Especially in the last decade, scholarship on Jonathan Edwards has attempted to place his thought in the wider scientific and theological context of his time. Along with his earlier work – Jonathan Edwards's philosophy of history (2003) – Avihu Zakai now has written a second important monograph that keeps in step with this trend. In this book Zakai argues that Edwards was among the few in the early modern period who recognised that scientific reasoning ‘required a major re-thinking of the received theological tradition’ (p. 2). Rather than simply reasserting a dogmatic theology, he asserts that Edwards creatively fashioned a theologically sensitive philosophy of nature that makes room for the operation of ‘God's sovereignty, power, and will within the order of creation’. This Zakai calls Edwards's ‘re-enchantment of the world’ (p. 234). In the opening two chapters, Zakai traces the origins of Edwards's philosophy of nature to medieval thought, and describes the challenge to it that scientific reasoning posed for him. In the next three chapters, Zakai explains how several early modern thinkers – notably Donne, Pascal and Leibnitz – responded to the mechanism and materialism of scientific reasoning, and rejected the essentially deistic understanding of God that it required. In the final two chapters Zakai returns to Edwards to describe how the New England theologian met the same challenge more effectively than the others. For this reason, Zakai contends, Edwards deserves a more prominent place in the history of early modern philosophy than he has been afforded. No single chapter of Zakai's work offers anything particularly original; the responses of early modern religious thinkers – including Edwards – to the rise of scientific reasoning are well documented elsewhere in the secondary literature. But the enormous strength of Zakai's work lies in its cumulative argument. Taken together, the chapters succeed very well in placing Edwards in the wider scientific and theological context, and make a very persuasive argument for the importance of Edwards's underappreciated philosophy of nature. Less convincing is Zakai's claim that Christianity and science were not engaged in intellectual ‘warfare’ in the early modern period, an assumption that runs throughout his otherwise pristine argument. While Edwards may have had more appreciation for scientific reasoning than other early modern thinkers, even he was keenly aware of the devastating threat that it posed to traditional Christian faith and practice. The reader wonders whether Zakai himself is convinced of his own claim; he often writes of Edwards's ‘counteroffensive’ against scientific reasoning, a decidedly martial metaphor. Zakai's work is one of very few sustained analyses of Edwards's philosophy of nature, and the only one that situates it in its wider scientific and theological context. For these reasons, the book is of singular importance in Edwards scholarship.