Revelation 6, which speaks of the opening of the six seals and a cosmic judgment avenging
∑∂∏ Notes to Pages 194–98
18: 283–309, 335–39, are especially important and encapsulate his theology of redemption. On the theology of Edwards' projected work see chapter 29, below.
22. A History of the Work of Redemption, sermon 5, Works, 9: 176–77. Though few of the sermons have a formal ''application,'' Edwards does interrupt his exposition once in a while for an ''improvement.'' He also preached some other sermons during this same period.
23. Sermon 1, Works, 9: 113. 24. Sermon 24, Works, 9: 436. 25. Sermon 29, Works, 9: 520. 26. Timothy Dwight, Travels in New England and New York, ed. Barbara Miller Solomon, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), 4: 230–31, quoted in Wilson, ''Introduction,'' Works, 9: 8–9.
27. Theodore Dwight Bozeman, To Live Ancient Lives: The Primitivist Dimensions of Puritanism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), emphasizes the theme of such ''primitivism'' (or attempts to live as though in biblical times) regarding seventeenth-century American Puritans, relating it to anthropological categories of myth, ''Great Time,'' etc. See esp. 13–19. Jan Shipps, Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), suggests how early Mormons quite literally saw themselves as restoring continuity with biblical time. See Richard T. Hughes, ed., The American Quest for the Primitive Church (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), for essays by these and other authors relating such themes to many American religious traditions.
28. Sermon 18, Works, 9: 351. Edwards believed Constantine's work was prophesied in Revelation 6, which speaks of the opening of the six seals and a cosmic judgment avenging the blood of the martyrs, also typical of the final judgment.
29. Moses Lowman's Paraphrase and Notes on the Revelation of St. John (London, 1737), which Edwards was reading in 1738 or 1739 and was a principal stimulant to his thinking, identified Constantine as one of the heads of the beast (Rev. 12:3), thus as an agent of Satan against the church. See Stephen J. Stein, ''Introduction,'' Works, 5: 45–46. Cf. Stein's summary of Lowman, 55–61.
30. I am indebted on these and related points to the insights of Avihu Zakai as presented in an early draft of his forthcoming book Jonathan Edwards's Philosophy of History: The Re-Enchantment of the World in the Age of Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), which he was kind enough to let me see.
31. Works, 9: 291. ''Shall we prize a history that gives us a clear account of some great earthly prince or mighty warrior, as of Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar, or the Duke of Marlborough, and shall we not prize the history that God has given us of the glorious kingdom of his son, Jesus Christ, the prince and savior of the world, and the wars and other great transactions of that king of kings and lord of armies, the lord mighty in battle, the history of the things he has wrought for the redemption of his chosen people.''
32. See above, chapter 5. 33. Sermon 18, Works, 9: 351–52. 34. Sermon 33, Works, 9: 411. 35. Sermon 24, Works, 9: 434. 36. Ibid., 434–35. 37. Sermon 22, Works, 9: 412.