Abstract
The study of late Reformation eschatology is frequently bogged down in a quagmire of terminology which can be as puzzling to novices as it is to those who plumb its depth. All too often modern assumptions about, and definitions of, the terms “premillennialism” (whose adherents place Christ’s Second Coming at the beginning of the thousand years during which Satan is bound in the “abyss” according to Rev. 20:1–3) and “postmillennialism” (whose adherents place Christ’s reappearance at the end of the millennium) are rigidly superimposed upon the developing historical context in the early modern era. Modern interpreters frequently characterize sixteenth- and seventeenth-century postmillennialists as forward looking thinkers who welcome scientific innovation and engage in literally transforming the fallen world into a terrestrial paradise; on this view, postmillennial progressivists know that they already live in the golden age of “the world’s conversion under an increased potency of grace” prior to Christ’s visible reappearance at the Day of Judgment.1 Postmillennialist activism became the predominant eschatological ideology of the nineteenth century, historians have usually argued, because it appealed to the intellectuals among the apostles of progress who embraced science, democracy, and human perfectibility as God’s ultimate gift to mankind.2 An inverse rationale is generally applied to premillennialism which, so the story goes, appealed to a more conservative contingent whose voluntaristic fundamentalism demanded nothing less than supernatural intervention to offset the chaos of human affairs. The supposed gloom-and-doom of the premillennialists, these modern critics explain, was engendered by their trepidation as they passively awaited their wrathful King of Kings to return at the beginning of the millennium, a prospect which inspired in them, according to the “official” interpretation, little more than abject terror or a dour melancholy.
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Notes
See Le Roy Edwin Froom, The Prophetic Faith of our Fathers: The Historical Development of Prophetic Interpretation,3 Vols. (Washington, D.C.: Review and Herald, 1946–54). 2:649–55. The quotation is located on 649.
See Ernest Lee Tuveson, Millennium and Utopia: A Study in the Background of the Idea of Progress (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1949); and Robert Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress ( New York: Basic Books, 1980 ).
C.C. Goen’s influential article “Jonathan Edwards: A New Departure in Eschatology,” Church History 28 (March 1959), 25–40, calls Edwards’ belief in a prosperous state of the church within history “a radical innovation which had decisive consequences for the future” (25). Goen refutes Perry Miller by identifying Daniel Whitby, Charles Daubuz (1637–1717), and Moses Lowman (1680–1752) as Edwards’ principal sources for his postmillennialism (35–38). In his Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America’s Millennial Role (Chicago. University of Chicago Press, 1968), Ernest Lee Tuveson adopts Goen’s argument with few qualifications (30–39) as does Alan Heimert (59–66) in Religion and the American Mind (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966); Stephen J. Stein, in his Introduction to “Apocalyptic Writings,” The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Perry Miller, General Ed., 18 Vols. to date (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957-), 5: 7–19 and 40–59; and Robert W. Jenson (133–34), in America’s Theologian: A Recommendation of Jonathan Edwards (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). James West Davidson significantly revises this argument in The Logic of Millennial Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), esp. 25–36, and John F. Wilson points to the nineteenth-century apostles of progress who adopt Edwards as their spiritual father to reify their own ideas, in “History, Redemption, and the Millennium,” in Jonathan Edwards and the American Experience, ed. Nathan O. Hatch and Harry S. Stout ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1988 ), 133–41.
Richard Baxter, The Glorious Kingdom of Christ, Described and Clearly Vindicated (London, 1691), 9–10.
St. Augustine, The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods (New York: Modern Library, 1950), Book 20, Chap. 7, 720. Cited hereafter in the following format: City of God, 20. 7. 720.
Ibid.,20.8.723.
Ibid.,20.8.722–4.
Ibid.,20.9.726
Ibid.,20.6.716–19; 9.727–28; 10.728–29. For the various positions outlined, see Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History VII.xxiv; Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Tryphon; Irenaeus, Against Heresies V.xxxv; Tertullian, Against Marcion III.xxiv; and Lactantius, Epitome,Chap. xi, and Divine Institutes V.xxxiv. Daniel Whitby reviews this debate in his Treatise of the True Millennium,Chap. 1, in Paraphrase and Commentary on the New Testament,2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1761), 2:2–9.
St. Augustine, City of God,20.11.729; 13.730–32.
Ibid.,20.16.735.
See Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium. Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (New York: Rev. and expanded ed., Oxford University Press, 1970; first ed.1957), 80 and 235, and Heiko A. Oberman, Luther: Man Between God and the Devil,trans. Eileen Walliser-Schwarzbart (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 42–4, 60, and 71.
See Heinrich Quistorp, Calvin’s Doctrine of the Last Things, trans. Harold Knight ( Richmond: John Knox Press, 1955 ).
Quoted in T.F. Torrance, Kingdom and Church: A Study in the Theology of the Reformation (Fair Lawn, N.J.: Essential Books, 1956), 152–3. Calvin, Commentary on Matthew 6: 10.
John Bale, Image of Both Churches, in Select Works of John Bale, D.D.,ed. Henry Christmas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1849), 558, 559–60.
Ibid.,561
Ibid.
