Sinners In The Hands of a Loving God

I used this line in comments on this thread over at Adam Walker-Cleavland's blog Pomomusings. He asked the question, "What is sin?"

The phrase is a reversal of the most infamous, and misleading, sermon of America's greatest theologian, Johnathan Edwards (I doubt there is a relationship between the first and his contemporary namesake running for the Presidency, but who knows?). I say "unrepresentative", because it should be taken in to account that Edwards' collected papers run to 60 fat volumes, available through Yale University Press, I do believe. Edwards wrote on subjects as diverse as beauty, metaphysics, the revelation of God in the beauty of nature, mysticism, and the power of grace and love. I do believe "Sinners in the hands of an angry God", with its horrifying imagery is used as representative of both Edwards and the First Great Awakening because historians are ignorant of the diversity and power of the even. It is all too easy to caricature Edwards if one only considers this particular sermon.

In any event, the reason I turned the tables on the sermon is this - I no longer accept the idea that God harbors anger towards human beings. Indeed, I do believe that God's love is tinged more with sorrow, rather than wrath. While there is Biblical warrant for speaking of God's anger (just read some of the prophets), I think that Christians who want to create a dialectic, or dichotomy, between God's love and God's anger, or between God's mercy and God's justice, miss the synthesis inherent in the crucifixion. All those old dichotomies and contradictions are taken up in to God and released and given new life as God's unfailing love and grace for all creation. We are called to participate in this great gift God has presented us. I do not believe there is any anger in God towards his errant creation.

We are not suspended above the fires of hell by a slender thread in the fingers of a God who would just as soon let us fall to eternal perdition. We are buoyed up by a God who would shelter us, not only from that eternal separation, but from our own folly, evil, and resistance. While I do believe this is part of Edwards' point - the mystery of Divine grace in the face of human sin - I would erase the initial imagery. God does not deliver us despite God's sense of justice, but precisely because of it. We are, indeed, sinners in the hands of a loving God.