"The Supreme Harmony of All"

Book excerpt: Jonathan Edwards lived in an age in which the doctrine of the Trinity was sometimes openly repudiated and more often quietly ignored. But as this important book shows, Edwards in fact took care to creatively fashion the Trinity into the centerpiece of his Christian life and work. Through her pursuit of Edwards's writings, especially his lifelong intellectual diary, Amy Plantinga Pauw traces the way Edwards established the basic outlines of his trinitarian thought when he was only twenty years old, and how the doctrine continued to run like a subterranean river throughout his famed career as a pastor and teacher. Recognizing the centrality of the Trinity in Edwards's thought both nuances our understanding of his Puritan inheritance and challenges the narrowness of Edwards's enduring legacy as the preacher of "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God."