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Sinners in the hands of an angry God is a lousy sermon

Sinners in the hands of an angry God is a lousy sermon

Last updated on: July 16, 2026 at 5:18 pm by Fred Clark

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Sinners in the hands of an angry God is a lousy sermon 2026-07-16T17:18:11-04:00 Fred Clark

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“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” is sometimes held up as the model of a “fire and brimstone” revival sermon. It’s not.

Jonathan Edwards offers plenty of fire and brimstone, yes, but he’s not calling for revival. The sermon doesn’t end with an altar call. His argument is that there would be no point in having an altar call because we’re all miserable, helpless sinners, wholly dependent on God’s grace, and we have no agency in the matter of our own salvation, repentance, or revival.

So even though it’s one of the most famous sermons in American history, “Sinners” makes for a lousy sermon. It’s certainly vivid, but it asks nothing of its listeners and offers nothing to its listeners, and that’s the actual intended point of it — there is nothing you can do and nothing for you to do (other than, I suppose, intellectually assent to this understanding of the mechanics of soteriology).

Edwards is making a theological argument about divine grace and human agency, arguing that salvation and forgiveness are entirely dependent on the former and that the latter plays no part at all. That’s standard Calvinist soteriology and I do not object to Edwards advocating for his theological stance using whatever extravagant rhetoric he chooses.

But that should be an essay, not a sermon.

Edwards tells his congregation that they are damnable wretches who are both desperately in need of God’s grace and utterly incapable of doing anything to earn it or to invite it. And that’s it.

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. …

Hell is gaping for you and your foot shall slide in time. There is nothing that you can do. Thanks for coming, have a great week, see you next Sunday.

That can’t be a revival sermon because it is, among other things, a sermon about the belief that there can be no such thing as a revival sermon. If heard this sermon from Edwards and took every word of it to heart you might be tempted to drop to your knees in tearful penitence, rending your garments, casting yourself upon the mercy of God and praying for forgiveness with every fiber of your being. But what would be the point? None of that matters.

That would be you doing something “to save yourself” and Edwards has just told you, at great length, as emphatically as he was able, that your prayers and penitence are useless. Pray or don’t pray. Submit or don’t submit. Seek, ask, knock or don’t. Either way, there is “nothing that you can do to induce God to spare you.”

To be fair, Edwards was elsewhere much more nuanced about the meaning of this belief and our human experience. While unwavering in his commitment to this idea that human agency is meaningless and that we are 100% dependent on God’s grace acting upon us, he allowed that it could and did still matter that we seek such grace and pray for it. Such seeking and praying, he argued, was a sign that we were already recipients of that grace, in that it was only by God’s grace that we were enabled to go through the motions of such manifestations of it. Our apparent volition and our apparent contrition is, itself, wholly a product of grace.

This gets subtle and sophisticated (or, less charitably, it gets semantic and fuzzy), but the upshot of this is that Edwards’ extremely Reformed concept of what revival and redemption looks like as it unfolds (wholly apart from any human agency) looks very much the same as a Wesleyan revival in which the role of human agency is not as scrupulously negated. That’s why the spiritual descendants of Jonathan Edwards — American Christians in the same Calvinist/Reformed tradition — can affirm this same theology completely and still end their “revival” sermons with an altar call inviting their listeners to actually do something. It’s why the altar calls at the fundie Reformed Baptist church I grew up in all had us singing “Just as I am, I come to thee.”

This is all a throat-clearing tangent inspired by my recent revisiting of Edwards’ famous sermon, which I was doing for reasons mostly unrelated to all of the above. But I needed to get this small rant out of the way first because apparently it really irks me whenever I see “Sinners in the Hands” referred to as a great “revival sermon.”

I’ll return to that subject soon, which has to do again with the way that people who otherwise affirm Edwards’ Reformed theology get very upset when Reformed historians actually apply that to history.

But while we’re here, offering tangential, passing thoughts about this sermon, here are two more:

1. The main reason this sermon is so widely remembered today is due to the paucity of “American Literature” prior to the 19th-century writers who actually created some. Anthologists and syllabizers feel like they have to include something from all those years before Hawthorne and Melville, and so they cobble together some early chapters with, like, Cotton Mather’s grocery list and the limericks of Freneau and, inevitably, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Feh. The English-speaking colonists of the 18th century were British subjects, just like Pope and Swift and Blake and Fielding.

2. Edwards preached this sermon, twice, during the summer of 1741, at the peak of the bloody mass hysteria in New York City. I contend that you cannot properly understand this fiery sermon without that context — without the context of dozens of enslaved people (and Jesuits, for some reason) being burned at the stake on the streets of Manhattan. The flames are everywhere. I mean, look:

The Corruption of the Heart of Man is a Thing that is immoderate and boundless in its Fury; and while wicked Men live here, it is like Fire pent up by God’s Restraints, whereas if it were let loose it would set on Fire the Course of Nature. …

And yet that context is almost never discussed or even mentioned in discussions of this sermon.

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