Winthrop, Bradford, Bradstreet, Taylor, and Edwards all use their writing to explore attributes or conceptions of God.

Instructions

Choose one of the questions below and develop a 3-5 page essay, 12 point Times New Roman, double-spaced. Include 2-4 secondary sources as a way to expand or deepen your discussion. Make sure to include your outside sources to deepen your discussions with these authors (critics or anything well written about them)

Question

Winthrop, Bradford, Bradstreet, Taylor, and Edwards all use their writing to explore attributes or conceptions of God. Write an essay that illuminates the dimensions of their views.

Short Stories

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God (1741) Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), a Congregational minister in New England, was certainly exposed to Enlightenment thought and intellectual vigor as well as to the methodology it engendered, but he had also been educated in the rich, challenging Calvinist theology of the earlier Puritan church. Edwards believed that people had fallen away from the demanding faith, with its emphasis on God's grace, that was so essential to their salvation. With that in mind, this great theologian began a revival in his Northampton, Massachusetts, church in the 1730s that became part of the general revival movement called the Great Awakening. To awaken people's faith and belief in the majesty of God, he presented both positive and negative images of God's power. He wanted people to feel God's presence, not just think about it.

The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked. His wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the fire. He is of purer eyes than to bear you in his sight; you are ten thousand times as abominable in his eyes as the most hateful, venomous serpent is in ours. You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince, and yet it is nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment. It is to be ascribed to nothing else that you did not got to hell the last night; that you were suffered to awake again in this world, after you closed your eyes to sleep. And there is no other reason to be given why you have not dropped into hell since you arose in the morning, but that God's hand has held you up. There is no other reason to be given why you have not gone to

hell since you have sat here in the house of God provoking his pure eye by your sinful, wicked manner of attending his solemn worship. Yea, there is nothing else that is to be given as a reason why you do not this very moment drop down into hell. O sinner! consider the fearful danger you are in! It is a great furnace of wrath, a wide and bottomless pit, full of the fire of wrath that you are held over in the hand of that God whose wrath is provoked and incensed as much against you as against many of the damned in hell. You hang by a slender thread, with the flames of Divine wrath flashing about it, and ready every moment to singe it and burn it asunder. . . . It would be dreadful to suffer this fierceness and wrath of Almighty God one moment; but you must suffer it to all eternity. There will be no end to this exquisite, horrible misery. When you look forward, you shall see along forever a boundless duration before you, which will swallow up your thoughts, and amaze your soul. And you will absolutely despair of ever having any deliverance, any end, any mitigation, any rest at all. You will know certainly that you must wear out long ages, millions of millions of ages in wrestling with this Almighty, merciless vengeance. And then when you have so done, when so many ages have actually been spent by you in this manner, you will know that all is but a point [dot] to what remains. So that your punishment will indeed be infinite. Oh! who can express what the state of a soul in such circumstances is! All that we can possibly say about it gives but a very feeble, faint representation of it. It is inexpressible and inconceivable: for "who knows the power of God's anger"! How dreadful is the state of those that are daily and hourly in danger of this great wrath and infinite misery! But this is the dismal case of every soul in this congregation that has not been born again, however moral and strict, sober and religious, they may otherwise be. Oh! that you would consider it, whether you be young or old! There is reason to think that there are many in this congregation, now hearing this discourse, that will actually be the subjects of this very misery to all eternity. We know not who they are, or in what seats they sit, or what thoughts they now have. It may be they are now at ease, and hear all these things without much disturbance, and are now flattering themselves that they are not the persons, promising themselves that they shall escape. If we knew that there was one person, and but one, in the whole congregation, that was to be the subject of this misery, what an awful thing it would be to think of! If we knew who it was, what an awful sight would it be to see such a person! How might the rest of the congregation lift up a lamentable and bitter cry over him! But, alas! instead of one, how many is it likely will remember this discourse in hell! And it would be a wonder, if some that are now present should not be in hell in a very short time, before this year is out. And it would be no wonder if some persons that now sit here in some seats of this meeting-house, in health, and quiet and secure, should be there before tomorrow morning!

I first learned this from Anne Bradstreet's marvelous poem of theological anxiety and mourning, "In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet, Who Deceased August, 1665, Being a Year and Half Old":

1 Farewell dear babe, my heart's too much content,
 Farewell sweet babe, the pleasure of mine eye,
 Farewell fair flower that for a space was lent,
 Then ta'en away unto eternity.
 Blest babe, why should I once bewail thy fate,
 Or sigh thy days so soon were terminate,
 Sith thou art settled in an everlasting state.

2 By nature trees do rot when they are grown,
 And plums and apples thoroughly ripe do fall,
 And corn and grass are in their season mown,
 And time brings down what is both strong and tall.
 But plants new set to be eradicate,
 And buds new blown to have so short a date,
 Is by His hand alone that guides nature and fate.
 
 I was 25 and, at first, took it for a simple, if moving, poem about the way faith in God might guide us through times of mourning. I admired the deft rhymes, its lovely incantatory qualities. And then I turned the page.
 
 When I returned to it a year later—to teach a course on early American literature —I noticed strange undercurrents, moments of anxiety, hesitation. Why, I wondered, does Bradstreet suggest that the grandchild is her heart's "too much" content? Is it possible to love a grandchild too much? If so, when God takes the child away, does the pain of mourning suggest fault in the mourner: an over- indulgence of earthly love? Is Bradstreet serious in her assertion that she shouldn't feel sad, as the child had only been lent to the world and, thus, her death was as simple as the repayment of a loan? And how are we to take the idea that we should not grieve for the dead, for they are "settled in an everlasting state," a position better than our own?
 
 Because part one ended with a clear question—why do I mourn the death of a child?—it seemed odd that part two began with completely inappropriate

answers: trees fall when they get old, time "brings down" the strong and tall. And, having worked through the false starts of these assertions, the picture of God Anne Bradstreet describes seemed, on second thought, chaotic and wild. He is a farmer who tears out new-set plants, an orchard keeper snipping the blooms before the fruit arrives. What kind of God is this? I wondered. And is there not a little bit of outrage—an anxiety and frustration borne of a failure to understand— mixed in with this quiet, lovely mourning?
 
 When I'd first read the final line, I took it for a comforting conclusion. Now, the metrical hesitations, the two extra weak beats interrupting the clean iambic pentameter, suggested a speaker who feels this is the sentiment she should express, no matter how difficult, or even wrong, it seems to her.
 
 And this struck me as a much more true expression of mourning, Bradstreet's mind asserting both what it knows—the existence of an all-powerful, all-good God—and what it feels, which is frustration, confusion, recrimination and sadness. It is a complex poem engaged with unanswerable questions about theology and mourning. It's complexity makes it not merely moving, but humane.
 
 And having learned this from Bradstreet—having been forced to articulate this to a group of freshman students who weren't sure why they had to study her work at all—I articulated for myself something about the power of poetry in a world where our most enduring questions are not definitively answerable.