Jonathan Edwards was a Puritan minister from Northampton, Massachusetts, who played a critical role in shaping the First Great Awakening. One of his great works entitled “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” is considered a classic of early American literature. Edwards, as a Puritan, believed strongly in the doctrine of predestination. However, when analyzing the sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” one can also detect hints of the theory of Arminianism in the underlying meaning. This is because his sermon is based on giving people the ability to turn to God and accept His Grace or reject God's Grace and spend eternity in hell. So this sermon qualifies and compromises the doctrine of predestination. In his sermons Jonathan Edwards begins his sermon by painting for his congregation a picture of the hell that is expected of them if they do not turn to God. He states that “their foot will slip in due time,” meaning that as human beings we are all born of sin and therefore all deserve damnation (Edwards). This vivid image was put in place to scare the unsaved into turning to God and His Grace. First, it is evident that Edwards supports the doctrine of predestination when he states that it is the graces of God that prevent them from falling into the fire. This means that it is only the Grace of God that sustains them because “there is no other reason to be given, why [they] should fall into hell since [they] arose in the morning, but that the will of God [them] has held] on” (Edwards). This sermon quantifies one of the four assumptions underlying the Doctrine of Predestination, implying that people are held in the pits of hell because they are born in sin and deserve and... middle of paper... end of Predestination. It qualifies the Doctrine of Predestination because it satisfies three of the four underlying assumptions: all human beings deserve damnation due to original sin, salvation occurs by faith (God's grace), and faith is a gift from God. However, it also compromises doctrine of predestination because it disqualifies the second assumption underlying predestination: humans have no choice in accepting God's grace. Edwards inserts an underlying theory of Arminianism throughout his sermon because he exhorts his congregation to turn to God to avoid eternal damnation; this implies that people can choose whether to accept it or not, thus disqualifying the second underlying assumption of Predestination. Works Cited Edwards, Jonathan. Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God and Other Puritan Sermons. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2005. Print.