Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Well, this will be my last week with you. I'm Jacob Moore. If I haven't had the pleasure of meeting anybody, some of you, that might be a reason for rejoicing that I will not be back up here. Well, you can come tell me after the fact if that's true. But we're going to be covering the Awakenings in America particularly. There is an awakening element over in England, but we're not going to really think about that too much.
[00:00:22] And you'll see in your handout kind of what we're walking through. But it's Generally the year 1662-1875 is roughly what we're covering, more or less.
[00:00:31] And as I joked with three people already this morning, nothing happens in these years. So it's going to be exceedingly boring. And you'll find that to be true here. But one of the things just to help us kickstart is as the Reformation has moved on into the 17th and as we'll see into the 18th centuries, one question that in a kind of Protestant Reformation scheme that you're going to have to ask is about conversion and assurance. Because as you move away from the medieval Roman Catholic system, where baptism and the Lord's Supper automatically impart life and assurance and where you have penance to help restore you when you sin, you're just going to naturally going to have to help address pastoral questions of when does a human soul know that it rests assured of salvation?
[00:01:15] And if it sins, and even if it sins grievously, how can that human soul feel assurance that it has clung to Christ well, in the right way?
[00:01:26] There's the kind of Luther critique of Roman Catholicism in a lot of ways, was that it didn't make grace too hard, that it made it too easy. And actually Protestantism has to wrestle with these questions around conversion and assurance, and we're going to see that really come to the forefront in the Awakenings today. And if you put this from the perspective of a pastor, you know, how do you distinguish between a genuine work of God in a person's heart versus somebody who may be responding with joy, but is a seed planted in soil with no root?
[00:01:57] How do you do that as a pastor, and how does that affect your preaching?
[00:02:02] For instance, is it okay for a pastor to tell people to turn to Christ immediately and repent? You may have never thought about that question, but people have. I absolutely thought about that question in history.
[00:02:14] Or should you instead encourage a sinner who feels like there may be some movement of God in their hearts to utilize the means of grace, such as prayer, fasting, reading the Word of God to see if God will give them salvation.
[00:02:27] Those are the kinds of questions that are lurking and hanging in the air that give way to the first and second Great Awakenings. And so, first, I just want to. I kind of want to give you a flavor of what the New England particularly area felt like. Give you a flavor of what that kind of piety was before the Awakenings happening. And so we're going to talk about American Puritanism and the anxiety of membership that they experienced.
[00:02:52] So in New England particularly, the dominant form of religion there, of piety there at the time, is Congregationalism.
[00:02:59] They're baby baptizers. They still practice paedobaptism. But these are people who moved away from a presbyter system, though they still have infant baptism, and they have placed authority in the local church. So they're kind of there sitting in between Baptists and Presbyterians, if you will, if you want an easy way of thinking about them.
[00:03:16] And at the time, in the colonies and in Congregationalism in general, because you have that structure, you're going to make a distinction between what a congregation is, those who are going to feel pressure to attend on the Sabbath because they've been baptized as children. And in the life of the city, it's very much expected.
[00:03:34] Sometimes there's laws around attending the Sabbath worship.
[00:03:38] So you have the congregation who's expected to attend Sabbath worship, but then you have the church. Who are those people who have moved into full communicant mode? They're taking Lord's Supper. They have entered into church membership and covenanted with that body.
[00:03:53] So they've kind of actualized their baptism, if you will.
[00:03:57] Now, one thing that's causing a lot of questions in the colonies at this time was that as you're getting second and third generations of individuals in the colonies growing up, many men in particular are not pursuing full church membership. They are remaining kind of in this congregational mode of relating to the church. And ministers are feeling that that might be because the cares of plantation life, of business, of raising a family, is operating like thorny ground, choking out the spiritual concerns of their congregants. And so they feel like their congregants may have.
[00:04:31] Sorry, lost a step. There we go. I knew that word was out there somewhere.
[00:04:37] So while that's, I think, true to some degree that I think plantation life, the busyness, the raising of a family in a new land did maybe do that. The laity have their own hesitations from their perspective. So Many of these individuals in the second generation, they just did not think they had the proper kind of conversion experience to have a compelling church membership case. So why did they think that? Well, that was due to, at the time, there was a weighty, and I have that kind of outline, threefold process of regeneration at the time, where to have a proper conversion experience meant that you had to be able to articulate how you'd been convicted, which is that you had had the moral law preached to you, you had understood anxiety around your sin, that you had come under persuasion that you had a problem with God.
[00:05:20] But that wasn't enough for conversion. You also had to undergo what they actually would call conversion, which is confusing because we use conversion and they use conversion differently. But that's basically just that you're spiritually illuminated. You're seeing the need for repentance and faith and like seeking after God. And yet this actually still isn't enough for conversion. In their scheme. There is a third mode of consolation that has to be arrived at, which is the attainment of assurance of salvation.
[00:05:48] And you had to have all three of these elements in place and to be able to present yourself for church membership. And conversion was expected to take at like minimum, I mean, days.
[00:05:58] More likely it was a week or month long process of wrestling through conversion. There are some who wrestle under this for years, wondering if conversion is theirs. If you ever want an interesting version, I mean, people brought up Pilgrim's Progress, go read. There are certain versions with John Bunyan's account of his salvation. Go read that. And the way he's wrestling with his conversion and whether he's in Christ or not is a wrestling most of us just don't feel today, partly because of the revivals. We don't understand the kind of anxiety around conversion that many of them felt.
[00:06:31] So they would wrestle with this and a lot of this. Behind all this was this understanding that in original sin and the way people related to salvation, it was a purely passive process on the part of the individual. So people, I mean literally a quote of somebody who was wondering if they were saved was that they, quote s must submit to God's decision even if it does not end in my favor.
[00:06:54] That's the kind of way they thought about I have to kind of pray and read and hope that I see God finally do something in me before I actually know I'm converted.
[00:07:02] So that's one element that's going on is this weighty conversion process that they labored under. Another element of congregationalism was what they called the Quote, godly walk.
[00:07:13] That meant they took seriously their piety. And there's a lot of positive elements to this. I don't want to be too negative about this, but they believed that one had to have life in God and that life in God was best discerned through seeing spiritual fruit. So basically, do you want to know if God's doing a work in your heart? Well, you got to give it time, because you're going to need to see if God actually does something that only God can do. And if you see something only God can do, then you can say, God's done something in your life, which is that kind of consolation, peace. And so they would commit themselves very seriously to piety and to a godly walk.
[00:07:48] And one of the major membership words that comes up when people present themselves is this concept of duty.
[00:07:55] The word duty emerges heavily onto the scene in the 17th century. And they hoped that they had a proper godly walk as a sign that they'd been truly regenerated and that they would look to that fruit for their assurance of that. So that's kind of how they were thinking. Now, this is a pretty serious, sometimes severe concept of conversion. And this godly walk, it made people very hesitant to join the church and especially to think about taking the Lord's Supper, which still had a largely more sacramental context than what we tend to think here at ubc.
[00:08:28] So especially given the language surrounding not taking the Lord's Supper unworthily, people would face existential dread at the thought of taking that unworthily.
[00:08:38] In fact, 1 Corinthians 11:29 warning about taking the Lord's Supper unworthily is one of the top five verses that people wrestled through before joining the church.
