Pentecostal Outpourings: Revival and the Reformed Tradition
Language: English
Publisher: Reformation Heritage Books
Published: Mar 14, 2016
Words:
107907
Pages:
672
Description:
Book last read: 2020-05-07 19:10:21
Percentage read: 100%
Chapter 2: 1. “The Power of Heaven in the Word of Life”: Welsh Calvinistic Methodism and Revival
Highlight
Chapter progress: 23.53%
Highlight: There was thus an insistence that truth was meant for the heart as well as the brain, and mutual supervision by a disciplined sharing of experiences.
Chapter 2: 1. “The Power of Heaven in the Word of Life”: Welsh Calvinistic Methodism and Revival
Highlight
Chapter progress: 29.41%
Highlight: Here there were orthodox teachings and structures that were independent of national or parochial boundaries, but liveliness and authority were absent. Such religion had become theoretically and denominationally exclusive. Intellectual assent to objective truth was deemed an adequate expression of personal faith, and sectarian pride all too often replaced evangelistic zeal for the lost.
Chapter 2: 1. “The Power of Heaven in the Word of Life”: Welsh Calvinistic Methodism and Revival
Highlight
Chapter progress: 42.65%
Highlight: Already the appeal of religion moved from that of spiritual edification to personal gratification. This was a profound and subtle shift away from the commitment to God’s inspired Word and from the passion for God’s glory that had characterized the Calvinistic Methodist fathers.
Chapter 2: 1. “The Power of Heaven in the Word of Life”: Welsh Calvinistic Methodism and Revival
Highlight
Chapter progress: 54.41%
Highlight: Revival is to be distinguished from revivalism. Revivalism maintains that revival is the normal state of the church, so that declension may be remedied by man’s efforts of preaching and praying, which are attended with the certainty of a successful outcome.
Chapter 2: 1. “The Power of Heaven in the Word of Life”: Welsh Calvinistic Methodism and Revival
Highlight
Chapter progress: 55.88%
Highlight: Revivalism also denies the essentially inward nature of regeneration and substitutes an outward profession or response for the evidence of a transformed lifestyle.
Chapter 2: 1. “The Power of Heaven in the Word of Life”: Welsh Calvinistic Methodism and Revival
Highlight
Chapter progress: 57.35%
Highlight: Even in the darkest times, God has His remnant. Who will deny them the reality of revival when such graces shone in them, even though the name revival is absent?
Chapter 2: 1. “The Power of Heaven in the Word of Life”: Welsh Calvinistic Methodism and Revival
Highlight
Chapter progress: 60.29%
Highlight: Estimates of growth in the number of organized Protestant churches in France vary from five in 1555 to between 1,750 and 2,150 a mere seven years later. It was reckoned that 10 percent of the population by the latter date were Protestant, and 50 percent among the nobility. Is such gospel success to be deemed reformation or revival—or both?
Chapter 2: 1. “The Power of Heaven in the Word of Life”: Welsh Calvinistic Methodism and Revival
Highlight
Chapter progress: 63.24%
Highlight: In a word, when I came thither at first, there was about one Family in a Street that worshipped God and called on his Name and when I came away there were some Streets where there was not past one Family in the side of a Street that did not so; and that did not by professing serious Godliness give us hopes of their sincerity.
Chapter 2: 1. “The Power of Heaven in the Word of Life”: Welsh Calvinistic Methodism and Revival
Highlight
Chapter progress: 66.18%
Highlight: Ordinarily in the life of the church, gospel objectives are achieved much as in the experience of the farmer: the land is tilled and prepared; seed is sown; the soil is fertilized and nourished; the sun and the rain have their effect; the crop matures for harvest and in time is gathered in (1 Cor. 3:6–7).
Chapter 2: 1. “The Power of Heaven in the Word of Life”: Welsh Calvinistic Methodism and Revival
Highlight
Chapter progress: 67.65%
Highlight: But there are also extraordinary occasions when sowing and reaping in a manner coincide, and gathering fruit is contemporary with sowing seed (Amos 9:13–15): that is revival. At such times, as Calvin notes on the passage, “The sum of the whole is, that there will be no common or ordinary abundance of blessings, but what will exceed belief, and even the course of nature, as every mountain shall as it were flow down.”
