Jonathan Edwards’ sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” typifies the spirit of the Great Awakening because it argues that people should have a personal and emotional relationship with God. This idea went against the prevailing Calvinist idea of predestination and a very detached relationship with God.
The Puritans believed that God had already chosen which people were going to Heaven and which were going to Hell. There was nothing people could do and nothing they could believe which would change their destiny. A person could love God with all their heart and do their best to act the way God wants, but could still be condemned to Hell. In such a belief system, there is little room for an emotional relationship with God. Such a relationship would not benefit a person in any way.
The Great Awakening pushed back against this idea. It held that people could achieve salvation, or at least make it more likely, by loving and appreciating God. Contrary to what the Puritans believed, the Great Awakening said that a person who opened his or her heart to God would have a better chance at salvation. Edwards told his listeners that many other people had been sinners just like them but that those people had accepted God and
are in now an happy state, with their hearts filled with love to him that has loved them and washed them from their sins in his own blood, and rejoicing in hope of the glory of God.
This passage would have made no sense to the Puritans. They would have said that whether a person loved God was irrelevant and gave no greater “hope of the glory of God.” The Great Awakening, however, argued that it really mattered if people loved God and had an emotional relationship with him. Edwards’ sermon typifies this idea because it outlines the ways in which people should feel sad for having disappointed God and the ways in which they should increase their hope of salvation by loving him.
Saturday, November 11, 2017
How does the sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God", typify the spirit of the Great Awakening?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Why is the fact that the Americans are helping the Russians important?
In the late author Tom Clancy’s first novel, The Hunt for Red October, the assistance rendered to the Russians by the United States is impor...
-
There are a plethora of rules that Jonas and the other citizens must follow. Again, page numbers will vary given the edition of the book tha...
-
The poem contrasts the nighttime, imaginative world of a child with his daytime, prosaic world. In the first stanza, the child, on going to ...
-
The given two points of the exponential function are (2,24) and (3,144). To determine the exponential function y=ab^x plug-in the given x an...
-
The only example of simile in "The Lottery"—and a particularly weak one at that—is when Mrs. Hutchinson taps Mrs. Delacroix on the...
-
Hello! This expression is already a sum of two numbers, sin(32) and sin(54). Probably you want or express it as a product, or as an expressi...
-
Macbeth is reflecting on the Weird Sisters' prophecy and its astonishing accuracy. The witches were totally correct in predicting that M...
-
The play Duchess of Malfi is named after the character and real life historical tragic figure of Duchess of Malfi who was the regent of the ...
No comments:
Post a Comment