Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758)

[link|http://usinfo.state.gov/products/pubs/oal/oaltoc.htm|Outline of American Literature] at the US State Department:

[Jonathan] Edwards was molded by his extreme sense of duty and by the rigid Puritan environment, which conspired to make him defend strict and gloomy Calvinism from the forces of liberalism springing up around him. He is best known for his frightening, powerful sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" (1741):

[I]f God should let you go, you would immediately sink, and sinfully descend, and plunge into the bottomless gulf....The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked....he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the bottomless gulf.

He'd fit right in, today, in too many places. :-/

More info on the sermon, including a PDF link, is [link|http://edwards.yale.edu/major-works/sinners-in-the-hands-of-an-angry-god/|here].

Cheers,
Scott.

Edwards probably wouldn't fit in with the fire-and-brimstone folks of today's evangelistic Christianity; Edwards was very much for the practicing of the religious principles he stood by, and that was one of the causes of Edwards being booted out of his church.

\r\n\r\n

He also was a good example of what a missionary ought to be -- he didn't just preach to the Indian tribes he visited, he also stood up for their interests against the wishes of colonial governments.

\r\n\r\n

In other words, it's easy to jump to a conclusion about Edwards from reading that sermon out of the context of the rest of his life, but that conclusion might well be wrong ;)

\r\n\r\n

(though I used to feel the same way about him, but one of my professors was an Edwards scholar and spent quite a lot of time pointing out that there was more to the man than that one sermon)

Welcome to IWETHEY!