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The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 15 (2004)

American Conceptualization of Timeand Jonathan Edwards’
Post-Millennialism Reconsidered
Naoki ONISHI *INTRODUCTION
On the summer’s day of August 19th, 1989, in a town called Sopron,
close to the border between Austria and Hungary, roughly a thousand East
Germans were getting together to enjoy what they were calling a PanEuropean Picnic. When they moved toward the border, the Hungarian
guards, whether expecting them or not, did not interfere with their crossing. With excitement suppressed in their minds, they crossed the border
one by one. On that particular day, roughly nine hundred East Germans
were able to make a “border run” into Austria and then to West Germany.
This is the often-retold ﬁrst event in the history of the Fall of the Wall,which ﬁnally led, on November 9th, to the opening of the border between
West and East Germany, and which, two years later, brought forth theend of the Cold War with the ﬁnal collapse of the Soviet Union on
December 26th, 1991. Meanwhile, the symbolic global clock, the so-called
Doomsday Clock, which had been measuring out the remainder of time
before nuclear Armageddon, seemed to have lost its task. With this seriesof dramatic historical events, the turn of the century, which was not so
far off at that time, was certainly projected with auspicious expectations.
As it was also the turn of the millennium, a festive mode seemed to be
Copyright © 2004 Naoki Onishi. All rights reserved. This work may be used, with thisnotice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work may be distributed,
electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without permission from the author.
*Professor, International Christian University

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developing among many of the peoples in various corners of the world.
Indeed, the synchronization of the endings of these two historical sequences stimulated vague expectations and good hopes for the new millennium and the new century, but at the same time vague eschatologicalworries were also latent, especially with the fears of the Y2K problems,or global collapse of computer systems.
In the beginning of the last decade of the twentieth century, Francis
Fukuyama’s book entitled The End of History and the Last Man1 waspublished. In spite of the title’s apocalyptic connotations, Fukuyama’s
argument was more to do with the self-assertion of American democratic principles. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the clear tendency of the world-wide shrinking and declension of Communism,
world history did not seem to be going any further along the path of thecontention between Democracy and Communism. Without the auf hebenof the contending ideologies, history had seemed to lose its momentum.
Liberal Democracy seemed to represent the ﬁnal form of ideological evolution and the ﬁnal form of human government. The vehement controversies concerning this thesis set aside, it was clear evidence and a good
instance of the fact that the end of the millennium was certainly the time
when the signiﬁcance of the ending was felt rather strongly in our daily
life.
Now, a few years having passed since the turn of the millennium, sufﬁcient time seems to have passed to make us thoroughly accustomed tocall the year, for instance, “O four.” At the turn of the millennium, there
was a slight confusion about whether the new year should be called two
thousand, or “O O” or “Zero Zero.” The frequently used term aroundthat time, “Y2K,” is now only rarely heard in our daily conversation.
Thus, the unusual feelings and sensations, the mixture of anxiety andhope, associated with the turn of century and that of the millennium have
now found their places only in our memory. Similarly almost forgotten
is the special auspicious expectation related to the idea of beginnings,
which were clearly devastated by the events of 9/11 2001 and the succeeding wars. If the terrorists’ attack had happened at the end of 2000,
what more gloomy and ominous sensations it must have caused is a matter of mere speculation but nonetheless easily imaginable.

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AMERICAN APOCALYPSE
Putting this kind of conceptualization of time into the historical context of the American psyche, we ﬁnd a long process of transformation
or development in the way that the American mind has conceptualized
time at any given moment of its history. For instance, almost two and ahalf centuries before these historical events mentioned above, anotherrevolutionary change had taken place in America. Living through that
period, the American prototypical folkloric ﬁgure of Rip Van Winkle
sat, perhaps, in front of his familiar tavern on an autumn day in 1776,
where, in fact, he used to sit twenty years before. In the tavern, a familiar portrait of King George III was hanging, a painting whose title,
whether or not Rip may have realized it, had been changed to George
Washington. The central event of the story, needless to say, the American
War of Independence, did not seem to have had any impact on his wayof life, because during that time he had been sleeping somewhere deepin the Kaatskill mountains. The story reads, “It was some time before hecould get into the regular track of gossip, or could be made to comprehend the strange events that had taken place during his torpor. How that
there had been a revolutionary war—that the country had thrown off theyoke of old England—and that, instead of being a subject of his Majesty
George the Third, he was now a free citizen of the United States. Rip, infact, was no politician; the changes of states and empires made but little
impression on him. . . .” He ﬁrst did not know about and then was totally at a loss how to understand the political change. To him nothing hadchanged or was changing after the War of Independence in his vicinity.
Certainly, the title of the new state, and that of the familiar portrait werechanged, but the way of life of the ﬁrst generation after the Independence
was little changed. As a matter of fact, Rip saw that he had been replaced
literally by his identical heirs. In such ways, Washington Irving depicted a representative ﬁgure who did not know how to adjust his own being
to the drastic change of political system. In short, Irving’s hero is a ﬁgure who has “Fallen From Time.”2 He was not even able to hear the soundof “the shot heard round the world.”
However, Rip’s case is not the typical American response to changes.
Different from his stance of having “Fallen from Time,” the sense oftime and that of ending shared by the American populace in general have
had a unique quality ever since the initial stage of the Puritan colonial

