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All the Way Down to the Amen Pew: The Great Awakenings and the Revival Tradition
The church revival—a concentrated, relatively informal meeting or series of meetings, generally involving large groups of people and focused on Gospel preaching, individual repentance, and rededication or conversion—has become a mainstay of discourse within and about Evangelical Christianity. Many of our modern denominations in this country can trace their origins, or at least a period of significant growth, to a revival or series of revivals, such as the Cane Ridge Revival, hosted by Barton Stone and held in Paris, Kentucky in August 1801. Stone, along with a few other Presbyterian ministers, helped found the Restoration Movement a few years later—from which, eventually, sprung the Christian Church, the Church of Christ, and the Disciples of Christ. More recently, evangelists such as Billy Graham and Oral Roberts have based much of their ministries and careers on the revival model, and the pursuit of revival (literally, to “live again”) animates many churches and ministries, particularly those of a Charismatic bent. Indeed, if your church happens, by some freak of statistics, to recognize worship songs written previous to 1950, you may well sing “Revive Us Again” on a semi-regular basis. Such revivals may take many forms, arguably ranging from Vacation Bible School to youth group trips to missions conferences such as Urbana, but whatever the form, the pattern of preaching, conviction, repentance, and salvation (for now we’ll bracket the theology of those steps) remains constant.
Perhaps as much for its spectacle as for its spiritual results, the revival has also captured the imagination of many an artist and author. Neil Diamond crooned about Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show (pack up the babies and grab the old ladies and everyone goes), Flannery O’Connor’s novel Wise Blood features the failed revival preacher Asa Hawks, and even Moby-Dick includes Father Mapple’s whale of a revival sermon, as preached to the Nantucket sailors. Others have ridiculed the whole idea: Sinclair Lewis’ title character in Elmer Gantry is a womanizing and power-hungry evangelist, Twain includes revival preaching in the repertoire of Huck Finn’s conmen the Duke and the King, and more recently HBO produced a short-lived series called Carnivale, in which Clancy Brown plays Brother Justin Crowe, a devilish but increasingly popular revival preacher during the 1930s. And then there’s Ray Stevens, a regular on Dr. Demento radio shows gone by, and his, um, unique take, entitled “The Mississippi Squirrel Revival.” Let’s watch.
Alas, poor Harv Newman: “some thought he had religion, others thought he had a demon.” Now, I think we can safely assume that “a half-crazed Mississippi squirrel” was not, in fact, responsible for the Great Awakenings, our topic for tonight. But a lot of the structure and theology that Stevens pokes fun at does come primarily from the 18th and 19th centuries. To be sure, both revival among believers and large-scale evangelism have Biblical precedents, such as the rediscovery of the Law in 2 Kings 22 or of course Pentecost in Acts 2. But both Stevens’ parody and its real-life counterparts add some uniquely American ingredients. Perhaps the most important among these is the idea that the event is not merely evangelistic, in the sense of winning new converts, but rather also aimed at existing church members: “seven deacons and the pastor got saved…and we all got rebaptized, whether we needed it or not.” The call to revival, like John the Baptist’s calls for repentance in the Gospels, is for believers-- though as we will see the potential gap between “believer” and “saved” caused some rather thorny problems. To try to navigate those problems, I’m going to focus tonight on two figures, Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) and Charles Finney (1792-1875), and their respective roles in the revivals often called the First and Second Great Awakenings. Although these two preachers had the same basic goal, namely to exhort both believers and skeptics into a saving trust in Christ, the contrast in their methods and their theological bases for revival will be, I hope, instructive.
As you might remember from your history classes, most of the early British immigrants to the New World sought to reform the Church of England, and to do so by the purification of the Colonial churches, with the eventual goal of demonstrating true Christian community—a “Citty upon a Hill,” as John Winthrop put it—to the folks back home. So it’s not surprising that the impulse to revive the church started early, in the seemingly endless series of Puritan jeremiads that started with Winthrop’s speech onboard the Arabella in 1630 and arguably continued to the American Revolution and beyond. These sermons of lament, punctuated by warnings to the backslidden and calls for repentance, were modeled after the prophet Jeremiah, and greatly influenced Edwards’ thinking and style. After all, though he belonged to the third generation of Puritan settlers, a group whose theology and piety had undergone much revision and development, he was the grandson of Solomon Stoddard, a powerful New England preacher for some 55 years. Most notably, Stoddard engineered the “Halfway Covenant,” a compromise that allowed second-generation Puritans to gain partial church membership (and thus access to the Lord’s Supper) without having to produce a conversion narrative, provided that they lived moral lives.
