Faith Halverson
Mr. Woolwine
Period 4/ AP English 11
2 October 2014
“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” – Rhetorical Analysis Christian revivalist speaker, Jonathan Edwards, in his sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (July 8, 2014) persuades that his audience is doomed to hellfire if they fail to head his message of repentance. He supports his claim by first using angry and fear inducing diction that is full of imagery, then he uses figurative language to emphasis the images and experiences of hell, and finally he shifts the tone at the end to provide hope for salvation. Edwards’ purpose is to convert individuals in order to bring more people to his view of salvation. He creates an aggressive and fearful tone for an audience of Christians that he believes is sinful and must repent. In order to create strong diction, Edwards uses long, powerful sounding words to put authority, fear, and describe images in his sermon. Since this passage is meant to be heard, and not read, these words sound strong when spoken aloud, especially with a harsh voice, like Edwards most likely did to evoke fear. Examples of this include: “lake of burning brimstone” (14), “the floods of God’s vengeance” (46), and “punishment will indeed be infinite” (101), each of these phrases, along with many others in the sermon, uses words that one should fear, like vengeance, which means inflicted punishment. Some of these phrases threaten the reader with punishment and eternal suffering; this is where he uses diction to describe the images of where the sinners will end up, in order to persuade the audience. Edwards uses several types of figurative language in this passage, including anaphora and similes. The anaphora is used to create emphasis, highlighting the important topics that the audience needs to pay attention to, like “the sun does not willingly shine upon you… the earth