Historically Speaking, June 2003 Jonathan Edwards’s Vision of History[*] by Avihu Zakai Once dubbed by Perry Miller “the greatest philosopher-theologian yet to grace the American scene,” Jonathan Edwards is now widely recognized as America’s most important theologian. And he is no less celebrated as a prominent philosopher, ethicist, and moralist. Edwards’s theology and philosophy are a matter of great scholarly interest today, and recent studies have dealt with almost every aspect of his thought. Strangely enough, however, there has been no serious attempt to explore Edwards’s philosophy of history, let alone to analyze the content and form of his distinct mode of historical thinking. Edwards’s sense of time, his vision of history, and the development of his historical consciousness warrant serious attention. Without this, much of his philosophy and theology are unintelligible; moreover, the significance he accorded to his actions—as well as the ultimate sacred historical meaning he attached to his own time, as evidenced by his decisive role in initiating, advancing, and promoting the Great Awakening, 1740-43—remain uncomprehended. * * * Edwards was the American Augustine, not least because like the Church Father he formulated a singular philosophy of history which exercised great influence on subsequent CHristian generations and greatly conditinoed their historical consciousness. Edward's evangelical historiography had an abiding important for America Protestant cullture. His A History of the Work of Redemption (1739) was the most popular manual of Calvinist theorlogy in the 19th century. One of the main reasons for the great success of this work was that Edwards palced revival at thecenter of salvation history, habituating American Protestants to see religious awakening as the essence of providential history and the main manifestation of divine agency in time. This evangelical theodicy of history signified that the heart of history is the revival, through which the Spirit of God consistently advances the work of redemption. So defined, these awakenings are the exclusive domain of God's will and power, and hence beyond the reach of human agency. Conceiving the locus of history in this way, Edwards made the phenomenon of revival the crucial element in the drama of salvation and redemption. In order to understand Edwards’s ideology of history, it is essential to analyze the slow and gradual growth of his historical consciousness before he came to compose History of the Work of Redemption. Such an investigation is necessary in order to follow the development of his ideology of history and of his unique redemptive mode of historical thought. Furthermore, it is important to place Edwards’s philosophy of history in the wider context of sacred ecclesiastical history, as a Christian mode of historical thought. Edwards was an heir of Christian theological teleology of history-salvation history-though he transformed it radically in order to proclaim God as the author and lord of history. Analysis of Edwards’s historical thought will first of all recognize that the mental universe of this New England divine transcended his local setting in Northampton