That’s short for “Edwards on the Head”, my Thursday afternoon phenomena of feeling like a deflated cerebral whoopie cushion. I have class on Mondays and Thursdays, but Thursdays are the big days. We clock in at 7:45 and hang up our hats at 3:30. The whole day we belly-up to a smorgasbord of academic cuisine, beginning with Hebrew and ending with a class on Jonathan Edwards, who, by the way, has the uncanny ability to make me feel both amazed and dumb at the same time. That’s a good thing.

Right now we’re working through his dissertation “Concerning the End for Which God Created the World.” His point is that God didn’t create the world out of some deficiency or need in himself. Instead, the infinite self-knowledge and joy he has experienced in the fellowship of the Trinity is so full that it spills over. Like a fountain. God desires to communicate or display that fullness, and so he creates. Here’s how Edwards put it:

…[W]e may suppose, that a disposition in God, as an original property of his nature, to an emanation of his own infinite fulness, was what excited him to create the world; and so that the emanation itself was aimed at by him as a last end of the creation. (End of Creation, 23)