Theologies of the American Revivalists

From Whitefield to Finney

Robert W. Caldwell

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780830891788
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

For centuries, revivals—and the conversions they inspire—have played a significant role in American evangelicalism. Often unnoticed or unconsidered, however, are the particular theologies underlying these revivals and conversions to faith. With that in mind, church historian Robert Caldwell traces the fascinating story of American revival theologies from the First Great Awakening through the Second Great Awakening, from roughly 1740 to 1840. As he uncovers this aspect of American religious history, Caldwell offers a reconsideration of the theologies of figures such as George Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards, John Wesley, Joseph Bellamy, Samuel Hopkins, and Charles Finney. His scope also includes movements, such as New Divinity theology, Taylorism, Baptist revival theology, Princeton theology, and the Restorationist movement. With this study, we gain fresh insight into what it meant to become a Christian during the age of America's great awakenings.

Introduction

In spring 1806, sixteen-year-old Ann Hasseltine found herself in the midst of spiritual turmoil. “I often used to weep, when hearing the minister, and others, press the importance of improving the present favorable season, to obtain an interest in Christ, lest we should have to say, The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.” Her town of Bradford, Massachusetts, a small rural village north of Boston, was experiencing a revival, and Ann greatly desired to be found among the converted. Having spent several years in worldly pursuits (“balls,” “parties of pleasure,” “innocent amusements”) interspersed with halfhearted religious concern, she was now ready to give serious attention to Christianity. “The Spirit of God was now evidently operating in my mind; I lost all relish for amusements; felt melancholy and dejected; and the solemn truth, that I must obtain a new heart, or perish forever, lay with weight on my mind.” The spiritual counsel of others only intensified her desire to seek reconciliation with God. Her aunt assured her that the concerns she entertained were indeed the work of the Holy Spirit and that she should take care not to lose her spiritual impressions lest “hardness of heart and blindness of mind” settle in, after which it would “be forever too late.” Her minister urged her to “pray for mercy . . . and submit to God” and gave her evangelical literature that narrated others’ dramatic conversions. With that, Ann set her sights on finding a new heart. “[I] spent my days in reading and crying for mercy.”1

Yet mercy came slowly and only after an unexpected turn. After “two or three weeks” her anxiety only increased when she caught a glimpse of the wickedness of her heart. “My heart began to rise in rebellion against God,” she noted. Complaints arose in her mind regarding God’s injustice: he took no notice of her prayers for mercy; he had no “right to call one [to salvation] and leave another to perish”; he is “cruel” to send any to hell for disobedience. Most of all she noted her “aversion and hatred” toward God’s holiness: “I felt, that if admitted into heaven, with the feeling I then had, I should be as miserable as I could be in hell. In this state I longed for annihilation.”2

It was only at this point that a calm island appeared in the midst of her spiritual storm. “I began to discover a beauty in the way of salvation by Christ. He appeared to be just such a Saviour as I needed.” She notes that in the midst of entertaining these new views of Christ that she did not give much thought to her own spiritual status but was solely preoccupied with the person and work of Christ: “I did not think I had obtained the new heart, which I had been seeking, but felt happy in contemplating the character of Christ.”3 From this point on the narrative reveals a growing awareness of the wonders of the Christian gospel and an increase in evangelical patterns of piety. In the following months she filled her time with reading Scripture, praying, attending religious worship, and making resolutions for moral and spiritual reformation. Others were undergoing similar experiences. “Five new members were added to the church,” she notes on April 12, 1807. During this time she grew nearer to God: “I had a sweet communion with the blessed God, from day to day; my heart was drawn out in love to Christians of whatever denomination; the sacred Scriptures were sweet to my taste; and such was my thirst for religious knowledge, that I frequently spent a great part of the night in reading religious books.”4 Books specifically mentioned include Joseph Bellamy’s True Religion Delineated, the recently published biography of Samuel Hopkins, and works by the authors Philip Doddridge and Jonathan Edwards.5 Intertwined with these spiritual discoveries are pointed theological statements on God’s moral perfections, his benevolent disposition “to the good of beings in general,” Christ’s atonement, and the justice of God.6 “I felt that if Christ had not died, to make an atonement for sin, I could not ask God to dishonor his holy government so far as to save so polluted a creature, and that should he even now condemn me to suffer eternal punishment, it would be so just that my mouth would be stopped.”7

