"Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," preached by Jonathan Edwards in Enfield, Connecticut in 1741, is perhaps the most well-known sermon of the Great Awakening, 1738 to 1742, a period during which Puritan leaders were trying to re-light religious enthusiasm among their congregations. The sermon, subtitled "Mr. Edwards's Sermon on the Danger of the Unconverted," is a masterpiece of rhetorical skill in service to Edwards's Puritan belief system, in this case, centered on the dangers of damnation his congregation was exposed to every minute of their lives. An often repeated story about this sermon is that several listeners fainted during Edwards's exhortation.
The sermon's central theme—that an angry God is about to send each person to Hell but is withholding that terrible event—begins with the mildest image in the sermon, one that sets the stage for each person's imminent danger from God's wrath:
The Expression that I have chosen for my Text, Their Foot shall slide in due Time; seems to imply the following Things, relating to the Punishment and Destruction that these wicked Israelites were exposed to.
A mild image, to be sure, but Edwards follows this by reminding his listeners that their slipping feet expose them to "sudden, unexpected" destruction, the first warning that they have no control over when they will fall into Hell. One of the main tenets of the Puritan belief system is that all mankind is already damned at birth (Original Sin—Adam and Eve's failure to obey God) and that only by God's grace are they kept out of Hell. And God, as the sermon's title states, is not the loving New Testament God but an angry, even hostile, God who is as ready to punish as he is to save.
As Edwards escalates the imagery, he increases the tension between his congregation's presumed concept of their safety and their real and unsuspected danger:
Unconverted Men walk over the Pit of Hell on a rotten Covering, and there are innumerable Places in this Covering so weak that they won’t bear their Weight, and these Places are not seen.
Edwards carefully and methodically presents images of increasing violence, all leading to damnation, in an attempt to convince his listeners that an invisible world exists all around them whose main purpose is to cast them into Hell at any moment.
Should any of Edwards's listeners believe he or she is immune to God's wrath, Edward dispels this notion in a frightening image:
The Bow of God’s Wrath is bent, and the Arrow made ready on the String, and Justice bends the Arrow at your Heart, and strains the Bow, and it is nothing but the meer Pleasure of God, and that of an angry God, without any Promise or Obligation at all, that keeps the Arrow one Moment from being made drunk with your Blood.
This is perhaps the most threatening and violent image in the sermon, an image calculated to reinforce Edwards's central argument that each of his listeners is in the hands of an angry and even capricious God, who is not obligated to either save a sinner or strike a sinner down in a gruesome way—"drunk with your blood."
Edwards's use of increasingly violent images reinforces his congregation's belief that they are subject to a wrathful God who might, depending solely upon his whim, cast them into Hell or save them. The security some may have felt in their righteousness is shattered by God's metaphorical arrow.
In "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," Edwards builds to his central theme by breaking his sermon into three main sections.
The first section lays the groundwork by quoting from Deuteronomy, an Old Testament verse that emphasizes God's attitude towards sin. This verse prepares the congregation by giving them something that they are familiar with as the introduction.
Edwards's second section builds on this groundwork by introducing different points that all have the same underlying message: God is the final judge, and He hates sin.
This all leads to the last section of the sermon, where Edwards's central idea is fully fleshed out as he makes the sermon personal for his parishioners. He reminds them that they are sinners, and unless they change their ways, they too are going to Hell.
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