Not many people realize how much they truly affect another person indirectly. Just the way someone perceives another can change their whole dynamic of life. This can be shown in the life of Jonathan Edwards, a renowned protestant amid the 18th century. Born in East Windsor, Edwards grew up in a well-educated church family. While attending Collegiate School (later Yale University), Edwards met a girl named Sarah Pierrepont, who he later married. Though already a part of the church, Edwards’ appreciation of Sarah and her faith may have very well led to his famous writings including “Images of Divine Things”. Between all of these famous writings, Edwards wrote a book specifically for his wife Sarah. Within this book, a passage titled “On Sarah …show more content…
This passage shows that not only did Sarah serve Edwards’ as his wife but also his backbone to his faith. With her unbreakable faith alone, gave Edwards a goal in which he wanted to reach in his own faith. Edwards’ love for his wife and his admiration of her faith can be easily seen throughout the passage. Edwards starts the passage by writing, “They say there is a young lady in [New Haven] who is beloved of that almighty Being, who made and rules the world,…”(704). Edwards doesn’t start the passage by showing Sarah’s faith, but instead shows God’s love for Sarah. He could have said “there is a young lady who has an impeccable faith in God”, however he chose not to go in that direction. By doing this, Edwards shows his admiration for Sarah’s relationship with God. The second part of the sentence, Edwards states, “…in some way or other invisible, comes to her and fills her mind with exceeding sweet delight, and …show more content…
Starting by describing her value of real world material, “…if you present all the world before her, with the richest of treasures, she disregards it and cares not for it…” (704). Edwards shows his wife’s lack of greed and selfishness within this sentence. Sarah is happy with nothing but her faith and her faith alone. In this time period, the more you had meant the more “popular” and “rich” you were. Being content with nothing would be a very difficult task to do in this world. Edwards then describes how she is capable of doing this, “She has a strange sweetness in her mind…uncommon purity in her affections; is most just and praiseworthy in all her actions;” (704). By calling the sweetness in Sarah’s mind “strange”, Edwards shows how unusual his wife’s faith truly is. His lack of experience with the kind of faith Sarah has in God, is also represented in Edwards use of the word “strange”. The words sweetness, purity, and praiseworthy, can show how Edwards feels about Sarah’s faith. He uplifts Sarah’s faith in a positive way because he desires the same experience. To be able to not care for the materialistic things of this world and have a personal relationship with the almighty
Sarah was a woman who had gone through many hardships in her life. She thought she was doing well, but believed that the devil still had it out to get her. She even believed that it was impossible to be saved at this point in time. No matter what she did, she was going to perish in Hell. It was then that she felt the spirit of the Lord come down and help her banish the devil. This is what drew her to the religious revivals because they validated her testimony of the help from God. Her testimony was as good as any man’s and would not be questioned. This is what drew many women to the religious revivals. Their public testimony of the grace of God was just as good as any man’s. In the eyes of the Lord, a testimony was a testimony. It did not matter the gender of the person testifying. This was different from the old ways of the church because women were seen as quasi-equal to men. Whereas in the old ways, women were always below
On July 8th 1741, Jonathan Edwards preached the sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” in Enfield, Connecticut. Edwards states to his listeners that God does not lack in power, and that people have yet not fallen to destruction because his mercy. God is so forgiving that he gives his people an opportunity to repent and change their ways before it was too late. Edwards urges that the possibility of damnation is immanent. Also that it urgently requires the considerations of the sinner before time runs out. He does not only preach about the ways that make God so omnipotent, but the ways that he is more superior to us. In his sermon, Edwards uses strong, powerful, and influential words to clearly point out his message that we must amend our ways or else destruction invincible. Edwards appeals to the spectators though the various usages of rhetorical devices. This includes diction, imagery, language/tone and syntax. Through the use of these rhetoric devices, Edwards‘s purpose is to remind the speculators that life is given by God and so they must live according to him. This include...
In the novel, Saving Grace, author Lee Smith follows the life of a young woman who was raised in poverty by an extremely religious father. In this story Grace Shepherd, the main character, starts out as a child, whose father is a preacher, and describes the numerous events, incidents, and even accidents that occur throughout her childhood and towards middle age, in addition, it tells the joyous moments that Grace experienced as well. Grace also had several different relationships with men that all eventually failed and some that never had a chance. First, there was a half brother that seduced her when she was just a child, then she married a much older man when she was only seventeen, whose “idea of the true nature of God came closer to my own image of Him as a great rock, eternal and unchanging” (Smith 165). However, she succumbs to an affair with a younger man that prompted a toxic relationship. What caused her to act so promiscuous and rebel against everything she had been taught growing up? The various men in Grace 's life all gave her something, for better or worse, and helped to make her the person she became at the end of the novel.
Anne Bradstreet and Jonathan Edwards were both Christians who had great faith in God and put Him first in their lives. They were both aware of God’s almighty power and that God had greater plans for mankind than what was visible on Earth. Their core way of thinking was similar but their personal understanding of God’s nature was strikingly different. Bradstreet saw a kind and compassionate God and Edwards saw a harsh and jealous God. However, both knew that eternal life awaited those who accepted God into their hearts.
Her choices of metaphors are simplistic explanations providing the backdrop for the emotional and spiritual connection we seek in following Christ. The symbolic comparisons of Mary Magdalene, her relationship to Jesus, mirrors some of Julian of Norwich’s personal spiritual journey of prayerful contemplation while seeking intimacy in her relationship to God.
