“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” 381obligatory and the path to hell is easily found. At
one point, Edwards likens humankind’s wickedness
to “lead” which drags one down “with great weight
and pressure towards hell.” Held over the “pit of
Hell,” a person has no refuge save for the grace of
God—“all that preserves them every moment is the
mere arbitrary will, and uncovenanted, unobliged
forbearance of an incensed God.” Edwards’s sermon
is often characterized as one of “fire and brimstone”
due to its vivid imagery and frequent appeals to fear
as a motivating tool. However, the sermon is also
a carefully constructed piece of rhetoric, moving
from theory to application and ending with a call
to action—“now awake and fly from the wrath to
come.”
Jeff Pettineo
Fate in “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry
God”
Fate figures prominently in Jonathan Edwards’s
sermon, for the passage on which the sermon is
constructed deals with the idea of fate implicitly—a
movement, or “sliding” toward hell. One of the main
tenets of Calvinism is the idea of “unconditional
election”: God chooses who will be saved based on
grace and mercy. God has “worked out,” in a sense,
the fates of individuals. If a person is predestined,
however, what is the merit of faith or grace or deeds?
The Calvinist response is that God is capable of
bringing all to him in time, and human deeds and
works are part of his deterministic plan.
With this context in mind, Edwards demon-
strates, primarily through an exposition and exten-
sion of the passage from Deuteronomy cited in the
introduction, how God’s grace and mercy are able
to suspend one above the “fiery pit of hell” toward
which the unregenerate man is always falling. The
fated nature of the unregenerate man is described as
always tending toward corruption, sin, or destruc-
tion, and Edwards uses a series of metaphors to
show how God is able to preserve one from falling
into such a state.
One of the inferences Edwards makes regard-
ing the verse from Deuteronomy is that “They are
already under a sentence of condemnation to hell.”
Edwards is referring to the “unregenerate” men of
his congregation, whom he likens to the “wicked
unbelieving Israelites.” He explains that although
the Israelites were “God’s visible people” and “lived
under the means of grace,” they decided, rather, to
remain “void of counsel.” Thus, the wicked, or unre-
generate, are already fated, or predestined, for hell,
to the extent that God’s mercy has no obligation to
save them. Edwards points to John 3:18 to support
his point—“He that believeth not is condemned
already”; therefore, every unconverted man is des-
tined for hell, or as Edwards puts it, “every uncon-
verted man properly belongs to hell; that is his place;
from thence he is... it is the place that justice, and
God’s word, and the sentence of his unchangeable
law, assign to him.” Thus, he uses the first section of
his sermon to provide warrants for the ideas of fate
and predestination, a theoretical groundwork that
he uses in turn to persuade the “unregenerate” of the
necessity for accepting God’s mercy.
When attempting to come to terms with the
ideas of fate, it is worth considering how Edwards
conceives of will, or human agency. In one line of
argument, he anticipates the counterclaims against
the ideas of fate, particularly entertaining the idea of
ignoring the doctrine. If one attempts to reject the
“knowledge” of hell, or basically the “idea” of hell, as
a way of escaping the “reality” of hell, the “solution”
is merely a delusion, and he hypothesizes that if one
were able to talk to a person who had been damned,
one might discover, according to Edwards, that the
damned would confess, “No, I never intended to
come here: I had laid out matters otherwise in my
mind.” Thus, despite human will or agency in intent,
the reality is that it is God’s will that determines
an individual’s fate, though the action of accepting
God’s grace is a necessary piece of the deterministic
puzzle. Edwards provides the metaphor of God’s
hand, constantly holding aloft the rebellious: “And
there is no other reason to be given, why you have
not dropped into hell since you arose this morning,
but that God’s hand has held you up. There is no
other reason to be given why you have not gone to
hell.. .”
In the last section of his sermon, Edwards
appeals to the “youth” of the congregation to con-
sider the consequences of neglect—“hardness of
heart.” That is, the unregenerate will be left to bear
the “fierceness and wrath of an infinite God.” How-