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Holy Spirit, and grace. Chapter 3 brings to light their shared Christology and its trinitarian foundation. It exhibits three parallels in their theology: (1) the Augustinian mutual love model is foundational in their thought, (2) the Holy Spirit plays a constitutive role in the Incarnation, and (3) the personal identity of Jesus Christ derives from the subsistence of the divine Son in and through his humanity. The trinitarian nature of Edwards’s Christology is particularly important. Prior interpretations have tended to neglect or only sketch the trinitarian and pneumatological elements of his Christology. However, a clear trinitarian and pneumatological grammar shapes his doctrine of Christ. Moreover, the trinitarian nature of his Christology distinguishes it from its successors in the evangelical tradition. Edwards and Coffey can help Evangelicals develop a Spirit Christology that integrates pneumatology on the basis of a foundational trinitarianism.
Chapter 4 proposes that Edwards’s and Coffey’s pneumatological concepts of grace and the trinitarian model of redemption give a theological basis for ecumenical convergence between Evangelicals and Catholics. It does so because their unity lies precisely in the areas that historically have divided Evangelicals and Catholics—namely, their differing understandings of the nature of grace and redemption. For both Edwards and Coffey, grace is the gift of the Holy Spirit and redemption consists in fellowship with the trinitarian God. This chapter and the preceding one on Spirit Christology set the stage for the construction of an ecumenical and transformational vision of redemption and an evangelical theology of religions that will be developed in the final two chapters.
Part 3 moves to constructive theology. Its goals are to address two areas of contemporary theology on the basis of the theology that has been developed in the previous chapters. Chapter 5 proposes a trinitarian vision of redemption that is relational and transformational based on an appropriation and integration of Edwards’s and Coffey’s Spirit Christology and pneumatological concept of grace. Their trinitarian and relational understanding of redemption critiques and provides a way to revise three areas of traditional evangelical theology. These are (1) an emphasis on forensic justification as the essence of salvation, (2) a subordination of