During the height of the First Great Awakening, when swarms of Americans were being cajoled, terrorized, and driven back into the church pews, the influential preacher John Edwards was busy converting the its fair share. Distinguished by his subdued style from the overenthusiastic and charismatic orators of his contemporaries Whitefield and Davenport, Edwards instead relied on his eloquently effective prose to make his impact on the populace. In his move away from exaggerated fervor, however, he encountered another difficulty: the physical language of human beings could not adequately demonstrate the glorious nature of God's holiness to Edwards' satisfaction. Undaunted, he pushed forward with the steady proliferation of his beliefs, now facing the continuing difficulty of expressing himself fully through his style. In the specific pieces “Personal Narrative,” “A Divine and Supernatural Light,” and “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” Edwards establishes that his willingness to record the failure of language actually exposes his devotion to faith, despite the fact that his technique simultaneously limits his scope and expands understanding. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Edwards' situation is highly ironic, as his language exists as both the creator and destroyer of his faith. He must use it as the only channel through which to express his adoration, but at the same time it serves as a dominant obstacle to the purity and ethereal quality of his internal contemplations. Ideally, the solution would be to progress from the level where its words are not fully connected to its meanings, to a relationship where they can come together in a “heavenly embrace.” However, realizing that this goal is largely impossible, Edwards instead anticipates the inevitable difficulties by qualifying the use of language that is not "pure". He establishes that the wonder of his soul cannot be described in words, emphasizing that the divine and supernatural light he feels in his heart "...is not an impression in the mind, as if one were seeing something with the eyes of the body. There is no imagination or idea of ​​any outward light or glory, or of any beauty of form or aspect, or of any visible splendor or brightness of any object" (Edwards, 480). He speaks of the “immediacy” of God's presence, which floods his consciousness internally but is intangible through reason. In the first of several recurring oxymorons, he argues that since it is not possible to rationalize the path to God, it is imperative to turn to the pure senses to connect to pure worship. Since love is truly blind and God has no discernible taste, no touch, no sound that we are allowed to experience, striving to reach Him with some sort of conglomerate of all these senses would only compound the feeling of religious wonder. Thus confirming the ethereal and indefinable nature of his feeling, Edwards then faces the problem of how to explain it anyway to his parishioners, and to himself. It is to his advantage, then, that he chooses to widen the gap between our perception of God and our ability to describe him. He writes repeatedly that “…of this spiritual knowledge…God is the author, and none other: He reveals it, and flesh and blood reveal it not” (Edwards, 478). He often emphasizes the word "author," as opposed to other possibilities such as "creator" or "inventor," as if confessing that only God can express his own glory in his holy tongue, that mere human beings cannot because they do not have it. created. glory, as they did with their speech. "Ineffects a person cannot have spiritual light without the word,” he explains, “but that does not mean that the word actually causes that light.” (Edwards, 484) In this way Edwards explains that his style is the lesser of two evils ; that although his writing cannot fully convey his ardor, at least his ardor is strong enough to lead him to express his faith regardless emotions through secular language, so he instead indicates this by highlighting failure in all its extremes. Instead of pretending, like some fellow preachers, that the direct and immediate source of his sermons was God himself, Edwards frankly admits that because the blunt language. that we use to describe God's glory did not actually originate from God, we are not heirs to some 'sacred language' but instead invented a brute one, which now prevents us from adequately articulating God's impact. He first illustrates this they quagmire by listing the next adjectives almost carelessly, almost as if they were muttering some obsessive problem to themselves, as if they were looking for the right word but couldn't find it. Attempting to convey his sudden understanding of holiness, he stammers, "[It]… seemed sweet in nature, pleasant, charming, serene, calm" (Edwards, 470). Indeed, the length of these "catalogues" of descriptions is almost burdensome in their excessive abundance. Furthermore, he uses extremely simple images that he repeats endlessly. With statements like, “The soul of a true Christian…appeared like a little white flower…” (Edwards, 470), the tone seems only appropriate for a small child who cannot handle anything more complex . He uses this technique of crude descriptions to infamous effect in “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” when the oft-repeated paintings of dancing devils and boiling flames left many of his congregations in frantic, naïve terror. Furthermore, Edwards struggles with the sheer scale of his passion, declaring that he is unable to describe a sensation that is simply too awe-inspiring to even imagine. He then turns to paradox to serve as a metaphor for the inconceivable complexity of God. Using an onslaught of contradictory images such as "a majestic mildness" and "a terrible sweetness" (Edwards, 468), he illustrates the quixotic character of his quest to define a the entity that could never be contained even with all the definitions of its world. These techniques strongly emphasize the lack of subtlety and incompetence of the language, leaving much of Edwards' prose with a paleness of seeming ineptitude that is distracting when read. Despite the confusing effect of these inflated methods, Edwards justifies his choice by coherently explaining every consequence of the delusion of language. In “A Divine and Supernatural Light,” he reflects on the concept of infinities upon infinities, qualifying his use of oxymorons by clarifying their purpose: to produce an emotional effect beyond rationality and petty human “feeling.” Returning to the arguments of his preemption, he asks: "It would not be rational to suppose that His speech would be extremely different from the speech of men, that there should be such excellence and sublimity in His speech... that the speech of men, yes, the wisest of men, should appear mean and vile in comparison?" (Edwards, 487). He answers firmly that, in fact, being blessed with a sense of God's glory is not the same as being blessed with the ability to describe it, that pure worship must not and cannot be adulterated by secularized words. Therefore it is interesting to note that although Edwards claims that.