An important consequence of Edwards’s teaching was that his great intellectual reputation lent respectability to a seductive conception of the Last Days, known in the jargon of theologians as ‘post-millennialism’. This proposition was a development of that traditionally exciting idea, dating right back to Justin Martyr and Irenaeus in the second century CE, that human history would culminate in a thousand-year rule of the saints. Edwards believed that this millennium would take place before the Second Coming of Christ — hence the Second Coming would be ‘post-millennial’.