[00:08:47] Just think about how different that feels than what you've ever heard here. And you can feel they're thinking differently. They're weighing the weight of joining a church very differently.
[00:08:58] And so that was one of the top five verses that people had to wrestle through before they could ever join a church.
[00:09:04] It was, quote, a matter of terror to one communicant candidate that they. Some never overcame, some never got confident that they could take it worthily. And so Mary Sanders, I have a quote by her there. She's one puritan in the 17th century. She said, I sin in coming unworthily, and I sin in staying away unworthily. And that just sums up really well the kind of Puritan anxiety over membership and over seeking assurance in God.
[00:09:29] And, you know, the laity aren't just making this up. It is True that the English Puritans at the time actually are critiquing the American Puritans, probably for narrowing the gates of the church a little too much, for putting excessive emphasis on these things. So while the ministers kind of maybe feel like their people have lost a step, there is, like, legitimate historical reason to think like the ministers are maybe placing undue weight on certain things, as people have to pass this test of relations, as they called it, to join the church.
[00:09:57] Well, what you get then is functionally, actually people who. You have a generation that's remaining baptized, but they're not joining the church. So when the second generation has kids, well, can you baptize those kids? Well, no, because those kids can only be baptized if their parents are full members of the church. And you have a lot of parents who have never taken that step into full communication with the church. So to keep close ties between the colonies and the church, Puritans, they started to try to address these issues. They started to make accommodations for the weak. The 1648 platform of church discipline comes out, and it basically encourages churches to accept new communicants on the basis of the weakest measure of faith. So you can already hear they're trying to say, look for.
[00:10:42] Try to give more charity to what faith might be as they do that, and what kind of comes about from that. There's a famous thing called the halfway covenant, which is actually the term its critics give it. But in 1662, they passed what's usually referred to as the halfway covenant, and that allowed children whose grandparents were full members to present their grandchildren for baptism. So you've kind of just like, solved this issue of what do you have with all these, like, baptized parents who have not joined the church, but we need to, like, baptize their kids. And this halfway covenant kind of emerges to allow those children to be baptized and bring them in, and that kind of continues to participate broad life in the church, in the city. And then in 1677, Solomon Stoddard, who's the grandfather of Jonathan Edwards, he is kind of emblematic of like, another push towards kind of trying to be more open. He opens up the Lord's Supper to anyone and his.
[00:11:39] Well, not anyone. His qualifications are that they must be above the age of 14, they must live morally, and they must have catechistical knowledge. So they have to be trained in catechesis. They have to know long and short confessions, essentially statements of faith and that whatnot. But as long as they do those things, they're invited to come, even if not full church members. And so you can feel like, okay, we've got this anxiety and dread. We're trying to make accommodations, but how wise or helpful are those accommodations is now becoming, like a legitimate question.
[00:12:08] And into this, we're going to get into a lot of revival. So there are glimmers of Revival. In 1727, there's an earthquake that happens in the New England region. And, I mean, that scares a lot of people. They see that as divine judgment, and they respond. And then in the 1730s, there's these scattered kind of small awakenings. But really, when you think about the first Great Awakening, you think probably about George Whitefield, and that's who we're going to think about, who enters into this scene.
[00:12:34] Things are never going to be quite the same after Whitefield. I mean, truly. I mean, Thomas Kidd's biography on him is that he's our spiritual founding father. And there's a lot of credibility to that kind of historical claim. So he's a Reformed Anglican. Whitfield is. But he's going to preach this new birth that is, at the time, materially different.
[00:12:55] Huh, Anglican? Yes. Reformed Anglican, yes. So he's English, and he's coming over and he's.
[00:13:04] Yeah, Reformed in his. In his basic convictions. And he's going to reshape a lot of American Protestantism. And it's hard to capture the excitement that would have been felt when he came. You know, there are notes, as when he toured in 1740, that the people would just drop their tools in the field. I mean, if, you know, if you. It's like, if you want to see left behind, just go to 1740 and look for all the tools left. And you're like, wow, it really did happen.
[00:13:32] So, yeah, these people would just drop everything. Sometimes they would hear that Whitfield would be somewhere in an hour and a half, and they'd have 12 miles to cover. You don't have time to take second. You're like, should we go? You're like, you're either going or you're not. And people went such that people probably ran into the first traffic jams that ever occurred in America on horseback.
[00:13:52] It's wild. I mean, Matt Phillips would have been probably like, why don't people know the zipper merge here? Or something like that. But none of us have ever figured that out.
[00:14:01] So Whitfield comes in. He's very exciting. He's a gifted entrepreneur as well as a preacher, and he's mastered this kind of newspaper culture that has come up. So wherever he goes, the newspapers are helping people know that he's going to be there. So he has large audiences wherever he arrived. He really does quite a bit with that. And New Englanders would have never heard anything like George Whitefield before his preaching. It fully leveraged what was famous to be a very distinct voice from an oratory perspective. And he has a theatrical background and oh boy, he can put that to effect. He delivers these short homilies that use extemporaneous speech. They have voice modulation in them that would have been very different. They have these extravagant bodily gestures and tearful outbursts that are captivating. They've just never seen anyone preach with this kind of passion. Enthusiasm would have been a word they would have used to describe him.
[00:14:56] And the themes of his sermons would have largely focused on election and conversion, while insisting on this necessity of a new birth for conversion and even where assurance should be looked for and the immediacy too, of the. Of sinners being able to go to Christ quickly. So he's doing that. And though he's a reformed Anglican, some things that are really. That he does that's really commendable is he's working across a lot of denominational lines. So he's able to come in and he's able to work with some Congregationalists.
[00:15:26] They get into it. I'll get there in a second. But he's also really close with the Wesleys in England. They were part of the Holy Club together. So he has strong sympathies for the Methodists and he's very warmly received by Baptists in the colonies. And so he takes these scattered awakenings and George Whitefield's really kind of unites all those little kind of tremors into a kind of knitted together movement that is going to basically birth evangelicalism as we know it. If you want to know where the birth of evangelicalism is, they would have called them Whitfield Arians at the beginning.
[00:15:58] So that's the kind of first term that would take. Tend to start describing evangelicals and as a movement that we just take for granted that we kind of have this sense of like there's an evangelical movement. That's not true before Whitefield, because Whitefield moves across denominational lines because he kind of claims the whole world is his parish, which we'll get into some ways in which that's actually troubling in a second. But because he does that, he does positively gift us this sense of evangelical identity that we honestly does a lot of good in a lot of instances.
[00:16:29] And so that's something that he does. And even that knitting together those movements, the modern missions movement that's going to emerge in the next 50 to 100 years probably can't happen at least as quickly or as well if he doesn't build some of those building blocks in it. So if you've ever been grateful for the modern missions movement, I mean, we have to at least give some gratitude to George Whitfield for influencing the way he's bringing together a scattered kind of parish bound sense of religion and uniting it. And that's just something like we can be grateful for a lot of the real fruit that even, not even just in his time, but that we've seen go throughout the world in terms of spreading the gospel.
[00:17:08] Whitfield has a lot of gratitude owed to him for that.
