Introduction: Jonathan Edwards’s Millennialism: America

Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) is known as “America’s greatest theologian and philosopher.”1Close As a Puritan theological heavyweight, his collected works span seventy-three volumes and have been investigated and dissected by many scholars from numerous perspectives.2Close While scholars have carried out critical research on his theology, only a small portion has focused on Edwards’s eschatology. In particular, from Edwards’s own day till now, no published monograph is available that directly and solely addresses Edwards’s millennial view. The works that have addressed this subject are scattered in articles and book chapters. They usually incidentally discuss Edwards’s millennialism when exploring his theological system or tracing the American and/or Puritan millennial tradition. Therefore, this book provides a more nuanced examination of Edwards’s millennialism. It sheds new light on a number of topics that were either less well-known or highly controversial, including Edwards’s understanding of the chronology and geography of the millennium, his insights into the significance of the land and people of Israel in God’s kingdom, his consciousness of God’s sovereignty and His glory manifested in history and nature, his contribution to the awareness of the capacious divine kingdom that incorporates China and the heathen world, his departures from America-centric theology of history, and the contemporary relevance of Edwards’s millennialism.

To begin with, I will provide a brief survey on the existing controversial viewpoints on various issues, including Edwards’s awareness of the millennial chronology and geography, his contributions to Puritan millennial thought, and whether he held a political millennialism.

In the twentieth century, H. Richard Niebuhr’s The Kingdom of God in America (1937) is probably the first work that briefly addresses Edwards’s eschatology.3Close For Niebuhr in particular, Edwards seemed to anticipate an imminent millennium that would arrive in America shortly after the Great Awakening.4Close In this book, Niebuhr presents the notion of the kingdom of God—“sovereignty of God”—as the “dominant idea in American Christianity.”5Close Based on this belief, he maintains that divine sovereignty is the “explicit foundation” in Edwards’s thought, which is clearly expressed in Edwards’s conversion experience in “Personal Narrative” and his millennial expectation in A History of the Work of Redemption (abbreviated as HWR hereafter).6Close Unlike the early Calvinists and the left-wing Protestants, who were inspired by the Great Awakening, Edwards showed a strong and evident “millenarian tendency” and his interest remarkably “shifted from the eternal kingdom into which souls enter one by one to the kingdom on earth.”7Close

Niebuhr was followed by Perry Miller, who covers various eschatological views from the Newtonians in the seventeenth century to atomic physicists in the twentieth century in his The End of the World.8Close Without little scholarly support, Miller declares that Edwards was “the greatest artist of the apocalypse” in America.9Close Noticeably, he argues that in his HWR Edwards actually refuted the mechanical-moral model advocated by the “apocalyptic physicists” such as Thomas Burnet and William Whiston.10Close In contrast to their conviction that the millennium is the reward of destruction, Edwards, by placing the millennium before the Final Judgment, demonstrated that humankind would definitely “fall back into depravity” even after the thousand years of “a conditioning in righteousness.”11Close Miller is convinced that this placement of the millennium before the judgment is the “hidden point” of Edwards’s HWR.12Close

Based on his reading of An Humble Attempt and HWR, C. C. Goen (1959) asserts that Edwards’s eschatological doctrine was a new departure from his Reformed predecessors.13Close With “a radical innovation” of anticipating “the church’s golden age” before the dawn of the millennium and the final consummation, Edwards actually, though unintentionally, departed from the Protestant opinion commonly held for two centuries.14Close Edwards’s proposal of the imminent millennium that will begin in America is a “definitive factor in the religious background of the idea of progress.”15Close Therefore, Goen regards Edwards as the “first major post-millennial thinker” and declares that Edwards’s historical millennium furnishes “a strong impetus” to the “radical utopianism” in American tradition.16Close This article by Goen has had significant impact in the following three decades. In the 1960s, Goen’s thesis of Edwards’s contribution to the utopianism is echoed by Ernest Lee Tuveson in his brief discussion of Edwards’s eschatology in his Redeemer Nation (1968).17Close In reading Edwards’s HWR, Tuveson uncovers that Edwards was seeking a kingdom of God on earth. Thus, his millennium is more like “a form of utopia” of great “temporal prosperity.”18Close