During these months her “many doubts” about her spiritual state gradually subsided as an assurance of salvation took root in her soul. A year after her first religious impressions, she recorded these last words in her regular journal:

But though my heart is treacherous, I trust that I have some evidence of being a true Christian; for when contemplating the moral perfections of God, my heart is pleased with, and approves of, just such a Being. His law, which once appeared unjust and severe, now appears to be holy, just, and good. His justice appears equally glorious as his mercy, and illustrative of the same love to universal happiness. The way of salvation by Christ appears glorious, because herein God can be just, and yet display his mercy to the penitent sinner.8

Confident in God and certain of her salvation, she no longer required a journal to test her religious experiences and could turn her energies to a life of radical Christian service. Several years later Ann married Adoniram Judson, a recent graduate of Andover Seminary, and in time the two would serve a remarkable tenure as missionaries in Burma, becoming America’s first well-known missionary couple.

For centuries conversion experiences like Ann Hasseltine’s have been a central feature of the evangelical movement, especially during seasons of revival.9 As the entryway into the kingdom of God, evangelicals held that the conversion experience served as the crucial divide in an individual’s biography: it spiritually united them to Christ, sociologically set them apart from the “world,” and vocationally molded them into men and women who eagerly sought to advance God’s kingdom on earth.

Often overlooked, however, are the numerous theological assumptions that undergird these conversion narratives. Hasseltine’s journal brims with assumptions that were shaped by her church, her denomination, and her revival tradition. For instance, we can discern several assumptions regarding the proper expectations of a true conversion: the length of her conversion was not sudden but drawn out over a period of weeks, even months; her religious anxiety at the beginning of the process was identified as being a work of the Holy Spirit, which could be lost “forever” if she were not careful to preserve it and allow the Spirit to complete his work; and the goal of her search for spiritual resolution was not merely the desire to follow Christ, but the genuine identification of a converted heart, one that prized divine holiness. Similarly, after entertaining new “views” of God, the accent of her account reveals more theological assumptions about the nature of God, salvation, and sanctification: a joy in contemplating God’s “moral attributes” (his holiness, love, and justice); a wonder at the atoning work of Christ that underscores how God can both uphold his “holy government” and justify sinners at the same time; and a gradual growth in assurance that slowly dissipated her doubts over the course of a year. Standing behind these statements lie long-established theological positions that cohere with an identifiable tradition of revival theology, the New Divinity theological tradition. The pages that follow seek to identify and explore not only this tradition but also other traditions of revival theology that informed the conversions of countless evangelicals in the century after the First Great Awakening.

What Is “Revival Theology”?

In the period of 1740–1840, American evangelicals thought deeply about conversion and the nature of religious revivals. The great prominence of revivals in the landscape of North American Protestantism compelled evangelical theologians to address a host of issues associated with them: the theological and experiential nature of human redemption, the proper balance of divine and human activity in the conversion process, the analysis and authentication of true religious experience, and the ways in which a preacher calls individuals to Christ. Consequently, they published hundreds of works investigating these subjects, from shorter works, such as Albert Barnes’s sermon “The Way of Salvation,” to lengthy manifestoes, such as Jonathan Edwards’s Religious Affections. These theological writings form a prominent subgenre in evangelical literature from the First Great Awakening to the Civil War that contains what we might call the numerous “­revival theologies” of the American revivalists.