Chapter 2: 1. “The Power of Heaven in the Word of Life”: Welsh Calvinistic Methodism and Revival
Highlight
Chapter progress: 67.65%
Highlight: He maintained that at the fall in the garden of Eden, man’s personality had been vitiated by sin
Chapter 2: 1. “The Power of Heaven in the Word of Life”: Welsh Calvinistic Methodism and Revival
Highlight
Chapter progress: 70.59%
Highlight: For those who concentrate only on these, the whole sowing and reaping process is faulty.
Chapter 2: 1. “The Power of Heaven in the Word of Life”: Welsh Calvinistic Methodism and Revival
Highlight
Chapter progress: 73.53%
Highlight: While we strive after God’s ideal, we fall miserably short of it and can only bemoan our failure. In times of great declension God may work graciously and savingly through agencies that are less than ideal, but neither is His character sullied nor His purpose frustrated by the use of such means. When God does such things, we are reproved for our sloth and driven to seek afresh His speedy deliverance and reformation.
Chapter 2: 1. “The Power of Heaven in the Word of Life”: Welsh Calvinistic Methodism and Revival
Highlight
Chapter progress: 75.0%
Highlight: The Spirit did not unchurch them or deny His own work at their first coming to faith in Christ. Saints are cumbered by sin as long as their earthly pilgrimage lasts, and the best saints know and grieve over this most profoundly.
Chapter 2: 1. “The Power of Heaven in the Word of Life”: Welsh Calvinistic Methodism and Revival
Highlight
Chapter progress: 80.88%
Highlight: Together with that passage of Scripture, his entry for resurrection mentions Lamentations 4:20 and Hosea 6:1–2: “The reviving and prosperity of drowsy, backslidden churches, brought to spiritual vigor, and divine comforts is also called resurrection.”
Chapter 2: 1. “The Power of Heaven in the Word of Life”: Welsh Calvinistic Methodism and Revival
Highlight
Chapter progress: 85.29%
Highlight: What grounds are there for believing that God’s people should pray for revival? Quite simply, Scripture provides warrant for it by its teaching and incentive to it by its promises.
Chapter 2: 1. “The Power of Heaven in the Word of Life”: Welsh Calvinistic Methodism and Revival
Highlight
Chapter progress: 88.24%
Highlight: Now, let Calvinism be nothing but such an Aeolian Harp,—absolutely powerless, as it is, without the quickening spirit of God—still we feel it our God-given duty to keep our harp, its strings tuned aright, ready in the window of God’s Holy Sion, awaiting the breath of the Spirit.
Chapter 3: 2. “Melting the Ice of a Long Winter”: Revival and Irish Dissent
Highlight
Chapter progress: 17.89%
Highlight: There was a tension held between the extremes of enthusiasm and the recognition that genuine emotion can accompany conversion.
Chapter 3: 2. “Melting the Ice of a Long Winter”: Revival and Irish Dissent
Highlight
Chapter progress: 17.89%
Highlight: Yet he also spoke of a man named Andrew Brown who was deaf and mute. Brown was mean-spirited and violent, but after his conversion he was known to weep openly during sermons, something that Livingstone saw as a sign of his genuine conversion.
Chapter 3: 2. “Melting the Ice of a Long Winter”: Revival and Irish Dissent
Highlight
Chapter progress: 22.11%
Highlight: In 1639 the Wentworth government enacted the Black Oath against the Ulster Scots. This was to abjure the “abominable covenant” made in Scotland. As Aidan Clarke explains, the oath was designed to force the Presbyterians back to Scotland, where they were not required to violate their earlier pledge to the National Covenant.
Chapter 3: 2. “Melting the Ice of a Long Winter”: Revival and Irish Dissent
Highlight
Chapter progress: 26.32%
Highlight: The revival itself was understood by those involved as a pouring out of God’s Spirit through the preaching of the gospel, and though it would manifest itself in visible signs such as crying out or fainting, it was grounded theologically and located within the structures of the church; often revival would come during Communion services.
Chapter 3: 2. “Melting the Ice of a Long Winter”: Revival and Irish Dissent
Highlight
Chapter progress: 40.0%
Highlight: “I found there were four Presbyterian congregations; two of these belong to the southern presbytery, and are Arians or Socinians; the other two are connected with the northern presbytery, and retain the Westminster confession of faith. One of these latter congregations is very small, and the ministry, though orthodox, appears to have but little success.”
