SINNERS IN THE HANDS OF AN ANGRY GOD Deuteronomy XXXII. Independent of its theological content, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” is a harbinger of American Romanticism, a literary work that prefigured Poe and Hawthorne, Melville and Lovecraft, in its intimations of a terrifying and alien God. As unpalatable as Edwards’s message might have been, his significance can’t be doubted, and from a rhetorical perspective his sermon is among the greatest American examples of the form. Often remembered as the prototypical “fire and brimstone” sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” reflects the complicated religious background of eighteenth-century America, influenced not just by Calvinism, but by Newtonian physics. As a demonstration of this evolution, consider that the most significant event in the congregation’s history was in 1741, when, during the midst of what’s remembered by historians as the First Great Awakening, the Massachusetts minister and guest speaker Jonathan Edwards delivered what is among the most influential of early American sermons: the stern, doctrinaire, and terrifying “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Standing at the pulpit, Edwards stared out at the congregation in Enfield and declared that the “wrath of God burns against them…the fire is made ready, the furnace is now hot, ready to receive them.” If eyewitness accounts are accurate, the audience moaned, lamented, and screamed at Edwards’s visceral descriptions of damnation. Architecturally, the building looks similar to its first three permutations, even while theologically much has changed among Congregationalists. The current iteration, which opened 174 years ago, is a handsome, white-washed Palladian and steepled structure with rainbow bunting, reflecting the liberal politics of the Protestant denomination of which it is a member, the United Church of Christ. ![]() Enfield Congregational Church shares its name with the small Connecticut town in which its worshipers have occupied four different buildings since its founding in 1683.
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