51 pages • 1 hour read
Jonathan EdwardsSinners in the Hands of an Angry God
Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 1741A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Background
Ideological Context
In 1726, Edwards accepted the position of assistant minister in his grandfather’s church in Northampton. Despite some theological misgivings—the independent Solomon Stoddard defied conventional practice by opening church membership to those who made a profession of faith without providing evidence of spiritual conversion—Edwards undertook the role aware he was being groomed as successor to his grandfather’s influential pulpit. Three years later, Stoddard died, and Edwards became pastor. Stoddard had fostered a series of revivals in Northampton, but Edwards remarked that in the years immediately following his grandfather’s death, religion was at a low ebb in the town, particularly among its youth.
By 1734, however, following the sudden (unrelated) deaths of a young man and woman in town, an awakening occurred that quickly spread throughout Northampton, leading to the conversion of nearly half the adult population over the next three months, in Edwards’s estimate. The virtual disappearance of illness and an outpouring of neighborly love unprecedented for the usually contentious townsfolk accompanied the remarkable religious transformation; evidence of a peculiar visitation of God’s grace, Edwards assumed. Edwards’s subsequent popularization of the Northampton awakening emphasized its universality and intensity, thereby lending the events a definitive and exemplary character. The extraordinary religious excitement quickly spread to surrounding towns in the Connecticut Valley during that winter and spring, but effectively came to an end in Northampton in June 1735 after the suicide of Edwards’s uncle, Joseph Hawley, a leading Northampton merchant who had been tormented with anxiety about his soul’s fate.
Edwards interpreted this tragic event as the work of Satan, enraged by the spiritual awakening in the town, which had surpassed in breadth and intensity any Edwards had known. Edwards’s account of the Northampton experience, A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God, was published in London in 1737 and quickly gained him an international reputation, influencing the English evangelicals John and Charles Wesley, George Whitefield, and others. Whitefield was rapidly becoming a phenomenon as an itinerant outdoor preacher and revivalist on both sides of the Atlantic, addressing enormous crowds and prompting mass awakenings at those gatherings. During Whitefield’s second tour of the American colonies in 1740, Edwards invited him to preach at Northampton in the hope that his affective rhetoric, a powerful new vehicle of God’s grace, would rekindle the spiritual commitment of the town’s congregation, which had waned since Hawley’s death. Whitefield’s stirring Northampton sermons elicited continuous weeping from the audience, and deeply impressed Edwards.
Whitefield’s influence on the revivals that swept the eastern seaboard during the 1740s was transformative. The young Methodist revolutionized evangelical religion by establishing the itinerant preacher, rather than the church pastor ministering to his own congregation, as the main vehicle of religious proselytizing, and he helped situate the regional colonial revivals within the larger context of the emerging transatlantic evangelical movement. Edwards believed the awakenings sparked by revivals were pivotal events in human and sacred history in which God carried out His plan of redemption by regenerating the hearts of the converted through the gift of grace. He viewed the revivals spreading through the American colonies and abroad as harbingers of the millennium, heralding the conversion of the world to Christianity, the defeat of Satan and the papacy, and the arrival of the thousand years of godly harmony that precedes Christ’s Second Coming.
It is within this eschatological framework, rooted in contemporary Reformist interpretations of scripture, that Edwards understood the importance of revivalism as a means of converting souls and furthering God’s cosmic purpose for humanity. Whitefield’s remarkable success in sparking awakenings and his dramatic oratorical style impelled Edwards to rethink his own revival rhetoric and method of delivery. Reserved in manner and soft-spoken, Edwards began experimenting with the more extemporaneous style that he would use in Sinners, keenly aware that fear was a prime motivator of religious conversion.
Source: Gura, Philip F., editor. “Chronology.” Jonathan Edwards: Writings from the Great Awakening, Library of America, 2013, pp. 699-719.
Historical Context
Edwards preached what is widely considered America’s greatest sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, in Enfield, Connecticut on July 8, 1741, during a revival tour with several other ministers. Enfield’s inhabitants had a reputation for being vain and complacent, and the town’s congregation had been little touched by the religious enthusiasm sweeping the region since Whitefield’s tour several months earlier, a fact that may help explain the sermon’s remarkable reception there. Edwards had delivered Sinners the previous month in Northampton, apparently without notable effect among an audience used to its admonitory message and minister. The audience at Enfield, however, was so moved by the terrifying and graphic imagery and the rhetorical power of the language, conveyed with Edwards’s solemn intensity, that an outburst of weeping and distress interrupted the sermon, forcing Edwards to stop. After chastising the congregants for the disruption, Edwards descended from the pulpit with his fellow ministers and conversed with the audience, several of whom were converted on the spot. Edwards apparently never completed delivering the sermon, which was published in Boston shortly thereafter.
