A short intellectual biography -- Young man Edwards : religious conversion and Theologica gloriae -- Theology in the age of scientific reasoning : Edwards and the reenchantment of the world -- The ideological origins of Edwards's philosophy of history -- God's great design in history : the formation of Edwards's redemptive mode of historical thought -- Edwards's philosophy of history : the history of the work of redemption -- "Chariots of salvation" : the apocalypse and eschatology of the Great Awakening -- Edwards and the enlightenment debate on moral philosophy
Avihu Zakai analyzes Jonathan Edwards's redemptive mode of historical thought in the context of the Enlightenment. As theologian and philosopher, Edwards has long been a towering figure in American intellectual history. Nevertheless, and despite Edwards's intense engagement with the nature of time and the meaning of history, there has been no serious attempt to explore his philosophy of history. Offering the first such exploration, Zakai considers Edwards's historical thought as a reaction, in part, to the varieties of Enlightenment historical narratives and their growing disregard for theistic considerations. Zakai analyzes the ideological origins of Edwards's insistence that the process of history depends solely on God's redemptive activity in time as manifested in a series of revivals throughout history, reading this doctrine as an answer to the threat posed to the Christian theological teleology of history by the early modern emergence of a secular conception of history and the modern legitimation of historical time. --From publisher's description
