Daily Inspiration Quote by Samuel Hopkins

A line like "Willingness to be damned for the glory of God" lands with the chill of religious extremity because it flips the usual bargain of faith. Salvation isn’t the prize; God’s sovereignty is. Hopkins, a New England cleric in the Edwardsean Calvinist tradition, is working inside a theological world where divine glory is the center of gravity and human beings are radically decentered. The phrase is designed to sound impossible by ordinary moral instincts. That’s the point: it makes sincerity measurable by how far it can go against self-interest.

The intent is pastoral and polemical at once. Hopkins is pushing what his movement called “disinterested benevolence” - love of God purified of calculation. If you only want God because God will save you, then you’re still loving yourself. The scandalous willingness to accept damnation becomes the stress test that exposes hidden spiritual narcissism: Are you devoted to God’s goodness, or to your own rescue?

The subtext is also about power, and it’s not subtle. This is a community wrestling with revival-era anxieties, moral discipline, and the fear that emotion could masquerade as faith. Hopkins’s formulation tries to outflank hypocrisy by demanding an interior posture no one can easily fake. It also normalizes a severe spiritual psychology: the self must be broken, even annihilated, for piety to count. In that severity lies its rhetorical force - and its danger. It turns devotion into a willingness to consent to one’s own erasure, sanctifying the most total form of surrender as the highest form of freedom.