Brightman’s stages are summarized in his The Reverend Mr. Brightmans Iudgement or Prophecies (London, 1643), found in Thomas Brightman, The Revelation of Saint John (Amsterdam, 1644).
Ibid.,264.
Ibid.
Ibid.,267.
Ibid.,266.
Ibid.,263–70.
Ibid.,265, 267, 270.
Ibid.,268.
Ibid.,265.
Johann Heinrich Alsted, The Beloved City Or, The Saints Reign on Earth A Thousand Yeares,trans. William Burton (London, 1643), 36.
Ibid.
Ibid.,17.
Ibid.,17–8.
Ibid.,17.
Ibid.,18.
Ibid.,78–79.
Ibid., 10,79–83.
Mede’s Clovis Apocalyptica was translated into English as The Key of the Revelation in 1647. My citations are from the second ed. (London, 1650), Part 1, 27.
Ibid.,1.
Mede, Remaines On some Passages in the Revelation (London, 1650), 25–8.
Ibid.,24–5.
Ibid.,25. For the same argument, see Mede’s The Key of the Revelation,A5—A6, and The Works of the Pious and Profoundly Learned Joseph Mede ed. John Worthington, 4th ed. (London, 1677), 603–5, 773–7.
See John Cotton, Churches Resurrection, or the Opening of the Fift and Sixt verses of the 20th Chap. Of the Revelation (London, 1642), 5, Cotton, Exposition upon the Thirteenth Chapter of the Revelation (London, 1655), 120.
Ibid.,5–6
Ibid.,6.
Ibid.,7, 6.
Ibid.,6, 7.
Ibid.,8.
Ibid.,6, 10.
Ibid.,16–20.
Ibid.,16.
Ibid.,20.
For John Davenport, see his “Epistle,” in Increase Mather’s Mystery of Israel’s Salvation (London, 1669). For Drue Cressener, see his The Judgments of God upon the Roman-Catholick Church (London, 1689), esp. 290–6. For Praisegod Barbone (also Barbon), see his Good Things to Come, Or, A Setting forth of some of the Great Things that will Contemporize and take place; when our Lord Christ shall come gain (London, 1675), 5–6, 22–32, 39–50, 59–65. For Increase Mather, see A discourse Concerning the glorious state of the church on earth under the New Jerusalem“ (ca. 1692–95), a manucsript ed. Mason I. Lowance, Jr., and David Watters which is included in their long article, ”Increase Mather’s `New Jerusalem’: Millennialism in Late Seventeenth-Century New England,“ Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 87 (1977), 381–85, 388, 393–94, and, also, Increase Mather, A Dissertation Concerning the Future Conversion of the Jewish Nation (London, 1709), 15, 18–21, 25–8; Samuel Willard, The Checkered State of the Gospel Church (Boston, 1701), 20–1, 51, 57–9. William Torrey, A Brief Discourse Concerning Futurities or Things to come (Boston, 1757), 7, 8–9, 27–37, 50–1; Ezekiel Cheever, Scripture Prophecies Explained (Boston, 1757), 7–13, 16–7. The sermons by Torrey and Cheever were written in the late 1680s and early 1690s; neither were published until more than half a century later, when Thomas Prince offered them as alternatives to Edwardsian postmillennialism. For Thomas Goodwin and Cotton Mather see my discussion below.
Thomas Goodwin, The World to Come, or, The Kingdome of Christ asserted (London, 1655), 33–4.
Ibid.,26
Ibid.,28, 29–30.
Ibid.,22, 23.
Ibid.,22, 23.
“`Problema Theologicum’ [1703]: An Authoritative Edition,” ed. by Jeffrey Scott Mares, Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 104, Pt. 2 (1994), 423. See also Reiner Smolinski, The Threefold Paradise of Cotton Mather: An Edition of ‘Triparadisus’ (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 245.
Mather, ’Problema Theologicum,’ esp. 384–8,420–4.
Ibid.,407.
Ibid.
Ibid.,406. See also 407–8.
Ibid.,423–4.
Ibid.,423.
See Mede, The Key of the Revelation,A5–A6, and Works,773–8.
Smolinski, The Threefold Paradise of Cotton Mather,278. For Cheever’s own views, see his posthumously published Scripture Prophecies Explained (Boston, 1757).
Praisegod Barbone, Good Things to Come (London, 1675), 53.
Ibid.,59–65.
Smolinski, The Threefold Paradise of Cotton Mather,316.
Ibid.,Part III, Chaps. 2–7
See Mede, Works,775, and his revision of this issue in A Paraphrase and Exposition of Saint Peter,2nd ed. (London, 1649), 12–22; Increase Mather, Dissertation Concerning the Future Conversion of the Jewish Nation,31–2; Cressener, The Judgments of God upon the RomanCatholick Church,284–300; Cotton Mather, ’Problema Theologicum,’ 417–22; Smolinski, The Threefold Paradise of Cotton Mather,155–243.
See Mede, Works,593.
Smolinski, The Threefold Paradise of Cotton Mather,180–1.
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Smolinski, R. (2001). Caveat Emptor: Pre- and Postmillennialism in the Late Reformation Period. In: Force, J.E., Popkin, R.H. (eds) Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture. International Archives of the History of Ideas / Archives Internationales d’Histoire des Idées, vol 175. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2282-7_10
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