James Davidson (1977), in his The Logic of Millennial Thought, provides a more detailed analysis of Edwards’s millennialism than his predecessors of the past four decades, though his examination contains a mere twenty-five pages.19Close By tracing Edwards’s millennial thought in An Humble Attempt, “Notes on the Apocalypse,” and HWR, Davidson argues that Edwards largely remained consistent since 1723 in his major eschatological views, though there were some developments and modifications in his later years. In particular, the “combination of gloom and hope” always existed in Edwards’s millennial expectation and remained as “central to the entire millennial rhetoric,”20Close though Edwards expected a rather optimistic future before the millennium and placed the slaying of the two witnesses as a past event (Revelation 11:7–12).21Close More importantly, Davidson reads Edwards’s millennialism from its correlation with his thinking on conversion and social order. Edwards’s HWR, as the New England’s “grandest summary” of the divine redemptive plan, places individual conversion within the “larger and more important” historical context of redemption.22Close The consequence of this inseparable connection between personal experience of conversion and the divine redemptive actions in history is a “conversion-oriented millennial outlook.”23Close And this “conversionist millennium” is “simply apolitical in its impact” on social reform, because Edwards believed that in the millennial kingdom “any number of different social or political orders would work well in a regenerate world.”24Close Holding completely different views from Goen on Edwards’s millennial chronology and geography, Davidson maintains that Edwards actually anticipated the millennium arriving around the year 2000. Furthermore, the millennium would be located at the land of Canaan. However, Davidson’s presentation on these two issues is surprisingly brief (less than one page), and it does not mention any of Goen’s views.25Close

In the same year of 1977, Nathan Hatch raised the similar argument of Edwards’s apolitical millennialism in his The Sacred Cause of Liberty.26Close Hatch illustrates the differences between the “civil millennialism” of the Revolution and Edwards’s “apocalyptic expectations of the Great Awakening.”27Close While the Revolutionary millennialist’s apocalyptic hope is based on the “civil and religious liberty” ensured by America’s victory over Britain, Edwards’s millennial kingdom is built upon the “spread of vital piety” and the work of God’s spirit in “widespread revivals.”28Close In this sense, unlike what Goen and Tuveson believe, it is questionable to trace civil millennialism directly back to the Great Awakening or take the religious piety as its “origins” and “main source.”29Close According to Hatch, Edwards optimistically anticipated that the millennium would soon begin in America, and his anticipation of the imminent and America-centric millennium has a strong impact on later millennialists such as Lyman Beecher (1775–1863), despite the fact that Beecher showed “little resemblance to Edwards’s apolitical millennialism.”30Close Nevertheless, after the Great Awakening, forced by the decline of piety, Edwards came to have a broader apocalyptic vision and “look beyond the Atlantic” for the site of the millennial kingdom.31Close

One more important work that appeared in 1977 is Stephen Stein’s informative introduction to the fifth volume of the works of Edwards.32Close In it Stein carefully traces various aspects in Edwards’s eschatology and his reading of the book of Revelation: the apocalyptic tradition in Edwards’s time, the formulation of his “Notes on the Apocalypse” and its implication and application in his ministry and his millennialism, the significance of his An Humble Attempt, Edwards’s theology of the apocalypse and the sources on which he relied (Moses Lowman, Matthew Poole and Matthew Henry, etc.), and the analysis of the manuscripts and the original text. Notably, Stein provides a historical development of Edwards’s millennialism, from his early career till the end of his life.33Close Based on Edwards’s public writings and personal reflective notes, Stein argues that by the 1750s Edwards already possessed “a coherent theology of the Apocalypse.”34Close Stein asserts that Edwards’s continuous apocalyptical thinking is an “intriguing and complex, but sometimes contradictory” system mixed by both private reflections and public presentations.35Close In this mix, Edwards held a more political millennialism to envision how “both civil and ecclesiastical governments will be overthrown” when the millennial kingdom is established around year 2000 in the land of Canaan.36Close

