From the WSJ Opinion Archives
REVIEW & OUTLOOK
Hell, Yes
There's more to Jonathan Edwards than "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God."
Can we say something nice about Hell?
Our thoughts are turned downward by the tercentenary of America's greatest theologian, Jonathan Edwards. Though this Congregationalist minister died nearly two decades before the American Revolution, in his own way he kindled the flame. Even so, and notwithstanding a prodigious written legacy, he remains popularly defined by a single sermon: his 1741 "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God."
That's no coincidence. The imagery Edwards invoked--of man held over the fires of eternal damnation like a spider dangling from a slender thread--plays well to Puritan caricatures. Never mind that the message was less about fire and brimstone than about Almighty God's overpowering love for his fallen creatures. Whatever Edwards's language meant in his day, in ours it is inevitably viewed as the kind of Calvinistic narrow-mindedness finally vanquished in the Scopes Monkey Trial.
The result is tragic, for it leaves us with no appreciation for one of the key Puritan contributions to the American experiment: the tempering of Enlightenment rationality with Christian realism. Max Stackhouse, a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary and a member of Edwards's church in Stockbridge, Mass., notes the democratic thrust of the Great Awakening lit by Edwards: that the individual's personal experience does witness to truth. In stark contrast to those who trusted in man's good nature, however, Edwards also insisted on original sin and his capacity for evil.
However ignorant today's children may be of Edwards's role in shaping America, this one can't be pinned on indifference at the upper levels of academe. Edwards has long constituted an industry in himself, the most recent offering being a magisterial biography by George Marsden ("Jonathan Edwards: A Life"). Yale University Press, which is publishing a 27-volume set of Edwards's writings, recently sponsored a national symposium at the Library of Congress to mark this month's anniversary.
Edwards himself might be comforted to know that even Hell hasn't gone completely out of style. Despite its unpopularity in many Christian seminaries, 69% of Americans still believe in it. Some scholars, moreover, think that belief in Hell might also contribute to prosperity. In a paper to be published later this month in the American Sociological Review, Harvard University's Robert Barro and Rachel McCleary offer preliminary findings that economic growth responds negatively to church attendance but positively to belief in Hell.
From the vantage of modernity the blind spots of Jonathan Edwards are all too obvious, from his ownership of slaves to a self-righteousness that even his own congregation could not stomach. But if the profoundly different outcomes achieved by America's liberal order and the other projects born of the Enlightenment are any clue, maybe he was right to suggest that those who discount Hell in the afterlife are less apt to guard against creating one here on earth.