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age. It is not too much to say that, totally different from Rip’s unchanging ﬁgure and his mental stance, the American psyche has been preoccupied with the idea of time. The dire image of the end of the world,
catastrophic and universal, is vividly depicted in numerous Puritan sermons. For instance, Michael Wiggleworth’s sermons and his lengthy
poem Day of Doom are ﬁlled with dismal images of the end of the world
caused by God’s ire. A similar idea of time with its imminent momentof ending repeatedly found expression in the writings of representative
Puritan leaders such as John Cotton, William Aspinwall, John Eliot, as
well as their opponent such as Anne Hutchinson. Ever since, not tomention the obvious recent examples from Hollywood movies in the late90’s, such as “Independence Day” (1996), “Armageddon” (1998), and“Deep Impact” (1999), the American imagination has been constantly
ﬁlled with horrifying, violent images of the end of America and that of
the world. Thus viewed, the American insistence on apocalyptic visions
can be called an obsession or a preoccupation.
In literature, too, such a well-known author as Edgar Allan Poe canbe considered to be preoccupied with the same concept, as can be seen
in his all-too-well-known ending of the “Fall of the House of Usher.” To
many readers of the story, the ﬁnal catastrophic ending was instantaneously brought to mind at the time of September 11th almost as a déjà
vu scene. The image of the fall of the towers had been imbedded somewhere deep in the American psyche. Let me just quote the last few linesof the novel:
The radiance was that of the full, setting, and blood-red moon, which now
shone vividly through that once barely-discernible ﬁssure, of which I have
before spoken, as extending from the roof of the building, in a zig-zag direction, to the base. While I gazed, this ﬁssure rapidly widened—there came aﬁerce breath of the whirlwind—the entire orb of the satellite burst at once
upon my sight—my brain reeled as I saw the mighty walls rushing asunder—
there was a long tumultuous shouting sound like the voice of a thousand
waters—and the deep and dank tarn at my feel closed sullenly and silently
over the fragments of the “Fall of the House of Usher.”Or, another famous ending, that of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick has asimilar shocking effect which also touches our imbedded sense of apocalyptic ending. Betraying the reader’s expectation of a dramatic ending
for Captain Ahab, which in fact happens instantaneously without any
word from him, the ﬁnal scene following his disappearance is pregnant

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in its symbolism. The emblematic ﬁgures of the Indian harpooneer,
Tashtego, and the unfortunate sea-hawk which was shrouded by theAmerican ﬂag and nailed by Tashtego’s hammer to the mast, conjure up
a ﬁnal scene strongly loaded with the image of the end of America. That
Melville intentionally gave the main role in the closing scene not toIshmael the narrator, nor to Queequeg but to the Indian Tashtego connotes the idea that the fate of America is deeply connected with that ofnative Americans. As a matter of fact, the name of the sinking whaler,
The Pequod, is that of an native tribe made extinct at the time of the genocidal Pequot War in 1637.
And now, concentric circles seized the lone boat itself, and all its crew, andeach ﬂoating oar, and every lance pole, and spinning, animate and inanimate,
all round and round in one vortex, carried the smallest chip of the Pequod outof sight. . . . Now small fowls ﬂew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; asullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great
shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled ﬁve thousand years ago. (Chapter 135,
“The Chase—The Third Day,” Emphasis mine)

The sinking of the Pequod is not the end of the story, however. The reference to “ﬁve thousand years ago” is apparently intended to send thereader’s imagination back to the pristine time before the Flood. After thisreference, in order to emphasize the idea of a return to the beginning, theﬁnal scene includes the following episode.
Buoyed up by that cofﬁn, for almost one whole day and night, I ﬂoated on asoft and dirge-like main. The unharming sharks, they glided by as if withpadlocks on their mouths; the savage sea-hawks sailed with sheathed beaks.
On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It was
the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing
children, only found another orphan. (“Epilogue,” Emphasis mine)

This episode was in one sense indispensable in the novel, simply because, anyhow, Ishmael had to survive this catastrophe in order to tellhis story to others and to the readers as a narrator. But, more importantly,
the ﬁnal episodic scene recovered out of the catastrophe also hints at apristine prelapsarian peaceful seascape. Together with the evocativereference to pre-Flood time mentioned above, this ﬁnal scene, with its
images of “unharming” sharks and “sheathed” sea-hawks, symbolizes
the peaceful life of creatures before the Fall. After the catastrophic ending, the recovered peaceful scene is thus intimated, and brings the reader back to the pristine beginning.

