People remember Sinners In The Hands of An Angry God because it's a cool title, not like anything that we would preach today. I'm guessing that less than half the people who recognise it know that it was Jonathan Edwards, and less than half of those would pin it to some Great Awakening, without knowing there were three of four. A fair number might guess it was Puritan, New England, and 16-1700, because that's the stereotype for that group (not without reason).
Yet it is a touch odd that that's the one remembered. It wouldn't be what he was known for in his own day. It would be as if a century from now, all that anyone remembered that some group, maybe the Rolling Stones but probably the Beatles, sang Sympathy For The Devil at Woodstock, and decided that was the most informative example of rock music. Well, no; you missed the story.
Edwards was known as a vivid preacher, not a particularly condemnatory nor emotional one. He kept up with natural science and was knowledgeable about philosophy, he studied for hours daily. He preached quietly, but was known for fresh analogies and descriptions. Perhaps that is what made him powerful, for the territory of most of the sermon was fairly typical for the time. For all have sinned, and fall short of the glory of God. Basic Calvinism, heard not only Sundays but at weekday dinner tables and taverns. In this sermon, as with many of his others, Edwards stressed that this pull of this weight, dragging the sinner to Hell, was inexorable. You were going there unavoidably unless something were done about it. This is close to the reverse of what most Americans, including many Christians believe today. It is a foundational, almost unquestioned belief that while we may not be completely innocent, we are mostly so, only needing a bit of instruction and encouragement.
In his own day, Jonathan Edwards was known for his emphasis on grace, on the amazing love that God had shown - that for no reason other than his lovingkindness, God interfered with the inevitable torment we were sliding toward. In the imaging of a later writer, that we are not Jacob Marley, doomed to drag weights around in misery for eternity, but Ebeneezer Scrooge, miraculously given "time for amendment of life." Today we have a tendency to go back one step earlier and shift the blame off ourselves. How/why did God get us in this mess to begin with?
I read Edwards' sermon many years ago, and remember it had some other vivid lines, although I very fuzzy on the lines themselves. Perhaps something about being suspended above the Lake of Fire by a spider's thread. If Edwards exaggerated the peril of an unredeemed soul (I'm not saying that he did), it was no worse and with at least as good reason as, say, the climate-change alarmists of today. "Carbon oxidizers in the hands of an angry Gaia" is not far from what we were being told until just the other day, when the evangelist megaphone was taken by other hands. And no honest man will deny the narcotic power of sin, of our power of rationalization, of our ability to find a reference group in which our peccancy seems not so bad. .The problem with "fire and brimstone" sermons is the fact that serious sinners are not there to hear them, and they can cause neuroses in people who really have very few sins to repent. We have all fallen short of the glory of God, but some have certainly failen farther short than others.
ReplyDeleteGreat comparison
ReplyDeleteI invite people to read 'Cold Comfort Farm' by Stella Gibbons, in which the father of the farm household is the preacher at the local Church of the Quivering Brethren. Excerpt:
ReplyDelete“Ye know, doan’t ye, what it feels like when ye bum yer hand in takin’ a cake out of the oven or wi’ a match when ye’re lightin’ one of they godless cigarettes? Ay. It stings wi’ a fearful pain, doan’t it ? And ye run away to clap a bit o’ butter on it to take the pain away. Ah, but” (an impressive pause) “there’ll be no butter in hell!"