Studebaker on Pauw

Steve Studebaker writers in the Scottish Journal of Theology (56:3) about Edwards’s trinitarian theology, and includes an extended critique of Amy Plantinga Pauw’s treatment of Edwards’s incipient “social trinitarianism.” According to Studebaker, Pauw’s analysis only works if one assumes that the history of Trinitarian theology can be sketched out as a series of pendulum swings between a “oneness” paradigm and a “threeness” paradigm (which has a contemporary variation in the opposition of “social” and “psychological” models). Studebaker wisely rejects this paradigm of the history of Trinitarian theology, and argues that Edwards is fully within the Augustinian tradition that employs the paradigm of lover-love-beloved, which includes both “social” and “psychological” emphases.