Sinners Response

Taylor Cole
AP- English
9-1-09

I found this Jonathan Edwards sermon to be really frightening but at the same time straight to the point. Although I felt a variety of feelings and some parts I couldn’t understand I still go the gist of the sermon. He was trying to convince his congregation that they could do no wrong at all or they would go to hell. I feel that in this passage there was no escaping any of the criticism given.
He felt that the majority of the people were doing wrong by God and that they thought that they could get away with this. If people were thinking this he made it clear that there was no way that you could out smart God. Every little wrong thing you do will catch up to you in the end and you will go to hell. I feel that he is scaring these people into doing “right”. What is the definition of doing “right”? I know this pastor was not a saint simply because n o one is a saint. So whatever he was accusing the congregation of he had to have done himself.
During the sermon he gives you the feeling that everything he is saying is fact and can be referred back too. He does this by using ethos; he refers back to certain quotes in the bible. Everything he is saying about the punishment that will come to the sinners can be found in the pages of his bible. It’s almost like he is taking everything that is said in the bible literally. In his eyes every sin that you commit is you fault and there is nothing you can do about it that is after the act is committed.
Staying away from God would be considered a sin that would send you straight to hell, and in his eyes this would of course be your fault. But I would like to poke logic at that statement. What if you lived your life that right way but didn’t know of God your whole life? How could that possibly be your fault if you were brought up that way?
He also used pathos by describing hell to a tee. If gave you the feeling of being frightened or wanting to crawl under a whole and make sure your not breathing in a sinful way. But in the end of the sermon he starts to put a twist on it. First he says that you can convert your life to Christ and then you will be okay to go to heaven. So this gives you hope that since you’re in church you might get a chance at heaven. But then he says that if you wait long enough it doesn’t matter who you are or how old you are you will go to hell.
My question to Jonathan Edwards is would he consider himself being able to go to heaven after writing this sermon? By the time you’re done reading this sermon, it’s almost like there is no way to go to heaven. I can applaud him on scaring the people in to living the right way but at the same time he could have been turning people away, giving them the feeling that they might as well live a bad life since every one’s going to hell anyway.