This discussion of politicization of Edwards’s millennialism is continued into the 1980s, as Ruth Bloch’s Visionary Republic (1985) shows.37Close Bloch asserts that Edwards, different from other revivalists, was a postmillennialist.38Close Particularly, among his American contemporaries, Edwards acted as “the most authoritative and articulate” interpretation of revivalism in the light of the millennium.39Close Following Goen, Bloch believes that Edwards expected the imminent and America-centric millennium and thus viewed the Awakening “as a sign that the millennium would come soon, and . . . it would probably begin in America.”40Close Consequently, while Edwards’s expectation of “the inaugural role of America” in the coming millennium is more evangelical and like a form of proto-nationalism, his “intense and widespread” millennialism still played a significant role in American political revolution.41Close

Goen’s conviction of Edwards’s “new departure” in eschatology was challenged by John Wilson in 1988.42Close While recognizing the immense influence of Goen’s interpretation, Wilson argues that Goen neglected both the background and foreground of Edwards’s postmillennialism. Without the delineation of both the millennial thoughts in the pre-Edwardsian England and New England and the consequent development of postmillennialism in the post-Edwardsian era, Goen’s presentation of Edwards’s millennialism is nothing but “a religious version of the doctrine of providence.”43Close In contrast to Goen, Wilson claims that Edwards’s postmillennialism is “far less innovative” than Goen thought, particularly, in both the New England millennialism and the context of Independency in England.44Close Wilson declares that Edwards’s postmillennialism represented “nothing remarkably new until the Enlightenment transformed it.”45Close

Goen’s interpretation of Edwards’s millennialism is further challenged by Gerald McDermott in his One Holy and Happy Society (1992).46Close For McDermott, Goen “misconstrues” Edwards’s singularity and mistakenly regards him as the first postmillennialist in New England. Reading Edwards’s millennialism from the perspective of his public theology, McDermott maintains Edward’s “new departures” in two aspects: taking the millennium as central in his theology; and his millennialism acting as “social critique” and “prophetic voice” at his time.47Close In surveying Edwards’s millennialism, McDermott examines Edwards’s commitment in studying the millennium, his detailed millennial expectations, and his awareness of the premillennial revivals. Importantly, McDermott clearly points out that unlike what Goen asserts, Edwards did not expect the imminent arrival of the millennium in America. Instead, he was hoping for a Canaan-oriented, global millennium in the distant future.48Close

Stephen Stein made two more important contributions in his recent survey. In 2002, in his review of the American apocalyptic traditions from the seventeenth century, Stein compared Jonathan Edwards with David Koresh (1959–1993) of Waco.49Close As the “unlikely pair,” the divergences in Edwards’s apocalyptic ideas and that of Koresh are rather evident.50Close Edwards’s exegetical and hermeneutical patterns are “within the Anglo-American Puritan tradition,” and his eschatology stands as “quite mainstream” as a result, though he believed that revivals were the “start of something special.”51Close In contrast, Koresh’s decoding of the Seven Seals and his exposition of the book of Revelation are simultaneously rejected by the commentators and “denounced” as “radical and marginal.”52Close In 2005, Stein zoomed in and explored Edwards’s eschatology.53Close Aiming to find its “continuities and discontinuities,” Stein divides Edwards’s eschatological reflections into three periods: his early years (1716–1733), his years of involvement in the revivals (1734–1748), and his “most productive” era, the last decade of Edwards’s life.54Close While Edwards’s eschatology is not “systematically expressed,” Stein makes five observations:

