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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.
Symbols & Motifs
Spiritual Blindness
Edwards repeatedly uses images of sightlessness to emphasize the incapacity (or refusal) of fallen man to recognize the danger of his true condition outside of Christ. Edwards’s task, and the aim of all awakening sermons, is to awaken the sinner from the moral blindness of complacency, egotism, and misguided self-assurance in order to move the unconverted to seek rebirth in Christ, the only means of salvation. To that end, Edwards creates a panoramic display of the vulnerability of the sinner to jar and terrify him into a state of psychological and emotional receptivity to God’s healing grace.
The motif of literal and figurative sightlessness appears in the second implication of Edwards’s Deuteronomic verse: “As he that walks in slippery places is every moment liable to fall, he cannot foresee whether he shall stand or fall the next” (625). The simile of walking on slippery ground signifies unforeseen danger; vulnerability to sudden destruction is the birthright of fallen man existing outside God’s protective grace. Edwards notes in the seventh proof of the doctrine that death by natural causes lurks everywhere: “The unseen, unthought-of ways and means of persons going suddenly out of the world are innumerable and inconceivable. […] The arrows of death fly unseen at noonday; the sharpest sight can’t discern them” (629). Original sin has corrupted human nature, impairing physical as well as spiritual sight; human vanity generates delusions of self-sufficiency that blind us to the existential immediacy of our mortality and offensiveness to God and creates rationalizations for our resistance to Christ and the dispensation of God’s grace. Edwards’s awakening sermon combats that spiritual blindness and hard-heartedness by reimagining in vivid detail the terrifying predicament of the unconverted.
The trope of human sightlessness is countered by heavenly sight, as the angels and departed saints witness the spectacle of the sinner’s eternal torment in hell. Blind to the consequences of his wickedness and rejection of Christ until it is too late, the sinner’s infinite torment after death is exacerbated by becoming a theatrical example of God’s majestic wrath for heaven’s inhabitants:
You shall be tormented in the presence of the holy angels, and in the presence of the Lamb; and when you shall be in this state of suffering, the glorious inhabitants of heaven shall go forth and look on the awful spectacle, that they may see what the wrath and fierceness of the Almighty is (638).
Edwards argues that the danger of spiritual blindness and hard-heartedness is never greater than at a time of great awakening, which he believes constitutes a special dispensation of God’s mercy and historical work of redemption. Those who are not sanctified through conversion will be “blinded,” as scripture relates concerning the unbelieving Jews following Christ’s resurrection, yet will paradoxically and “eternally curse this day […] to see such a season of the outpouring of God’s spirit, and wish that you had died and gone to hell before you had seen it” (641). The opposition of vision and blindness forms a rich motif in Sinners, operating on complex levels of literal and figurative signification.
Suspension
Physical suspension is a recurring trope in the sermon conveying the helpless condition of the unconverted sinner before a wrathful God. Edwards’s images of suspension suggest several meanings with important psychological significance: dislocation and incapacitation, terrifying danger and vertigo, being the abject object of dominant, arbitrary power, and the prolongation of mental suffering. The motif of suspension functions within a dynamic system of figurative meanings in which being physically positioned “above” or “below” signifies the radical hierarchy of power relations in Edwards’s Calvinist view of nature, mankind, and God. At the same time, Edwards holds his audience in a prolonged state of psychological suspension, aiming increasingly to intensify their terror and guilt as he repeatedly depicts them in the condition of woeful vulnerability while withholding psychological relief.