Chapter 3: 2. “Melting the Ice of a Long Winter”: Revival and Irish Dissent
Highlight
Chapter progress: 42.11%
Highlight: He found the Baptists verging on Socinianism and succumbing to the sinful world around them. In an attempt to stem the heterodoxy, Fuller led a contingent to appeal to the Baptist Association, only to be rebuffed, resulting in a split in the already small church.
Chapter 3: 2. “Melting the Ice of a Long Winter”: Revival and Irish Dissent
Highlight
Chapter progress: 44.21%
Highlight: Learning from the failure of the Irish Reformation, the Society translated the Bible and theological works into Irish. For the next forty years the group saw nearly one church planted per year.
Chapter 3: 2. “Melting the Ice of a Long Winter”: Revival and Irish Dissent
Highlight
Chapter progress: 49.47%
Highlight: The drastic population reduction had long-lasting ramifications for Ireland, particularly in terms of lagging economic recovery. It brought a decline in the Irish language and a rising adherence to Roman Catholic religion. The disputed causes of the famine also contributed to feelings of resentment—many blamed the English Parliament for failing to respond adequately.
Chapter 3: 2. “Melting the Ice of a Long Winter”: Revival and Irish Dissent
Highlight
Chapter progress: 51.58%
Highlight: In distinction from earlier understandings of revival as a top-down outpouring of God’s Spirit, Finney believed that “means” could be used to spur revival as a bottom-up exercise. These means included colloquial and itinerant preaching, drawn-out prayer meetings often led by women, and “anxious benches” where sinners who were fearful about hell would sit at the front of a meeting and find salvation.
Chapter 3: 2. “Melting the Ice of a Long Winter”: Revival and Irish Dissent
Highlight
Chapter progress: 52.63%
Highlight: According to Holmes, “The type of evangelicalism expressed within Presbyterianism up to 1859 was conservative in character and drew its religious theological weight from the Presbyterian theological tradition. In that context, the 1859 revival was the culmination of efforts by Presbyterian evangelicals to reform their denomination.”
Chapter 3: 2. “Melting the Ice of a Long Winter”: Revival and Irish Dissent
Highlight
Chapter progress: 53.68%
Highlight: Alexander Carson expressed the strident views of the evangelical party when he said, “A Calvinist and a Socinian or Arian, can with ‘no propriety worship together.’ They do not address the same God.”
Chapter 3: 2. “Melting the Ice of a Long Winter”: Revival and Irish Dissent
Highlight
Chapter progress: 56.84%
Highlight: However, it was not until March 14, 1859, that the first real expression of revival occurred. At a service held at First Presbyterian Church in Ahoghill, one of the Tannybrake converts, James Bankhead, stood and declared that “a revelation had been committed to him.” The nature of this “revelation” endowed him with an authority that he believed superseded that of any minister.
Chapter 3: 2. “Melting the Ice of a Long Winter”: Revival and Irish Dissent
Highlight
Chapter progress: 60.0%
Highlight: Laypeople, who were typically of working-class stock, were the principal preachers and organizers of prayer meetings. Their role became a point of dispute with many clergy, even those who supported the revival. For the traditionally minded evangelical, “Only if a layman was an elder, or the individual had been officially sanctioned by the church officers, would it be acceptable.”
Chapter 3: 2. “Melting the Ice of a Long Winter”: Revival and Irish Dissent
Highlight
Chapter progress: 60.0%
Highlight: Yet, as Janice Holmes says, “For many ministers the reduction in congregation size, the loss of clerical authority and the abandonment of the ministerial office was becoming more and more of a possibility.”
Chapter 3: 2. “Melting the Ice of a Long Winter”: Revival and Irish Dissent
Highlight
Chapter progress: 61.05%
Highlight: The lay-led meetings were characterized more by personal conversion testimony rather than biblical exposition but were generally better attended than those led by ordained ministers.
