Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God Published - July 8, 1741

Jonathan Edwards' sermon 'Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God' was published on this day in 1741.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to this day. In history class, it's July eight.
Jonathan Edwards published as most famous sermon, which was centers
in the Hands of an Angry God on this Day
in seventeen forty one. This played out during the First
Great Awakening that happened from the seventeen thirties to seventeen forties,
and it was a response to the Enlightenment. In the
Age of Reason, culture in the American colonies had been

(00:25):
shifting more towards secularism, and while there were a lot
of religious denominations in the colonies, church attendants was dropping.
People were more focused on rational thought and taking a
more distanced view of religion. This really set the stage though,
for the Great Awakening, which it's hallmarks were traveling preachers
and ministers whose work was really rooted in Calvinism. A

(00:48):
lot of the common themes were the need for all
people to seek salvation immediately and urgently, and the total
sovereignty of God, and the need for a very personal
relationship with Christianity. So these concepts might bring to mind
traveling ministers whose whole experiences maybe having been raised in
a very religious household and having had a lot of

(01:08):
personal intense study in the Bible and in religion, but
not necessarily in a formal way. And while Jonathan Edwards
did have a family that was deeply religious, he also
was educated at Yale. He graduated from there in seventeen
twenty and then continued to study divinity in the area
and went on to earn a master's degree. He also

(01:29):
served with multiple congregations, and he taught Mohican children at
a mission school. As for this sermon of his, he
was the pastor of the Church of Christ in Northampton,
Massachusetts when he delivered it, and he delivered it there
in Northampton before the publication date that we normally site
with this particular sermon. It starts out with this verse

(01:50):
from the Book of Deuteronomy. Their foot shall slide in
due time. This is describing the Israelites and sort of
the idea that they are ultimately going to slide into sin.
It's just inevitably going to happen. Here's a quote from it. Quote.
There is no want of power in God to cast
wicked men into hell at any moment. Men's hands can't

(02:12):
be strong enough. When God rises up, the strongest have
no power to resist him, nor can any deliver out
of his hands. From there, he goes on to say
that these wicked Israelites who were referred to in that
Deuteronomy verse, they deserve to be cast into hell. They
are already sentenced to being cast into hell. There's a
lot of anger and wrath and torment and the devil

(02:33):
being ready to seize these sinners. All of this language
makes people think of Jonathan Edwards as his fiery, passionate
preacher just terrifying his congregation with the idea of eternal
damnation as this ever looming, ever present threat. But a
lot of his preaching was really calm and subdued. Even
this sermon, with its very fiery language, was apparently delivered

(02:57):
with this very uh passionate, detached, calm demeanor. That's not
only though his most famous sermon, that's one of the
most famous of the entire Great Awakening. So even though
this wind up being so famous, Jonathan Edwards actually wound
up rubbing his Northampton congregation the wrong way. He was

(03:18):
dismissed and preached a farewell sermon there on July first
of seventeen fifty. He did go on to do a
lot of other work with other congregations, and from a
religious and a spiritual standpoint, he was hugely influential. In general,
today's evangelical religions in the United States have a lot
in common with what was going on with the Great Awakening.
Is similar focus on the need for salvation and the

(03:41):
need for a personal experience and a need for a
personal relationship with God and with Christianity. He also wrote
tons and tons of other sermons. Even though this is
the most famous one, there are huge volumes of his
work and almost all of it still exists, with the
Bina Key Rare Book in Manuscript Library at Yale having
almost of his complete works in his collection. In addition

(04:01):
to all of that, like others of his time, he
both condemned the cruelty of the slave trade and also
enslaved people himself, and at the very end of his
life he was the president of Princeton for a brief
time before dying of smallpox. That might actually have been
contracted from a deliberate exposure method that was used to
try to get people immune to smallpox before the actual

(04:23):
existence of vaccines. Thanks to Eve's Jeff Cote for her
research work on today's episode, a Tatari Harrison for her
editing work on all these episodes. You can subscribe to
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and wherever else you get your podcasts. Tune in tomorrow
for a revolution