I’m currently working through Thomas Kidd’s recent work, The Great Awakening, and he broaches a question that I’ve often asked myself, but never really thought too deeply on.  That question is, “why do we remember Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God?”  Of all the revival sermons that were preached in the various revival episodes beginning in 1734 and lasting through about 1742, what makes Sinners so special?  Why do we not remember sermons from other revivalist preachers, especially those of The Grand Itinerant himself, George Whitefield?

This question becomes even more interesting when, as Kidd reminds us, there was really nothing that extraordinary about the content of the sermon.  “Awakening sermons” were quite common in the period, especially among Calvinist preachers.  These sermons were designed to “shake sinners out of their self-righteous delusions” (104), and would often include graphic descriptions of the plight of the unconverted and their everlasting torment in the fires of hell.  Certainly Sinners fulfilled that qualification to the utmost.  Another point that makes the lasting significance of this sermon quite curious is the fact that a good number of the other Awakening preachers employed lavish preaching styles that may have, at the very least, effected, and at the very most, manipulated, the response they received while preaching.  This was not so for Edwards, however, who was known for his somber deliveries.  A third and final consideration to be made, one that Kidd doesn’t bring up but still bears mentioning, is the fact that the preaching of this sermon that made it famous was not the first time it was preached.  We remember the episode at Enfield, Connecticut on July 8, 1741, but we do not remember that Edwards first preached this sermon to his own Northampton congregation in June of that year as the revival movements were beginning to gain steam.

With these considerations in mind, Kidd offers a two suggestions as to why this sermon has been remembered as the archetype for “awakening sermons” and the most representative work during the period of the Great Awakening.  The first is, of course, the response it received.  It should always be known that Enfield lay in close proximity to the town of Suffield, which, only days before the preaching of July 8, had undergone heightened senses of divine things to the point of there being, in the words of Stephen Williams, “considerable crying among ye people…& a Screaching in ye streets” (104).  Surely these emotional responses were known in Enfield and Enfield may have caught the awakening fever from its neighbor, especially considering that many who had fallen into fits in Suffield may have come over to hear the preaching at Enfield.

The second, and more likely, reason that this sermon is remembered is the grand style of the rhetoric that Edwards used.  Sinners is a masterpiece of imagery and style that is simply unmatched by other awakening sermons of the era.  Kidd says, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God was brilliant, vivid, and terrifying.  Edwards’s warnings of judgment made the congregation scream for fear of hell” (105).  And he did this, again, through the mere communication of words.  Not through performance or affected style, but simply through the power of his imagery.  George Marsden makes this very point in explaining, “Sinners is so remarkable because Edwards employed so many images and addressed them so immediately to his hearers that they were left with no escape” (Jonathan Edwards: A Life, 222).

It’s interesting, when you talk to the average person about Edwards, the person that only knows Edwards from high school English or Intro to Literature in college, that all they remember is the imagery of the sermon.  Much of this remembered imagery comes from the infamous “spider” passage in which Edwards proclaims, “The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect, over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked….”  Yet the imagery used in this passage is merely one of many metaphors that Edwards uses for the purpose of shaking his hearers out of their sin and into the marvelous light of faith in Christ.  That is why this sermon is so remembered and regarded as exemplar of the period.  The unending barrage of metaphors, the vivid, terrifying imagery, the seriousness of the subject, the carefully crafted and designed rhetoric—all these work together to produce a masterful work in which Edwards, at least on the surface of reaction, achieved the end in which he set out to get.

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george marsden, great awakening, sinners in the hands of an angry god