Theopedia

Revival

Will You not revive us again, That Your people may rejoice in You?

— Psalm 85:6

Definition

Revival is an extraordinary intensification of the Holy Spirit’s ordinary work through the Word, awakening renewed conviction of sin, faith, and love for Christ among many believers together rather than only in isolated individuals. Reformed theology describes the Spirit’s ordinary work as cum verbo, “with the Word.” This sets it against two rival views: the Lutheran formula of the Spirit working per verbum, “through the Word,” as though the Word itself carried an inherent saving power, and the Anabaptist claim to an inward word operating independently of the preached and written Word.1

Biblical Basis

Scripture itself supplies the church’s language for revival. The psalmist prays, “Will You not revive us again, that Your people may rejoice in You?” (Ps. 85:6), and the prophet echoes the same plea amid judgment, “O LORD, revive Your work in the midst of the years” (Hab. 3:2). Corporate repentance under preaching appears already in the Old Testament, when the people of Nineveh believed God’s word through Jonah and turned from their evil way, from the greatest of them to the least (Jonah 3:5-10). The pattern recurs at Pentecost, where about three thousand souls were added to the church in a single day after Peter’s sermon (Acts 2:14-41), and again in Samaria under Philip’s preaching, where the crowds gave attention with one accord and “there was much joy in that city” (Acts 8:5-8).

Confessional Witness

The Second London Baptist Confession has no chapter devoted to revival by name; the term belongs to later theological vocabulary rather than the confession’s own. Its chapter on effectual calling states the doctrine revival presupposes, in any age: God is pleased “in his appointed, and accepted time, effectually to call, by his Word and Spirit,” those he has predestinated to life.2

Historical Development

Reformed theology does not confine the Spirit’s operation to the Word in every case: he “works when and where He sees fit,” so that the same grace ordinarily applied through preaching can, at particular points in the church’s history, break out with unusual intensity.3 Charles Hodge traced this recurring pattern from the apostolic age, when “thousands were converted” and “many were daily added to the Church,” through “a wide diffusion of the saving influences of the Spirit” in the Augustinian age, “still more conspicuously” at the Reformation, and again in “the wonderful revival of true religion under Wesley and Whitefield” alongside the contemporaneous Great Awakening in the American colonies.4

Objections and Responses

Aren’t the sudden, mass conversions revival produces simply a natural feature of religious psychology, found across every religion and requiring no supernatural explanation? The psychology of religion observes that “conversion,” “awakening,” and similar experiences “occur in all religions and peoples,” and that, beyond Christianity, “all religions can speak of revivals both in the lives of individuals and in that of masses of people,” typically clustering around adolescence.5 Bavinck does not dismiss this observation outright: he grants that adolescent religious and sexual development run in parallel and that psychological study of religious experience “has been profitable in bringing this to light.” But he rejects the reduction it is often used to support: “We reject all materialist explanations and theories that reduce spiritual changes such as conversion to mere biological or psychological causes; we insist on the independent value of the life of the soul and its religious content.” At the same time, he affirms “the psychosomatic unity of the human person”: a genuine work of the Spirit can still carry a describable psychological dimension without being reduced to one.5

Doesn’t calling a movement of the Spirit “revival” collapse into the very enthusiasm the Reformers themselves rejected, the Spirit acting apart from and beyond the preached Word? Historic Reformed theology drew this line explicitly against the Anabaptists, who held that “the internal word” of the Spirit “precedes and is superior to Scripture,” so that the believer finds God by “withdrawing from the world” and “passively awaiting an internal and immediate revelation” rather than attending to the preached Word; Bavinck calls this “in fact a revival of the pantheistic mysticism” of an earlier age.1 Against both this and the opposite error of treating the Word as carrying power in itself apart from the Spirit, Reformed theology holds that “though the Holy Spirit can work apart from the Word, ordinarily Word and Spirit go together.”1 On this account, revival is the same Spirit-and-Word conjunction intensified, rather than a different kind of working.

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 22, “The Spirit’s Means of Grace”: “both Lutherans and Reformed, against nomism and antinomianism alike, taught that though the Holy Spirit can work apart from the Word, ordinarily Word and Spirit go together. Lutherans, however, prefer to speak of the Spirit working per verbum (through the Word), while the Reformed prefer cum verbo (with the Word).” ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  2. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 10, “Of Effectual Calling,” para. 1. ↩

  3. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 2 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), chap. 14, “Vocation,” 663: “The Reformed… hold that the operations of the Holy Spirit are confined neither to the Word nor to the sacraments. He works when and where He sees fit.” ↩

  4. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 2 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), chap. 1, “The Plan of Salvation,” 343-44. ↩

  5. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 17, “The Order of Salvation.” ↩ ↩2