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A similar return to the pristine origin after a catastrophic ending canbe found in other novels, too. The well-known last lines of F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby can be read as another instance. After the ﬁnal
scene of Gatsby’s funeral and its aftermath, the episodic lines at the very
end read, “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future thatyear by year recedes before us. It eludes us then, but that’s no matter—
tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further. . . . And one
ﬁne morning—So we beat on, boats against the current, borne backceaselessly into the past.” Indeed, although Fitzgerald did not ﬁnish thesentence, it is intimated that “one ﬁne morning” what was believed by
Gatsby, “the orgiastic future,” will be reached.
Behind these kinds of uniquely preoccupied feelings about the end of
history, and also perhaps about another beginning after the end, there isa peculiar sense of time deeply rooted in the Judeo-Christian concept oftime. Concerning this point, Ruth H. Bloch writes, while analyzing themillennium expectation at the time of the American Revolution, “Timewas conceived by the ancient Israelites as possessing a linear structurewith a clear beginning and an end. History was expected to culminate in
the glorious triumph of God’s people across the world. The earth would
then become a paradise for the righteous; sickness, deprivation, war, andoppression would cease to exist. . . . It has formed the core of a remarkably persistent millennial tradition that has deeply affected the historical consciousness of the modern world.”3 Certainly, it can be clearly said
that the Judeo-Christian sense of time has a linear movement with a clear
beginning and ending, but not a circular one. Nor can it repeat itself,
making a cyclical pattern. What is interesting to note in this context isthe formation of the New Testament. By putting John’s Apocalypse at
the end of the Bible, it makes a completion of the history initiated by thestory of Creation in Genesis with the words, “In the beginning” and completed with the ﬁnal vision. Frank Kermode wrote, “it cannot be denied
that when the Christians took over the Jewish Bible they converted it intoanother book entirely, an extraordinary act of ﬁctive imagination.”4
Indeed, to return to the pristine origin and redo it from the beginningis one of the most basic impulses which propelled American history itself. Starting from the colonial endeavor, and throughout the following
immigrants’ experiences, America has been a country where a fresh start
was always and repeatedly possible. “Zero start” is such a constant recurrent experience that the Biblical story of Adam and Eve has been a commanding preoccupation in the literary imagination from 17th century

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Puritan writings through 19th and 20th century novels. These classic
works of American Studies, such as American Adam, Virgin Land, andThe Machine in the Garden, reiterated the point that this almost archetypal imaginative framework was rigidly structured in the American
imagination. Not to mention such an obvious case as John Steinbeck,
East of Eden, it is revealing to note that even such a work as Sherwood
Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, can be read within this context. The collected short stories which make up the novel are mainly based upon thecentral ﬁgure’s stream of consciousness, and do not have any religious
overtone as a whole. But, one group of short stories in the novel of modernism, namely, “Godliness—A Tale in Four Parts,” takes its basic narrative structure from the Old Testament. In short, America has been taken
as a location where the Old Testament stories were to be reiterated andwould acquire different new meanings throughout its history.
AMERICAN MILLENNIUM
It has been saliently argued during the 70s and 80s that this Biblicalbasis was in fact structured within the traditional Biblical exegeticalmethod, namely Typology. The prophesies told in the Old Testament(types) are fulﬁlled and realized in the New Testament (anti-type). And,
with the analogical extension of that co-relationship between Old and
New Testaments to Old and New Worlds, America has been considered
as a special place where prophecy is to be fulﬁlled. Sacvan Bercovitchand others have convinced us that the Puritan writings in the seventeenth
century were saturated with this Biblical framework of typology.5 The
repeated cliché, America is one’s “dream come true,” can be considered
as a secular version of the typological thinking only deprived of its religious framework.
However, what is even more salient than the typological understanding of American history is the idea of Millennialism. This is because,
whereas typology merely points out the fact of realization of prophesies
brought forth in anti-type, Millennialism gives a temporal condition andfactors in historical understanding. It prophesies the timing of the Second
Coming, sometimes very ambiguously and at other times quite precisely. At any rate, it is really set within time, or is said to be very imminent.
Thus, Millennialism could function as a cultural power to enhancecertain social movements by a time-set program agenda, so much so, in
fact, that it should be a signiﬁcant subject when we consider theOnishi Naoki(p19)6/2 04.7.18 0:03 PM ページ 26

