Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God

In 1726, Edwards accepted the position of assistant minister in his grandfather’s church in Northampton. Despite some theological misgivings—the independent Solomon Stoddard defied conventional practice by opening church membership to those who made a profession of faith without providing evidence of spiritual conversion—Edwards undertook the role aware he was being groomed as successor to his grandfather’s influential pulpit. Three years later, Stoddard died, and Edwards became pastor. Stoddard had fostered a series of revivals in Northampton, but Edwards remarked that in the years immediately following his grandfather’s death, religion was at a low ebb in the town, particularly among its youth.

By 1734, however, following the sudden (unrelated) deaths of a young man and woman in town, an awakening occurred that quickly spread throughout Northampton, leading to the conversion of nearly half the adult population over the next three months, in Edwards’s estimate. The virtual disappearance of illness and an outpouring of neighborly love unprecedented for the usually contentious townsfolk accompanied the remarkable religious transformation; evidence of a peculiar visitation of God’s grace, Edwards assumed. Edwards’s subsequent popularization of the Northampton awakening emphasized its universality and intensity, thereby lending the events a definitive and exemplary character. The extraordinary religious excitement quickly spread to surrounding towns in the Connecticut Valley during that winter and spring, but effectively came to an end in Northampton in June 1735 after the suicide of Edwards’s uncle, Joseph Hawley, a leading Northampton merchant who had been tormented with anxiety about his soul’s fate.