During most of the First Great Awakening, as swarms of Americans were cajoled, terrified, shocked, and sent back to the pews, Influential preacher John Edwards was busy converting his fair share. Distinguished by his restrained style from the overly enthusiastic and charismatic oratories of his contemporaries Whitefield and Davenport, Edwards instead relied on his eloquent and effective prose to make an impact on the people. However, in moving away from exaggerated fervor, he encountered another difficulty: the physical language of humans could not adequately demonstrate the glorious nature of God's holiness to Edwards's satisfaction. Undaunted, he continued the steady proliferation of his beliefs, now addressing the enduring difficulty of full expression 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 his faith, despite the fact that his technique simultaneously limits its focus and broadens understanding. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Edwards' predicament is powerfully ironic, since his language exists as both creator and destroyer of his faith. He must use it as the only channel through which to express his worship, but at the same time it constitutes the dominant obstacle to the purity and ethereal quality of his inner contemplations. Ideally, the solution would be to move from the level where one's words are not fully connected with one's 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 on the mind, as if the we saw something with the bodily eyes. There is no imagination or idea of ​​any outward light or glory, or of any beauty of form or countenance, or of any visible luster or brightness of any object” (Edwards , 480). He speaks of the “immediacy” of God’s presence, a presence that floods one’s consciousness internally but is intangible to reason. In the first of several recurring oxymorons, he argues that since one cannot 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 recognizable taste, touch, or sound that we are allowed to experience, striving to reach Him with some sort of conglomeration of all these senses would only worsen the feeling of religious wonder. Thus confirming the ethereal and indefinable character of his feeling, Edwards then addresses the problem of how to nevertheless explain it to his parishioners and to himself. It is therefore to his advantage that he chooses to widen the gulf between our perception of God and our ability to describe him. He writes several times that "...this spiritual knowledge...God is the author of it and no one else: he reveals it, and flesh and blood reveal it not" (Edwards, 478). Often he emphasizes the word "author", as opposed to other possibilities such as "creator" or "inventor", as if confessing that only God can express in his holy language his own glory, that of simple humans cannot because theydidn't create this. glory, as they did in their own speech. “Indeed, a person cannot have spiritual light without speech,” he explains, “but that does not mean that speech properly causes this light.” (Edwards, 484) In this way, Edwards explains that his style is the lesser of two evils; that even if his writing cannot completely convey his passion, at least his passion is strong enough to lead him to express his faith regardless. One of Edward's main complaints is that he is unable to successfully express the greatness of his emotion through profane language, so he instead indicates it by emphasizing failure in all its extremes. Instead of claiming, like some of his fellow preachers, that the direct and immediate source of his sermons was God himself, Edwards frankly admits that since the blunt language we use to describe the glory of God does not actually come from God, we are not the heirs of anything. "a sacred language", but rather the inventors of a crude language, which now prevents us from correctly expressing the impact of God. He first illustrates this quagmire by listing successive adjectives almost carelessly, almost as if he is muttering some obsessive problem to himself, as if he is searching for the right word but simply cannot find it. Attempting to convey his sudden understanding of holiness, he stammers: "[It]...appeared to me to be of a gentle, agreeable, charming, serene, and calm nature" (Edwards, 470). In fact, the length of these “catalogues” of descriptions is almost authoritarian in its excess. In addition, he uses extremely simple images that he repeats constantly. With statements such as: "The soul of a true Christian... appeared like such a little white flower..." (Edwards, 470), the tone only seems appropriate for a young child who can do nothing bear more complex. He used 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 burning flames left many of his congregations in frenzied and naive terror . Additionally, Edwards struggles with the sheer scope of his passion, stating that he cannot describe a sensation that is simply too massive to imagine. He therefore turns to paradox to serve as a metaphor for the inconceivable complexity of God. Using an onslaught of contradictory images like "majestic gentleness" and "terrible gentleness" (Edwards, 468), he illustrates the quixotic nature of his quest to define an entity that could never be contained even with all the definitions of its world. These techniques strongly emphasize the lack of finesse and ineptitude of the language, leaving much of Edwards' prose with a pallor of apparent ineptitude that distracts from reading. Despite the disconcerting effect of these inflated methods, Edwards justifies his choice by coherently explaining each consequence of language deception. 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 for his preemption, he asks: "Would it 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 word of men, yes, of the wisest of men, should seem mean and base in comparison? » (Edwards, 487). He responds firmly that, in fact, having a feeling for the glory of God is not equivalent to having the ability to describe it, and that pure adoration.