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American preoccupation with time. Except for the studies of Ira V.
Brown6 and David E. Smith7 in the 1950’s, mentioned above, however,Millennialism studies was not such a productive ﬁeld until the late 60’s.
Probably, the close ties of Millennialism with fundamentalist denominations often bafﬂed the religious historians of main line churches.
Picking up Brown’s interest and concern, in 1960’s J.F. Maclear produced an informative article,8 which stimulated the eschatological studies of American culture in early America.
American Millennialism, which was initiated with the Puritan’s direimage of the end of the world, can in fact be classiﬁed into two different categories; that is to say, Post- and Pre-millennialism. In PreMillennialism, the Calvinistic strict and imminent Second Coming wasa selective and one-time event. And, after the Second Coming, which
would bring forth a violent judgmental intervention, it was believed thatthe thousand years of glory would follow. Roughly speaking, thePuritans in the seventeenth century were preoccupied with this idea.
Around the time of the Second Great Awakening in the late-nineteenth
century, however, promoted mainly by New Divinity, that is, so-called
Edwardseans, millennialism was transformed. C.C. Goen called thisphenomenon a “new departure of eschatology.” Differing from the pessimism and the horrifying image of the end of the world and of glory
only for the selected, post-millennialism is based upon the idea of a gradual progress of the world, ﬁnally reaching a universal salvation after athousand years of blissful time. During that process, human efforts formissionary work can provide a solid momentum toward reaching theﬁnal glorious goal. Then, the Second Coming happens. Thus, by pushing the timing of the divine judgmental moment far forward beyond athousand years of future time, and changing the stance from pre- to postmillennialism, the American psyche acquired its unique future-oriented
optimism. In other words, post-millennialism is the basis on which
American optimism and utopianism has been standing. The formationof 19th century secular progressivism depends upon this concept.9 Various technological developments of that period, such as the invention of
the steam engine, the telephone and electricity, were taken as symptomatic of the gradual steps that would be made during the thousand years’
progress. In America, therefore, the advancement of science andtechnology do not collide, or contradict with that of religion. Edward

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Bellamy’s futuristic utopian novel, Looking Backward (1888) has to beread within this context. By now the transformation of millennialism has
been proved from various angles including non-main line churches. Asa matter of fact, it can be said that post-millennialism stimulated thedevelopment of America-born religions such as the Latter Day Saints,
Seventh Day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses and others, and the research on each denominational development with post-millennialism has
now been thoroughly conducted.
The points which concern us here in this respect are the facts that
Jonathan Edwards was often alleged to be the key person for this transformation. C.C. Goen’s article published in Church History in 1950 has
been quite inﬂuential in disseminating this view: according to Goen, “He(Edwards) began to entertain the idea that God might have purposed torealize the biblical prophecies in America as a land destined to accomplish the renovation of the world.” Thus, Goen focused our attention on
Edwards’ Thoughts on the Revival of Religion in New England (1740)
in which, Edwards “openly espouses the imminency of the golden age
and attempts to show that many things make it probable that His work
will begin in America.” Then, he quotes from Edwards, “This new worldis probably now discovered, that the new and most glorious state ofGod’s church on earth might commence there, that God might in it begin
a new world in a spiritual respect, when he creates the new heavens andnew earth.”10 To Goen, it was a great contribution of Edwards toChristian thought to innovate the idea of millennialism by removing thefears of the impending end of the world. Therefore, he concludes, “Could
one expect less from the theologian of the Great Awakening [Edwards]?”
Here, what was referred to as a rumor by Ira V. Brown, “It was rumoredthat Edwards often said that the millennium had already begun, and thatit began at Northampton,”11 is consolidated as a fact.
It has been mentioned that the originators of post-millennialism in its
modern form are such Biblical commentators on the Book of Revelation
as Daniel Whitby (1638–1725), Charles Daubuz (1670–1740) and Moses
Lowman (1680–1752). Under their strong inﬂuence, Edwards is considered to have applied the idea to America, particularly to the phenomena of the First Great Awakening. But, this is exactly the point on which
we have to raise a question. Was it really so?

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NAOKI ONISHIJONATHAN EDWARDS’ MILLENNIALISM RECONSIDERED
In order to see the matter properly, we have to stand back to get a wider
view of the matter from a broad perspective. Among various factors
necessary for a good understanding of Edwards’ thought, what is mostimportant is the research regarding accessibility to his works. For that
purpose, ﬁrst of all, we have to review the facts related to the fame ofJonathan Edwards soon after his unfortunate death. Considering the present fame and signiﬁcance of Jonathan Edwards, it seems rather odd that
Edwards’ untimely death, which happened only a few weeks or so after
his Presidential appointment at the College of New Jersey, was not treated prominently. Probably, the suddenness of his death might be one reason for the neglect, but there seems to have been no eulogy printed, nor
any other memorial event held except the funeral. Even his funeral was
conducted in the simplest manner, as his death bed wish had directed it
to be conducted.12 During his active life, in spite of his fame as a supporter of the “First Great Awakening,” or precisely because of that, he
had never been selected to read the election day sermon.13 This can beunderstandable when we think of his position as the central ﬁgure ofintense controversies such as that respecting the qualiﬁcation for church
membership, and that regarding the nature of the revival between the
New and Old Lights. However, it is rather shocking to note that at thetime of his death, there was only one notice in a local newspaper, that is,
the Boston Gazette, of April 10, 1750:
On Wednesday, the 22nd of last month, died, by inoculation, at Nassau Hall,an eminent servant of God, the Rev. pious, Mr. Jonathan Edwards. Presidentof the College of New Jersey: a gentleman of distinguished abilities, and an
heavenly temper of mind: a most rational, generous, catholic and exemplary
Christian, admired by all who knew him, for his uncommon candour and disinterested benevolence; a pattern of temperance, meekness, patience andcharity; always steady, calm and serene; a very judicious and instructive
preacher, and a most excellent divine. And, as he lived, cheerfully resigned
to the will of Heaven, so he died, or rather, as the Scriptures emphatically
express it with respect to good men, he fell asleep in Jesus, without the leastappearance of pain.14

