Edwards on Justification--A New Perspective (Abstract)

For over sixty years schol­ars have debated whether Edwards’s sote­ri­ol­ogy, and par­tic­u­larly his doc­trine of jus­ti­fi­ca­tion, was faith­ful to the Ref­or­ma­tion or not. Thomas Schafer and oth­ers have said he departed from Ref­or­ma­tion views. Oth­ers have recently vig­or­ously defended his fidelity to Ref­or­ma­tion prin­ci­ples. Which is it? This paper will argue that he was faith­ful to Ref­or­ma­tion prin­ci­ples but not to what became known as the Ref­or­ma­tion tradition.