First, the “connection” between creation and end times is the “controlling principle” of Edwards’s eschatology;

Second, the progress between the two ends is governed by divine providence;

Third, the Holy Spirit acts as the “primary agent” who enables the Kingdom of Christ to advance on earth;

Fourth, the opposition to the divine redemptive work is from the forces of evil; and

Fifth, the final stage, viz. Christ’s return, final judgement, the consummation of the union between Christ and the saints, and the condemnation of the sinners in hell, “will not, in fact, be final.”55Close

While these observations are insightful, concerning Edwards’s millennialism, they probably do not add much to Stein (1977).

Stein’s contributions are followed in 2011 by a short but excellent chapter on Edwards’s eschatology in the most recent encyclopedic work by Michael McClymond and Gerald McDermott.56Close McDermott and McClymond regard Edwards as “one of the most eschatological thinkers in the history of Protestantism,” because his theological thinking was fundamentally and essentially eschatological by “conceiving of all history being drawn toward the end.”57Close In the few pages on Edwards’s consciousness of the premillennial era and the millennium, the authors mainly survey An Humble Attempt and Some Thoughts Concerning the Revival (abbreviated as Some Thoughts hereafter).58Close According to them, Edwards followed “the afflictive model of progress” by Petrus van Mastricht (1630–1706), expecting a long and gradual premillennial period mixed of both revivals and tribulation.59Close Notably, the authors affirm what McDermott asserts in his One Holy and Happy Society that Edwards’s millennium is neither imminent nor America-centric. In fact, Edwards did not expect that Northampton would be the city knitting together the whole of Protestant America and thus bringing the world into the millennium. Instead, for him the millennium “would be everything that Northampton was not.”60Close Additionally, Edwards anticipated that in the millennium, “a spiritual federalism” would be established under Christ’s spiritual reign. While sin, death, and imperfections will still remain, the nations will be united and become “a global community” though retaining their “self-governing integrity.”61Close

In addition to the published works, two dissertations are noteworthy, because they are probably the only doctoral works to the date that directly and solely address Edwards’s millennialism.62Close The first one is “Postmillennialism and the Work of Renewal in the Theology of Jonathan Edwards” by Christopher Smith (1992).63Close By examining Edwards’s HWR, Distinguishing Marks, Some Thoughts, An Humble Attempt, and “Notes on the Apocalypse,” Smith asserts that Edwards consistently advocated a postmillennial theology of history throughout his life time,64Close serving as an eschatological preacher who paved the way for the defeat of Antichrist.65Close In contrast to Goen’s thesis of “the imminent millennium,” Edwards actually always expected the millennium at around the year 2000.66Close In fact, what Edwards consistently anticipated, Smith advocates, is an imminent revival that would encourage the Puritan activism. Therefore, the greatest portion of Smith’s dissertation is discussing Edwards’s view of revivals. Edwards believed that revivals will bring the downfall of Antichrist’s kingdom,67Close and he hoped for another great revival even after the Great Awakening.68Close

Another doctoral dissertation is Michael David Peters’s “Jonathan Edwards’s Politicization of Millennialism” (2000).69Close In this dissertation, Peters challenges Nathan Hatch’s claim of Edwards’s apolitical millennialism, and it covers Edwards’s HWR, Some Thoughts, An Humble Attempt, and “Notes on the Apocalypse” to highlight the politicization of Edwards’s millennialism that enabled the Revolutionary clergy to find “a sacred cause of liberty” to justify the War for American Independence.70Close Starting from this thesis, Peters traces that Edwards, during the last fifteen years of his life, shifted the emphasis from promoting revival to military means to destroy the Antichrist and fulfill the millennium.71Close And this shift greatly impacted the development of the “revolutionary ideology.”72Close By politicizing his millennialism, Edwards identified the Pope as the Antichrist and thus justified the military actions against Roman Catholics.73Close And this is why Edwards, taking the battle against the French as the destruction of the Antichrist, encouraged his congregation to fight during King George’s War (1744–1748).74CloseTherefore, Peters insists that while Edwards did not deny the significance of prayer in promoting the millennium, he did politicize his millennialism to justify the war against the French as well as to ensure the millennium commencing in America.75Close