Only his close protégés and disciples such as Samuel Hopkins and Joseph
Bellamy, took care of the aftermath of his death, and it was Hopkins who
took Edwards’ documents into his care. In other words, the voluminous
writings which Edwards had been dealing with in his Stockbridge mission house (1751–1757) were brought to Hopkins’ church at Burlington.

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These writings were studied only by those disciples, and only those disciples cherished the impact of Edwards’ achievement and theology
among themselves. Thomas Johnson’s bibliographical study15 shows
how Edwards’ printed materials were limited in number and were received quite differently by his contemporary readers than we would today imagine. For instance, his most well-read and frequently-printed
book was the biography of his son-in-law, David Brainard, entitled The
Life of Brainard (1765). The painstaking missionary work among thenative American people to which he devoted his short life were taken asa model case of missionary history, and the biography was reprinted thirty times before 1925. Edwards’ popularity among general readers washeavily and almost solely dependent upon this publication during the late
19th century. In such ways, Edwards’ fame and his achievements were
accepted very differently at that time from our own appreciation.
Even the idea that Edwards was the main promoter of the First Great
Awakening has to be reconsidered. Back in 1967, it was widely accepted that the period of the Great Awakening could be narrowly deﬁned
within a few years of the 18th century. Alan Heimert’s comment, madein the introduction to his well-argued book, was the origin of this understanding and was quite inﬂuential. There he wrote, “The Great Awakening was the series of religious revivals which, foreshadowed in the‘refreshings’ in New Jersey and New England in 1734–1735, rose tointercolonial crescendo in 1740.”16 Elsewhere, he mentioned, “The Great
Awakening was a religious revival that swept through the Americancolonies between 1739 and 1742.”17 After that, it took more than a quarter of century for scholarly liberation from this solid conceptualization
to be achieved with Jon Butler’s iconoclastic research18 which ﬁnallyconvinced us that the Great Awakening was not a clear-cut movement
but a set of amorphous phenomena in terms of both period and area. Since
then, including other inﬂuential demythologizing studies by Joseph
Conforti,19 researchers have focused keenly on the issues of the Revivals
especially on their time range and scope. There is now an argument, forexample, that deﬁning the period is meaningless even to the extent to saythat the period cannot be clear-cut. Referring to Stephen A. Marini’s
works, Gordon Wood summarizes the point at issue as follows;“Marini’s works suggest that there were in fact no distinct First andSecond Great Awakenings but instead one long period of evangelicalrevival from the mid-eighteenth century to the early decades of the nineteenth century.”20
In other words, as Jon Butler has made clear, the Great Awakening is

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NAOKI ONISHI“an interpretive ﬁction,”21 conjured up by Edwards’ disciples for the promotion of their own revival movement. By calling the earlier revival, theFirst Great Awakening they tried to authorize their revival movement as
the Second, deriving its authenticity from the ﬁrst. Indeed, the Great
Awakening promoted by his disciples (so-called, Hopkinsians), that is
to say, Samuel Hopkins, “the closest friend and disciple,” Joseph
Bellamy and others, should be understood as such in terms of their own
expectations. Frank Lambert22 has recently enforced this view quite thoroughly by researching the mechanism by which the Great Awakening
was promoted and enhanced intentionally.
Another of the assertions that Edwards really did proclaim that
Millennialism started from New England, or more precisely from
Northampton has to be reconsidered, too. It is certain that Edwards himself clearly wrote with that intention in his report of the Revival of 1740:
And if we may suppose that this glorious work of god shall begin in any partof America, I think, if we consider the circumstances of the settlement of
New England, it must needs appear the most likely of all American colonies,
to be the place whence this work shall principally take its rise. And if thesethings are so, it gives us more abundant reasons to hope that what is now seenin America, and especially in New England, may prove the dawn of that glorious day. . . .23