Chapter 3: 2. “Melting the Ice of a Long Winter”: Revival and Irish Dissent
Highlight
Chapter progress: 65.26%
Highlight: Whereas in the earlier revival, efforts were made by leaders such as Robert Blair and John Livingstone to contain enthusiasm—though allowing for open displays of emotion—the later awakening became notorious for violent displays of spiritual evidences. Such displays included moaning, sobbing, fits, visions, clairvoyance, trances, and stigmata; the last is a curious evidence for an anti-Catholic to experience
Chapter 3: 2. “Melting the Ice of a Long Winter”: Revival and Irish Dissent
Highlight
Chapter progress: 66.32%
Highlight: The visions were often of either heaven or hell, with Jesus reaching out to shield or save those in the grip of terror. Women often found themselves conversing with Jesus in visions, where He would show them His wounds and impart spiritual gifts.
Chapter 3: 2. “Melting the Ice of a Long Winter”: Revival and Irish Dissent
Highlight
Chapter progress: 68.42%
Highlight: Yet by the autumn of 1859 the manifestations had all but ceased. The ministers, on the other hand, were less in favor, arguing that they were not necessarily signs of conversion.
Chapter 3: 2. “Melting the Ice of a Long Winter”: Revival and Irish Dissent
Highlight
Chapter progress: 69.47%
Highlight: Nelson argued that lay preaching was dangerous and believed that the manifestations were signs of enthusiasm, displays of emotion without a theological or biblical foundation.
Chapter 3: 2. “Melting the Ice of a Long Winter”: Revival and Irish Dissent
Highlight
Chapter progress: 70.53%
Highlight: William McIlwaine, rector of St. George’s Church in Belfast, was an Anglican critic of the revival. As a founding member of the Evangelical Alliance and an important anti-Catholic controversialist, he thought that excesses of the revival would undermine evangelicalism.
Chapter 3: 2. “Melting the Ice of a Long Winter”: Revival and Irish Dissent
Highlight
Chapter progress: 72.63%
Highlight: When revival did come, the long-term results were different from the strongly Presbyterian and Puritan awakening of the mid-seventeenth century. Peter Brooke has argued that the core of Presbyterian identity, namely its polity and its Calvinism, was undermined by the 1859 revival: “In the eighteenth century to be a Presbyterian was to be a member of a self-organizing community. By the 1850s to be a Presbyterian was to be a person with particular religious views.”
Chapter 3: 2. “Melting the Ice of a Long Winter”: Revival and Irish Dissent
Highlight
Chapter progress: 72.63%
Highlight: These religious views were more often revivalistic rather than espousing a robust Calvinism. The revival made space for other forms of dissent, such as the Brethren and the Baptists, and internally transformed Presbyterianism in Ulster; traditional doctrine and ecclesiology moved aside for a more generic evangelicalism and revivalist theology.
Chapter 3: 2. “Melting the Ice of a Long Winter”: Revival and Irish Dissent
Highlight
Chapter progress: 73.68%
Highlight: Andrew Holmes insightfully draws a link between the role of religious experience and the evangelical acceptance of higher criticism. He says that when “pietistic spirituality”—which emphasizes personal conversion, holiness, and experience—is placed at the center of theological inquiry, the Bible can be characterized as a “record of the developing spiritual experience” rather than a manual of doctrine.
Chapter 3: 2. “Melting the Ice of a Long Winter”: Revival and Irish Dissent
Highlight
Chapter progress: 74.74%
Highlight: For evangelicals who were caught up in the experience of revival, a pietistic spirituality could be maintained while aberrant views of the Bible were brought in. Holmes says, “It is significant that those figures most closely associated with modern biblical criticism within the Irish Presbyterian Church were also supporters of modern revivalism.”
Chapter 3: 2. “Melting the Ice of a Long Winter”: Revival and Irish Dissent
Highlight
Chapter progress: 74.74%
Highlight: Holmes goes on to say that theologians who espoused higher criticism in Scotland were happy to draw the link with revivalism—especially the later visits of D. L. Moody (1837–1899)—and sought further revivals and religious experience. For instance, the Irishman James E. Davey (1890–1960), an evangelical who embraced higher criticism, used revivalism and religious experience in his defense during his trial for heresy in Belfast in 1926–1927.
Chapter 3: 2. “Melting the Ice of a Long Winter”: Revival and Irish Dissent
Highlight
Chapter progress: 76.84%
Highlight: Murray’s delineation is generally helpful in understanding the two Ulster revivals. In 1625 the revival came unplanned through the preaching of a man who only excoriated his hearers with hell fire and wrath; the revival struck when the local ministers took up the slack and held meetings to explain the gospel to those afflicted in soul. In the 1859 revival, on the other hand, there was long and great expectancy that God was about to pour His Spirit that prepared the way for eventual revival. The former was theologically grounded and paved the way for a new, confessional denomination in Ulster. The latter was much broader doctrinally and confessionally lax; it contributed to a greater evangelical cooperation and a blurring of lines between denominations.
