Reverend Stephen Williams was in attendance at the Enfield sermon, with his diary entry for that day containing the following account of the congregation's reactions during and after the sermon:
[B]efore the sermon was done there was a great moaning and crying out through the whole house — "What shall I do to be saved?" "Oh, I am going to hell!" "Oh what shall I do for a Christ?" and so forth — so that the minister was obliged to desist. [The] shrieks and cries were piercing and amazing. After some time of waiting, the congregation were still, so that a prayer was made by Mr. Wheelock, and after that we descended from the pulpit and discoursed with the people, some in one place and some in another. And amazing and astonishing: the power [of] God was seen and several souls were hopefully wrought upon that night, and oh the cheerfulness and pleasantness of their countenances that received comfort. Oh that God would strengthen and confirm [their new faith]! We sang a hymn and prayed, and dispersed the assembly.[7]
Although the sermon has received criticism, Edwards' words have endured and are still read to this day. Edwards' sermon continues to be the leading example of a First Great Awakening sermon and is still used in religious and academic studies.[8]
Since the 1950s, a number of critical perspectives were used to analyze the sermon.[9] The first comprehensive academic analysis of "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" was published by Edwin Cady in 1949,[10] who comments on the imagery of the sermon and distinguishes between the "cliché" and "fresh" figurative images, stressing how the former related to colonial life. Lee Stuart questions that the message of the sermon was solely negative and attributes its success to the final passages in which the sinners are actually "comforted".[11] Rosemary Hearn argues that it is the logical structure of the sermon that constitutes its most important persuasive element.[12] Lemay looks into the changes in the syntactic categories, like grammatical tenses, in the text of the sermon.[13] Lukasik stresses how, in the sermon, Edwards appropriates Newtonian physics, especially the image of the gravitational pull that would relentlessly bring down the sinners.[14] Gallagher focuses on the "beat" of the sermon, and on how the consecutive structural elements of the sermon serve different persuasive aims.[15] Choiński suggests that the rhetorical success of the sermon consists in the use of the "deictic shift" that transported the hearers mentally into the figurative images of hell.[16]
Jonathan Edwards also wrote and spoke a great deal on heaven and angels, writes John Gerstner in Jonathan Edwards on Heaven and Hell, 1998,[17] and those themes are less remembered, namely "Heaven is a World of Love".[18]
