Sinners Angry God

“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” Analysis

When today’s Christians and Catholics normally think about religion and God, they imagine a source of happiness provided by the forgiving man in white up in the sky. However, that’s the complete opposite of what the Puritans were taught to believe in the 1700s by the preachings of Jonathan Edwards. Precisely, his six-hour long sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” which already sounds somber enough, resulted in much of the audience becoming stressed and terrified of the concept of God. Edwards’s use of imagery, logical reasoning, and emotional appeal certainly had an impact on his listeners.. It was just a bit over the extreme. Imagery is the description used in literature to create mental images for the reader to visualize and get a better understanding of what they’re reading or listening to. Edwards uses quite

Edwards’s emotional appeal happened to be negative to his audience, who would cry, faint, and even run away from his preachings of the wrath of God. There may be some wonder if Edwards intended to get the reaction that he received, since preachers are usually perceived to be kind and lighthearted, and thinking in such a potent way would be out of character. However, he actually did hope that his frightening words would persuade the Puritans to reform, or else they would, apparently, be eternally damned as the useless beings that they are. Edwards threatens, “God will have no other use to put you to, but to suffer misery; you shall be continued in being to no other end; for you will be a vessel of wrath fitted to destruction; and there will be no other use of this vessel, but to be filled full of wrath...” (page 89). Surely this and other sections caused many of the Puritans to become cautious of how they lived their lives, discreet about what could await them in the