“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”: An annotation

Over at JSTOR Daily, Ed Simons offers an annotation of the famous 1741 sermon. A taste:

Often remembered as the prototypical “fire and brimstone” sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” reflects the complicated religious background of eighteenth-century America, influenced not just by Calvinism, but by Newtonian physics. As unpalatable as Edwards’s message might have been, his significance can’t be doubted, and from a rhetorical perspective his sermon is among the greatest American examples of the form. Independent of its theological content, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” is a harbinger of American Romanticism, a literary work that prefigured Poe and Hawthorne, Melville and Lovecraft, in its intimations of a terrifying and alien God.

The following scholars inform Simons’s interpretation: Maurice Betteridge, Edward H. Davidson, Jim Sleeper, Vincent Brummer, Thomas Steele, Eugene Delay, Thomas Schafer, James Hoopes, Brian Jackson, Edward Cady, Nathan Johnstone, Margaret Jacob, Matthew Kadane, Kathleen Verduin, Howard Wallace, C.A. Patrides, Stephan Kunitz, Amalie Kass, John Griffith, Francisco Guerra, John Bray, Vincent Tomas, Conrad Cherry, Kenneth Surin, Paul Lewis, James Tufts, Stephen Pyne, Perry Miller, Clarence Faust, Jean-Pierre Martin, Ron Loewinsohn, Jennifer Leader, Cynthia Radding, Gail Thain Parker, Scott Meyer, Cristobal Silva, David S. Wilson, T. Walter Herbert Jr., Peter King, Robert Oakes, James Simpson, Drew Daniel, Kate Tunstall, Theodore Dalrymple, Vivian Shalom, Paul Davies, Gehard Alexis, Robert Francis Harper, Stephen Law, Nicholas Everitt, Stephen Turley, Douglas Winiarski, Bruce Daniels, R.C. Gordon-McCutchan, Helen Smith, Frank Lambert, James Moorhead, Sacvan Berkovitch, Daniel Shea, and Edward Gallagher.

Read it all here.

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