“Your wickedness makes you as it were heavy as lead, and to tend downwards with great weight and pressure toward hell.” What student of American literature can forget this riveting sermon? It typifies the image of the hellfire preacher, the enflamed Puritan divine fixated on the terrors of perpetual damnation.

Philip Gura points out in his elegant short biography “Jonathan Edwards: America’s Evangelical” (Hill & Wang, 304 pages, $24) that Jonathan Edwards rarely reached the intensity of “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” which he first delivered in 1741, rocking an Enfield, Mass., congregation to the floor with fainting fits, outcries, and convulsions. Yet though “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” may not be representative of Jonathan Edwards the preacher, Mr. Gura misses an opportunity to show how the sermon is nevertheless evocative of the man and his mission.

In George Marsden’s magnificent “Jonathan Edwards: A Life” (2003), which Mr. Gura acknowledges as the “standard biography,” Mr. Marsden calls “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” an “awakening sermon.” These two words, in a way, say it all. Edwards aimed his entire career at arousing the spirit of faith, a joyful acceptance of an omnipotent God, and a dynamic desire never to become complacent about one’s faith or proud of one’s own piety. Only by God’s grace could the individual soul be saved. That simple truth – what Edwards called a “new simple idea” – had to be constantly reaffirmed lest believers backslide into supposing they held their fate in their own hands.

Edwards was a scholar – not only a formidable theologian but an avid reader of science and philosophy. He did not have a very strong voice and rarely rivaled the charismatic power of contemporary evangelicals like George Whitefield. Indeed, Edwards invited Whitefield to preach to Edwards’s congregation in order to stir them into an awareness of God’s awful sovereignty, a sovereignty they ignored to their eternal peril.

Jonathan Edwards sought joy through spiritual rebirth, and every rebirth story requires the death of the self, a relinquishment of old habits, a desire to reform. His name will forever be associated with the “Great Awakening,” the mid-18th-century evangelical movement that convinced Edwards that latter-day Puritans could recover the fervor and sanctity of that first generation who had come to America to establish a new Jerusalem.

Edwards’s work and life are worth careful study today, Mr. Gura suggests, because Edwards’s agenda is still our own. Like Mr. Marsden, Mr. Gura is a believer. Both biographers reject aspects of Edwards’s dogma but not the underlying religious view of the world Edwards exemplifies. In this sense, Mr. Gura has written an evangelical biography, emphasizing in his preface:

Edwards viewed all souls as irreducibly equal and capable of being touched by the “new simple idea” that subsequently transforms them into benevolent beings. History teaches us (as it taught Edwards) that such transformations are rare, but (again with Edwards) we must continue to believe that they are possible. Thus I do not write this book apologetically but rather in confidence that the nature of true virtue set before us, we can only do more good in the world.

This heartfelt affirmation is the biographer’s segue into a world that is every bit as complex as our own, one which for all the differences between then and now, remains remarkably unchanged.

In this sense, Mr. Gura’s effort to dissociate Edwards from fire and brimstone are laudable. Mr. Gura deftly limns Edwards as an aloof minister of the word. Edwards’s congregants found him rather stiff and taciturn – although anyone capable of climbing to his intellectual plane would have discovered not only a passionate man but also a sensibility guided by a belief in Christian humility and self-scrutiny.

At the same time, he was no austere family man. His devoted and happy wife furnished a household that Edwards’s congregants thought too luxurious, and his considerable domestic expenditures incited sharp criticism during the years of his ministry in Northhampton, Mass. Edwards had lived in New York City and missed it. Even then Manhattan, with its population of 7,000 souls, seemed more stimulating than New England.

Like Mr. Marsden, Mr. Gura worries that modern readers – that is, those who are not evangelicals – find Edwards repugnant. His Puritan obsession with predestination can easily be caricatured as parsimony of the spirit. Humanity shrinks in the shadow of this looming, vengeful God. Not so, these biographers contend. Whatever modern readers make of Edwards’s theology, it cannot be denied that he opened human hearts, instilling in his congregants a loving humility and positive energy that is not even dreamed of in crude portrayals of dour Puritans.

