Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God

Today marks the 267th anniversary of the sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” preached by Jonathan Edwards at the Congregationalist church in Enfield, Connecticut. As is my custom, I took a few moments today and re-read that great Puritan tract on the nature of damnation and salvation. It is a practice I recommend. I want to offer a few meditations on the experience.

Edwards preaches Hell: flat-footed, two-fisted eternal damnation with no apologies and no escape hatches. Modern preachers (and I sadly include myself) can find triage for their own anemic offerings by the mere exposure to the red-blooded and rock-ribbed boldness of this by-gone pulpiteer. Yet his language is remarkably restrained - no Stephen King gore, no sadistic glee in extra-Scriptural descriptions of specific forms of torment. He portrays damnation as the logical downside of the glory of God instead of the twisted torture chamber of an arbitrary and immature potentate. God’s greatness is a gun that kicks as hard as it shoots and Edwards’ words leave one feeling that Hell is simply the price to be paid for a God worth worshiping.

Edwards also sees Hell as equal parts external and internal: God casts us into it but also permits it to come out of us. “Sin is the ruin and misery of the soul. It is destructive in its nature, and if God should leave it without restraint, nothing else would be needed to make the soul perfectly miserable. . . .As the heart is now a cesspool of sin, so if sin were not restrained, it would immediately turn the soul into a fiery oven, or a furnace of fire and brimstone.” We find this same idea in C. S. Lewis and Charles Williams, though I think Lewis at least owed it more to the Victorian universalist George MacDonald than to an American clergyman. (Where Williams got his ideas God alone knows; his was truly an original mind and since he didn’t take drugs I think he must’ve been crazy with a happy madness.) In Lewis’ novel That Hideous Strength, one character, contemplating his own joy at the wickedness of an enemy, likens his heart to the bad guys’ hellish headquarters when he wonders, “Is there a whole Belbury inside you too?” Edwards’ sermon uncomfortably awakens one to the need to look within and see what seeds of Hell the enemy has planted - and that I tenderly nourish.

I believe a dream I had last night - or rather early this morning - predisposed me to be particularly receptive to Edwards’ sermon today. I won’t go into the details - they had the usual blurry incoherence of dreams. I won’t claim that God sent it to me - that kind of claim surely belongs to someone else and I have no Joseph or Daniel to parse the mass into an instructive parable. I will only say that, in this dream, I had fallen among low companions, lured by the blandishments of a decadent lifestyle until I had finally sunk to that place where I no longer enjoyed its rewards but was too weak to cast them aside, and where even my companions in evil had grown disgusted by the flabby thing I had become. I remember at one point sitting at a table in some sort of dive, surrounded by loud and wicked people, impaired by whatever I had been eating and drinking. I resolved to leave, to give it up once and for all and made to rise, only to realize I was completely naked. The interesting thing is that I hesitated, by rising, to face the derision of those people whose company I could no longer abide.

Perhaps that dream helped me resonate to Edwards’ vertiginous descriptions of the plunge to damnation: The unconverted “walk over the pit of hell on a rotten covering,” and “if God should withdraw His hand,” all or efforts to remain aloft “would avail no more to keep you from falling than the thin air can hold up a person who is suspended in it.” Why, all our efforts to cling to life “have no more influence to uphold you and keep you out of hell than a spider’s web has to stop a falling rock.” If I have not entered the world of my dream, if I have not sunk like slime in a pit to the nadir of human existence - only to find, horribly, that I can go lower still - it is because the grace of God has sustained me. And if, with eternal Hell yawning below, I do not plunge into the pit, it is only because “underneath are the everlasting arms.”

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