Page |102 - thirties, mounted the narrow steps into ee the pulpit on July 8, 1741, the sermon he h 71 God S.-religious "og" . was about to preach would become one umd Piste OF Systias of the most famously electrifying anthropomorphism Ar aes “rez, ortations in American history, “Sinners in intone Sedwardsnonhumanmedem 2." the Hands of an Angry God.” Edwards hello EE Order? ier preached this sermon during the massive 8 Ags egoere = transatlantic religious revival that gave _ rise to Methodism in England and came Chapter 11” to be known in the American colonies as . “the Great Awakening.” This was not Anthropomorphism: Human the familiar pulpit of his congregation in Connection to a Universal Society Northampton, Massachusetts, but rather When Jonathan Edwards, an the church at Enfield, a town that had angular New England minister in his late gained notoriety for stubbornly resisting the exhortations of previous preachers of SSS spiritual awakening. From his scriptural The lead author, Clark Gilpin, Ph.D., is the text—‘‘their foot shall slide in due time” Margaret E., Bauon. Prouessoral thé Basten? Bt (Deut. 32: 35)—Edwards drew the sHnISH Ont AU HE UEIVERNUIp ah CUICAEO doctrine that “there is nothing that keeps Divinity School. Clark studies the cultural : history of theology in England and America wicked men, at any one moment, out of from the seventeenth century to the present. hell, but the mere pleasure of God.” From 1990 to 2000, he served as dean of the Sinners living here and now, Edwards Divinity School, and from 2000 to 2004 he _ declared, were “the objects of that very directed the Martin Marty Center, the Divinity . School’s institute for advanced research in all same anger and wrath of God, that is fields of the academic study of religion. His expressed in the torments of hell,” and current research projects include a book with the that wrath was an annihilating fire that working title Alone with the Alone: Solitude in already “burns against them; their