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Jonathan Edwards: A New Departure in Eschatology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

C. C. Goen
C. C. Goen
Affiliation:
Graduate Student, Yale University
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Extract

The current revival of interest in both Jonathan Edwards and eschatology points up the fact that there has been no deliberate effort to bring these two subjects together. The only previous attempt to treat Edwards' doctrine of the last things is that by Frank Hugh Foster, in a series of articles on “The Eschatology of the New England Divines.”1 Unfortunately, the title promises more than the discussions afford; because Foster's interest is confined almost entirely to the problem of Universalism, his section on Edwards treats only of the doctrine of eternal punishment and serves to perpetuate the common notion that the great Puritan was little more than a preacher of damnation.

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 28 , Issue 1 , March 1959 , pp. 25 - 40
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1959

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References

1. Bibliotheca Sacra, XLIII (1886), 1–32, 287–302, 711–728Google Scholar, and continued in subsequent volumes.

2. Winslow, Ola Elizabeth, Jonathan Edwards (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1941), p. 193.Google Scholar

3. Cf. Charity and Its Fruits (London, 1851).Google Scholar The last chapter alone is sufficient to contradict Miss Winslow's judgment that Edwnrds' treatment of heaven was two-dimensional and prosaic.

4. Miller, Perry, Jonathan Edwards (New York: William Sloan Associates, 1949), p. 310.Google Scholar

5. Other modes of interpreting Revelation are the Preterist, which regards nearly all of its prophecies as already fulfilled, the Futurist, which places fulfillment largely at the end of the age, and the Historical Background, which seeks to uaderstand its message in terms of the situation in which it was written and received.

6. These ideas have their source in the chiliastic sects of the Middle Ages, notably the Franciscan Spirituals, who espoused Joachimite doctrine in the thirteenth century. They are common notions of Wycliffe. Huss, the Taborites, some of the Anabaptists, and the Reformers generally.

7. Edwards, Jonathan, Works (New York: Robert Carter and Bros., 1881), I, 457.Google Scholar This is a reprint of the Worcester edition, which has been considered more or less standard, although it has some variations in arrangement.

8. Ibid., p. 456. Interpreters of the “Historical” School assign to the reign of Antichrist 1260 years by the application of the year-day principle to Rev. 12:6, 14; 13:5; etc.

9. Ibid., p. 480.

10. Ibid., p. 482.

11. Ibid., p. 486.

12. Ibid., p. 487.

13. Ibid., pp. 487 ff.

14. Townsend, Harvey G. (ed.), The Philosophy of Jonathan Edwards from His Private Notebooks (Eugene: University of Oregon Press, 1955), p. 207.Google Scholar

15. Grosart, Alexander B. (ed.), Selections from the Unpublished Writings of Jonathan Edwards (private printing, 1865), p. 128.Google Scholar

16. Townsend, op. cit., pp. 207 f.

17. Edwards believed that the personal, visible return of Christ at the end of the age is prefigured by several other crises in history: the destruction of Jerusalem, the victory of Constantine, the time of the Reformation.

18. Miller, op. cit., p. 318.

19. Edwards, , Works, III, 314.Google Scholar

20. Allen, Alexander V. G., Jonathan Edwards (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1890), p. 236.Google Scholar

21. Dwight, S. E., The Life of President Edwards (New York: G. and C. and H. Carvill, 1830), p. 197.Google Scholar This sentiment appears often.

22. Ibid., p. 217. Italics mine.

23. Ibid., p. 218.

24. Edwards, Works, III, 439.

25. Ibid., p. 471.

26. Ibid., p. 472.

27. Ibid., p. 491.

28. Ibid., p. 494.

29. Ibid., p. 500.

30. Ibid., p. 493.

31. Ibid., p. 507. Perry Miller accuses Edwards of believing, for a time at least, that the millennium had actually begun in Northampton. (Op. cit., p. 318.) Edwards answers this himself: “It has been slanderously reported and printed concerning me, that I have often said, that the Millennium was already begun, and that it began at Northampton. A doctor of divinity in New England, has ventured to publish this report to the world, for a single person, who is concealed and kept behind the curtain: but the report is very diverse from what I have ever said. Indeed I have often said, as I say now, that I looked upon the late wonderful revivals of Religion as forerunners of those glorious times so often prophesied of in the Scripture, and that this was the first dawning of that light, and beginning of that work, which, in the progress and issue of it, would at last bring on the Church's latter day glory; but there are many that know that I have from time to time added, that there would probably bc many sore conflicts and terrible convulsions, and ninny changes, revivings and intermissions, and returns of dark clouds, and threatening appenrances, before this work shall have subdued the world, and Christ's kingdom shall be every where established and settled in pence, which will be the lengthening of the Millennium or day of the Church's peace, rejoicing and triumph on earth, so often spoken of.” (Dwight, op. cit., p. 213.)

32. Institutes of the Christian Religion iii. 25. 5. It should be stated that Calvin knew millennial faith only as exhibited in the carnal chiliasm of the revolutionary Anabaptists, and he pictured them (probably erroneously) as believing in nothing beyond the earthly kingdom which they were bent on setting up by force.

33. Quistorp, Heinrich, Calvin's Doctrine of the Last Things, trans. Knight, Harold (Richmond: John Knox Press, 1955), p. 177.Google Scholar

34. Cf. Brown, J. A., “The Second Advent and the Creeds of Christendom,” Bibliotheca Sacra XXIV (1867), 629–51.Google Scholar

35. After Cutler's defection to episcopacy in 1722 (just before Edwards entered Yale), orthodoxy in Connecticut was strictly defined as complete acceptance of the Saybrook Platform. In this rigorous doctrinal environment, “by both precept and example, he was predisposed to subscribe to the Saybrook Platform… before he was asked.” (Winslow, op. cit., p. 85.)

36. Schaff, Philip, Creeds of Christendom (New York: Harper and Bros., 1877), III, 723.Google Scholar The article on the return of Christ precedes this in the confession; whether a temporal precedence is intended or not is impossible to say.

37. This is not to say that either Edwards' predecessors or contemporaries eschewed chiliasm. Early colonial writings are replete with references to prophecy; legislators and educators, historians and theologians wrote on prophecy within the general framework of the “Historical” School. But virtually every one holds to the premillenninl return of Christ, and most of them place it far in the future. Postmillennialism as an explicit tenet was unknown. “The founders of New England were not social radicals—they preached the millennium as far off, so that for the present we must be visible saints and submit to church discipline.” (Miller, op. cit., p. 320.)

38. Dwight, op. cit., p. 246. See also pp. 211, 219.

39. Miller, Perry, “The End of the World,” Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1956), p. 239.Google Scholar

40. Ibid., p. 235.

41. In Jonathan Edwards' list of books “to be enquired after” is “the best exposition of the Apocalypse.” My guess is that he found Lowman's work nearest to this desideratum. Cf. Johnson, Thomas H., “Jonathan Edwards' Background of Reading,” Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, XXVII (1931), 193–222.Google Scholar

42. Bellamy, Joseph, “The Millennium,” Sermons (Boston: Edes and Gill, 1758), pp. 62 ff.Google Scholar

43. Ibid., p. 69.