Chapter 3: 2. “Melting the Ice of a Long Winter”: Revival and Irish Dissent
Highlight
Chapter progress: 77.89%
Highlight: All of this has contributed to an Irish evangelicalism that is marked by revival hope, though the two revivals have bequeathed differing ethos between evangelicals cross denominationally and even within Irish Presbyterianism. Borrowing from historian J. H. Merle D’Aubigne (1794–1872), John Weir said that the Spirit was “melting the ice of a long winter” in 1859; yet the yearlong revival contributed to the melting of confessional orthodoxy, paving the way for the eager reception of Moody and the growth of theological laxity within Irish Dissent
Chapter 4: 3. “The Lord Is Doing Great Things, and Answering Prayer Everywhere”: The Revival of the Calvinistic Baptists in the Long Eighteenth Century
Highlight
Chapter progress: 6.59%
Highlight: In 1715 there were around 220 Calvinistic Baptist churches in England and Wales. Note that some of these were sizeable congregations. For example, in Bristol there were two Calvinistic Baptist works: the Pithay and the Broadmead. In the 1710s they would together regularly have up to seventeen hundred people attending worship on any given Sunday. By 1750 the number of congregations, however, had declined to about 150.
Chapter 4: 3. “The Lord Is Doing Great Things, and Answering Prayer Everywhere”: The Revival of the Calvinistic Baptists in the Long Eighteenth Century
Highlight
Chapter progress: 7.69%
Highlight: Then there was the development of the theological position known as High Calvinism, sometimes called hyper-Calvinism. Pastors and believers of this persuasion were rightly convinced that salvation is God’s work from start to finish. On the basis of this conviction, however, they erroneously reasoned that since unbelievers are unable to turn to Christ, it was therefore unscriptural to urge them to come to the Savior.
Chapter 4: 3. “The Lord Is Doing Great Things, and Answering Prayer Everywhere”: The Revival of the Calvinistic Baptists in the Long Eighteenth Century
Highlight
Chapter progress: 12.09%
Highlight: At the heart of the revival, superbly captured by this description, was the Christ-centered ministry of the Holy Spirit. Fully in line with the New Testament emphasis about this ministry (see John 16:14a), the Spirit inspired a profound appreciation for and devotion to the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ. As the Spirit of God moved powerfully throughout British society on both sides of the Atlantic, tens of thousands of men and women were shaken out of spiritual slumber and death and were drawn irresistibly to adore and to serve the Lord Christ.
Chapter 4: 3. “The Lord Is Doing Great Things, and Answering Prayer Everywhere”: The Revival of the Calvinistic Baptists in the Long Eighteenth Century
Highlight
Chapter progress: 13.19%
Highlight: Charles Wesley in 1756 writes about the Baptists in his diary: they were “a carnal…, contentious sect, always watching to steal away our children, and make them as dead as themselves.”
Chapter 4: 3. “The Lord Is Doing Great Things, and Answering Prayer Everywhere”: The Revival of the Calvinistic Baptists in the Long Eighteenth Century
Highlight
Chapter progress: 15.38%
Highlight: Later in the eighteenth century this position was reiterated by the man who was the leading Calvinistic Baptist divine for much of that century, John Gill (1697–1771). “The Church of England,” he declared in no uncertain terms, “has neither the form nor matter of a true church, nor is the Word of God purely preached in it.”
Chapter 4: 3. “The Lord Is Doing Great Things, and Answering Prayer Everywhere”: The Revival of the Calvinistic Baptists in the Long Eighteenth Century
Highlight
Chapter progress: 16.48%
Highlight: Many eighteenth-century Calvinistic Baptists were thus adamant in their refusal to regard the Evangelical Revival as a genuine work of God, for, from their perspective, it simply did not issue in “true gospel churches.”
Chapter 4: 3. “The Lord Is Doing Great Things, and Answering Prayer Everywhere”: The Revival of the Calvinistic Baptists in the Long Eighteenth Century
Annotation
Chapter progress: 17.58%
Highlight: They rightly felt constrained to emphasize the New Testament idea of the local church as a congregation of visible saints and assert that the concept of a state church is antithetical to the whole tenor of the new covenant.
