Rhetorical Analysis Of Sinners In The Hands Of An Angry God

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Impression means the first and immediate effect of an experience or perception upon the mind; sensation. There are impressionistic paintings and impressionistic music. As for orators their ideas are their canvases, their language is their paint brush and their wordings are their colors that orators combine them together to paint elaborate paintings, the painting of speaking. Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God (1741) is a topical sermon which was wrote by Jonathan Edwards in the Great Awakening. Edwards wants to use the sermon to awaken his audience that they should dedicate their lives to God. In the Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, Jonathan Edwards delivers his ideas about the God’s rage and human sinfulness to his audience by using …show more content…

Diction is the choices of words an author uses. Different dictions can have diverse effects on the speech. In the speech, Edwards uses a lot of exaggerated words to develop the image of God’s anger. For example, he said, “Consider the fearful danger you are in. ‘Tis is a great furnace of wrath, a wide and bottomless pit, full of the fire of wrath, that you are held over in the hand of that God, whose wrath is provoked and incensed as much against you, as against many of the damned in hell.” Edwards likes to take the repetition of a word to scare his audience to make his point. “Wrath” means “forceful anger”. Instead of just saying plain anger, Edwards uses repetition of fury to make his point more profoundly. Edwards emphases that people are in great danger and God is extremely angry. Edwards describes the anger of God as “great furnace of wrath”, “full of the fire of wrath” and “wrath is provoked and incensed”. Those descriptions of anger are grandiloquent which are more impressive and it also places stress on the audiences. Edwards thinks Puritans are sinful that they are not as pure as they were like. He wants to use repetition of anger and exaggerated descriptions of Hell to tell people that God is angry about them and they could be put in hell at any time if they do not do the conversion. Besides using dictions,