Great Awakenings

O LORD, revive Your work in the midst of the years!

— Habakkuk 3:2

The Great Awakenings were successive periods of widespread religious revival in Britain and its American colonies, marked by mass conversions, fervent itinerant preaching, and renewed conviction of sin. The First Great Awakening (1730s-1740s) began with Jonathan Edwards’ preaching at Northampton and George Whitefield’s transatlantic ministry, alongside parallel revivals among the Moravians and in Wales.¹ The Second Great Awakening, associated principally with Charles Finney (1792-1875), turned instead to revivalist methods aimed at securing an immediate decision of the will, rather than Edwards’ emphasis on conviction of sin giving way to peace.²

Confessional Witness

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession predates both Awakenings and names neither; it has no chapter devoted to a historical revival movement of this kind. Its chapter on effectual calling states the confession’s own account of how God brings any sinner to faith, in any age, “not from any thing at all foreseen in man,”³ the same doctrine of grace that later Reformed theologians such as Charles Hodge invoked to assess the Awakenings themselves.

Doctrinal Significance

Charles Hodge treats the (First) Great Awakening as one instance in a recurring historical pattern of sovereign, unpredictable outpourings of the Spirit’s saving grace, alongside the apostolic age, the “Augustinian age,” and the Reformation:

After a long decline in Great Britain came the wonderful revival of true religion under Wesley and Whitefield. Contemporaneously the great awakening occurred throughout this country.⁴

For Hodge, the very unpredictability of revival is doctrinal evidence: churches and parents “pray and labour long apparently without success; and then, often when they look not for it, comes the outpouring of the Spirit.” Since these changes “must be referred to the immediate agency of the Spirit of God,” he argues, “with this fact no other scheme than the Augustinian can be reconciled.” On Hodge’s reading, then, the Awakening is evidence against Arminian or works-based accounts of conversion, not merely a neutral historical episode.⁴

Historical Development

The First Great Awakening (1730s-1740s)

The Awakening’s American roots trace to Theodorus Frelinghuysen (1691-1747), a Dutch Reformed minister in New Jersey’s Raritan Valley whose conversion-focused preaching discriminated between true and nominal hearers. George Whitefield later credited him as the “beginner of the great work” God was carrying on in the region.¹ Gilbert Tennent (1703-64), a Presbyterian minister at New Brunswick, adopted a similarly pointed style; Whitefield called Tennent’s preaching the most “searching sermon” he had ever heard, one under which “hypocrites must either soon be converted or enraged.”¹

Jonathan Edwards (1703-58) became the Awakening’s most prominent leader through both his preaching and his published defenses of it. Preaching on justification by faith alone at Northampton in 1734, he later credited that sermon as “the beginning of the late work of God in this place”; by December of that year, he recorded, “the Spirit of God began extraordinarily to set in, and wonderfully to work amongst us,” until “there was scarcely a single person in the town, either old or young, that was left unconcerned about the great things of the eternal world.”¹ Edwards went on to defend the revival’s authenticity, historically and theologically, in A Faithful Narrative, The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God, and Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New-England.⁵

The American revival had transatlantic parallels. In Saxony, a Moravian community of persecuted Bohemian Protestants gathered at Herrnhut under Count Nicholas von Zinzendorf (1700-60); a shared “descent of the Spirit” on August 13, 1727, produced an unbroken hourly prayer chain and, from 1732, the first organized Protestant missionary sending, beginning with St. Thomas in the West Indies.¹ In the same decade, a Methodist revival began in Wales under Howell Harris (1714-73) and Daniel Rowland (1713-90), both converted independently in 1735; by 1742, with the hymn writer William Williams Pantycelyn, their itinerant preaching had “set the whole of Wales aflame from Holyhead to Cardiff.”¹

The Second Great Awakening and the shift to Finney

American revivalism changed character in the generation after Edwards. Herman Bavinck writes:

American revivalism underwent an important change from the time of Jonathan Edwards to that of Charles Finney (1792-1875). When Edwards preached to the unconverted he spoke of God’s wrath and the torments of hell; conversion moved the sinner from dread and fear to comfort and peace. Finney proceeded from the assumption that human beings are sinners voluntarily and urged them to make a decision to give their heart to God now, in this very moment.²

Bavinck traces the same shift forward into Dwight L. Moody’s later evangelistic ministry, which he distinguishes again from Finney: where “Finney tended to be the preacher of duty, as Edwards was of fear, Moody highlighted the love and gift of God in Christ.”² Finney’s own theological rationale for his revival methods drew on an older synergistic tradition: Matthew Barrett traces Finney’s insistence that human beings possess a natural ability to repent and obey God’s law back to Philip Limborch’s account of prevenient grace as merely assisting, rather than regenerating, the sinner’s own will.⁶

Opposing Views

Edwardsean revival theology holds that genuine revival is a sovereign work of the Spirit on a will otherwise unable to turn to God, so that conviction of sin necessarily precedes, and gives way to, settled peace; Edwards himself distinguished spiritual affections produced by the Spirit’s work on the heart from mere impressions on the imagination.²

Finney’s revivalism held instead that sinners possess a natural ability to repent and can be brought to do so immediately, through deliberately employed “New Measures,” rather than waiting on an unpredictable sovereign work; Barrett places this within a longer Arminian-synergist lineage running from Limborch through Nathaniel Taylor to Finney.⁶

Objections and Responses

Doesn’t the emotional excess that accompanied the Awakenings, and the church splits and drift toward theological liberalism that followed, count against their being a genuine work of the Spirit? Bavinck names the phenomena directly: revival preaching produced “intensity of emotions” that “gave rise to convulsions and hysteria, loud screams and cries, wailing exclamations and unintelligible sounds,” and that “the ‘one-sidednesses’ that often marked revivals elicited strong reactions and repulsions which lead to church splits or alternative theological ideals such as strands of liberal theology.”² His own verdict is measured rather than one-sided: such reactions against a plaintive Christianity are “understandable, and to a degree warranted, but … also marked by gross exaggeration.” Genuine grief over sin remains, on his account, a real and biblically warranted part of conversion (Ps. 51; Luke 15:18; 18:13; Acts 2:37; 2 Cor. 7:10), so that excess in how revival was sometimes conducted does not by itself settle whether the conversions themselves were genuine.²

Related Doctrines

References

Steven Tshombe Godet, “Gill’s Context, Life, and Works,” in “The Trinitarian Theology of John Gill (1697-1771): Context, Sources, and Controversy” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2015), 11-81. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 19, “Faith and Conversion.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 10, “Of Effectual Calling,” para. 1. ↩
Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 2 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), 343-44. ↩ ↩²
Jonathan Edwards, The Great Awakening, vol. 4 of The Works of Jonathan Edwards, ed. John E. Smith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 144-288, 293-530. ↩
Matthew Michael Barrett, “Arminian Synergism in Theological Perspective,” in “Reclaiming Monergism: The Case for Sovereign Grace in Effectual Calling and Regeneration” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2011), 269-270, 309-310, citing Charles Finney, Finney’s Systematic Theology, ed. J. H. Fairchild (Minneapolis: Bethany Fellowship, 1976), 199-278. ↩ ↩²