Many scholars in the past half-century seem to take note of Edwards’s millennialism as an inseparable ingredient in his theological system. However, there are still disputations on numerous issues on Edwards’s millennialism, and these range from the specific features to the nature of his millennialism. One specific aspect of their differences focuses on the millennial chronology and geography. And there are two opposite camps: while some like H. Richard Niebuhr, C. C. Goen, James Davidson, and Ruth Bloch advocate that Edwards expected an America-centric and imminent millennium, others like Gerald McDermott and Michael McClymond insist that Edwards’s millennium is Canaan-centric and arriving in the distant future. Similar disagreement is found in the assessment of the nature of Edwards’s millennialism. While C. C. Goen, Ernest Tuveson, and Stephen Stein maintain that Edwards’s millennialism is political, a few others like James Davidson and Nathan Hatch assert that Edwards’s millennialism is apolitical. Edwardsean scholars thus disagree over what Edwards expected in his millennialism, that is, whether Edwards anticipated an America-centric political utopia or a spiritual kingdom of God. And did Edward’s millennialism really contribute to the formation of the American dream of “the redeemer nation”?

However, a number of significant issues on Edwards’s millennialism are still to be addressed. To be specific, what are the roles of Christ in Edwards’s millennium? What did Edwards envision about the land and people of Israel in the millennial kingdom when much (maybe too much) scholarly discussion focused on his view of New England? What was his perspective of “the heathen world,” such as China, in his millennial expectation? To sum up all these specific questions, one may well ask: Is Edwards’s millennial vision America-centric or beyond America? If it is beyond America, what is the singularity of this vision among his Reformed forefathers and Puritan colleagues, particularly during the development in the millennial thought from the Reformation (ca. 1500 to ca. 1565) to post-Reformation (ca. 1565 to ca. 1750) eras? And how did Edwards incorporate his millennialism into his grand vision of the history of redemption?

In order to answer these questions, this book addresses Edwards’s millennialism in light of his Christological, Judeo-centric, and cosmic theological vision. I am aware of the fact that Edwards’s vision of the millennial kingdom is complex and departed significantly from the Reformed tradition in certain ways, though it is deeply rooted in this tradition. In fact, Edwards’s millennial vision was informed by his redemptive-historical consciousness and affected by a variety of factors: his reading of the biblical texts, his engagement in the Reformed tradition, his intellectual interactions with the Enlightenment thinkers, and his conviction of God’s glory as the ultimate goal of the realization of the millennial kingdom.

Hence, this book will situate Edwards in his intellectual and theological context in order to gain a more perceptive vision of his millennialism. Living in eighteenth-century colonial New England, Edwards was faced with theological and intellectual challenges that were “corrupt opinions,” in his own words.76Close One threat came from the heretical teachings of Arminian, Arian, Socinian, and Latitudinarian writers.77Close Another intellectual challenge came from Deism, humanistic rationalism, and religious skepticism. All of these heretical doctrines and intellectual/philosophical challenges have at least one thing in common: they undermine God’s sovereignty and Christ’s lordship that has been revealed in the divine redemptive work leading to the end time.78Close Consequently, Edwards found himself facing a “growing de-Christianization” tendency and a “de-divination of the historical process.”79Close In particular, he would often encounter the writings of skeptical historians and philosophers who attempted to separate history from the divine work, thus attributing the governing force of history to an “impersonal law”80Close or “self-actuating powers.”81Close As Avihu Zakai observes, in Edwards’s time, history-writing tended to minimize or eschew any sense of a divine purpose in the realm of history, while also abandoning the biblical narratives as a major source for interpreting historical events.82Close In this context, Christian eschatological hope for the millennium was in danger of being reduced to nothing but an imaginative construct.