While Edwards no doubt read and used Stoddard’s 1714 book A Guide to Christ, which was subtitled “The way of directing souls that are under the work of conversion,” ultimately he rejected what he saw as Stoddard’s theological liberalism. Instead, Edwards explicitly framed the revivals he led, first in the 1730s but also during the main Great Awakening in the 1740s, in terms of strict adherence to Calvinist theology and models of preaching, with the specific goal of strengthening church membership. Contrary to some stereotypes of the Puritans, however, for Edwards the path toward revival was not simply an intellectual, rational process. Granted, he used his considerable brilliance and erudition to craft sermons, plan and organize a return to what we would call small-group Bible studies, and try to maintain the always-precarious balance between being in the world but not of the world. For example, there is no evidence that he departed from the standard Puritan practice of writing out his sermons, and those sermons often read more like a theological treatise than what we would recognize as a call to repentance. Exegesis was paramount for Edwards, but exegesis aimed at an emotional, at times even visceral, knowledge and conviction about one’s own sinfulness and Christ’s free offer of grace. Edwards’ goal, it seemed, was to impress spiritual reality on his audience so strongly—though of course spiritual reality bounded by Scripture—that they did not simply learn theology intellectually but achieve a direct experience of God’s truth.
Let’s look briefly at Edwards in action. This excerpt, from a sermon he preached in 1736, gives us a good sense of his methods and goals, though I will not pretend to be able to imitate his performance. The title, “Justification by Faith Alone,” is consistent with Edwards’ Calvinism, as in his view Arminianism (then embodied most strongly in Wesleyan and Unitarianism, albeit in different forms) amounted to “earning” salvation by good works. Here’s Edwards:
[S]eeing we are such infinitely sinful and abominable creatures in God’s sight, and by our infinite guilt have brought ourselves into such wretched and deplorable circumstances, and all our righteousnesses are nothing, and ten thousand times worse than nothing (if God looks upon them as they be in themselves), is it not immensely more worthy of the infinite majesty and glory of God, to deliver and make happy such poor, filthy worms, such wretched vagabonds and captives, without any money or price of theirs or any manner of expectation of any excellency or virtue in them, in any wise to recommend them? Will it not betray a foolish, exalting opinion of ourselves, and a mean one of God, to have a thought of offering any thing of ours, to recommend us to the favor of being brought from wallowing, like filthy swine, in the mire of our sins…to the state of God’s dear children, in the everlasting arms of his love…or to imagine that that is the constitution of God, that we should bring our filthy rags, and offer them to him as the price of this? (13).
For those of you in or familiar with the Calvinist tradition, the basic pattern here is nothing new: man is scum, God is sovereign, and nothing we can do can tip the scales. Indeed, Edwards goes further, to claim that any assumption of human merit is unbearably prideful and insulting to God. According to this schema, conversion—admittedly a tricky concept given the Calvinist doctrines of predestination and limited atonement—does not represent a conscious human action but rather a recognition of one’s own inadequacy and a surrender to God’s grace, without which righteousness is impossible. Edwards clearly has in mind the story of the Prodigal Son, though of course he would focus more on the father’s grace and forgiveness than on the son’s decision to leave his pigsty (no comments from the peanut gallery about the state of my apartment) and return home.
But even beyond Edwards dogged insistence on human depravity and irresistible grace (also known as the “I” in the Calvinist TULIP), we should note his intellectual and highly methodical approach. Edwards’ work suggests that he saw no significant difference between the categories of “theologian” and “evangelist,” and he was quite at home expounding on theological nuances to prove his point. George Marsden labels this habit Edwards’ “characteristic fugal development of every variation on a theme” (153-4), an apt metaphor: just as an orchestral fugue follows an initial exposition with multiple episodes in various keys and sometimes for various instruments, Edwards started with a basic claim about his text of Scripture and did not give up until he had exhausted its possibilities. Sometimes this meant that he didn’t get to finish his revival sermons due to interruptions from distraught audience members, as was the case the first time he preached “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” in 1741, and it’s a far cry from the styles of sermons characteristic of his more popular counterparts in both Awakenings. But it makes sense: while their sermons were aimed more generally at conversion, Edwards additionally wanted to instill proper doctrine, particularly in existing church members. Thus he deliberately avoids what one might call “mere Christianity” in favor of doctrinal specifics—and while he welcomed individual testimonies, which after all were required for church membership during the time of first-generation Puritans, he always made it clear that an individual’s conversion was never of his own design.
