382 Edwards, Jonathan
ever, if a member of the church decides to accept
Christ, he or she will be “born again,” as Edwards
implores the unconverted to “awake and fly from the
wrath to come.”
With almost abusive use of “fire-and-brimstone”
imagery and the constant reminders of humankind’s
depravity, Edwards’s sermon provides insights into
how oratory and rhetoric were used to elaborate
theological concepts such as fate and will. Although
the Calvinist ideas of predestination, or “uncon-
ditional election,” were not without its inherent
logical entanglements and ideological challeng-
ers, Edwards’s sermon demonstrates an attempt to
explain, in highly figurative language, a complex
theological principle, revealing his skill as an orator,
theologian, preacher, and rhetorician.
Jeff Pettineo
Justice in “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry
God”
One point Jonathan Edwards stresses in his sermon
is that God’s grace keeps the “unregenerate” man out
of hell. Edwards tries to show that this grace is not
obligatory but part of “God’s mere pleasure”—God’s
“sovereign pleasure, his arbitrary will, restrained by
no obligation, hindered by no manner of difficulty.”
This “attitude” is what Edwards connects to God’s
sense of justice.
At the time Edwards gave his sermon, the North
American colonies were experiencing a religious
revival, and the “unregenerate man” he speaks of
is the man who had not yet accepted the necessity
of the grace of God as a means of salvation. Thus,
Edwards’s extensive use of “fire-and-brimstone”
imagery is intended to “awaken” the unregenerate to
this phenomenon of grace, largely through an appeal
to fear but also by attempting to demonstrate that
spirituality is a duty, and God’s justice is in no
way obligatory but, rather, merited. Relying on the
books of Ezekiel and Proverbs, Edwards seeks to
show that pity, grace, punishment are commensurate
with spiritual awakening:
Consider this, you that are here present, that
yet remain in an unregenerate state. That
God will execute the fierceness of his anger,
implies, that he will inflict wrath withoutany pity. When God beholds the ineffable
extremity of your case, and sees your tor-
ment to be so vastly disproportioned to your
strength, and sees how your poor soul is
crushed, and sinks down, as it were, into an
infinite gloom; he will have no compassion
upon you...Although Edwards characterizes God as wrath-
ful, it is a wrath borne out of a sense of right and
wrong, and the faithful adherent must understand
God’s sense of justice in order to avoid falling into
the “fiery pit” of hell. One passage to keep in mind
when studying Edwards or Calvinism is Romans
9:14–16, which discusses justice in terms of God’s
mercy: “What shall we say then? Is there injustice
with God? God forbid! For he saith to Moses: I will
have mercy on whom I will have mercy. And I will
show mercy to whom I will show mercy. So then it
is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth,
but of God that showeth mercy.”
Edwards describes human depravity in terms
of the sliding metaphor from Deuteronomy 32:35.
From this metaphor, Edwards makes several infer-
ences about the innate depravity of humankind.
One of these conclusions is that humankind is
always near destruction, always “exposed” to slip-
pery ground; another inference is that humans are
capable of falling “of themselves,” meaning human
will is capable of error of its own accord, not needing
another’s influence to fail. Edwards’s main conclu-
sion based on this initial series of observations is
that “the mere pleasure of God” is the only thing
that keeps humankind out of hell—the “irresistible
grace” of God. Since God’s grace is a facet of his
will, Edwards proceeds to show that God indeed has
the power and authority to punish the wicked, and
God is not bound in any way to display his wrath.
Among other ideas, Edwards points out that “divine
justice” necessitates the punishment of sin, and that
lack of faith is already a condition for condemnation.
Edwards relies on John 3:18 to support his claim
about faith—“He that believeth not is condemned
already”—and asserts that “the immutable rule of
righteousness” strikes out against the wicked.
Edwards makes it clear that even human will
and agency cannot “protect” one from hell, for “God