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Chapter 11¹¹

Anthropomorphism: Human Connection to a Universal Society

When Jonathan Edwards, an angular New England minister in his late

¹¹ The lead author, Clark Gilpin, Ph.D., is the Margaret E. Burton Professor of the History of Christianity at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Clark studies the cultural history of theology in England and America from the seventeenth century to the present. From 1990 to 2000, he served as dean of the Divinity School, and from 2000 to 2004 he directed the Martin Marty Center, the Divinity School's institute for advanced research in all fields of the academic study of religion. His current research projects include a book with the working title Alone with the Alone: Solitude in American Religious and Literary History, which explores ways in which the spiritual discipline of solitary writing—autobiographic narratives, journals, and letters—shaped the careers of major New England intellectuals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Anthropomorphic representations of God make many modern people very nervous, including many religious people. Attributing human-like ideas and emotions to the comprehending powers of the universe not only seems out of step with modern science but also a presumptuous confinement of the world within merely human needs and capacities. Yet, the impulse to speak anthropomorphically about our "ultimate environment" has vigorously persisted into the modern age. Rather than dismissing anthropomorphism as an outmoded way of thinking, this essay adopts a historical approach to rethink why anthropomorphism exhibits this perennial capacity to focus the human ethical imagination on our relations with and obligations to the universe within which we live.

thirties, mounted the narrow steps into the pulpit on July 8, 1741, the sermon he was about to preach would become one of the most famously electrifying orations in American history, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." Edwards preached this sermon during the massive transatlantic religious revival that gave rise to Methodism in England and came to be known in the American colonies as "the Great Awakening." This was not the familiar pulpit of his congregation in Northampton, Massachusetts, but rather the church at Enfield, a town that had gained notoriety for stubbornly resisting the exhortations of previous preachers of spiritual awakening. From his scriptural text—"their foot shall slide in due time" (Deut. 32: 35)—Edwards drew the doctrine that "there is nothing that keeps wicked men, at any one moment, out of hell, but the mere pleasure of God." Sinners living here and now, Edwards declared, were "the objects of that very same anger and wrath of God, that is expressed in the torments of hell," and that wrath was an annihilating fire that already "burns against them; their damnation does not slumber; the pit is prepared; the fire is made ready...to receive them." In a notorious image, Edwards portrayed God dangling the sinner's soul over the fires of hell like a spider on a single, slender filament of its web. The sermon achieved stunning results, as recorded in the diary of one of those present, Stephen Williams: "before the sermon was done, there was a great moaning and crying out throughout the whole house—what shall I do to be saved; oh, I am going to hell; oh, what shall I do for a Christ." The "shrieks and cries were piercing and amazing," Williams reported, and the scene was so tumultuous that Edwards had to stop before finishing his sermon.ⁱ

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