America is an evangelical country with a sense of sin and redemption that makes trivial the talk about red and blue states. Jonathan Edwards’s key idea that the self must continue to grow spiritually is not really so different from, say, Norman Mailer’s existential belief that we must constantly test (challenge) ourselves or die unfulfilled.

It may seem farfetched to argue that Edwards was the Norman Mailer of his day, yet Edwards’s profound engagement with the outpouring of emotion during the Great Awakening made him, among his fellow divines, a suspect and even dangerous figure.

To the “old lights,” the orthodox Puritans, Edwards was licensing self-indulgent feelings, and they felt called on to start a pamphlet war against him. The ecstatic responses of those who believed they had been saved by God’s grace might just be a trick of the devil, they argued. Indeed, in many cases enthusiasts quickly lapsed into their old ways or even gave in to worse behavior – as in the case of one of Edwards’s own male congregants, whose frenzied feelings turned to thoughts about sex and the female anatomy.

Emboldened by their new sense of self, such young men rejected Edwards’s efforts to restore them to spiritual discipline. To the contemplative Edwards, however, the backsliders were indicative of an innate human depravity. Some of the converted might renege on their compact with God, but Edwards had seen many examples of permanent transformations in believers who thrilled him with their humble quests to lead devoutly Christian lives.

Profoundly conservative in his theology, Edwards was nevertheless an adventurous minister. He learned from his congregants even as the flow and ebb of awakenings that occurred from the 1730s to the 1740s troubled him. How to sustain a spiritual revolution was his main concern. Preserving the status quo seemed to him a recipe for doom.

Hovering over both the Gura and Marsden biographies is the figure of Benjamin Franklin, who is called to mind because he would seem to be the antithesis of the dogmatic Edwards. Franklin is our secular saint, both biographers recognize. His worldliness and tolerance seem far more modern than Edwards’s. But both biographers suggest that in fact Edwards, whether we know it or not, is just as crucial to an understanding of American selfhood and even to the self’s place in the modern world.

If Franklin is the epitome of the self-made man, one who prefers in his autobiography to call his sins “errata” – a term borrowed from his days as a printer – the concept of sin cannot be so easily dismissed from the American lexicon. As Mr. Marsden observes, Franklin may seem the “progenitor of modern America,” but then how to explain why “levels of religious practice came to be much higher in the United States than in other modernized nations”? Britain, for example, had a powerful evangelical movement in the 18th and 19th centuries, which now seems forgotten. No wonder Tony Blair, a man of evangelical convictions, is so at odds with his own party.

The concept of sin is a reminder that no one is truly self-made and that our fate ultimately cannot be in our own hands – a truly terrifying idea that Edwards understood humankind has trouble accepting. Or, as Mr. Gura puts it: Of course we have difficulty in facing Edwards. Reading him, we are forced to consider the immeasurable difference between sin and virtue and how far short we shall fall when we attempt to bridge that gap without the insight that Edwards termed grace. If, finally, we believe that someone like Benjamin Franklin has more to offer us, we add only more proof to Edwards’s sense of the infinite distance between saint and sinner.

“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” tried to bridge that distance by awakening sinners to their sinfulness and its consequences: i.e., their blindness to the grace that would save them.

It is remarkable – isn’t it? – that the word “grace” still has so much power even in its secular ramifications. And isn’t grace precisely the wonderful reward that Edwards – no matter how you feel about his theology – sought? During the Great Awakening he saw his people become more graceful. This was not his doing, and certainly not just a product of their own striving, but rather a “gift” delivered from outside the self.

Perhaps Mr. Gura, who pays tribute to Mr. Marsden, will not mind my quoting the latter’s conclusion that “histories of America – of the modern world for that matter – need to integrate people like Edwards into their accounts.”