[00:17:12] So these sermons that he preached, they shook the ground that people walked on. Though as positive as we just said those things are, there are some polemical negative edges to some of his preaching. He is coming. He's not just preaching election and conversion. He is also putting on a full frontal assault on this godly walk that we talked about. He, this sense of duty that characterizes the Congregationalists.
[00:17:35] He, he just thinks that's sandy foundations. And he goes straight after the things that would have most have built up assurance in the people at the time. And this means that Whitefield's preaching is going to cause a lot of ruptures within the Congregational churches.
[00:17:50] Before Whitefield, like I said, people were born in this orderly system. They were born into like parishes that have boundaries. They were born into settled ministers and they knew what a godly walk meant and looked like.
[00:18:02] But with Whitefield and these other itinerant preachers who are springing up around him with the awakening, they're taking stock. They're being told that this is a sandy foundation.
[00:18:12] And things like infant baptism, family upbringing, devotional routines, these are all looking very negative and cynical to them.
[00:18:20] And part of this is because Whitefield didn't just attack Congregationalist ideas, unfortunately, he attacks Congregationalists themselves.
[00:18:28] He attacks Congregationalist ministers in ways that I didn't love as I read about it personally. He would claim that they would have orthodox beliefs, but he would claim in sermons that they were like Nicodemus, that when they heard about this new birth, they said, how can these things be implying that they're Pharisees, teachers of the law, who have no regenerative reality within themselves, no matter how honest, no matter how serious they were in their spiritual and worldly duties, they would start to be labeled as Pharisees. As hypocritical guides who would never enter the kingdom of heaven unless they too repented. And you can start to imagine like, that would be really troubling to experience.
[00:19:07] But I think those Pharisees had some good reasons to ask questions about the revival, because the new birth that Whitefield was preaching, it was being attended by a lot of these extemporaneous kind of physical expressions of the Spirit that were happening in these meetings. And while Whitefield himself tried to remain a little more cautious than some of his other New Light kind of revivalists, he still did give more credence to some of these things than we might have expected.
[00:19:32] One of the signs of conversion that people started to latch onto in this time was what they called biblical impulses.
[00:19:38] And what that looked like was that they would say, quote from the mouth of newborn babes, the Lord would establish his praise. And what that looked like was that when people got saved, there would be this, like, string of extemporaneous utterances. There would basically be biblical quotes, a blending together of like 5 to 10 scriptural references in this long kind of exclamation of praise to God. And they started to point to that. They're like, that's when, you know, the Spirit has implanted itself in the heart. That's when conversion has taken root.
[00:20:08] And, you know, you can probably understand how that's going to be problematic in some of its own ways. And Whitefield gives a lot of credibility to this.
[00:20:17] And Jonathan Edwards even warns him that he's kind of over relying on these biblical impulses as evidence of what is happening. And that's kind of the thing that the Pharisees, the Congregationalists, are like, we're not really sure about this. This seems maybe disorderly, chaotic, and they are wondering about that.
[00:20:37] But these charismatic outpourings continued on, and the established ministers were really hesitant. But Whitefield and some of the other new lights continued to push in that direction. And we'll get to two guys who push in it even more. But one thing I do want to just commend Whitefield for is while that was true, and he overleaned on those, one thing we can just be grateful for, to end with one more positive note on him, is he shows us a vision of Calvinism at the time that preaches the gospel cheerfully, that preaches a God who's ready to accept you quickly.
[00:21:10] And he shows us that that's compatible with kind of Calvinistic instincts. And I think that, again, is a good model for us, something we can take away from Whitefield's. Preaching. So while some of the evidence of conversion that he pointed to we might not love, the model of kind of cheerful, joyful, passionate preaching mixed with Calvinistic Reformed doctrine is something that Whitefield does that not a lot of people before him had really mastered or done very well. And we preach that way today. In a lot of ways, we're recipients of Whitefield when we hear that kind of preaching, even here at ubc.
[00:21:43] So that's a little bit on Whitfield. I'm going to go through the radical new lights, Andrew Croswell and James Davenport, and then I'll take questions if you've got anything burning.
[00:21:50] But I want to cover a couple people that don't often get mentioned who are kind of like run behind Whitefield and will help you understand why some of the awakening gets even more complicated than just Whitefield versus the Congregationalists.
[00:22:01] Because there's a few revivalists and they would have called them the new lights versus the old lights anyway. You can hear the kind of derogatory claim there. But the new lights would have claimed that they were doing something new.
[00:22:14] Surprise.
[00:22:15] But two figures that really stood out are Andrew Croswell and James Davenport.
[00:22:20] And just to talk about them, Croswell was notable for downplaying the legal preaching and lengthy preparation that conviction took to work into a person's heart. He absolutely disagreed with that. And he embraced Whitefield's sense of the new birth and believed it could happen quickly. He argued that ministers should call people to repent immediately. That might not be shocking now, but that was shocking then, that you could do that. And behind this all was Croswell's growing conviction that, quote, all men should be pressed to believe that Christ and forgiveness are theirs not in possession, but in right or grant only.
[00:22:54] So the what he's getting at is that all men have been granted an ability to hear the gospel, and God has granted them the ability to respond, and he's making that claim.
[00:23:04] So they don't possess the gospel prior to hearing it, and they don't have it in right, but they do have a grant to respond, and he believes in that. And so while they don't have the benefits, they do have the legitimate choice. And he's getting this conviction. He's kind of outworking this from the Merrow brethren in Scotland. If any of you have ever read the Whole Christ by Sinclair Ferguson, you'll be familiar with some of this controversy. And that actually makes us probably sympathetic to Croswell because he's very much a kind of Merrow brethren. Kind of vibe in a lot of ways.
[00:23:32] But he basically believes you can say to any crowd anywhere, Jesus Christ is yours.
[00:23:37] And that's actually scandalous at the time. Just again, remember, he's kind of a radical figure. So if you've ever thought, like, hey, is there a problem with saying Jesus Christ is yours? Just know you've skipped a whole host of theological debates about that.
[00:23:49] But it's the foundation of faith for him, that Jesus Christ can be held out to sinners and can be truly responded to. That's where faith exists, that they can legitimately know that Christ died for you. Because if you're really leaning on, like, because if you don't want to breed false assurance in a heart, the reason that that's problematic is, like, if you say Jesus Christ died for you, but you don't know if somebody's elect or not, you don't know if they're actually going to be one of the saved or not. Did Jesus die for them?
[00:24:14] That's just a short way to introduce you to, like, you know, you got to actually kind of answer that question and decide, well, can I actually meaningfully say Jesus Christ died for you? If actually your sins won't be atoned for at the end of all things?
[00:24:25] That's like a debate you've got to enter into. We would, I think, side with Croswell that, yes, you can say that there's a sense in which Jesus Christ is the savior of all mankind, but especially of those who believe. And I think we just have to. We have to hold those tensions. And so Croswell believes you can extend that invitation. And he points to biblical examples where people are converted. The woman at the well, Zacchaeus, they don't seem to need a lot of time to respond to Christ. And I think those are legitimate examples that he points to.
[00:24:53] And he actually doesn't think it takes seriously sin enough. He says, after all, quote, they may be devoured by the wrath of God before the sermon is done.