Notes: Classic Baptist Author
Chapter 4: 3. “The Lord Is Doing Great Things, and Answering Prayer Everywhere”: The Revival of the Calvinistic Baptists in the Long Eighteenth Century
Highlight
Chapter progress: 26.37%
Highlight: I want to lose sight of self in the refulgence of [God’s] glory, and to shrink into nothing, that God may be all in all. I long, I long, at least in some of my happier moments, to serve, to praise, to glorify my dear Redeemer, as my chief business, my chief delight, and as the chief part of my heaven.
Chapter 4: 3. “The Lord Is Doing Great Things, and Answering Prayer Everywhere”: The Revival of the Calvinistic Baptists in the Long Eighteenth Century
Highlight
Chapter progress: 39.56%
Highlight: The net effect of this teaching was to place the essence of conversion and faith not in believing the gospel, “but in a persuasion of our being interested in its benefits.” Instead of attention being directed away from oneself toward Christ, the convicted sinner was turned inward upon himself or herself to search for evidence that he or she was being converted.
Chapter 4: 3. “The Lord Is Doing Great Things, and Answering Prayer Everywhere”: The Revival of the Calvinistic Baptists in the Long Eighteenth Century
Highlight
Chapter progress: 41.76%
Highlight: His personal experience prior to and during his conversion ultimately taught him three things in particular. First, there was the error of maintaining that only those sinners aware of and distressed about their state have a warrant, or right, to come to Christ. Second, genuine faith is Christ-centered, not a curving inward upon oneself to see if there is any desire to know Christ and embrace His salvation. Third, he recognized that true conversion is rooted in a radical change of the affections of the heart and manifest in a lifestyle that seeks to honor God.
Chapter 4: 3. “The Lord Is Doing Great Things, and Answering Prayer Everywhere”: The Revival of the Calvinistic Baptists in the Long Eighteenth Century
Highlight
Chapter progress: 42.86%
Highlight: The “pulpit,” Fuller commented a few months later, “seems an awful place!—An opportunity for addressing a company of immortals on their eternal interests—Oh how important! We preach for eternity. We in a sense are set for the rising and falling of many in Israel…. Oh would the Lord the Spirit lead me into the nature and importance of the work of the ministry!”
Chapter 4: 3. “The Lord Is Doing Great Things, and Answering Prayer Everywhere”: The Revival of the Calvinistic Baptists in the Long Eighteenth Century
Highlight
Chapter progress: 46.15%
Highlight: “True faith is nothing more nor less than an hearty or cordial belief of what God says, surely it must be every one’s duty where the gospel is published, to do that. Surely no man ought to question or treat with indifference any thing which Jehovah hath said.”
Chapter 4: 3. “The Lord Is Doing Great Things, and Answering Prayer Everywhere”: The Revival of the Calvinistic Baptists in the Long Eighteenth Century
Highlight
Chapter progress: 68.13%
Highlight: The grand object of prayer is to be that the Holy Spirit may be poured down on our ministers and churches, that sinners may be converted, the saints edified, the interest of religion revived, and the name of God glorified. At the same time, remember, we trust you will not confine your requests to your own societies [i.e., churches]; or to your own immediate connection [i.e., denomination]; let the whole interest of the Redeemer be affectionately remembered, and the spread of the gospel to the most distant parts of the habitable globe be the object of your most fervent requests. We shall rejoice if any other Christian societies of our own or other denominations will unite with us, and do now invite them most cordially to join heart and hand in the attempt.
Chapter 4: 3. “The Lord Is Doing Great Things, and Answering Prayer Everywhere”: The Revival of the Calvinistic Baptists in the Long Eighteenth Century
Highlight
Chapter progress: 71.43%
Highlight: when God intends to do a great work He stirs up His people to pray for the thing He intends to do. Preceding times of revival and striking extensions of Christ’s kingdom, the concerted and constant prayers of Christians invariably occur. It is clearly this principle that those who issued the Prayer Call of 1784 wanted to stress, although most of them probably concurred with Edwards’s postmillennial vision.
