crisp, “Penal Non-Substitution,” 157–58.

52. Crisp, RCPT, 314.

53. Ibid., 312.

54. Ibid., 316.

55. For more on his significance to the Edwardsian tradition, see: Ferm, Jonathan Edwards the Younger.

56. Edwards Jr, “On Necessity of the Atonement,” 1–42; Edwards Jr, “Remarks on the Improvements,” 481–92 and “Thoughts on the Atonement,” 493–508.

57. Edwards Jr, “On the Necessity of the Atonement,” 8–9.

58. Lewis, RCPT, 329 (emphasis added). According to Lewis, “in the case of a debt, what is required is that the creditor shall not suffer a loss. Whereas in the case of a debt of punishment what is required is that the debtor shall suffer a loss.”

59. “Miscellany” n. 1076, WJE 20:460.

60. Matthew Levering offers a recent and helpful synthesis of Edwards’ thinking about punitive nature of divine justice and its relationship to both spiritual and somatic death in: The Ecumenical Edwards, 134–40. Levering’s argument lends considerable strength to the idea that Edwards did in fact support some version of penal substitution. It is worth noting that several of his references to the nature of human suffering (and God’s providential role in that suffering), however, might well be read in support of a penal non-substitution or moral government model.

61. “Miscellany” n. 449, WJE 13:497 (emphasis added).

62. For a recent and interesting account of Edward O’hare and the Capone empire, see: Eig, Get Capone.