[00:25:04] Why then should they not be called immediately to get into the city of refuge before the avenger of blood overtakes them? So you can feel the seriousness of the weight of the sinner's problem. And he thinks salvation should be kind of commensurate and quick to address that problem, rather than slow when you're like, this is a problem. So he compares this to, like, if you imagine a mother who's rocking her child to sleep and she's like, you need to go to sleep. But then every once, in a way, like, keeps like, whispering in his ear, like, don't go to sleep. Don't go to sleep. And then, like, keeps rocking him, like, that's what he thinks the Congregationalists are doing. Basically, they're like, you should believe in Christ, but, like, wait, don't actually go to sleep and rest yet.
[00:25:39] And then, like, continues to just try to rock them. And this kind of image of, like, a baby being, like, unsettled or, like, being woken up from, like, almost sleeping is what he thinks is happening in the Congregationalist scheme.
[00:25:51] So faith and conversion for Croswell is a single moment when someone apprehends the mercy of God and realizes God is oriented towards that sinner, towards us, that he loves us, that he loves you. If you feel like you can say that, you at least identify with Croswell in that much, that if you feel like God loves you and that's the thing that assures and helps you, then you. You have a lot of overlap with Croswell. And while I think there are a lot of commendable impulses, again, one of the things with the revival is the polemics that come out against people are so strong that they raise concern. He once berated a group of church members he was preaching to, saying, quote, I think I have that in your hand. Though I have been at communion with you today, I doubt not, but if you were to die tonight, three quarters of you would be damned to hell.
[00:26:34] I mean, yeah, you can feel the weight of that. He's saying that. I mean, you want to make sure you're right if you're going to say things like that.
[00:26:42] So as extreme as he was, we can even keep going. There's a more radical New Light revivalist named James Davenport, and this is actually, by any measure other than Whitefield, the most successful itinerant minister of the revival.
[00:26:56] Whitfield's so impressed by him that he claims that he was, quote, highly honored in his gospel labors. But Davenport and Whitefield will kind of regret that endorsement over time. But Davenport was very radical, even though, again, Whitefield's embracing him, which shows you kind of what's more normal in the revival, at least in 1740. But he would open up revival meetings, then he would pray, and he would just sit down, and he'd actually leave the platform open for any kind of lay member who had these extemporaneous spiritual utterances to come forth and just talk. Sometimes they would just start talking from outside in the kind of crowd. Witnesses say that up to 30 people at a time could be talking just in this Chaotic jumble. And Davenport would kind of roam through the crowd telling people, come to Christ.
[00:27:41] Come to Christ. And just be ministering to them there on the spot as they kind of have these kind of charismatic expressions, if you will.
[00:27:48] And, yeah, he also gave up. Like, while Whitfield spoke extemporaneously, he still had a lot of memorized sermons. So, like, he wasn't, like, unprepared.
[00:27:56] Davenport actually meditating on first in Matthew, said, take no thought of what you should say.
[00:28:02] Actually takes that. And basically, like, I'm going to apply that to my revivalist preaching. And again, witnesses say, like, you just got what may be the first instance of the Donald Trump weave, this kind of chaotic, jumbled, but still mesmerizing kind of speech that you're like, I don't know what's going on. But Davenport is very much one of the first primarily persons to.
[00:28:23] Maybe. Maybe he should have a trademark on that. But he's very much just speaking whatever comes to him in the moment, and he develops out of that that he has the apostolic gift of discernment.
[00:28:35] He claims that for himself, which means that he can tell who's saved and who's not in a room. And he will actually divide rooms up at his meetings based on that gift of discernment and give to the Lord's Supper those he claims are saved and deny it to those who he thinks are not. And if you can guess, the ministers that he's going around are always on the side that are barred from the Lord's Supper. Apparently, most of Connecticut had carnal Pharisees for pastors at one instance, so you can feel just how dangerous he's going. But he's popular again, by any measure. He's one of the most popular First Awakening revivalists. And people were hungry and, like, looking for something new, and they were flocking to him. But his rhetoric and actions, they're pretty deeply unsettling.
[00:29:22] Yeah. Any questions on that? I know we kind of covered, like, those early people. Get into Jonathan Edwards, who's part of this, in a second. But any questions?
[00:29:33] I'm just thinking, like DVC are, when we do the Lord's Supper, we open up to those who are members of churches Congregational. It sounds like theirs would have definitely been a closed community.
[00:29:48] Yeah. How about Baptist history?
[00:29:51] Was it more of a close and then it became more open, or has it always been more open? No, it's probably tended more towards closed, especially in the particular Baptist confession.
[00:30:02] Yeah, there would have been more. There's debates about that. So I don't want to say it's monolithic by any means. There are people who are debating, even in England, like open communion in the way we would practice it. But it's probably early on, it would tend to be towards closed.
[00:30:19] You would want to be like in covenant with that church to take it at that church. Yeah, good question. Any other questions? What's the view of strict Sabbatharianism Starting to change.
[00:30:32] It will change a little bit.
[00:30:35] I honestly didn't get to see how much that's tied to the immediate Whitfield revivalists. But I think, yeah, honestly, I'd have to do more digging to know exactly how Sabbatarianism changes over this time. I didn't dig into that.
[00:30:51] Any other questions?
[00:30:57] Well, we're going to keep going with Jonathan Edwards.
[00:31:00] This is obviously probably, maybe even more famous than Whitfield, one one of America's greatest thinkers.
[00:31:06] But as we think about him in revival, his opinions on the topic, revival shift directly because of people like James Davenport. And I want to kind of trace, I think Edwards because I think his complicated relationship with revivals is actually going to mimic, I think, what a lot of us, if we study the revivals, would feel. And I think Edwards is helpful just to kind of document some of how he seems to change over time. So Edwards had originally experienced early forms of these kind of scattered local revivals in his pastoring in Northampton.
[00:31:36] And as the Spirit seemed to be pouring out on the nation in this 1740s tour, 1740 tour by Whitefield, he's actually asked to deliver his 1741 keynote work on the distinguishing marks of the work of the Spirit of God. And this is actually delivered one day after he just saw Davenport for the first time. So some of his cautions in that might actually even be a direct outflow of what he may have seen.
[00:32:00] But he's still at that point in 1741, basically assessing that the revival is a genuine work of the Spirit of God. And it's a really interesting work. There's a lot of really great things in it.
[00:32:11] Edwards actually even hints that this might even be the beginning of a post millennial reign of Christ that we're seeing, though Edwards is always too bright and too cautious to ever, like, completely give himself to that. He hedges around it so that he's. So that he doesn't actually commit himself to that. Absolutely. But he does think that it's a real work of the Spirit of God. God.
[00:32:31] It's still, I think, actually regrettable. And I think he changes his mind from some of how he Speaks later. The way he frames this work does make any who oppose revival seem like skeptics whose questions are going to be treated as if they're non believers. So in this work, he actually goes on to say at one point, quote, if any of you are resolutely set to disbelieve this work, I am ready to think they would have been disbelievers and opposers of the miracles and missions of our Savior had they lived in his days.
[00:33:00] So, again, even in a great work like this, you're just finding the polemics just kind of regrettably strong. He's basically saying, if you have questions and oppose the revival, you probably would have opposed Jesus too, which is just such a weighty, like, thing to throw down. You know, you want to. You want to be competent if you're going to say things of that strength. But it does show how strong Edward's supportive revival was at the time.