The astonishing “spiritual discoveries” and mass conversions prompted by the New England revivals (and epitomized by the reception of Sinners at Enfield), prompted controversy and pushback from more conservatively minded clerics. The fervid emotionality aroused by “New Light” revivalists like Whitefield, Edwards, James Davenport, Gilbert Tennent, and others troubled the “Old Lights” within the New England ministry who felt that reason, prudence, and moderation, rather than overzealousness and extraordinary visions, were a truer sign of genuine Christian faith and more reflective of Christian social conventions. The conflict was exacerbated when Davenport, one of the most radical of the young preachers, accused the rectors of Harvard and Yale of being unconverted and thus incapable of fulfilling their pastoral duties. Davenport’s charge provoked explicit denunciations of the revivalist movement, most notably from Charles Chauncy, pastor of Boston’s First Church, and a law was passed in Connecticut against unauthorized itinerant preaching.
Though Edwards realized some of the conversions were counterfeit, the malicious work of Satan to sabotage God’s work of redemption, he came to the defense of the revivalist cause, publishing several polemical justifications between 1741-1746. In these works, most notably Distinguishing Marks of the Work of the Spirit of God and Religious Affections, Edwards attempted to distinguish the genuine signs of religious conversion from mere “enthusiasm,” arguing that love of God and saintly behavior, rather than visionary experiences or eccentricity, demonstrated the actual presence of grace. Though the New England phase of the Great Awakening had largely tapered off by 1743, Edwards devoted substantial energy over the next several years to this debate, a controversy that irreparably divided New England religious culture between those emphasizing the importance of the heart as opposed to the mind in the sinner’s sanctification.
Tension between Edwards and his own congregation began to mount in the late 1740s, ultimately leading to his dismissal as Northampton’s pastor in 1750. The primary cause of the dispute was Edwards’s decision to revoke his grandfather’s unusually liberal policy of granting church membership to those who made a profession of faith without requiring an account of their spiritual conversion. Edwards, who had always emphasized the experiential and emotive aspects of conversion above the rational acceptance of Christian doctrine, reinstituted the old Puritan requirement by which applicants needed to provide a public testimonial of their personal regeneration in order to be admitted to the sacrament of communion. Edwards also abolished the “Half-Way Covenant,” which had enabled children of non-communicants to be baptized if their grandparents were church members. These measures, coupled with his insensitive handling of a scandal involving several of the congregation’s young men, angered the town’s older residents, who preferred the more genial style of the beloved Stoddard. The bitter dispute resulted in Edwards’s congregation dismissing him from the pulpit by an overwhelming vote.
Source: Gura, Philip F., editor. “Chronology.” Jonathan Edwards: Writings from the Great Awakening, Library of America, 2013, pp. 699-719.
Authorial Context
Jonathan Edwards’s career, thought, and legacy are marked by sharp contrasts. The stern, hellfire preacher of Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God was also a sensitive admirer of nature’s beauty who saw the delightful harmonies and fluctuations of the natural world as symbols of God’s excellence and evidence of His benevolent presence sustaining creation. A strict Calvinist in the mode of his Puritan forefathers, Edwards was both a product and a tireless critic of the Enlightenment. He adapted the new sensationalist philosophy of John Locke to defend Reformed Protestant doctrine against the devaluation of God’s absolute sovereignty and agency made by Deism and other progressive trends within Christianity during the Enlightenment. After Edwards had established himself as one of New England’s preeminent divines during the Connecticut Valley revivals, his career and public reputation suffered a stinging setback when his Northampton congregation, alienated by the increasingly stringent requirements he placed on church membership, turned him out of his pulpit in 1750. The inspirer of Northampton’s awakening of the mid-1730s and a key motivating force behind the New England revivals of the 1740s came by the end of that decade to suffer the humiliating rebuke of the town’s parishioners and leading citizens, who preferred to remain without an official pastor indefinitely rather than subject themselves to Edwards’s civil and religious authority.
The complexity of Edwards’s character is similarly reflected in his attitudes toward slavery and the native New England inhabitants. Like many colonial households of similar social status, Edwards retained one or two domestic slaves, yet he rejected the racial basis of African American slavery as unsupported by scripture. Likewise, he felt affection towards several Mahicans and believed that, once Europeanized and Christianized, native Americans would make a noteworthy contribution to philosophy and literature. Disposed to find evidence of God’s presence throughout human history and the diversity of cultures, Edwards recognized distorted and debased elements of Judeo-Christian religion in the beliefs and practices of pagan societies. At the same time, he shared the prevailing opinion among colonials that the indigenous raids on the British settlements were the work of Satan seeking to destroy the providential mission of the Protestant settlers who had emigrated to the American colonies.
The final years of his life offer dramatic contrasts as well. After leaving Northampton in 1751, Edwards served as missionary to the Mahican Indian settlement in the colonial outpost of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, a focal point of recurring hostilities between the British settlers, the surrounding indigenous population, and their Catholic French allies. Amid the instability and violence of frontier life and the press of his professional duties, Edwards composed the important theological treatises that established his reputation as a seminal Protestant thinker, no doubt with an eye toward vindicating the doctrinal convictions that had led to his disagreement with his Northampton congregation.
Source: Gura, Philip F., editor. “Chronology.” Jonathan Edwards: Writings from the Great Awakening, Library of America, 2013, pp. 699-719.