Perry Miller, in his biography of Edwards published in 1959, touched
upon this point and criticized Edwards’ indiscreet remarks by saying,“He committed the mistake for which he paid in full; he insinuated that
history could and might culminate in Northampton. True, he did notopenly claim it, but he let slip some injudicious sentences that soundedas though he did, and rumors spread through New England ‘that I haveoften said, that the millennium was already begun, and that it began at
Northampton.’ ”24 Edwards’ words, quoted by Perry Miller here, aretaken from the biography of Edwards written by Sereno Edwards
Dwight, but the context of the passage, or in fact, a few more lines following Miller’s quotation gives us a different impression. In order to get
the context of the argument, let me quote the passage in full:
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 haveoften said, as I say now, that I looked upon the late wonderful revivals ofOnishi Naoki(p19)6/2 04.7.18 0:03 PM ページ 31

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religion as forerunners of those glorious time so often prophesied of in the
Scripture. . . , but there are many that know that I have from time to time
added, that there would probably be many sore conﬂicts and terrible confusions, and many changes, revivings and intermissions, and returns of darkclouds, and threatening appearance, before this work shall have subdued theworld, and Christ’s kingdom shall be every where established and settled inpeace, which will be the lengthening of the Millennium or day of the Church’s
peace, rejoicing and triumph on earth, so often spoken of.25

As is clear in this passage, Edwards admitted that he had said that
Northampton was a starting point of the Millennium, as Perry Miller
pointed out, but his true intention was not to specify the arrival ofMillennium in terms of location or timing. He only asserted that thephenomena of the revival he observed could be considered as the “forerunner” of the Millennium, but even so, it is under the condition of probability, as he emphasized. Recently, putting Edwards’ position within
the large context of New England geo-political situation, Frank Lambert
has clariﬁed Edwards’ own understanding of the revival of 1740 as follows; “That the Northampton awakening could have been the beginningof a global revival did not seriously occur to Edwards, and if it had, hefelt inadequate to take a leading role in promoting the idea. Indeed, left
to Edwards’s own initiative, the Northampton story might never havebeen published. He was a difﬁdent young minister still in his twenties
and wished to defer to the judgment of older evangelicals. He also begged
off assuming a leadership role in publishing revival news by citing
Northampton’s remote location, especially its great distance from thepress.”26 Thus, it can be said that Northampton as the starting point of
the Millennium was an exaggerated interpretation or an over-emphasis
put on a casual remark of Edwards.
Another reconsideration about Edwards’ Millennialism has to bemade concerning salvation after the Millennium. Upon the Second Coming, Christ is believed to make the ﬁnal judgment on each human being;—choosing some for eternal bliss and assigning others to damnation.
Joseph Bellamy, in this respect, has calculated the number of would-be
converts during the process of Millennium, while observing the revival
phenomena of the Second Great Awakening. He has reached the conclusion that at that time almost everybody on the earth will be saved.
Samuel Hopkins, too, had a similar understanding. Upholding the sameidea of post-millennialism and its optimistic rendering of a history
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a matter of fact, is quite different from that of the disciples stated here.
Whereas Hopkins maintained that millennial society would be developed out of the church membership which would be enlarging during themillennium, Edwards himself thought only a few would be ﬁnally saved.
The limited nature of salvation is clearly expressed in his Miscellanies:
520. FEW SAVED. See Shepard’s Sincere Convert, paragraph at the bottomof the 83rd page and the top of the 84th. The following seem to be some of
the reasons why there are but few of fallen men chosen to eternal life: . . .
That the difference is owing to divine election, is more apparent. If the generality were saved and but few perished, a designing of those many to salvation could hardly be called an election. “Election” seems to denote a choosing
out one or a few out of many, a choosing a portion out of the common mass;
but if the multitude or mass itself was taken, and only a few distinguishedones left, this could hardly be called an election. The divine sovereign will
is more obviously the cause of the distinction in such an election, when a few
are distinguished from the generality and are chosen to a supernatural state,than if the generality were designed to this state, and only a few left in theirnatural state. . . .27

