By Patricia Lee Sharpe
Since the response to the now infamous “the chickens have come home to roost” sermon has been hysterical and irrational in the extreme, I thought it might be useful to share a snippet I’ve just come across in a book I’m reading. The book is a recent biography of the great American theologian and philosopher Jonathan Edwards by George M. Marsden. Edwards, as students of American literature may recall, was the preacher who delivered the famous sermon entitled “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” whose gist was: if you don’t get your act together, you are going to spend a pretty nasty eternity burning in
hell. The dominant image was that of a spider being held over a flame by a furious patriarch.
Edwards was a Puritan and a Calvinist and he believed in heavy duty soul-searching of the sort in which deep-rooted guilt and inescapable personal responsibility play major roles. He’d hate my putting it this way, but Edwards believed in karma big time. Actions have reactions. Events have repercussions. Chickens, etc., etc.
The congregational network in which Jonathan Edwards played his powerful polemical role is also the very church that is ancestral to the United Church of Christ. On 9/11 Jeremiah Wright was pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, and he preached a thundering sermon afterwards. He wanted his congregation to do some serious soul-searching. Whether or not Barak Obama was in a Trinity pew when that sermon was preached, he was a member of that congregation, and that sermon may, unjustly, be the undoing of his presidential aspirations.
In fact, Wright’s reaction to 9/11 would have made perfect sense to Calvinistic eighteenth century America. Had he said anything less, he would have been shirking his duty, which brings me to my snippet.
When General Edward Braddock was defeated on his way to Fort Duquesne (now Pittsburgh) in 1755 during the French and Indian War, the catastrophe was seen as apocalyptic by the English colonists. An entire column of Red Coats had been slaughtered. The future of the English enterprise in North America was doubtful.
One of Jonathan Edwards’s daughters was married to Aaron Burr, who was President of the College of New Jersey, a religiously conservative theological seminary that would evolve into the Princeton University we know today. When the news of the French victory reached her, Esther Edwards Burr wrote in great consternation to a friend in Boston:
O the dreadful, awful news! General Braddock is killed and his army is defeated....Oh my dear, what will, what must become of us! O our sins, our sins—they are grown up to the very heavens, and call aloud for vengeance, the vengeance that the Lord has sent—‘Tis just, ‘tis right.
Esther’s lamentations are perfectly consistent with her father’s preaching. In short, what Wright preached that day in Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago is as American as apple pie—or Jonathan Edwards.
As for Jonathan Edwards: A Life, I highly recommend it, if you're into philosophy, theology history—and tales of bang up small town squabbling.