“..for Edwards, it is the people of Israel, rather than the Americans or Chinese, who play the most significant role in expanding the kingdom of God.”
Who would have thunk? Almost four hundred years ago, the greatest religious mind in the Anglo-American universe predicted that China, America, and Israel would be major players in the final countdown before the end of the world. There would be massive persecution of Christians at the same time as worldwide revival. Jews would return to their homeland and establish a nation-state. War would break out as the nations gather against the people of God before the Messiah returns to rescue his saints.
A new book by Victor Zhu, a Chinese-Australian scholar, shows much of this in fascinating detail — the extraordinary events which Jonathan Edwards (1703-58) prophesied would take place in the centuries before the return of Jesus and His final judgment of the world.
Most Christians think of Edwards as a hellfire-and-damnation preacher during the Great Awakening (1740s) that preceded and helped inaugurate the American Revolution. He was that indeed, but far, far more.
For one thing, Edwards was the greatest theologian of God’s beauty in the history of Christian thought. Historians of Christian aesthetics such as Patrick Sherry and Edward Farley have drawn this conclusion.
Most Christians would also be surprised to learn that Edwards is widely regarded as the greatest religious thinker in the history of the Americas. Yale University Press has completed its 73-volume critical edition of The Works of Jonathan Edwards, most volumes between 400 and 800 pages. The three volumes of the Encyclopedia of the American Religious Experience contain more references to Edwards than to any other single figure.
So Edwards is one of Christianity’s greatest theologians, and that is enough to warrant any Christian’s interest, especially those interested in beauty or revival or the history of redemption (his book on that subject is a modern classic). But his work on eschatology — theology of the end times — is remarkable. He wrote an entire book of commentary on the biblical book of Revelation, preached on the latter days throughout his life, and filled hundreds of pages in his private notebooks with ruminations on the millennium and the historical events that led up to it.
Now Zhu has written the first book-length study of “America’s theologian” (as he has been called) on the millennium — the word from the Latin mille (one thousand) for a thousand-year rule of Christ with His saints on earth before the Second Coming. The Church fathers before Augustine taught a literal millennium, and millions of Protestants since the Reformation (16th century) have taken this earthly utopia as central to their hope for the future.
Zhu shows that Edwards, the greatest Reformed theologian after Calvin, rejected the supersessionism of the Reformer at Geneva. Like Augustine and Luther, Calvin believed that God’s new covenant with the largely-Gentile church superseded God’s earlier covenant with the Jewish people. Calvin also taught that after 30 AD (the probable date for the death and resurrection of Jesus) God turned his gaze from the land of Israel to all the lands of the world, so that the little strip on the eastern edge of the Mediterranean was no longer holy.
Edwards denied both of these supersessions. Although he regarded the word “Israel” as a spiritual term for all of God’s people including faithful Jews, he insisted that God’s love for the Church never replaced his love for Jewish Israel, and that the land continued to be holy because God would one day return the Jews to their ancestral home, where they would establish their own state.
Edwards also differed with Puritan theologians such as John Cotton and Cotton Mather, who thought the millennium would be centered in England or America. Zhu shows that “Edwards’s millennial kingdom is centered on the land of Israel.” The colonial thinker “had a zealous eschatological hope for the people of Israel” whose restoration to the land was “essential” to the millennium and would “determine the destiny of the world.” Edwards’s Israel-centric eschatology “reflects his rejection of anti-Semitism.”
Edwards was also innovative on the timing of the millennium. While leading Puritans believed the millennium was imminent, Zhu demonstrates convincingly that Edwards said the millennium was at least 250 years beyond his own time, and that the twin antichrists — Rome and Islam — would be defeated in the meantime.
Zhu argues that Edwards was alone among the Puritan-influenced to take China seriously. Although he wrongly believed the Chinese classics contained Christian teachings such as a Messiah from the West who would redeem, Zhu credits Edwards for insisting that even an abundance of religious knowledge by the Chinese would not save them apart from personal encounter with Jesus Christ. This came to many Chinese after the Gospel was introduced in China in the seventh century.
Zhu notes that China’s long history is rife with millennial movements, beginning in the Eastern Han dynasty (25-220 CE) and eventuating in the Taiping Rebellion (1836-64) inspired by evangelical Protestant eschatology. Today there are the Eastern Lightning (led by a Chinese woman claiming to be the returned Christ) and the evangelical Back to Jerusalem movement. All these millennial movements place China at the center of the world’s redemption, aping English and American Christians who thought their countries were central to the end of the ages.
But “for Edwards, it is the people of Israel, rather than the Americans or Chinese, who play the most significant role in expanding the kingdom of God.” Their restoration to the land and to their Messiah, Zhu maintains, are keys for Edwards to the restoration of the nations and the millennium.
Therefore, Zhu suggests, Christians should imitate Edwards’s freedom from cultural pressure when interpreting the Bible: “Edwards did not allow his cultural context to blind his reading of the biblical revelation” on the latter days.
Zhu’s only misstep is to place too much confidence in one prejudiced account to characterize all forms of Zionism as “treating [Israel’s] neighbors in a hostile way.” This is hard to reconcile with Israel providing two million Arabs within her borders with full citizenship and world-class education and healthcare, not to mention these Arabs refusing to move to Gaza (before the war) or the “West Bank” to live under Palestinian rule. They know they have more freedom in Israel than they would have in any of the 22 Arab countries.
Zhu’s achievement, however, is to provide scholars and Christians generally with the first-ever careful look at the center of eschatological vision for the greatest Reformed theologian and the paramount Christian thinker on both beauty and revival.