In the first proof of the sermon’s doctrine, Edwards compares the relative power of God and humans by means of an analogy: “so it is easy for us to cut or singe a slender thread that any thing hangs by: thus easy is it for God, when he pleases, to cast His enemies down to Hell” (626). This image foreshadows the metaphor of the hanging spider that appears later in the Application, in which the relative position of the listener is inverted and likened to a loathsome insect suspended over the pit of hell by an angry, omnipotent God. Edwards evokes a sense of acrophobia in several related images of suspension in the Application. The fiery lake of Hell, he cautions his audience, is “extended abroad under you,” adding, “you have nothing to stand upon, nor anything to take hold of; there is nothing between you and hell but the air; ‘tis only the power and mere pleasure of God that holds you up” (631). The false illusions of safety to which the sinner clings are as insubstantial as air, while his sin is as materially real as rock. Edwards inverts the physical position of the sinner in other images of suspension, placing the wicked beneath the “black clouds of God’s wrath now hanging directly over your heads” and below the great flood waters piling up that are restrained from bursting upon the sinner only by God’s hand (632). The rapid alternation of the sinner’s physical placement, of being precipitously both above and below God’s means of sudden destruction and utterly helpless to forestall catastrophe, serves to evoke a vertiginous and disconcerting disorientation in Edwards’s auditor.
The Spider or Insect
The image of the spider, or insect, the most frequently discussed symbol in Sinners, is intimately related to the motif of suspension. The spider represents the loathsome creature subject to immediate and effortless destruction by the arbitrary will of its executioner. Early in the sermon, Edwards refers to the insect (or worm) to suggest mankind’s dominance over the lower orders of nature as an analogy for God’s absolute power over humankind. Inverting the initial terms of the comparison, Edwards then depicts fallen man as a helpless insect subject to the might of his divine creator. Compared with the omnipotence of God, “All the kings of the earth, before God, are as grasshoppers; they are nothing, and less than nothing: both their love and their hatred is to be despised” (635). A striking evocation of the spider image occurs in the Application, in the famous passage in which Edwards apostrophizes his audience: “O sinner! […] You hang by a slender thread, with the flames of divine wrath flashing about it, and ready every moment to singe it, and burn it asunder” (634). In this image, the plight of the sinner facing eternal damnation is compared to that of an insect hung over a flame, helpless to escape and utterly dependent on the arbitrary will of a superior being whose moral nature transcends his victim’s.
Similarly, Edwards likens the self-deceptive rationalizations of the unconverted to a flimsy cobweb, unable to stop a falling rock. The cobweb spun by the spider is as ineffective resisting the brute force of gravity as the hopeful plans and procrastinations of the wicked are in evading God’s imminent punishment. This cluster of images suggests the contemptible, hapless, and disgusting nature of fallen man before the purity, power, and excellence of God.
Gravity
The influence of Isaac Newton’s work, which Edwards studied at Yale, underlies the recurring images of gravitational force in Sinners. Images of sliding and falling, beginning with the sermon’s epigraph “Their foot shall slide in due time,” form a companion motif to the motif of suspension. The image of the falling rock shattering the cobweb of the sinner’s false illusions about his destiny is one example of this gravitational motif. The necessary consequences of sin are as inexorable as the natural laws of physics unless the sinner accepts the gift of God’s grace and is reborn in Christ. Edwards likens the theological condition of sin to Newton’s universal law of gravity; just as every physical object is drawn toward an object of greater mass, the sinful element in fallen man is necessarily drawn toward hell as its source and proper home.
In the fourth implication of his doctrine, Edwards states, “Then they shall be left to fall, as they are inclined by their own weight […] as he that stands on such slippery declining ground, on the edge of a pit, he can’t stand alone, when he is let go he immediately falls and is lost” (626). In the Application, the analogy of sin and gravity is even more explicit: “Your wickedness makes you as it were heavy as lead, and to tend downwards with great weight and pressure towards hell; and if God should let you go, you would immediately sink and swiftly descend and plunge into the bottomless gulf” (632). Edwards concludes the passage with the image of the rock falling through the spider’s web, using an empirical example of physical law to suggest the spiritual obduracy of sin. The combination of gravitational force and great pressure threatening utter destruction likewise underlies the image of God’s wrath as steadily mounting floodwaters that are held back temporarily by the will of God. Through such images and similes, Edwards alludes to the sensory, materialistic philosophy of Locke and Newtonian mechanics to explain and portray the theological dynamics of sin and the divine necessity of punishment for evil.