Jonathan Edwards's sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" is moving and powerful. His effectiveness as an eighteenth century New England religious leader is rooted in his expansive knowledge of the Bible and human nature, as well as a genuine desire to "awaken" and save as many souls as possible. This sermon, delivered in 1741, exhibits Edwards's skillful use of these tools to persuade his congregation to join him in his Christian beliefs.
He was a man whose very words struck fear into the hearts of his listeners. Acknowledged as one of the most powerful religious speakers of the era, he spearheaded the Great Awakening. “This was a time when the intense fervor of the first Puritans had subsided somewhat” (Heyrmen 1) due to a resurgence of religious zeal (Stein 1) in colonists through faith rather than predestination. Jonathan Edwards however sought to arouse the religious intensity of the colonists (Edwards 1) through his preaching. But how and why was Edwards so successful? What influenced him? How did he use diction and symbolism to persuade his listener, and what was the reaction to his teachings? In order to understand these questions one must look at his life and works to understand how he was successful. In his most influential sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”, Jonathan Edwards’ persuasive language awakened the religious fervor that lay dormant in colonial Americans and made him the most famous puritan minister of the Great Awakening in North America.
Freneau describes that religion is supposed to be discovered through nature, it is not hidden or coded, but merely patiently waiting to be found. On the contrary, Edwards goes on for quite some time to reinforce the urgency of salvation. The certainty that God can take you out of this world at any moment and the severity of his punishments are repeated multiple times. Edwards continues to say that the only reason any being is alive at this moment is only because God is holding on to them. God is preventing all the breathing masses from slipping down the slope of death in which all will inevitably slip down because without Him, no mere human possesses the strength to stand on that slope. All the while, “natural men are held in the hand of God, over the pit of hell” ("Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” 213). In a nutshell, Edwards is trying to show that one must be saved by God now, and no later than now, because at any moment God can tear a life away and then it will be too late, the person will have already been sentenced to eternal Hell even before death because of the simple fact that God is angry with all who have not yet been
Starting in his younger years, Edwards struggled with accepting the Calvinist sovereignty of God. Various circumstances throughout Edward’s own personal life led to him later believing in the sovereignty of God. Jonathan Edwards is known greatly as a key figure in what has come to be called the First Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s. Fleeing from his grandfather’s original perspective by not continuing his practice of open communion, there was a struggle to maintain that relationship. Edward’s believed that physical objects are only collections of sensible ideas, which gives good reasoning for his strong religious belief system.
Winthrop, John. "A Model of Christian Charity." Franklin, Wayne, Phillip F. Gura and Arnold Krupat. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2007. 147-158.
Edwards reacted to the Enlightenment with distrust, and his writing suggests that he felt threaten by the new ideas of the Enlightenment because they were against the church. Edwards believed these thoughts caused the churches to lose their authority over its society and nonetheless those who followed the ideas felt powerless. Even so, there were others who felt empowered by the ideas of the Enlightenment and thought the ideas of the Church were too rigid to be employed in a person’s lifetime. Edwards went on to state in his narrative that “It reveals no new doctrine, it suggest no new proposition tot the mind, it reaches no new thing of God, or another world, not taught in the Bible, but only gives a due apprehension of those things that are taught in the word of God” (420). Edwards believe the bible had all the material one needed in life, in within the words God had set out a specific plan for all of his children to follow. Edwards to an extent rejected the idea that one should follow their personal intellect to make decisions in their life, as he desperate clutched on to the teaching established through the Puritan
Lane, C, Belden.. "JONATHAN EDWARDS ON BEAUTY, DESIRE, AND THE SENSORY WORLD." Theological Studies 1(2004):44. eLibrary. Web. 17 Jan. 2012.
Jonathan Edwards Is most known for his big role in shaping the first Great Awakening. However, he has also made many other accomplishments throughout his lifetime. He is a Yale College graduate and soon after became a preacher of the Christian religion, a philosopher, and a theologian. Some people even consider him to be “America’s most important and original philosophical theologian”. He gave a famous sermon that greatly affected the Roman Christian tradition. Edwards helped anybody and everyone he could. His Many followers became known as the New Light Calvinist Ministers over time. Edwards took great pride in helping others throughout his life. He contributed to many Christian conversions, and was a big part of The Great Awakening. With everything Edwards dedicated himself to throughout his life, he helped influence the Roman Catholic traditions.
Throughout the Bible God can be represented in a number of different ways. In some chapters of the Bible God can be found to be a compassionate, loving God, who would do anything for his people. To contradict this, in other chapters of the Bible God can be found trying to instill fear into people so that they believe in him, or do what he wants of them. In both instances it shows how different God can be seen and why believers can have doubts about how God really is.
God is presented as being all-powerful and all-knowing. He’s aware of all the shortcomings and misdeeds of humanity for every individual person. The existence of God and the afterlife are two questions that merely rely on the matter of faith and belief. Jonathan Edwards and Anne Bradstreet both have relatively similar religious beliefs; however, their individual view point on God could not be further aside from one another. Jonathan Edwards preaches a literal fear of an arbitrary, unpredictable and vengeful God (Baird). Anne Bradstreet, on the other hand, believed with human error in a loving, trustworthy God.(Baird) It is almost unimaginable that these two authors’ views are traced back to puritanism due to their vast differences.