And now, through the magic of broad-brush historical summary, let’s leave Edwards behind at his pulpit and jump forward a hundred years or so. By the time Charles Grandison Finney—named, incidentally, for a character in a popular Samuel Richardson novel—came on the scene in the early 1820s, a lot had changed. For one thing, though there were already considerable political rumblings during Edwards’ time, by 1820 we’re past the Revolution and the early days of the Republic, and in the often rough transition from the rule of the Founding Fathers (John Quincy Adams was president from 1821-28) to that of Jacksonian Democracy and, later, Manifest Destiny. We’ll get more into the religious implications of this political transition in a bit, but it’s also important to note that the United States was dramatically more religiously diverse during Finney’s time than during Edwards’. Emerson and the Transcendentalists were chattering about transparent eyeballs, debates over slavery (and the Biblical hermeneutics on both sides of those debates) splintered churches, and quite frankly a whole lot of people were wondering why they needed a church in the first place. For revivalists, life was often challenging, but never dull, in this rather target-rich environment.
Change was brewing within Christendom as well. In particular, both Baptist and Methodist churches had grown exponentially in the late 18th and early 19th centuries: to quote Nathan Hatch, “by 1820 Methodist membership numbered a quarter million; by 1830 it was twice that number. Baptist membership multiplied tenfold in the three decades after the Revolution; the number of churches increased from five hundred to over twenty-five hundred…In total these movements eventually constituted two-thirds of the Protestant ministers and church members in the United States” (3). Not only were Edwards’ Puritan Calvinists thoroughly outnumbered, but such variety made his denominationally-focused revival practically impossible. Besides, even with the relative historical distance from the fiery speeches of Paine and Jefferson, any association with conservative theology, particularly conservative British theology, was bound to come under fire. Certainly there were still Calvinist revivalists during the Second Great Awakening, such as James McGready, but the academic exegesis and staunch Puritanism we saw in Edwards simply seemed out of touch. So while it’s too simplistic to say that Edwards simply disappeared from revival discourse—after all, he was one of the most brilliant American theologians who ever lived—the emphases were very different by 1820.
Finney took full advantage of these differences. Originally trained and employed as a lawyer, he converted to Christianity at (where else?) a revival meeting in October 1821, and almost immediately began formal theological study under George Gale. Actually, Finney’s choice to pursue education was atypical among revival preachers of his time: as Hatch notes, it was not uncommon for converts to start preaching immediately, regardless of their respective levels of theological knowledge or intellectual sophistication. Jonathan Edwards, I suspect, would have had the Puritan approximation of a hissyfit. In any case, Finney, like Edwards, knew how to use the emotional effects of his words to theological advantage, albeit perhaps in a less sophisticated manner. If Edwards mimicked the bewigged and begowned university professor or judge, reading off carefully crafted prose (and what, ladies and gentlemen, is wrong with that?), Finney was part pitchman, part performer, and part preacher. He never shrank from using cutting edge technology and methods in his advertising and promotion—perhaps a lesson he learned from Edwards’ contemporary George Whitefield—often spoke extemporaneously or with minimal notes, and perhaps most importantly never hesitated to use his own story in his exhortations to others.
Compared to those of Edwards, then, Finney’s revivals were far more anthropocentric in the sense of his emphasis on human action and the necessity of human response to God’s offer of grace, though he did not (as some critics charged) teach salvation by works. At the same time, though, Finney’s exuberance and forcefulness earned him some enemies. On more than one occasion, he clashed with local clergy by implying or claiming outright that they were not really converted, and similar claims tended to upset the citizenry pretty much wherever he went. You see, despite the fact that Calvinism was waning compared to the Puritan era, the idea of the necessity of having a “born again experience,” a concept normal to us, was new to many of Finney’s audience members. Whether explicitly in favor of predestination or not, they believed that the type of clear, emotionally intense experience Finney demanded was not the only legitimate indicator of salvation. Likewise, many people got upset at Finney’s at times extreme pressure techniques—he was, after all, a lawyer—as manifested in his calling out individuals by name during sermons and demanding that they repent, a habit which prompted more than one violent outburst at Finney’s revivals.