In confronting these theological and intellectual challenges, Edwards kept revising his view of eschatology, particularly in relation to his expectation of the millennium, in order to express his belief that “God is truly sovereign and not dependent on human volition to accomplish His ends.”83Close In his millennial anticipation expressed in his HWR and other manuscripts, Edwards aimed to address three issues.

First, he invited his congregation to share his eschatological vision by constructing “a singular sacred history based . . . solely on God’s redemptive activity.”84Close

Second, he enabled his audience to review their own time in the light of the grand stream of redemptive history in which God’s sovereignty and Christ’s centrality are progressively revealed.

Third, he viewed history from the perspective of its telos, in order to establish “the re-enthronement of God as the sole author and Lord of history.”85Close

Hence, this book treats Edwards as a representative example of the development of the millennial views during the period between Reformation and post-Reformation. Based on the fundamental features of Edwards’s millennial view, the scope of this study is confined to the following.

First, this book presents Edwards’s Christological focus in his millennialism. I will take his HWR as an instance to illustrate: literarily speaking, Edwards presented Christ’s centrality through the structural construction of this work; hermeneutically, he emphasized his Christocentric concern by applying Christological typology and in his natural typology.

Second, this book highlights Israel in Edwards’s vision of the millennial kingdom. I will demonstrate his Judeo-centric view of the millennium, while being aware of the danger of promoting Israel superiority. Geographically speaking, unlike the America-centric millennium held by some of his Puritan colleagues, Edwards’s millennial kingdom is centered on the land of Israel. Anthropologically, he had a zealous eschatological hope for the people of Israel, believing that they would return to their homeland and experience a national conversion. Israel’s restoration is essential in Edwards’s vision of the millennial kingdom, because it will determine the destiny of the world. This conviction of the theological significance of Israel in God’s kingdom marks a remarkable departure from the supersessionism of his contemporaries and reflects his rejection of anti-Semitism.

Third, this book stresses the cosmic scope of Edwards’s vision of the millennial kingdom. He demonstrated the extensiveness of God’s kingdom at the broadest possible level in space, over time, and among people. While his millennial kingdom vision is Canaan-centered, it covers the whole earth with both visible and invisible dimensions extending to heaven and impacting hell. Departing from the Puritans who claimed the imminent millennium, Edwards had the conviction that its progressive realization encompasses the whole of human history and will be fully accomplished in the remote future. Additionally, when Edwards focused on how the millennial kingdom was to be realized among the redeemed and the church of God, he was fully aware of the involvement of various nations, including both the elect and the heathens. In fact, Edwards believed that the millennial kingdom would not be accomplished without the general conversion of the heathen world. Particularly, he demonstrated God’s successive revelation in Chinese philosophical and religious classics. Nevertheless, Edwards’s cosmic vision of the millennial kingdom does not lead him into the trap of Deist natural theology. Conversely, by confronting with the Deists who took China as an example to reject God’s redemptive work, Edwards remarkably presented the necessity of God’s biblical revelation and His redemption.

Finally, I will show that Edwards’s theology is “an unusual combination of traditionality and originality.”86Close This claim applies fittingly to his millennialism. While Edwards was aligned with his Puritan colleagues in various specific features of his millennialism, his anticipation of the millennial kingdom actually deflated the America-centric theology of history. In contrast to his Puritan contemporaries who centralized their present time and nation, Edwards decentralized the time, space, and people of England and New England. Specifically, by expecting a millennial kingdom arriving in the distant future, Edwards departed from those who advocated the imminent millennium and thus decentralized the present time of his historical epoch. By insisting on the land of Israel as the ideal location of the millennium, Edwards departed from his Reformed forefathers and Puritan colleagues who envision the millennial kingdom being realized in England or New England. Consequently, he de-emphasized the overinflated significance of both English and American territories in God’s kingdom. By highlighting the critical role played by the people of Israel in the millennial kingdom, Edwards departed from those held to a belief in American superiority and decentralized the people of England and New England from an overstressed contribution in redemptive history. Therefore, what Edwards expected was neither a political nor an America-centric utopia. Conversely, his vision of the millennium is a Christ-reigning, Judeo-centric, and cosmic kingdom arriving on earth in the distant future.