That Edwards did not consider that after the thousand years of millennium virtually all the people would be saved can be easily understoodwhen we think of his strict stance concerning church membership. At
Northampton, he tried hard to bring the membership policy back to theoriginal Puritan practice, in which only the people who confessed theirfaith in front of the congregation should be admitted as church members.
And, this change of membership policy can be considered as one of thereasons for his dismissal from his own church in 1750. In this way, there
is a discrepancy of understanding between Edwards and his disciples
concerning the nature of saving at the time of the Second Coming. Or,
to put it differently, Hopkins and others had interpreted the notion of millennium as originating in Edwards, but through the way they interpreted
Edwards’ writing the signiﬁcance of the millennium was transformed.
Concerning this difference, C. C. Goen mentioned, “It is one of theironies of history that Edwards himself, by his doctrine of the millennium, supplied this escape mechanism. Perhaps he gave away his argument unintentionally—or was he ever the philosophe?”28 But, to tell thetruth, Edwards’ idea was clearly different from his disciples’ interpretation. Only Goen, who had an access to Edwards’ writings, such as his“Miscellanies,” had to consider the phenomenon as “one of the ironies
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CONCLUSION
Thus far, we have seen how Jonathan Edwards’ idea of Millennialism
was understood by the people succeeding him. Probably, due to themishap of his death and his difﬁcult and secluded position at the mission
house in Stockbridge, his accumulated writings were not widely understood but were appreciated only by his followers. In other words, as
the accessibility to his writings was limited after his death, his fame wastotally forgotten. Through that process, the conception of post-Millennialism afﬁliated with Edwards has been interpreted not as he himself
asserted it but as his followers wanted him to have asserted it. Hopkins
and Bellamy a generation afterwards, and C. C. Goen and Alan Heimert
almost two centuries later, constructed their own images of Edwards,
each of which reﬂects the particular interest and position surrounding theinterpreters. The kind of vacuum left by Jonathan Edwards after his deathhas been thus ﬁlled by the projected images harbored by his disciples
and followers. An interesting fact is that through this process, we candetect the particular situation of the United States at each period, as it
has taken its expression in their various interpretations of Jonathan
Edwards. For instance, at the time of the Second Great Awakening, theEdwardsean idea of post-millennialism was understood to mean the universal saving at the end of the millennium. And, at the time of the post
WWII period, in the 50’s, Edwards was believed to have said that
America, or more precisely, Northampton was the locale where theMillennium had started on the earth. In particular, stimulated by Perry
Miller’s biography of Jonathan Edwards, a new way of interpreting
Edwards’ thought was revived by C. C. Goen, who has reached the conclusion that Edwards’ post-millennialism played a signiﬁcant role inconstructing the unique American future-oriented psyche; “this wasexactly suited to the American nationalistic temper: the new world wasto be the scene of dawning glory and no hand could stay its coming.
Whatever the tragedy of the ultimate secularization of the millennial
hope, it becomes an integral part of the optimistic activism which was
destined to crown with success the ‘errand into the wilderness.’ This is
Jonathan Edwards’ contribution to the radical utopianism which is partof the American tradition.”29
To put it differently, in each period Jonathan Edwards’ idea of millennialism was interpreted or accommodated so that it could be used forthe sake of and in relation to the needs of the particular American

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situation at that time. James H. Moorhead, while analyzing the 19thcentury response or adjustment to post-millennialism, argued that, “Postmillennialism resolved the problem by delaying the supernaturaldestruction of this age until after the millennium.” Continuing his argument, he points out how post-millennium was accommodated to theneeds of the 19th-century mental atmosphere of America; “The ﬁnal
judgment was thus conveniently delayed, but apocalyptic terrors wereby no means held in complete abeyance until the end of time.”30 It canbe maintained, therefore, that post-millennialism was invented andintroduced so that it might suite American sentiments. Because, by “conveniently” delaying the Second Coming for a thousand years, post-millennialism could function as an “escape mechanism.”31
It is now said that the long-awaited completion of the Yale edition of
the Works of Jonathan Edwards is at hand. Since the ﬁrst volume waspublished in 1957, nearly a half century has passed and the ﬁnal volume,
Volume 27, will be published within a year or so, just a few years after
the tri-centennial of Edwards’ birth. Finally, the vacuum Edwards left at
his untimely death will be completely ﬁlled, and we will reach for theﬁrst time the place from which Edwards’ understanding can be opened
up into a new horizon. Certainly, historical understanding cannot escapefrom its own limitations, by its nature. A historian can only understandthe past from his or her own standpoint, which is inevitably conditionedby the contemporary situations in which the historian is positioned.
However, one nonetheless has to make a constant effort to liberate oneself from one’s limitations by trying to include various points-of-views,
looking at the subject from different angles. As for Edwards, we haveseen how the understanding of his ideas was limited at the same timethat it was promoted by the small group of his followers and disciples.
Soon after his death, it was Hopkins and Bellamy, and in the post-WW
II era, it was C. C. Goen, who promoted particular understandings of
Edwards, especially in relation to his Millennialism. While these kindsof efforts are indispensable in order to disseminate a proper understanding of Edwards, we now realize that Edwards has been utilized mainly
for the sake of their understandings. If Jonathan Edwards, a British
national who was already dead before the birth of the United States ofAmerica, is in fact imperative in understanding the signiﬁcance of theUnited States of America, somehow this kind of narrow understandingof him fostered by his followers should be liberated from their close andclosed circle. Concerning Edwards’ idea of Millennialism, it is not likely

