Question

What kind of imagery did Jonathan Edwards use in his sermons and to what effect?

Answer 1

Jonathan Edwards was a prominent preacher during the First Great Awakening, a religious revival that spanned the 1730s to 1740s. In this context, Edwards gave speeches and sermons throughout the colonies of a great God whose mercy was the only way of reaching Heaven.

Though his sermons were given staring straight forward with none of the dramatic gestures that we would associate with a modern day sermon with the same content, audiences during the period would have found his speeches that said "They deserve to be cast into hell; so that divine justice never stands in the way, it makes no objection against God's using his power at any moment to destroy them." or "we have no reason to think any other, than that some of you will burn in hell to all eternity." (from his sermons "Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God" <His most well known> and "Pressing into the Kingdom of God").

The most famous of his imagery in "Sinners in the hand of an angry God" describes men as dangling above hell, and only the mercy of the Lord could save them:
"O sinner! Consider the fearful danger you are in: it is a great furnace of wrath, a wide and bottomless pit, full of the fire of wrath, that you are held over in the hand of that God, whose wrath is provoked and incensed as much against you, as against many of the damned in hell. 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 one moment."

Again, though some may find the imagery fanciful today, the highly religious audiences of the period would have found this terrifying-to the point some wept or had to leave.