ABSTRACT
Jonathan Edwards’s sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” is frequently anthologized in high school and college American literature texts as a masterful example of colonial revivalist oratory. An unfortunate effect of this anthologizing is that Edwards is known to most people only as the author of “Sinners.” The context and full content of the sermon are usually lost, leaving only the title and its menacing implications to haunt the imaginations of those who encountered it once upon a time. While theologians and scholars have long appreciated the richness and complexity of Edwards’s thought, the popular image of colonial North America’s most original and sophisticated theologian has been reduced to the caricature of a hellfire-and-brimstone, tent-revival preacher.