Along with this fiercely individualistic theology, which tended to do away with ceremonies and rituals that many held dear, notably baptism and Communion, Finney also popularized the use of what was then known as the “Mourner’s Seat” or “Mourner’s Bench,” a chair or bench at the front of the church or meeting room where the penitent could come to repent and be prayed for. Finney renamed it the “Anxious Seat”—a term certainly suited to his style of emotional manipulation—and made it central to his theology. In Julie Jeffrey’s words, “the anxious bench set ‘sinners’ physically apart where they became the main focus of attention. Members the congregation, family members and friends, along with the preacher poured out earnest pleas, supplications, impromptu prayers, groans and even tears. Sometimes supporters even clustered around the anxious bench to urge the sinner on. As one observer explained, anyone sitting in the anxious seat ‘could hardly avoid being affected by the tide of emotions.’” However, despite this seemingly anti-intellectual and certainly anti-traditional basis for conversion and salvation, Finney’s own ideas about the use and practice of revival were highly developed. Sounding much like Edwards, he argues in Lectures on Revivals of Religion (1835) that
The very idea of anxiety implies some instruction. A sinner would not be anxious at all about his future state, unless he had light enough to know that he is a sinner, and that he is in danger of punishment and needs forgiveness. But men are to be converted, not by physical force, or by a change wrought in their nature or constitution by creative power, but by the truth made effectual by the Holy Spirit. Conversion is yielding to the truth. … The great design of dealing with an anxious sinner is to clear up all his difficulties and darkness, and do away all his errors, and sap the foundation of his self-righteous hopes, and sweep away every vestige of comfort that he could find in himself.
Now, obviously we could go on in the biographical mode all night, both because Finney and Edwards were far more complex and interesting than this thumbnail sketch may indicate and because thousands of preachers, theologians, missionaries, and of course everyday Christians made important contributions to both Awakenings. For instance, during Finney’s time both the Methodist and Baptist denominations split along racial lines (and split many more times along doctrinal and other lines), with the black churches producing a distinctly different kind of revival meeting. Similarly, though the Second Great Awakening in particular was characterized by a lot of itinerant preachers, Finney among them, we’re still mainly talking about the East Coast of the United States. In 1830, for instance, not much of the Louisiana Purchase had been incorporated as states, Mexico still owned the Southwest, and Boston was very much the cultural center of the country. And lest we forget, though most historians agree that the Great Awakenings were strongest in the United States—I’ll get to one theory on that in a minute—the impulse for American revival was both influenced by and itself influenced broader Pietism movements in Europe and England; meanwhile, missionaries from many Western countries were spreading the Gospel all over the world, likely using methods they had learned from revivalists in their respective home countries. Revivals were one important way of maintaining some sort of Christian unity, a cohesion that would prove vital—and more often than not, exceedingly difficult—in the face of the Civil War, of doctrinal threats from Darwinism and higher criticism, and of an increasingly frustrating apparent gap between the concerns of the organized church and those of the average American citizen.
Besides these general concerns, however, I want to finish up by suggesting a couple specific reasons why the revival tradition is important to us today. First, the concept and practice of revival has strongly influenced the very idea of campus ministry, even if it’s not exactly standard operating procedure for Bob to insist, ala Edwards, that “[t]he 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.” (Random fun fact: Jonathan Edwards College, one of the Yale residential colleges, has the spider for its mascot. Yay, Wikipedia.) Bill Bright, for instance, built his group Campus Crusade for Christ on much the same doctrinal principles that Charles Finney outlined and used, particularly in Bright’s well-known booklet “The Four Spiritual Laws.” This same spirit of revival has been evident in most Christian retreats, conferences, and camps that I’ve been to, though often the focus is more on a revitalized relationship with Christ than on a first-time conversion. Put another way, while evangelism proper does (and indeed, must) remain important in any campus ministry, groups such as Intervarsity have rightly recognized that mere evangelism is useless without a corresponding commitment to “feed the sheep.”
In much the same way, I would argue that Intervarsity’s own emphasis on student leadership, small groups, and discipleship also represents a legacy of the Great Awakenings, though perhaps more on the Edwards model than the Finney one. Edwards, remember, often used small groups and distributed leadership to maintain order and cohesion within the churches he led, and while I doubt he would deny any willing volunteer the chance to learn and serve in the church, he would also insist on some sort of theological education for high-level and/or ordained leaders. Similarly, many campus ministries, Intervarsity included, now offer substantial resources and in some cases actual coursework to train would-be leaders in Bible study, church history, theology, and so on. Yet at the same time, the point, as I understand it, is not to create a separate class of elite scholars—grad school does that quite well as it is—but to encourage and inspire our spiritual brothers and sisters to deepen their individual relationships with God. In other words, at least within Evangelical Protestantism, we’re perpetually balancing the needs of the individual and that individual’s place within the institutional structures of the visible church.