[00:33:22] He's even, like, kind of giving. He doesn't ever say that. Like, these extemporaneous impulses are, like, sure signs of a revival, but he is like, they're plausible. Like, it might make sense if the Spirit was, like, giving you a side of Christ, or if you're, like, experiencing the horrors of hell, like, could that overwhelm the body? And he's like, well, yeah, probably, like this kind of weird union of spirit and body. And that could absolutely happen.
[00:33:48] But. So he's kind of not endorsing those as the thing to look at, but he is kind of making room for them as a. He's making an argument why they might be part of revival at the same time.
[00:33:59] And so then he continues on in one of his famous sermons is Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. And many of you will have read this. The sermon is rhetorically brilliant. It's breathtaking. It's wonderful. And honestly, just the way it makes you remember how much we stand in debt to God for salvation is just fantastic. I mean, you're like, if God removes his hand, the way you would just plunge endlessly down into the horrors of hell.
[00:34:22] I mean, he's super helpful on that. But you do have to go back and put it in its historical context. And remember, he preached that to a church.
[00:34:31] And when you do that, imagine someone coming into UBC and saying to us that due to the emphasis on church membership, that, quote, the bigger part of those that heretofore have lived under the same means of grace and. And are now dead are undoubtedly gone to hell.
[00:34:44] However, moral and strict, sober and religious they may otherwise be, we know not why they are or in what seats they sit.
[00:34:51] Try to imagine that sermon is being preached to you in your local church context. And he's saying most of the people who probably pass through these walls, yeah, they built their foundation on the wrong things and most of them are gone to hell.
[00:35:03] You can understand why the Congregationalists are, like, really wrestling with this, because the polemics, the preaching, it's so strong and it's causing upheaval everywhere.
[00:35:15] And these itinerant ministers kind of get to leave town and they don't have to deal with the pastoral fallout, which, anyway. But Edwards, as he's moving through this. So that's 1741, and he's. He's kind of. That's where he's at at that time. But Edwards does latch onto this idea of the, quote, new heart that was a fusion of the spirit. The spirit is very central in how we're brought to life.
[00:35:37] But he is, while he's initially fascinated by these embodied responses of the spirit and revival, and he kind of like, wants to see if he can elicit them, and he seems kind of drawn towards that. I don't think that defines Edwards over time. So I think by the time you get to like, 1746, five years after the 1741 address at Yale, religious affections comes out. And by the time you get to a 1750 farewell sermon at Northampton, it seems to me, as far as I can tell so far, that Edwards is growing sober minded about the realities of the revival.
[00:36:06] He's moving from, like, making ways that they could be plausible parts of revival to downplaying them in a way that's not a complete change of mind, but it is an emphasis shift. And he's really leaning into the fact that, like, we need to make the right things the focus of revival, and we may have been making the wrong things too large of a part of that.
[00:36:26] And so he again had warned Whitefield that this could be the case. And I think Edwards is taking his own caution to heart over time. And so in his more mature works, ecstatic dreams, trances, voices, he really does not want to treat them as signs of the Spirit because Satan can imitate those things. Satan, as disguising as an angel of light, might be able to facilitate experiences that seem like imitation of the Spirit of God. We know that the Egyptian, I mean, he's going to evoke, like the Egyptians mimicking the miracles of Moses initially. He's going to kind of get that weird, like, trinitarian Antichrist Beast. And like the three figures there in Revelation, he's going to basically say like Satan loves to try to imitate God, to deceive people to thinking that that's God when it's really just the devil. So he says, what is actually the one thing that the devil kind of can't imitate?
[00:37:17] And that is why he steps away from itinerant revivalism and moves on towards talking about this, what's called disinterested spirituality.
[00:37:28] This is prominent and kind of as a way of describing some of the religious affections. The basic notion here is that an authentic converting experience is just a God oriented one because it's the one thing the devil like really can't imitate or doesn't want to imitate. He can't give glory to another.
[00:37:45] And so it doesn't like legitimate faith, doesn't pursue God for the benefits it receives.
[00:37:52] It doesn't pursue God focusing on subjective experiences. It prizes God simply for the intrinsic loveliness of God, the beauty of God. If this idea had a verse, it's Psalm 27:4. One thing I ask from the Lord, this only do I seek, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life to gaze on the beauty of the Lord and to seek him in his temple.
[00:38:15] There's obviously other Bible verses and there are legitimate reasons to be glad about the benefits we receive in God. So I think Edwards idea does have some limits. But generally at the time, this is super great pastoral wisdom from Edwards. I think he's exactly right, at least in his own time. And it's a helpful reminder to us the dramatic experiences around conversion and all these other things, like they are not the right things to emphasize what truly satisfies a soul is contemplating on the glory and beauty of God. And I think you see Edwards shifting to that as like, that's the thing, that's the main thing and anything else we should like move away from or at least be extremely skeptical of claiming that as the evidence for a movement of God. And I think he's incredibly increasingly getting more focused on that. That's a vital antidote in the time.
[00:39:04] And so yeah, Edwards actually is one of the first to leave off itinerant preaching, roaming around preaching in other areas and in other pulpits and others start to follow him over time. As the revivals kind of have these negative polemics. They're having a lot of like radicalism, like with James Davenport. There's book burnings and all kinds of things that are going on. And it's with those that actually, we get the sad backlash against Whitefield in 1745.
[00:39:28] So he. 1740, he comes. He's massively popular.
[00:39:32] Massively popular. But when he comes back, the president of Harvard college. Wigglesworth is his last name. It's a good last name.
[00:39:40] He says of Whitefield, quote to the furious zeal with which you had so fired the passions of the people hath in many places burned up the very vitals of religion. So Whitefield's coming back in 1745. And as he does this and as he enters back into new England, where he'd been received so popularly, there's more than 120 ministers in New England who close their pulpits to him because they are so nervous about the kind of enthusiasm that has sprung out of. Not necessarily from Whitefield directly, but through kind of like him and the way he then influenced disciples who were just left to kind of roam the land kind of unchecked.
[00:40:14] But it's not just New England. Official censures went out in Virginia due to their Anglican ties, where he had also been in some ways similarly censured. Presbyterians in Philadelphia are split over whether to allow whitefield to come. You just. You get. Those are, like, official, like, proclamations of, like, where he can and can't step foot in.
[00:40:33] It was worth noting that while Whitefield, like pioneers outdoor preaching, part of that is because he struggles to sometimes find consistent access into churches, because, again, he would claim the whole world is his parish. But I'll just tell you, when the whole world is your parish, nobody is your parish. And when you preach and you leave these ideas lurking, you don't have to deal with pastoral implications.
[00:40:55] I do think that's a drawback to Whitefield's style of preaching. He was a preacher. He was not a pastor.
[00:41:01] And I think these pastors have legitimate gripes. So that's all I'm saying about this.
[00:41:06] They had legitimate reason to wonder, are you actually helpful? Because we have to deal with neighborhoods and people not talking to each other and divisions and church splits. Where now we had one church, now we have four churches.
[00:41:18] Whitfield doesn't deal with that.
[00:41:20] He doesn't deal with that. And even his strongest supporters would even be forced to admit that he had fomented a, quote, spirit of wrath, bitterness, contention, scorn and derision in churches where just earlier, a few years, he had preached powerfully.
