Tuesday, December 9, 2014

how does edwards sermon reflect puritan religious belief?

For a correct statement of fact, Jonathan Edwards is
hardly Puritan, in fact it is perhaps the perfect antithesis of Puritan belief.
Puritans, as strict Calvinists, believed that God determined before the beginning of the
world who would be saved. Those who had received some indication that they were the
recipient of God's undeserved merit were known as the "elect," but it was determined
long ago. There was no free will involved.


Edwards was a
product of the first Great Awakening which rejected Puritan ideas. He once commented
that the people of New England needed


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not so much to have their heads stored as their
hearts touched. It is a reasonable thing to right persons away from
hell.



His sermons reject the
idea of predestination; rather he preached that all persons could be recipients of God's
salvation, and that justification came from faith in Christ. All persons in Edwards'
view could be saved; but all persons also could burn in hell if they did not repent. His
most famous sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God
illustrates this point:


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O sinner! Consider the fearful danger you are
in: it is a great furnace of wrath, a wide and bottomless pit, full of the fire of
wrath, that you are held over in the hand of that God, whose wrath is provoked and
incensed as much against you, as against many of the damned in hell. You hang by a
slender thread, with the flames of divine wrath flashing about it, and ready every
moment to singe it, and burn it asunder; and you have no interest in any Mediator, and
nothing to lay hold of to save yourself, nothing to keep off the flames of wrath,
nothing of your own, nothing that you ever have done, nothing that you can do, to induce
God to spare you one
moment.



It is interesting to
note that Edwards did not appeal to the emotions of his hearers as did his contemporary
George Whitefield; his sermons were read calmly and dispassionately; yet when he was
finished, several minutes were required to calm the congregation who often shrieked and
howled in terror of hell. One would never see such in a Puritan
service.

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