Chapter 4: 3. “The Lord Is Doing Great Things, and Answering Prayer Everywhere”: The Revival of the Calvinistic Baptists in the Long Eighteenth Century
Highlight
Chapter progress: 73.63%
Highlight: Our chief design was to implore a revival of godliness in our own souls, in our churches, and in the church at large.
Chapter 4: 3. “The Lord Is Doing Great Things, and Answering Prayer Everywhere”: The Revival of the Calvinistic Baptists in the Long Eighteenth Century
Highlight
Chapter progress: 76.92%
Highlight: Prayer, because it is a weapon common to all who are friends of truth and holiness, is one sphere in which Christians can present a fully united front against Satan. Sutcliff is well aware that evangelicals in his day held differing theological positions and worshiped in different ways. He himself was a convinced Baptist—convinced, for instance, that the Scriptures fully supported congregational polity and believer’s baptism—yet, as he rightly emphasizes in his preface, such convictions should not prevent believers committed to the foundational truths of Christianity from uniting to pray for revival.
Chapter 4: 3. “The Lord Is Doing Great Things, and Answering Prayer Everywhere”: The Revival of the Calvinistic Baptists in the Long Eighteenth Century
Highlight
Chapter progress: 79.12%
Highlight: May God protect and prosper! May all India be peopled with true Christians!—even though they be all Baptists…. The Lord is doing great things, and answering prayer everywhere.
Chapter 4: 3. “The Lord Is Doing Great Things, and Answering Prayer Everywhere”: The Revival of the Calvinistic Baptists in the Long Eighteenth Century
Highlight
Chapter progress: 84.62%
Highlight: How sobering to find that this man, who was at the heart of a prayer movement that God used to bring so much spiritual blessing to His church, also struggled when it came to prayer. When Sutcliff lay dying in 1814 he said to Fuller: “I wish I had prayed more.”
Chapter 4: 3. “The Lord Is Doing Great Things, and Answering Prayer Everywhere”: The Revival of the Calvinistic Baptists in the Long Eighteenth Century
Highlight
Chapter progress: 84.62%
Highlight: Eventually he came to the conviction that Sutcliff did not mean that he “wished he had prayed more frequently, but more spiritually.”
Chapter 5: 4. Revival: A Scottish Presbyterian Perspective
Highlight
Chapter progress: 14.81%
Highlight: Although he would later agree that presbyterianism rather than episcopacy was in keeping with the Word of God, Whitefield’s presence in Presbyterian pulpits was too much for some Scottish ministers, and a bitter pamphlet war resulted. But MacCulloch had no difficulty in inviting him.
Chapter 5: 4. Revival: A Scottish Presbyterian Perspective
Highlight
Chapter progress: 19.75%
Highlight: “It is here especially that the nobility of the Disruption testimony comes to light. The Free Church adhered to the Establishment principle when she no longer enjoyed the advantages of State support.”
Chapter 5: 4. Revival: A Scottish Presbyterian Perspective
Bookmark
Chapter Progress: 24.69%
Chapter 5: 4. Revival: A Scottish Presbyterian Perspective
Highlight
Chapter progress: 29.63%
Highlight: The process of vegetation in the seed which fell into the good ground was much slower than that of the seed which fell on the stony. Let me therefore sow in hope.”
Chapter 5: 4. Revival: A Scottish Presbyterian Perspective
Highlight
Chapter progress: 34.57%
Highlight: One of the effects of Chalmers’s conversion was the reenergizing of parish ministry. As a Presbyterian minister in Glasgow, for example, he did not ignore the social distress and poverty experienced by many in the city, and he viewed it as the church’s responsibility to bring the gospel to the poor. For Chalmers, to bring the doctrines of evangelical Christianity to bear on the standards and commerce of public life was not to “vulgarise” the gospel; it was rather to assert “the might and the universality of its sole pre-eminence over man.”
Chapter 5: 4. Revival: A Scottish Presbyterian Perspective
Bookmark
Chapter Progress: 34.57%
Chapter 5: 4. Revival: A Scottish Presbyterian Perspective
Highlight
Chapter progress: 54.32%
Highlight: This was not revivalism, but the kind of revival that only the Spirit of God can produce. Those who were converted during it were deeply stirred in their feelings, but did not live on their feelings. There is a great difference between the two
Chapter 5: 4. Revival: A Scottish Presbyterian Perspective
Highlight
Chapter progress: 66.67%
Highlight: Genuine revival has not had to be at the expense of doctrinal orthodoxy, nor has it had to rely on innovative methods. It has been rather an extraordinary power accompanying the ordinary preaching of the Word of God.
