This chapter discusses Edwards’s view of history and the end times. It does so by examining four interlocking frameworks of interpretation that Edwards inherited from Reformed-Puritan theology: first, a general approach to relating the Bible and history; second, an intense kind of providentialism; third, specific forms of biblical theology aiming toward an integrated salvation history; and fourth, a futurist type of millennialist eschatology. What emerges from this is the picture of an Edwards who was, for the most part, a traditionalist. At the same time, he, like many of his peers, engaged with the intellectual discourses of the Enlightenment, both by partaking in them and criticizing their perceived excesses. Edwards’s version of a moderate Protestant Enlightenment produced a deepened, eschatologically inflected interest in redemption history, which he understood as a progressive continuum. Within this framework of history Edwards came to assign crucial significance to revivals.
