Sometimes people get a bad wrap.  Whether it’s deserved or not, a bad reputation in the public eye is hard thing to get turned around.  Just ask Michael Vick.

Especially discrediting are negative first impressions.  For many young people, though, that’s exactly what they get when encounter the writings of Puritans in their high school literature courses.

A high school student I know recently went through his introduction to Jonathan Edwards’ sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”  Not surprisingly, his reaction was somewhat negative.  Cold, condemning, judgmental, mean—that’s how Edwards is all too often portrayed to students every year in American Literature classes all over the country.

Hughes Oliphant Old writes that,

For generations, Edwards has been held up to the ridicule of every American high school student as the original preacher of hell, fire, and damnation. The typical high school English teacher in the required American literature course all too often perceives Edwards to be the source of all that made up the worst of American revivalism…In the popular imagination Edwards has a bad reputation, and the protestations of serious scholars have only been heard by intellectuals.

Here’s how the Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University introduces this sermon,

Anthologized in high school and college textbooks, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God represents in many persons’ minds the bleak, cruel, and hell-bent outlook of Edwards and his Puritan predecessors. But of course such a representation is only a caricature, for Sinners, if it represents anything, stands for only a small part of Edwards’s view of the relationship between humankind and God.

It really is a shame that Edwards is so commonly written off as a prudish, unrealistically zealous, hellfire preacher.  But he is, and often.

George Marsden, in his book, Jonathan Edwards: A Life, points out that Edwards “…is widely acknowledged to be America’s most important and original philosophical theologian,” and one of America’s greatest intellectuals.  What really is unfortunate is that the only thing many students can remember about him is that he said things like this:

The bow of God’s wrath is bent, and the arrow made ready on the string, and Justice bends the arrow at your heart, and strains the bow…

and this:

He is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times so abominable in his eyes as the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours.

It’s ironic that literature classes so misunderstand Edwards as to only remember lines like these—lines which when pulled out of context seem completely cruel and unjust.  I certainly don’t remember my American Literature class emphasizing the end of the sermon—the invitation to receive Christ’s mercy.  Edwards writes,

And now you have an extraordinary opportunity, a day wherein Christ has flung the door of mercy wide open, and stands in the door calling and crying with a loud voice to poor sinners.

He continues,

And let everyone that is yet out of Christ, and hanging over the pit of hell, whether they be old men and women, or middle aged, or young people, or little children, now harken to the loud calls of God’s word and providence.