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that the hope and expectation that a glorious time would be waiting forhuman beings after a thousand years, as he allegedly stated, would be
realized. Nor, can it be shared universally by the inhabitants on the globe.
Contemporary political as well as environmental situations constantly
remind us of the limited resources and future of the world. In short, theword, “progress,” does not seem to project any optimistic overtones anymore as it used to do. Meanwhile, on the other hand, it is also unlikelythat only pessimism could control us. Under such circumstances, what
stance America will take is highly critical and important. Twenty years
ago, William Q. McLoughlin wrote, “What astounds the historian offaith in America is the subtle shift from a postmillennial (Do-it-yourself)
approach to saving the world to a premillennial (trust-in-God) approach”32 Indeed, the fate of the world and its future should not entirely
depend upon the unilateral effort of the United States, but upon theTranscendental, which should not be and cannot be monopolized byAmerica.
NOTES
1Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York, Toronto: The
Free Press, 1992).
2
Philip Young, “Fallen from Time: The Mythic Rip Van Winkle,” Kenyon Review
22 (1960), 547–73.
3
Ruth H. Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought,
1756–1800 (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), xi.
4Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000;
edition with a new epilogue, originally published in 1967), 192–93.
5See, for instance, Typology and Early American Literature, ed. by Sacvan
Bercovitch (Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1972).
6
Ira V. Brown, “Watchers for the Second Coming: The Millenarian Tradition in
America,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 39 (1952), 441–458.
7David E. Smith, “Millenarian Scholarship in America,” American Quarterly 17(1965), 535–549.
8
J.F. Maclear, “New England and the Fifth Monarchy: The Quest for the Millennium
in Early American Puritanism,” The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series 32(1975), 223–260.
9Jean B. Quandt, “Religion and Social thought: Secularization of Postmillennialism,”
American Quarterly 25 (1973), 390–409.
10
C.C. Goen, “Jonathan Edwards: A New Departure in Eschatology,” Church History
28 (1950), 25–40. This study focused upon the idea of Edwards’ post-millennialism has
been quite inﬂuential to other signiﬁcant works, which, according to Stephen J.Stein,includes Earnest Lee Tuveson’s Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America’s Millennial
Role (Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press, 1968), and Alan Heimert,
Religion and the American Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966).

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Ira. V. Brown, “Watchers for the Second Coming: The Millenarian Tradition in
America,” 448.
12
Sereno Edwards Dwight, Life of President Edwards (New York: G. and C. and H.
Carvill, 1830), 578, “And as to my funeral, I would have it to be like Mr. Burr’s; andany additional sum of money, that might be expected to be laid out that way, I would
have it disposed of to charitable uses.”13
Thomas H. Johnson, The Printed Writings of Jonathan Edwards 1703–1758, A
Bibliography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1940), viii, “Edwards was neverinvited to deliver an ‘Election Sermon.’ ”
14
Quoted in Sereno Edwards Dwight, Life of President Edwards, 579.
15
Thomas H. Johnson, The Printed Writings of Jonathan Edwards 1703–1758, A
Bibliography, x.
16
Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind, 2.
17
Alan Heimert, Perry Miller, eds., Great Awakening: Documents Illustrating the
Crisis and Its Consequences, (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967, 40).
18
Jon Butler, “Enthusiasm Described and Decried: The Great Awakening as Interpretative Fiction,” Journal of American History 59 (1982), 305–325.
19
Joseph Conforti, “The Invention of the Great Awakening, 1795–1842,” Early
American Literature 26 (1991), 101–105.
20
Gordon Wood, “Religion and the American Revolution,” in New Directions in
American Religious History (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), ed.
by Harry S. Stout and D.G. Hart, 186.
21
Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People(Cambridge, Mass., London: Harvard University Press, 1990), 165.
22Frank Lambert, Inventing “Great Awakening” (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1999).
23
Jonathan Edwards, “Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in
New England (1742),” Works of Jonathan Edwards: The Great Awakening, Vol. 4, ed.
by C. C. Goen, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 358.
24
Perry Miller, Jonathan Edwards (William Sloan Associates, 1949), 318.
25
Sereno Edwards Dwight, The Life of President Edwards, 213. This is in fact fromthe letter written by Edwards to William McCulloch on March 5, 1744. See Stephen J.
Stein, “Editor’s Introduction,” The Works of Jonathan Edwards: Apocalyptic Writings,
Vol. 5 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 29.
26Frank Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening” (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1999), 69.
27
Jonathan Edwards, The “Miscellanies” (Entry Nos. 501–823), ed. by Ava
Chamberlain, Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 18 (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2000), 65.
28
C. C. Goen, “Jonathan Edwards: A New Departure in Eschatology,” 38.
29
C. C. Goen, “Jonathan Edwards: A New Departure in Eschatology,” 40.
30
James H. Moorhead, “Between Progress and Apocalypse: A Reassessment ofMillennialism in American Religious Thought, 1800–1880,” The Journal of American
History 71 (1984), 537.
31
C. C. Goen, “Jonathan Edwards: A New Departure in Eschatology,” 38.
32
William Q. McLoughlin, “Faith,” in “Special Issue: Contemporary America,”
American Quarterly 35, (1983), 102.