[00:41:34] That's really sad because Whitefield, like we said, birthed so many positive things. But his legacy is notable and his focus on the new birth, his Ready offer the gospel. There's so many things in which our evangelical impulses are owed to him.
[00:41:47] And I just am horribly. If you hear anything, it's like there's just a lot of conflict as I study the man and as I studied the revival.
[00:41:54] And Edwards is somebody who I think is a good tone of like he's changing over time as well in response to that.
[00:42:02] So as we get there, one other thing I don't want to ignore before we get to the second Great Awakening, which already doesn't get enough time in this class, but I don't want to skip the Methodists and the Baptists because, well, the Baptists, for obvious reasons, but the Methodists don't miss out on the Methodists.
[00:42:17] In fact, actually there's an argument you could come up to me and say I focused on the entirely wrong people and the entirely wrong groups with the emphasis, because the Methodists and Baptists are some of the most lasting spiritual fruit out of this whole thing.
[00:42:30] So they don't have the famous figures like George Whitefield kind of in their midst, but they are a dynamic engine of salvation. So Methodists, I mean, because Charles Wesley. John Wesley are basically like starting out contemporaries to Whitefield. So there's like no Methodists in 1740, basically. But by the evil of the Civil War, there's an estimated 1.7 million Methodists, 5 to 6% of the population in America. I mean, that's notable. That's really notable. And they, like I said, they were just legendary workers. I mean, the way that they would toil to reach out into the frontiers and into the pioneers, the kind of labors they went to, it's honestly inspiring, just like the work ethic that they laid behind their evangelistic zeal.
[00:43:17] One of the major differences between Methodists and Baptists will be they're staunchly Arminian. So they are committed. They think God is.
[00:43:25] We think this too, but they don't believe that Calvinists have a benevolent and kind God and they just utterly disagree with that. We would disagree with that too. Right? God is kind.
[00:43:35] God is benevolent to the world. They don't think Calvinists can really believe that. And so because of that, they emphasize the freedom of the will, not because they think the will is so great, but because God is so kind. And so he's eliminated in Christ's work all the obstacles to responding to him. And so they are staunchly Arminian, and we would still disagree with them on the way they would articulate how the human will works as it relates to salvation. But Again, they're just, they're legendary and their evangelistic efforts and save a lot of people. There's a lot of fruit, there's a lot of Methodists out there, similar to Baptists these days.
[00:44:11] But I do want to focus on Baptists because that's us. And as we try to drive into like, how does UBC come to emerge to cover Baptists? And revival is complex because the US there is not primarily defined by theology but by ecclesiology. What is the church?
[00:44:28] So there's no like unified revival theology. If you try to point to like a figure and be like, that's Baptist revivalism. No, probably not.
[00:44:36] It's much more complicated because we're a big tent environment. You feel that in the sbc, if you go to it, very big tent, that's not by accident. That's because nobody emphasizes, like Baptists, that a church is a covenanting body of rightly baptized believers, that they have a local autonomy to act and that they emphasize religious liberty in the ways that they do.
[00:44:56] And so you can make fun of your non denominational friends if they ever make fun of being Baptist, that they're just Baptists and are afraid of admitting it.
[00:45:03] So aside from making jokes at the non denoms, if you trace the strands of Baptists, there's basically three groups. There's particular Baptists. Bennett hit on them quite a bit last week. These are kind of the more urban educated Baptists. They have strong confessional and Calvinistic instincts. So they're aligned with like the London and Charleston confessions. These are the particular Baptists. But what you get in the revival is actually these separatist Baptists. These are the new, like Congregationalists, the Whitfieldarians who are coming out of Congregationalism. They're establishing their own churches. And as they're re examining scripture, half of these separatist churches will embrace Credo Baptist principles. And by 1770, Separatist Baptist churches in southern New England have more than tripled versus their 1740, 1750 numbers. So they're growing quickly.
[00:45:53] I will also just note there's free will Baptists that start up in the Northeast. They're forged by a guy named Benjamin Randall. This group is basically Methodists with Baptist ecclesiology. They're mostly Arminian, tend to emphasize freedom of the will. If you just go look around the SBC and be like, can I see all these things? The answer is yes. Again, because we agree on kind of polity. We're able to kind of work together for missions.
[00:46:15] That's just kind of how Baptists have always united in general.
[00:46:20] So separate Baptists, I want to focus on them because they're kind of the revival, the children of the revival. Primarily, they held Calvinistic instincts, but they are children of revivalism and they refuse to let theological squabbles get in the way of doing evangelistic work. So listen to what Separatist Baptist leader John Leland wrote. He said, quote, I conclude that the eternal purposes of God and the freedom of the human will are both truths.
[00:46:44] And it is a matter of fact that the preaching that has been most blessed of God and most profitable to men is the doctrine of sovereign grace. That's Calvinism in the salvation of souls mixed with a little of what is called Arminianism. Emphasis. There is mine on the kind of quote, but you can hear that the Separatist Baptist instinct, just a little bit of Arminianism mixed with the blessed preaching of Calvinism.
[00:47:08] For us at ubc, it's just helpful to know that this exists because we have both of these instincts. So separatist Baptists, because they tend to do really well on the rural frontier parts of the country, well, guess what? Arkansas was at the time rural, uneducated frontier, heavily uncultivated.
[00:47:27] And so separatist Baptists actually shape Arkansas much more than the particular Baptists initially.
[00:47:34] However, you live in northwest Arkansas, you know, we're actually not that rural anymore. We have become more affluent. We sit right next to the university. We're more educated, we have more confessional mode that's theologically influenced by particular Baptists now at this point.
[00:47:50] So we are this kind of mix of different things. We've emerged out of a state and context that's heavily influenced by the separatist Baptists while being theologically influenced heavily by particular Baptists. And if you're just attuned to that, you'll feel it like in our preaching, when we tell sinners they can convert right in the pew. That's a separatist Baptist instinct. That's a revivalist with Fildarian instinct.
[00:48:14] And yet when it comes to citing one, to baptizing children, we tend to move carefully because we don't want to falsely assure them. We want to take time. We want to make sure that they see genuine fruit. Well, that actually sounds kind of pre revival, almost particular Baptist. I'm not even making any judgment. That's fine. It's fine to have both instincts. It's just helpful for you to be aware of that.
[00:48:34] We will have both of those present and coming into our church, and we will feel that. And so as you work through issues, it's just helpful to attend to those historical realities because they make up who we are and they influence how we think more than we give credit to. And I think you can make different decisions and you can enjoy both heritages and you can make decisions out of both streams of thought. And that's totally perfectly acceptable.
[00:48:57] So how should we evaluate the first Great Awakening?
[00:49:01] I'll just say this simply. People at the time didn't know that religion was becoming something, quote, more than a form. I think that's a real insight. I think there's a lot of real evangelical roots, like I said, that are coming out of this. And so to reject the Awakening would just be, frankly, to reject your evangelicalism. Bonafides. We can't do that. We don't want to do that.
[00:49:21] There is much good, much new zeal, much renewed interest in not just the form of religion, but actually pursuing Christ and the new birth and a genuine conversion experience.