Revival theology is more than just the theoretical foundations that undergirded the preaching of salvation by early American revivalists. To be sure, a revivalist’s soteriology, or doctrine of salvation, did color how ministers presented the gospel to sinners during awakenings.10 Thus in the pages to come we will become acquainted with the major theological systems that animated the revivals of the First and Second Great Awakenings, such as traditional Calvinism, Wesleyan Arminianism, and Edwardsean Calvinism. Yet there were other, more practical elements that factored prominently into their revival theologies, elements that were intimately tied to their soteriologies. Two of them stand out.

First, there were issues related to what ministers are to do while preaching the gospel. Numerous questions surfaced here:

• Is preaching the moral law (the Ten Commandments) a necessary prelude to preaching the gospel?
• Are ministers to direct sinners to use the means of grace (such as praying, reading the Scriptures, attending preaching services) as they seek God’s salvation in Christ?
• How do the doctrines of election and spiritual inability, if true, practically translate into evangelistic method?
• Should ministers call sinners to repent immediately, or should they direct sinners to wait to discern certain signs of genuine faith in the heart before calling them to repentance and faith?
• Should ministers employ a method, such as an anxious bench or altar call, to call anxious souls to come forward publicly and receive spiritual counsel, or should they leave it up to individuals themselves to seek the counsel of spiritual advisers after a revival service?11

Second, there were questions related to the spiritual experiences individuals were expected to pass through in their journeys through the conversion process. These questions included the following:

• Is it necessary that individuals pass through a period of spiritual distress known as conviction of sin before they are ready for faith in Christ? If so, how much conviction is necessary?
• Is conversion a lengthy process, or does it normally occur in a short period of time?
• What, specifically, are sinners to do to be saved? Do individuals wait for God to create in them a new heart, or are there steps they can take that render salvation more probable?
• What are the essential marks of salvation? How do individuals truly know that they love God and believe in Christ?
• Should converts experience an assurance of salvation immediately at the moment of belief, or is assurance the fruit of Christian maturity?

Revivalists in the First and Second Great Awakenings addressed these questions in their ministries. The different answers they gave drew them into debate with one another and generated several different schools of thought. These different traditions form the subject of this book. Thus, as we explore the theologies revivalists heralded in the First and Second Great Awakenings, our attention will be focused on the interplay of these three themes—their theologies of salvation, the ways they practically preached the gospel, and the conversion experiences they expected from those experiencing salvation. These three components constitute a given revival theology.

Revival Theologies in Early America: A Thematic Overview

This book is a historical theology of the significant traditions of revival theology that surfaced in North America from the First Great Awakening through the Second Great Awakening (roughly 1740–1840). This is a very complicated story, filled with numerous controversies and unexpected turns. To bring some coherence to what follows, our narrative will have three components: a starting point, a main trajectory of doctrinal development, and several side stories that add texture to the main narrative. In a nutshell the starting point consists in the “moderate evangelical” revival theology of the primary revivalists of the First Great Awakening, such as Gilbert Tennent, Jonathan Edwards, Jonathan Dickinson, and Samuel Davies, who preached a deeply pietistic form of Calvinism that they inherited from their Puritan predecessors. This will be the subject of chapter one.

The main trajectory of doctrinal development concerns the twists and turns associated with the Edwardsean theological tradition. Even though he was closely associated with the moderate evangelicals of the First Great Awakening, Jonathan Edwards contributed to the emergence of a new kind of Calvinism that in time gave rise to a revival theology that was distinct from the moderate evangelicals. The origins and transformation of the Edwardsean theological tradition will occupy numerous chapters in what follows, from its birth in Edwards’s writings (chapter two) to its first mature expression in the writings of Edwards’s disciples Joseph Bellamy and Samuel Hopkins (chapte...

Table of contents

• iii
• v
• vii
• ix
• 1
• 11Chapter One
• 43Chapter Two
• 75Chapter Three
• 101Chapter Four
• 127Chapter Five
• 145Chapter Six
• 165Chapter Seven
• 197Chapter Eight
• 221
• Conclusion
• 230
• 242
• 246
• 247
• 249
• 250
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press