A similar dynamic—and we’ll finish up with this—operates in terms of the broader relationship between the revival and the history of the American church. Following Nathan Hatch’s research in his wonderful book The Democratization of American Christianity, I want to suggest that the Awakenings in general, and the revival more specifically, formed an important mediating bridge between American Christianity—in which, as Sidney Ahlstrom points out, we are all in some sense “post-Puritan”—and the key tenets of American political philosophy. Many theologians and historians have questioned some much-beloved principles of the American Revolution, particularly its focus on individualism and (to put it mildly) its disdain for civic and political authority, conflict with Biblical injunctions for peacekeeping and rendering unto Caesar. Likewise, though the debate rages on about whether America was “a Christian nation” at its inception, it is certainly true that people such as Jefferson, Franklin, and Paine tended to see organized religion as part of the problem that the Revolution was supposed to fix. After all, the leaders of the French Revolution saw the Catholic Church (and rightly so) as a major political force and thus focused their ire on priests as well as aristocrats, so why, many Americans were asking, should religion play any significant part of the New Republic?
While of course not the only factor, I do think it’s important to note the importance of the Great Awakenings in addressing these questions. Though it’s hard to pin down exactly how politics and Christianity worked together in the 1730s-40s and in the first half of the 19th century, mainly because political opinions varied quite thoroughly from person to person and church to church, I think it is safe to say that both these periods represent significant challenges to America’s national identity. With the weakening of what Mark Noll has called the “Puritan canopy” in the late 17th and early 18th century, and the corresponding rise in American economic prosperity and political clout, the Puritan narrative of America being a “city upon a hill” (see also Winthrop, Kennedy, Reagan, Bush, and assuredly not Obama) was no longer a given. If anything, in a complaint we still hear today, the established churches seemed irrelevant and out-of-touch with the lives of young Americans in particular. Similarly, as I’ve already said, in Finney’s time the vast amount of religious diversity seemed to make religion a buyer’s market: pick and choose what you think is true, shop around, and if nothing looks good, then make like Joseph Smith and start your own religion. Then, too, church smacked of hierarchy and old money, neither of which packed much of an ideological punch outside New England. What could prevent the watering down of Biblical Christianity into mere civil religion?
Well, though revival meetings didn’t address these concerns by themselves, and certainly didn’t do so overnight, they did demonstrate common goals between American Christianity and American democracy, and more importantly opened up opportunities for citizens to pursue both ideas in good faith. Edwards, while probably less of a politician than Finney or than many of his contemporaries, managed to harness the power of individual conviction and repentance and channel it into greater community and social cohesion. Along the way, he “carefully observed the social and political currents swirling about him and developed an elaborate theory of what it means to be a Christian citizen in civil community.” At the close of a survey of this theory, published in Christianity Today in 2001, Gerald McDermott remarks that “Jonathan Edwards shows us that true faith is deeply private (arising from a transformed heart) but not privatistic (devoid of active concern for society). His public theology is also a reminder that evangelism should never be opposed to social action. Rather, Edwards was convinced that a time of revival is precisely the time when the church needs to show social concern.”
Finney, as usual, took a different tack, but in doing so satisfied the desires, prevalent then as now, for Christianity to matter to the individual in a democratic context. Hatch notes that Finney “called for a Copernican revolution to make religious life audience-centered…he told ministers to throw out their notes, look their audience square in the face, and preach in a style that was colloquial, repetitious, conversational, and lively—‘the language of common life.” And Hatch goes on to quote another of Finney’s complaints in his book on revival: “Nothing is more calculated to make a sinner feel that religion is some mysterious thing that he cannot understand, than this mouthing, formal, lofty style of speaking, so generally employed in the pulpit.”
We can certainly argue further about the proper role of religious mystery and how best to communicate that to an American audience still itching for individual relevance, and moreover about the ultimate effectiveness of Finney and his occasionally televised successors. (That, incidentally, would require another Ray Stevens song: “Would Jesus Wear a Rolex?”) At the same time we evaluate these events and their legacies, with whatever historical and/or doctrinal distance that we can muster, I hope we can keep one thing in mind: we serve the same God that the revivalists did, a God who has proven himself quite willing to send shockwaves of a rather disruptive Spirit all the way down to the Amen Pew. Thanks for your attention.
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