July 8

The theology of Ruby Sales vs. the theology of Jonathan Edwards

Author

David Barnhart
July 08, 2025

Bees visiting a pumpkin flower, 2025. Own photo.

Today in 1741, Jonathan Edwards preached his famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” setting the tone for the “Great Awakening” in North America with “hellfire and brimstone.” 

Today is the birthday, in 1948, of Ruby Sales, civil rights worker, theologian, and director of Spirit House in Atlanta. Her life was saved on August 20, 1965, when a white supremacist attacked her and other civil rights workers in Hayneville, Alabama, but her colleague Jonathan Daniels pushed her out of the way and took the shotgun blast instead. Sales has continued her work for liberation for all people for decades by preaching what she describes as “black folk theology.” 

Reflection: 

An excerpt from Edwards’ sermon: 

“The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours.”

Much has been written about Edwards’ famous sermon, both from a literary and a theological perspective. I believe it is a sermon rooted in the trauma of white European immigrants, who could too easily imagine the tortures of hell, because they had seen torture inflicted on their neighbors in the form of witch- and heretic-burnings and religious violence for centuries. American Evangelical Protestantism completed the inversion of Christianity begun by the Roman Empire by imagining God not so much loving the world as hating everything about it. 

I’m also particularly annoyed by the vilification of spiders and snakes, which says more about Edwards’ distorted theology about nature than about the God who made those creatures.  

Ruby Sales said, 

“We must look deeply into the culture of whiteness. That is a river that drowns out all of our identities and drowns us in false uniformity to protect the status quo.”

and

“We will not be free until we’ve all been redeemed from unredemptive anger.”

I find this last quote particularly poignant in contrast to Edwards’ vision of a wrathful God whose anger is entirely unredemptive. We followers of Jesus, if we are to heal the world, must not only critically examine the whiteness of Edwards’ theology, but its glorification of unredemptive anger. 

Jonathan Daniels, an Episcopal seminarian, did not sacrifice himself for Ruby Sales because God was so full of wrath, but because God was so full of love. In this an interview with Krista Tippet, Ruby Sales tells the story of how the struggle for civil rights made her cynical about a benevolent God, but eventually she went to seminary herself and became a public theologian for liberation.

Prayer: God, help us discern righteous anger, which is rooted in love, from unredemptive anger, which is rooted in trauma and contempt.