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Jonathan Edwards’ Apocalyptic Writings

In some earlier posts I have written about the Jonathan Edwards “Gold Standard” found in the Yale University Press volumes on the works of Jonathan Edwards. Now totaling 26 volumes in all, each volume has an outstanding editor’s introduction that is worth the high price of the entire book. Some of these critical (in a good way) introductions are longer than 100 pages!

Stephen J. Stein’s introduction to Volume 5, Apocalyptic Writings: “Notes on the Apocalypse’ & “An Humble Attempt,” is 93 pages in length. Here are some of Stein’s opening words–

“The book of Revelation fascinated Jonathan Edwards, America’s premier philosopher-theologian, a fact that has been a source of bewilderment and embarrassment to some students of American thought. For him the Apocalypse came alive with each new reading. Like others in the eighteenth century, Edwards believed that the biblical visions with the mysterious figures and cryptic references could be very useful to the Christian church.

“He drew heavily in his sermons and treatises upon the Revelation’s bizarre and sometimes baffling symbolism, finding it a source of comfort and encouragement for the people of New England. Edwards spent long hours studying the Revelation, the only book of the Bible he favored with a separate commentary; that preoccupation began in early manhood as he searched for the best interpretation of the Apocalypse, and it spanned the full range of his years. Not content with mere curiosities or speculations, he probed for the pastoral and theological implications of the prophecies.”

The title of his second work on the subject ties in with prayer. Here is the full title of the treatise: An Humble Attempt to Promotes Explicit Agreement and Visible Union of God’s People in Extraordinary Prayer.

Providing context to Edwards writing of a notebook on end times, Stein quotes Perry Miller: “In America… the greatest artist of the Apocalypse was, of course, Jonathan Edwards”; but he was hardly the only American to form such biblical components into functional designs. Edwards came to his craft naturally, for in New England a long line of colonial spokesmen–most prominently, John Cotton and Roger Williams in the first generation, the historian Edward Johnson, the poet Michael Wigglesworth, Samuel Sewall the commentator, and father and son Increase and Cotton Mather–had made the vision of the Revelation a formative influence upon the consciousness of the people.

“The Puritans filled their diaries, sermons, and public papers with apocalyptic discourse. After leaving their homes in the old world under duress, they identified their cause in the wilderness with the plight of the persecuted saints in the Revelation and transferred to their commonwealths a sense of divine mission and a spirit of apocalyptic fervor. Later when that sense of election eroded and new waves of settlers buried the religious commitment under a host of competing claims, the clergy rose to castigate the people for their sins and to warn them of impending punishment, drawing upon the imagery and ideas of the Apocalypse. Then the Puritans wrote the history of their experiences as though they were the subjects of the Revelation. In effect, they translated the apocalyptic tradition into a meaningful literature of their own.”

May we wrestle with the text of Revelation–especially the magisterial chapter one; and challenging chapters two and three–in our own time, our own churches and our own lives. “Maranatha. Come Lord Jesus!”