[00:49:34] I do think, however, historians like Douglas Winarsky, Thomas Kyd, I do think we should be careful about how we paint the Congregationalists at the time. I don't think they were as barren and as dead as the new light polemics cast them. In fact, an estimated two thirds of the first Awakening revival participant were probably already existing church members.
[00:49:53] So they're not necessarily new souls being saved, they're people being renewed kind of in their zeal for religion. And I think that's just helpful to keep in mind when you think about the kind of fruit and what's happening and if we take cues from anyone, I would say Edwards is a really helpful kind of guide to moving through the time again. His growth, his shifting thoughts, I think they prevent us from being dismissive of the Awakening. Edwards was never dismissive. He never thought there was no work of God going on. And yet he cautions us against over relying on charismatic outpourings, subject subjective experiences, these kind of pouring forth of overly personal preaching and everything like that that is going on.
[00:50:33] So that's some of my assessment there. I'll take.
[00:50:36] I got time for like a couple quick questions if everybody has before we quickly cover the second Awakening.
[00:50:46] The regular Baptists.
[00:50:50] Well, so you're talking about last week, Like. Well, I just. Sometimes when I drive around, I'll see a regular Baptist church. Is that like a particular separate.
[00:50:59] I don't know if I've ever studied where regular Baptists come from, to be honest. I'd have to. I'd have to stop and think about that. I don't know. Cole do you know anything about regular Baptists? Yeah, sorry, I don't know. It's a good question. I'm not sure.
[00:51:11] Huh. He's not here.
[00:51:14] Well, yeah, Cole, sorry, you're not here.
[00:51:18] No, you're good, Josh. He's hiding over in the corner. Fair point. Karen, do you have a question?
[00:51:24] What is this term?
[00:51:30] Arminian? Arminian, yes. So Arminian in Calvinism just shortly would just emphasize, like, is the human will free to choose God? And then does God save in light of that human will's activity? Or. Or does a human will respond because God has graciously illuminated in their hearts Jesus Christ? So basically you're just articulating like everybody agrees that God looks through history and chooses who's going to be saved, more or less.
[00:51:59] Arminians are going to say God looks through history and sees who is going to respond to him and saves on that basis.
[00:52:05] Calvinists are going to kind of say, no, God looks through history and elects people for himself. So election is the language of Calvinism, largely.
[00:52:13] Whereas Arminians, they're going to say no. People have real. They make real choices. They're not just like robots. Like God, like, chooses and then they make decisions. Which again, is probably not a fair description of Calvinism, but that's kind of what they think Calvinism is, is that God makes choices. So people are constrained to choose or not choose God, and they say, no, the human will is free, so God saves based on whether that human will is going to respond in history or not. Is that helpful?
[00:52:42] Oh, yeah, yeah. Arminian Calvinism debates are not by any means gone. Yeah.
[00:52:49] Yes. Would you elaborate a little more on Free Will Baptist? And also if you could comment on Northern Baptists, like, are you. You're talking about the, the Free Will Baptists that come out of the Northeast under Randall and local Free Will Baptist?
[00:53:05] Yeah, yeah. I mean, they're basically people who have Arminian instincts. So, like, they're birthed out of, like, they're Methodists. And what I meant by that was they're Arminian in instinct, their sense of salvation.
[00:53:15] They predicate a much freer will within that, like we just talked about, but they still have the same ecclesiology. Methodists don't share 100% our Ecclesiological Baptist organization.
[00:53:25] So these Free Will Baptists are people who are theologically Methodist mostly with like a Baptist ecclesiology.
[00:53:33] Does that make sense? Any comment on Northern Baptist versus Southern Baptist?
[00:53:39] I mean, you're going to get these different ones all over the area. I mean, the biggest difference between north and South Baptist is like, largely in my mind. This happens during the Civil War. And the split there over slaveholders like Bennett talked about basically follows a lot of those national divisions, as far as I'm aware. There might be more to that story, but that's what I know.
[00:54:02] Okay, I need to go through the second Great Awakening, and I need to do it rather quickly.
[00:54:07] So I do want to hit on Charles Finney, and before I get to him, I want to make a couple notes on Edwards on original sin, because Finney is going to depart from that. So it's helpful for you just to understand this. Edwards had a kind of novel concept where he defended human responsibility against Calvinistic critiques at the time. And the way he did that was he viewed the fall of adam in Genesis 3 as this matter of what he called negative efficiency. All that means is that God and the reason that man fell is that he withdrew his supernatural presence from Adam and then Adam left to himself. His tendencies turned in on himself and became selfish and committed sin.
[00:54:44] And that's how the fall of the world happens. And this is basically how original sin in Edwards gets defined. So we have guilt imputed to is through Adam. He's not denying original sin. He's not denying our union with Adam. But he would say that the way we experience corruption, it's not through an infusion of evil substance into ourselves, but rather it comes through our union to that same reality of God's withdrawn supernatural presence.
[00:55:07] And we're morally united with Adam and this spiritless life, and we all then turn inwards and sin and participate in Adam's original decision.
[00:55:17] There's a lot more that could be said there, but hopefully you at least get some of that. The way that cashes out is he makes a distinction between what he calls natural ability. He says everybody hypothetically, could choose Christ. The will is free, and it could choose Christ. But because of this environment kind of devoid of God's supernatural presence, we all have moral inability.
[00:55:37] No one will choose Christ.
[00:55:39] So the will is free genuinely to choose what it wants, but it will never choose Christ. You know, the way you might say it is we would choose just the same way you might choose Brussels sprouts for dessert. Okay? You have a technical ability to choose Brussels sprouts for dessert.
[00:55:53] And honestly, maybe some of you, maybe one of you is going to prove Edwards wrong, but not many of us are making that choice, okay?
[00:56:00] It's morally disgusting to choose Brussels sprouts for dessert. Okay?
[00:56:06] So as you turn to Finney, he's Working in upstate New York. There are other regions in the Second Great Awakening. And, and he's honestly even late in the Second Great Awakening. So full acknowledgement, we're using Finney as a poster boy for the Second Great Awakening. But he takes Edwards view of the will and he just thinks that's no distinction at all, that natural ability and moral inability is not a valid distinction. But instead of moving back towards the idea that we're morally enabled to choose God, he emphasizes natural ability.
[00:56:33] And he believes that the human will truly is just utterly free to choose God. So in that way he's basically Arminian, some would even say getting close to Pelagianism, if not there.
[00:56:44] So he thinks that these old notions of conversion that we've covered, that he actually, one of the pastoral frustrations he has is that he thinks they're giving people plausibility structures to hide from responding to Christ. And so what that means is that he would like tell people, you need to turn to Christ. And they're like, well, I have to wait at God's time.
[00:57:01] I have to wait for God to do something. And Finney was so frustrated by that because he wanted to put the ball in the center sinner's court and say, you got to take a shot, you got to respond, you got to get your head in the game. So he, he is thinking people are responsible for consenting to the gospel. And because he does that, he preaches a very extreme freedom of the will.
[00:57:22] And that's what motivates him in a lot of his evangelism.
[00:57:26] He also has this interesting concept of revivals and what they mean. So Finney is famous for denying that revivals are miracles.