All of these discussions are based on my selection of primary resources: Some Thoughts, An Humble Attempt, “Notes on the Apocalypse,” HWR, and the Miscellanies, as well as Edwards’s other published works and his raw manuscripts consulted when necessary.87Close Since HWR is Edwards’s only published work in his time that provides sufficient description of his millennial expectation and depicts a full scope of his redemptive-historical vision, I treat this volume in Chapter 2, which focuses on the literary and typological communication of Edwards’s Christological focus in his millennialism. As a historical rather than philosophical or systematic theological project, this book will investigate, synchronically and diachronically, the development of the Reformed tradition of millennial thinking, in order to provide a critical exposition and examination of Edwards’s millennialism. In evaluating Edwards’s vision of the millennial kingdom, for each theological locus under discussion, I will examine its historical transformation in Reformation and post-Reformation tradition as well as its development in Edwards’s own theological system, in order to compare Edwards’s views with those of his Reformed predecessors and Puritan contemporaries. Although the focus will be on the historical development of Reformed millennial thinking, I will also explore his engagement in some of the theological and intellectual debates of the Enlightenment, in particular his interaction with the Deists. Hence, by situating him in the Reformation and post-Reformation context and by taking into account his interaction with the intellectual challenges posed by Enlightenment thinkers, I aim to discover Edwards’s agreements with and his departures from the Protestant and Puritan tradition.

In doing so, this book breaks new ground in Edwardsean scholarship in the following ways.

First, by examining Edwards’s millennialism from his redemptive-historical vision, this research provides a fresh and extensive review of Edwards’s millennial theology.

Second, by stressing his literary strategies and typological interpretation to explore Edwards’s Christocentric conviction in his vision of the millennial kingdom, I examine Edwards’s artful communication of his Christological focus in his millennialism. This offers a groundbreaking perspective to the less-researched subject of the correlation between Edwards’s Christology and his eschatology.

Third, by presenting and summarizing the Judeo-centric and cosmic nature of Edwards’s vision of the millennial kingdom, this project offers an innovative interpretive key to his millennialism which brings his view into line with some of his contemporaries. This also provides a background to current debates on Israel and the end time.

Fourth, by situating him in the historical and intellectual context, particularly by focusing on the transformation of millennialism in his period, this book fills in a gap in research on Edwards’s millennialism: his interaction with his Reformed friends and his Deist foes. In so doing, it provides another outlook on Edwards’s continuity in and departures from his Reformed tradition.

Fifth, this book ventures into two less well-known subjects: Israel and China in Edwards’s millennial vision. Particularly, it provides new insights into his Canaan-oriented millennium, his conviction of Israel’s restoration, and his eschatological hope for China and the heathen world.

Each of the chapters examines a specific topic accordingly: Chapter 1 addresses Edwards’s vision of the millennial kingdom in the Reformed tradition; Chapter 2 investigates his Christological focus in the millennial kingdom; Chapter 3 explores God’s glory in the progressive realization of the millennial kingdom; Chapter 4 stresses Edwards’s conviction of the significance of both the land and the people of Israel in the millennial kingdom; Chapter 5 studies his cosmic vision of the millennial kingdom that encompasses China and the heathen world; and Chapter 6 examines the contemporary relevance of Edwards’s millennialism, particularly by having an interaction with Jürgen Moltmann’s millenarian eschatology and the Chinese Back to Jerusalem movement.