On July 8, 1741, the Congregational Church of Enfield, Connecticut, passed into the history books. On that day, the assembled parishioners were treated to perhaps the single most famous sermon in American history, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Preached on the ominous text “Their foot shall slide in due time” (Deut. 32:35), the sermon featured the unforgettable image of the sinner suspended over the fires of hell, dangling from a slender thread like a spider or “some loathesome insect,” whose fate is held by a God who “abhors you and is dreadfully provoked.” Tradition has it that the visiting minister—a stranger to the congregation—delivered the sermon in a monotone, staring at the bellrope at the back of the church, while terrified churchgoers fell from their pews in agony at their unredeemed state. Strong men clung to the pillars of the meetinghouse and begged for mercy.

The speaker was not the celebrated George Whitefield, the Billy Graham of his day, who had lately toured New England with such spectacular success; nor was it any of the other itinerant evangelists who were beginning to upset the settled order of the colonial churches in the religious upheaval known as the Great Awakening. It was Jonathan Edwards, the greatest American theologian of the eighteenth century—and possibly of any other. Not simply a religious figure, Edwards was also, as John E. Smith claims in his new monograph,¹ the most acute American philosophical thinker before Charles Sanders Peirce, the late-nineteenth-century