"Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" is a

sermon A sermon is a religious discourse or oration by a preacher, usually a member of clergy. Sermons address a scriptural, theological, or moral topic, usually expounding on a type of belief, law, or behavior within both past and present contexts. El ...

written by the

American American(s) may refer to: * American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America" ** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America ** American ancestry, pe ...

theologian Jonathan Edwards, preached to his own congregation in

Northampton, Massachusetts The city of Northampton is the county seat of Hampshire County, Massachusetts, United States. As of the 2020 census, the population of Northampton (including its outer villages, Florence and Leeds) was 29,571. Northampton is known as an acade ...

, to profound effect, and again on July 8, 1741 in

Enfield, Connecticut Enfield is a town in Hartford County, Connecticut, United States, first settled by John and Robert Pease of Salem, Massachusetts Bay Colony. The population was 42,141 at the 2020 census. It is bordered by Longmeadow, Massachusetts, and East Longm ...

. The preaching of this sermon was the catalyst for the First Great Awakening. Like Edwards' other works, it combines vivid imagery of

Hell In religion and folklore, hell is a location in the afterlife in which evil souls are subjected to punitive suffering, most often through torture, as eternal punishment after death. Religions with a linear divine history often depict hell ...

with observations of the world and citations of Biblical scripture. It is Edwards' most famous written work, and a fitting representation of his preaching style. It is widely studied by

Christians Christians () are people who follow or adhere to Christianity, a monotheistic Abrahamic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. The words ''Christ'' and ''Christian'' derive from the Koine Greek title ''Christós'' (Χρι ...

and historians, providing a glimpse into the theology of the

First Great Awakening The First Great Awakening (sometimes Great Awakening) or the Evangelical Revival was a series of Christian revivals that swept Britain and its thirteen North American colonies in the 1730s and 1740s. The revival movement permanently affecte ...

of . This was a highly influential sermon of the Great Awakening, emphasizing God's wrath upon unbelievers after death to a very real, horrific, and fiery Hell. The underlying point is that God has given humans a chance to confess their sins. It is the mere will of God, according to Edwards, that keeps wicked men from being overtaken by the devil and his demons and cast into the furnace of hell – "like greedy hungry lions, that see their prey, and expect to have it, but are for the present kept back y God's hand" Mankind's own attempts to avoid falling into the "bottomless gulf" due to the overwhelming "weight and pressure towards hell" are insufficient as "a spider's web would have to stop a falling rock". This act of grace from God has given humans a chance to believe and trust in Christ. Edwards provides much varied and vivid imagery to illustrate this main theme throughout.

Doctrine

Most of the sermon's text consists of ten "considerations": # God may cast wicked men into

at any given moment. # The wicked deserve to be cast into Hell. Divine justice does not prevent God from destroying the wicked at any moment. # The wicked, at moment, suffer under God's condemnation to Hell. # The wicked, on earth—at this very moment—suffer a sample of the torments of Hell. The wicked must not think, simply because they are not physically in Hell, that God (in whose hand the wicked now reside) is not—at this very moment—as angry with as he is with those he is now tormenting in Hell, and who—at this very moment—feel and bear the fierceness of his wrath. # At any moment God shall permit him,

Satan Satan,, ; grc, ὁ σατανᾶς or , ; ar, شيطانالخَنَّاس , also known as Devil in Christianity, the Devil, and sometimes also called Lucifer in Christianity, is an non-physical entity, entity in the Abrahamic religions ...

stands ready to fall upon the wicked and seize them as his own. # If it were not for God's restraints, there are, in the souls of wicked men, hellish principles reigning which, presently, would kindle and flame out into hellfire. # Simply because there are not visible means of death before them at any given moment, the wicked should not feel secure. # Simply because it is natural to care for oneself or to think that others may care for them, men should not think themselves safe from God's wrath. # All that wicked men may do to save themselves from Hell's pains shall afford them nothing if they continue to reject Christ. # God has never promised to save mankind from Hell, except for those contained in

Christ Jesus, likely from he, יֵשׁוּעַ, translit=Yēšūaʿ, label=Hebrew/Aramaic ( AD 30 or 33), also referred to as Jesus Christ or Jesus of Nazareth (among other Names and titles of Jesus in the New Testament, names and titles), was ...

through the covenant of Grace.

Purpose

One church in Enfield, Connecticut, had been largely unaffected during the

of New England. Edwards was invited by the pastor of the church to preach to them. Edwards's aim was to teach his listeners about the horrors of Hell, the dangers of sin, and the terrors of being lost. Edwards described the position of those who do not follow Christ's urgent call to receive forgiveness. Edwards scholar John E. Smith notes that despite the apparent pessimism of the notion of an angry God, that pessimism is "overcome by the comforting hope of salvation through a triumphant, loving savior." Whenever Edwards preached terror, it was part of a larger campaign to turn sinners from their disastrous path and to the rightful object of their affections, Jesus Christ."

Application

In the final section of "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," Edwards shows that his theological argument holds throughout scripture and biblical history. He invokes stories and examples throughout the whole

Bible The Bible (from Koine Greek , , 'the books') is a collection of religious texts or scriptures that are held to be sacred in Christianity, Judaism, Samaritanism, and many other religions. The Bible is an anthologya compilation of texts of a ...

. Edwards ends the sermon with one final appeal: "Therefore let everyone that is out of Christ, now awake and fly from the wrath to come." According to Edwards and the Bible, only by returning to Christ can one escape the stark fate he outlines.

Effect and legacy

Edwards was interrupted many times during the sermon by people moaning and crying out, "What shall I do to be saved?". Although the sermon has received criticism, Edwards' words have endured and are still read to this day. Edwards' sermon continues to be the leading example of a First Great Awakening sermon and is still used in religious and academic studies. Since the 1950s, a number of critical perspectives were used to analyze the sermon. The first comprehensive academic analysis of "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" was published by Edwin Cady in 1949, who comments on the imagery of the sermon and distinguishes between the "cliché" and "fresh" figurative images, stressing how the former related to the colonial life. Lee Stuart questions that the message of the sermon was solely negative and attributes its success to the final passages in which the sinners are actually "comforted". Rosemary Hearn argues that it is the logical structure of the sermon that constitutes its most important persuasive element. Lemay looks into the changes in the syntactic categories, like grammatical tenses, in the

text Text may refer to: Written word * Text (literary theory), any object that can be read, including: **Religious text, a writing that a religious tradition considers to be sacred **Text, a verse or passage from scripture used in expository preachin ...

of the sermon. Lukasik stresses how in the sermon Edwards appropriates Newtonian physics, especially the image of the gravitational pull that would relentlessly bring the sinners down. Gallagher focuses on the "beat" of the sermon, and on how the consecutive structural elements of the sermon serve different persuasive aims. Choiński suggests that the rhetorical success of the sermon consists in the use of the "deictic shift" that transported the hearers mentally into the figurative images of hell. Ironically, Jonathan Edwards wrote and spoke a great deal on heaven and angels, writes John Gerstner in ''Jonathan Edwards on Heaven and Hell'', 1998, and those themes are less remembered, namely "Heaven is a World of Love".

Notes

References

* * * * * * * * *

External links

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God
from DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln {{authoritycontrol Christian sermons 1741 works 18th-century Christian texts Enfield, Connecticut History of Christianity in the United States Hell