[00:57:35] Now you might hear that on first glance and you're like, oh, that's terrible. And we would disagree with it. But what he means by that is that they're not miracles in the sense that if Christians employ the right persuasive means, revival always follows.
[00:57:48] So if we employ the right persuasive means to our non believing friends, revival always, I'm emphasizing that word always follows.
[00:57:56] That means that revivals aren't miracles because they don't operate outside of God's normal providence of the world.
[00:58:02] So people call him mechanistic, pragmatic, and he does functionally operate that way. Just know that he is not like truly pragmatic, truly mechanistic. He thinks that God has ordained means. God's people should use those means. And if they do the right kinds of persuasive work, God will always follow with revival.
[00:58:21] And so that's what basically makes him motivated to do the revivals the way he does. Because if you believed that God brings revival and has a one to one relationship with persuasive means, you would be working very hard to find the proper persuasive means to make someone respond to Christ. Which is exactly what you see Finney do. Which again, functionally makes him look and operate very pragmatically.
[00:58:42] But what we would disagree with him on is actually the premise that God always does revivals. That's actually where we fundamentally disagree.
[00:58:50] But Finney, his primary means, there are some ways in which they're very commendable. He two of his top means were anxious prayer and preparation. So his team would organize prayer meetings weeks in advance before he would ever show up to locations. So Christians were united in prayer for weeks leading up to these events, hating sin, longing to see a work of the Spirit. And they would also, once they got there, Finney, he would spend a long time going door to door and he would ask people about the state of their souls. And so when Finney stood up to preach in an area, I mean, he would name sin in specific ways that was devastating and had great effect on the people because he knew what the people were really dealing with there. Because again, he's trying to find out the right persuasive avenue to pursue with everyone.
[00:59:37] And so that's one thing. He actually gets to know the people he's talking to incredibly well and even sometimes will call out individuals in his revival sermons and name their sin and convict them. And that was actually convicting to a lot of people.
[00:59:51] And they would respond to his revivals pretty powerfully, at least at first.
[00:59:56] This culminates in his most famous revival that was in Rochester from September 1830 to June 1831. And it's actually here that he kind of famously perfects two of his most quote, new measures is what they're called the protracted meeting and the anxious bench. If you ever hear those terms, they come from this revival. The protracted meeting was essentially what was happening out in the western frontiers. It's a camp meeting without the campouts, okay? And they would extend days and people would keep coming back. They would just go to their home overnight. It was a, I guess, what is it? It's not a retreat, it's a conference. So anyway.
[01:00:33] But the anxious bench was this pew or room off to the side where convicted sinners, the anxious, they were called to leave their seats and move forward for spiritual counsel. Because Finney, again, he doesn't Want you sitting in the seats, maybe deflecting, maybe thinking that you're cool with God. He wants to get you in front of him and he wants to persuade you by all means that you should turn to Christ there in that moment and that the will, if it's pressed in the right ways, does and will have that ability to respond.
[01:01:03] So he does not want sinners to flatter themselves. He does not want them to think they're good with God. He wants them to come forward, forward and have to confront not just God, but the means of God's people as they press for a response.
[01:01:16] Finney would initially see explosive results in campaigns like this. But Finney himself would grieve some of the spiritual fruit, or lack thereof, that his campaigns often had. He even said once that he would come back to a place and it would be, quote, sad, frigid, carnal and contentious within three months after we left them. And it's just out of Finney's own mouth. I mean, he's struggling with his own assessment of how things are going. I do want to note that while spiritually Finney has a very.
[01:01:41] His legacy is unfortunately not very fruitful. His societal impact is immense. It's utterly immense. He is huge behind the abolition of slavery. He accelerates the abolition of slavery.
[01:01:55] I don't want to say single handedly, but it's got to be something close to that. Believing that the human will is free to choose right from wrong. He's going to say we don't have to like do this gradual incrementalism, trying to get rid of slavery slowly over time, we can choose good right now. We can discard slavery. There's nothing standing in the way of the human will doing that. So we should do that. And so he started barring slave holders from the Lord's Supper, which just was extremely contentious, but got a lot of attention. And then he would become the president of Oberlin College and he would make that school a key hub in the Underground Railroad. So that was a massive stop along the way. And even major abolitionist leaders like Theodore Veldt would be saved under Finney's preaching. And if you've ever read American slavery as it is and seen the work that Theodore Veldt does, I mean, it's massive. I mean, he's legitimately saved under Finney's preaching and legitimately makes a large national effort to help abolish slavery. So Finney's emphasis on slavery being just absolute moral evil and the people who are saved under that preaching really shows us evangelical Activism at some of its best.
[01:03:03] So the societal impact, again, of Finney is unqualifiedly just good in many ways.
[01:03:09] And that's something we should think about with him.
[01:03:12] So I'll conclude here, and then, you know, if there's a few minutes for questions, we'll just end with Q and A again.
[01:03:17] But as we look back from 1662 to 1875, these 200 years I've tried to cover, we see a complex, we see a beautiful. We see a challenging story behind us. You know, the Awakenings, they challenged a lot of forms of piety that I think were overly anxious, overly introspective, and they gave way to a lot of religious liberty. They birthed modern missions movements. They emphasized the new birth and conversion and the immediacy with which Christ could save all things that we can be incredibly grateful for. In the Second Awakening, we just said helped abolish institutions like slavery, again, something we can just be glad about.
[01:03:52] But these revival leaders, they were also, at times, they were deeply divisive. They caused church splits. They elevated fanatical leaders at time and even replaced deep biblical instruction, sometimes with emotional subjectivity. And that's something I think we can lament, and we can rightfully just look at history and say it was not ideal. And so at ubc, my prayer and just hope is that we have roots in many of these things. I hope that God gives us the evangelistic zeal of the revival. I hope that he makes us people that are anxious in prayer over sinners. If you ever read Finney's quotes on prayer, they are beautiful.
[01:04:27] He had a heart for prayer for sinners.
[01:04:30] And many of the new itinerant preachers in the First Awakening similarly had a massive heart for sinners. And I hope that we have that at ubc. But I also hope that we can have something of the Congregationalists and the particular Baptists who existed before the revival because they understood a godly walk. They stood. They understood the importance of covenanting with each other, and they understood the importance of having theological depth alongside evangelism. Those things, I mean, man, you think theological depth and evangelism.
[01:04:57] Haddon Robinson has this quote where the Freudian slip that seminary turns into cemetery as it relates to evangelism is unfortunately too often true. And as we wrestle through the Awakenings, one of my prayers for us would just be that we use this to try to figure out how in the world do we have theological depth with evangelistic zeal? How do we do that and do that? Well, because it's not easy brothers and sisters and requires much discernment and much prayer and much toiling after God. To not throw over theology for the sake of evangelism, but to also have theology fuel evangelism is unfortunately difficult. We sometimes oppose works of God. We are sometimes skeptical to what God may be doing. Because of all of our categories and our nuances and our caveats. We are slow to be involved in the work of the field. And so I just pray that we learn how to embrace all of these things that UBC is birthed out of and to have that evangelistic zeal with covenantal care.
[01:05:54] So that's my prayer.
[01:05:56] We got a couple minutes. Actually, no, we don't. I'm sorry. I took all our time. I'm going to pray for us, and then we're going to go. So you can come ask me anything afterwards.
