THE ECOLOGICAL PROMISE OF JONATHAN EDWARDS’ RELATIONAL ONTOLOGY

Abstract

According to Jonathan Edwards, “The whole universe, earth, air and seas… [is] full of images of divine things, as full as a language is of words.”1 As Sang Hyun Lee has demonstrated in his study of Edwards’ theological metaphysics, Edwards arrived at this idea through a complex and constructive theological proposal. Rather than approach being qua being from the vantage of traditional Aristotelian ontology, which saw reality as an aggregate of individual substances, Edwards developed a relational ontology, wherein he conceived of the structure of being in terms of all reality’s inherent relationality, accounting for the way relations subsist both among things and within them. For Edwards relationality was internal to being, and therefore constituted the nature of reality on its deepest level.