Every day brings more noise, more anger, and more reasons to feel overwhelmed. Fear is loud. I feel that there is little hope. Faith feels empty. In moments like these, it helps to listen to the voices of the past who understand that fear and grace are the forces that determine whether people come together or fall apart.
Jonathan Edwards is often called America’s greatest theologian and early philosopher. He, along with George Whitefield, sparked the Great Awakening. In 1741, he delivered a sermon that became one of the most famous sermons in American history. Sinners in the hands of an angry God: “God will sustain you over the pits of hell as a man holds a spider…There is nothing that will keep you from falling into hell except the mere joy of God.”
That was Edwards, whom I once fired. At Oberlin College, which boasts a progressive tradition, I wanted nothing to do with that voice. But as a religion major, I studied with Clyde Holbrook, Jonathan Edwards’ guru and founder and dean of the American Academy of Religion. He claimed that Edwards also wrote one of the most probing studies of religious experience. His rival was much later William James. When Holbrook was asked to edit original sina volume collecting Edwards’ work from the original manuscripts, he invited me to help.
Of course, Holbrook wrote the introduction and conclusion. My job was to transcribe. Edwards was verbose, and moreover, his handwriting was personal, full of symbols and abbreviations. The “world” was a circle with a dot. The “spider” looked like a stain with legs. “Hell” had a dark opening, more suggestive than descriptive. The words are blurred and the lines on the limbs and tail are gone. Holbrook’s wife, Dorothy, was watching me closely. I was a chain smoker at the time, so I felt stuck.
It was strange to spend days trying to decipher the handwriting of a man known for fire and brimstone. The handwriting was more difficult to understand than theology. Later I noticed Amazon’s exclamation. “The reasoning of one of the world’s greatest theologians is that now Available in clear, contemporary prose!” This is not a reference to my labor.
By the end of the summer, Edwards felt personal. He no longer looked like a preacher of terror. For him, fear was diagnostic rather than punitive. He was pulled in two directions. It’s about thunder and patience, fear and consideration of how faith grows. Edwards believed that most of those who were “caught over the pit” were saved by grace. Being tied there was not the same as being dropped.
For Edwards, heaven and hell were two sides of the same reality. The power that makes judgment unbearable is the same power that makes grace real. He refused to choose between fear and love. Long before Freud or Jung, he understood that what we repress comes back to us in a different form. You can’t eliminate fear. It can only be answered with a stronger love.
Fear was not the enemy. I was proud. Noise and fear are given. It’s not panic. A more serious enemy is the belief that innocence is a head start. A university pastor once said: “If we do not yet have love, at least we are guilty. It is not an extraordinary bond because it prevents separation through judgment.”
That common condition makes us turn inward. A modern poet writes: “The opposite of love is not hate, but fear…For each of us there has always been a wilderness within our hearts.” Edwards understood that inner world. He knew that denying fear does not make us whole. Facing our fears and meeting them with a love greater than ourselves makes us whole.
For Edwards, that love was inspired by beauty, which was his main focus. He saw the universe as a “transmission” of divine harmony. This perspective is often overlooked by those who simply know him. sinner. The same man who painted the Spider on the Fire spent his time in the fields observing insects and clouds, believing that the heavens would leave him omens. Grace does not make the world smaller. It helps us see it more clearly.
Edwards did not condemn fear. We live with noise, fear, and the urge to panic or retreat. He proposed an alternative: acknowledging the darkness, but not allowing it to control you.
Edwards may have been satisfied with the unconventional William Blake. marriage of heaven and hell“Without contrarianism, there is no progress.” Without a frame, there is no painting, only an infinite canvas.
Without heaven, hell would continue indefinitely, without framework or restraint, just to endure. In times like ours, fire and brimstone actually makes sense. Jonathan Edwards would have said, “You better believe it.”
There’s just one catch. The frame is us. The hands that hold the arrow are also ours.
notes and reading
The Great Awakening began in the pews, but later developed a moral vocabulary that challenged slavery and exclusion. By equalizing the “lower class” and the “elite,” the psychological foundations for political equality were prepared.
Even if you are right in many ways, you can still get caught up in the cultural norms of the day. Despite the persistence of Edwards’ own elitism, his doctrine of shared guilt helped to make the grace of democracy conceivable. He understood that public panic is a shadow of private wilderness. Unrecognized inner contradictions play out in public life, deepening the crisis. In the face of contradiction, grace brings opportunity. If you refuse that, the argument will not work.
reference. “The religion that underlies our arguments: What we are fighting over is not really a disagreement.” dispatch (January 25, 2026).
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The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 3: Original Sin—Editor, Clyde A. Holbrook (1970). In the pre-digital era, transcriptions were typed from microfilm.
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Jonathan Edwards: Life—George Marsden (2003). The first complete biography of Edwards in 60 years, the renowned Notre Dame scholar humanizes America’s greatest colonial cleric, highly regarded in his day but then scapegoated by decades of abuse at the hands of Puritan bashers.
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Jonathan Edwards among theologians—Oliver D. Crisp (2015). Edwards was not just a “fire-breather” but a “constructive theologian” who used Enlightenment philosophy to reimagine Reformed theology. Crisp is a British theologian currently working as Professor of Analytical Theology at the University of St. Andrews (Scotland).
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one holy and happy society: Jonathan Edwards’ Public Theology―Gerald McDermott (1992). McDermott is a theologian and Edwards Scholar who taught at Roanoke College, later served as Professor of Episcopal Theology at Beeson School of Theology, held positions at Jerusalem Theological Seminary and Reformed Episcopal Theological Seminary, and is resident chaplain at Holy Cross Episcopal Church in Crozet, Virginia.
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“The opposite of love is not hatred or resentment, but fear…”—Tracy K. Smith Losing Fear: Poetry for Dangerous Times (November 18, 2025). Smith is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and former U.S. Poet Laureate, known for his work that brings “lyric accuracy” to moral and civic attention.
89 seconds
vineyards and the world
Approximately 2+2=5
Source: 2 + 2 = 5 – williamgreen.substack.com
