e human and the nonhuman environment. The Rhetoric of Divine Wrath Clearly, Edwards’s anthropomorphic rhetoric destabilized in a terrifying way the Enfield congregation’s complacent perceptions of the world. It did so by starting from an assumption that Edwards and the congregation shared: that humanity’

their natural environment. Consequently, except for “the sovereign pleasure of God, the earth would not bear you one moment,” and Edwards warned the Enfield congregation that “the creation groans with you” and resented its subservience to human usurpation: “the sun don’t willingly shine upon you to give y

rican colonies as “the Great Awakening.” This was not the familiar pulpit of his congregation in Northampton, Massachusetts, but rather the church at Enfield, a town that had gained notoriety for stubbornly resisting the exhortations of previous preachers of spiritual awakening. From his scriptural text—“‘