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connection with the nonhuman world.
The metaphorical and analogical
reasoning so characteristic of religious
interpretations of the world is not merely
a rhetorical flourish but is, instead,
closely tied to general psychological
processes in which self-knowledge and
knowledge of other humans function as
the most readily accessible starting
points for inferences we make about
human connections to the most
comprehensive and consequential forces
at work in the nonhuman world. vii

Anthropomorphism’s dual
perception of nonhuman phenomena—as
simultaneously both like and unlike
human persons—has shaped modern
religious and spiritual perceptions in two
especially intriguing directions. In one
case, it has fastened on the difference
between the human and the divine and
cultivated iconoclastic perceptions of the
spiritual in which anthropomorphic
representation is regarded as a
dangerously misleading, albeit
necessary, accommodation to the
limitations of human reason. viii In the
other case, it has emphasized the point of
metaphorical identity between the human
and the nonhuman. Thus, an ancient
idea held that the physical universe was
a macrocosm mirroring the human
microcosm, and this included what
literary critics have named “the pathetic
fallacy,” that is, a sympathetic response
in nature to the affective states of
humans. The early modern political
philosopher Hugo Grotius (1583-1645),
for example, described how human
disobedience to divine law prompted an
anthropomorphic emotional response
from nature: “with sad motion
wheeling, let the sky lament and
mourn.” ix In the modern history of
religions, these two modes of
anthropomorphism, one accentuating

difference and the other accentuating
identity, have varied according to social
circumstance, rhetorical purpose, and
political ramifications. “Sinners in the
Hands of an Angry God” illustrates, in
one historical context, how
anthropomorphic language crosses the
boundary of the human in order to
interpret human ethical responsibility to
both the human and the nonhuman
environment.

The Rhetoric of Divine Wrath

Clearly, Edwards’s
anthropomorphic rhetoric destabilized in
a terrifying way the Enfield
congregation’s complacent perceptions
of the world. It did so by starting from
an assumption that Edwards and the
congregation shared: that humanity’s
ultimate environment should be
construed, anthropomorphically, as a
cosmic society held together by a
covenant that God had made with the
whole of creation. The sermon induced
terror among the congregants by
graphically portraying their own
responsibility for disrupting the
harmonious order of this all-
encompassing society and provoking
divine wrath for their rebellion against
the covenant.

The primary evidence for this
divine wrath came not, however, from
the external orders of nature and divine
providence, which Edwards imagined
working together to maintain the
harmonious order of the world. Instead,
wrath had arisen from a clash between
the benign will of the world and the
rebellious human will: “there is laid in
the very nature of carnal men a
foundation for the torments of hell:
there are those corrupt principles, in
reigning power in them, and in full
possession of them, that are seeds of hell

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