Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God

A fundamental theme in Sinners is the stark contrast between God’s awesome power and human weakness. This contrast underlies Edwards’s doctrine that it is only the arbitrary pleasure of God, His momentary forbearance, that prevents the unconverted sinner from being immediately cast into hell. Edwards focuses on the unimaginable severity of God’s righteous wrath, which he likens to sublime terrors of the natural world—dark thunderclouds, rising floodwaters, the fury of whirlwinds and raging fire—as the fearsome expression of divine omnipotence, rather than on the benevolence of the Creator or the myriad beauties of the creation.

Underlying Edwards’s depiction of God’s terrible wrath are the imprecatory verses of the Old Testament prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel, as well as the Revelation of St. John, which Edwards cites (among other biblical passages) as evidence that the day of God’s destructive might is at hand. Edwards’s God in Sinners is the vengeful, wrathful, and jealous God figured forth in certain books of the Hebrew Bible, a God who covenants with His chosen people through the Mosaic Law and punishes the Israelites for their lawless wickedness. New England’s Puritan communities similarly saw themselves as a covenanted people, bound in a special relationship to God based on the merciful intercession of Jesus Christ, whose sacrificial act of atonement for man’s sin redeemed the faithful and established the “covenant of grace.”

Edwards addresses Sinners directly to those living outside the covenant of grace—

those who have not been reborn in Christ through the Holy Spirit and thus remain unconverted or unregenerate descendants of Adam, the original man. In Edwards’s Calvinist theology, God is under no obligation to those outside the new covenant, and “natural man,” as Edwards terms him, is at every moment condemned to death for wickedness and preserved from his miserable fate at each instant only by the arbitrary pleasure of God. God’s sovereignty is thus even more awesome and terrifying for the unconverted, since they are utterly powerless to alter or influence their predetermined destiny and are constantly exposed to the threat of death and immediate, eternal damnation in the fiery torments of hell. God is righteously disposed against them, and only by accepting Christ as Mediator in an act of heartfelt contrition prompted by grace can they enter a relationship of mutual obligation with their Creator offering the comforting promise of salvation and eternal life in heaven.

Edwards uses tropes of the sublime to convey both God’s omnipotence and the horrors of punishment for sin. Infinity, eternity, and unimaginable extensions in time and space characterize God’s might as well as the sinner’s torment in hell. By means of relentlessly accumulating images of God’s angry wrath and the beckoning fires of hell, Edwards evokes terror, awe, and amazement, the emotions associated with the sublime, in the credulous listener. Similarly, Edwards’s rhetoric employs multiple means of intensification to overwhelm the sinner’s imagination with the fury and might of God directed against him. Arguing that God’s sovereign power is infinitely greater than the most powerful human rulers and potentates, Edwards emphasizes that the magnitude of His anger, already great, is constantly increasing against the unregenerate sinner, like mounting floodwaters struggling against restraint. God is more incensed with many now living, Edwards avers, than with those already suffering eternal torment in hell.

While the power of God is represented in images of overwhelming, terrifying forces, merciless cruelty, and sublime, mystifying dimensions, the weakness of human beings is figured by images of sliding and falling, metaphorical blindness, and insect-like animals such as the worm, grasshopper, and spider. The Fall, the consequence of Adam and Eve’s disobedience in Eden, resulted in the corruption of mankind’s spiritual, corporeal, and mental faculties through the transmission of original sin. Fallen, or “natural,” man, is thus subject to disease, death, the temptations of Satan, infirmity of the will, clouded reason, and confused and unruly passions. Edwards argues that unless reborn in Christ, unregenerate man is incapable of recognizing his true spiritual condition and making a genuine, satisfactory repentance that enables reconciliation with God. In the purity of God’s vision, Edwards insists, the most powerful kings on earth are like repulsive grasshoppers, whose love and hate are equally contemptible. The sinner in God’s sight is an abominable and worthless insect to be crushed in His due time, a worm to be trod upon, or a spider hung from a thread over the fiery pit of hell.

Edwards exploits the emotional corollary of human weakness, his auditors’ fear, by insistently threatening them with graphic visions of the hellfire and fury that awaits them and lurid, almost grotesque images of their pitiable state. Fear, Edwards came to realize during the Connecticut Valley revivals of the 1730s, is the most powerful motivation toward conversion. Sinners exemplifies the awakening sermon’s controlled manipulation of effects to evoke fear of the unimaginable miseries of damnation.

Human beings’ inherent sinfulness, the moral corruption resulting from original sin, renders them loathsome to God, Edwards argues: “[Y]ou are ten thousand times so abominable in His eyes as the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours” (634), he impugns his audience, and the magnitude of the sinner’s offense against God is infinitely greater than that of a rebel’s sedition against his king. The covenant of grace, by which Christ’s sacrifice on the cross atones for Adam and Eve’s sin and offers redemption to their descendants, only applies to those who, moved by the freely given gift of grace, accept Christ as redeemer and are reborn in Him. Edwards constantly reiterates that the unconverted are fully deserving of their damnation and have already earned it: “every unconverted man properly belongs to hell; that is his place; from thence he is” (627). Edwards personifies divine justice as crying out for vengeance against the wicked while God arbitrarily stays His hand of execution, while the earth itself recoils from the sinful burden of those walking upon it. Just as the wicked willfully resist Christ and the gift of grace, the entire creation unwillingly suffers the presence of sinners continuing to live and sin within it. Unchecked by a contrite heart reborn in the Spirit, the weight of sin constantly increases and drags the unconverted sinner spiritually and physically closer to hell.

Edwards alludes to Newtonian mechanics and the universal law of gravity in his description of the moral effects of sin. The righteousness of God’s wrath is demonstrated by the abominable nature of sin, which Edwards represents as the theological equivalent of gravity working on material bodies. Sin draws the sinner toward hell as naturally and irresistibly as a rock falling to the ground; it is an offense to the divine principle that judiciously ordered creation, and its very existence is a derangement of that creation. Edwards firmly subscribes to the Protestant doctrine that it is only by faith alone that human beings are justified, that is, made worthy to receive the gift of grace; good works and behavior do not merit redemption. Mankind is incapable, therefore, of doing anything to secure salvation, other than accepting Christ through an infusion of grace. God’s wrath against the sinner is thus perfectly justified, since the wages of Adam’s sin are death, and the atonement of Christ for our original parents’ disobedience is limited only to those predestined for salvation.