Chapter 5: 4. Revival: A Scottish Presbyterian Perspective
Highlight
Chapter progress: 71.6%
Highlight: He is careful to point out that revival times can have the effect of bringing evangelical Christians together, and they can have the effect of polarizing and dividing, especially when some Christians might view a revival with suspicion because of questionable teaching or questionable methodology. This is what revival historian Brad Allen meant when he wrote that “denominationalism was one source of opposition during the Lewis Revival…. There were many who looked for revival, who longed for revival, but could not believe that when revival came, it did not come to their denomination.”
Chapter 5: 4. Revival: A Scottish Presbyterian Perspective
Highlight
Chapter progress: 74.07%
Highlight: The strengths of Presbyterianism are many, fostering cross-congregational interest, mutual help and support, parity and equality of office, shared responsibility, and national witness. But its weaknesses are just as apparent: the divisions that arise in one quarter cause fissures in another, the tendency to set up whole new denominations over secondary issues, and the prejudice against reunification are defects in the system.
Chapter 5: 4. Revival: A Scottish Presbyterian Perspective
Highlight
Chapter progress: 76.54%
Highlight: Perhaps he was more of a prophet than his detractors realized; perhaps he had the foresight to imagine what the legacy of a particular kind of evangelicalism might be once the revival was over: Can a people, enthused by the fire of extraordinary gospel effects, really survive on the ashes of an unbiblical Arminianism? I have no doubt that opposition to the work of the Holy Spirit can be driven by unbecoming motives, but not every attempt to examine certain features of revival is opposition to the Spirit’s work in it.
Chapter 5: 4. Revival: A Scottish Presbyterian Perspective
Highlight
Chapter progress: 82.72%
Highlight: Revival must never be viewed as an alternative to the regular means of grace. Donald Macleod’s comment is apposite: “There is no promise of a divine inspiration which can take the pain out of pulpit preparation. Even in revival situations the Spirit-filled man will be distinguished not by presuming on divine assistance but by painstaking application.”
Chapter 5: 4. Revival: A Scottish Presbyterian Perspective
Highlight
Chapter progress: 83.95%
Highlight: In all of this, whatever our position in Christ’s church, we remain unworthy and unprofitable servants, who, at the end of the day, have only done our duty (Luke 17:10) and, in many cases, done it badly. The work of gospel outreach, and the blessing that may have attended it, was often not due to us but in spite of us, and God will use whom He will as a channel of His own grace. The history is as humbling as it is thrilling. As we read and study what God has done in the history of the church in Scotland, we say, “Where is boasting then? It is excluded” (Rom. 3:27).
Chapter 5: 4. Revival: A Scottish Presbyterian Perspective
Highlight
Chapter progress: 86.42%
Highlight: I am not sure that we can sit back and wait for the revival to come either. That would be to justify our inactivity by the apparent inactivity of God. There are some things that are secret and belong to the Lord—such as when, and to what extent, He wills to give His Spirit for the revitalizing and renewing of His church.
Chapter 6: 5. Edwards’s Revival Instinct and Apologetic in American Presbyterianism: Planted, Grown, and Faded
Highlight
Chapter progress: 5.06%
Highlight: When invited to Scotland to serve a Presbyterian congregation there, he replied: “As to my subscribing to the substance of the Westminster Confession, there would be no difficulty…and the Presbyterian way has ever appeared to me most agreeable to the word of God.”
Chapter 6: 5. Edwards’s Revival Instinct and Apologetic in American Presbyterianism: Planted, Grown, and Faded
Highlight
Chapter progress: 11.39%
Highlight: First, the Presbyterians’ doctrine, previously expressed in the Westminster Confession of Faith, demonstrated their inclination to expect and welcome larger measures of the promised Holy Spirit. The Larger Catechism states in question 182 that while the Holy Spirit is given to all Christians, His working is “not in all persons, nor at all times, in the same measure.” Further, the Westminster Confession states that “Christ has purchased for believers under the gospel…fuller communications of the free Spirit of God” (20.1). Finally, Presbyterian theologians such as Robert Fleming (1630–1694) and John Howe (1630–1705) emphasized the eschatological hope of successive outpourings of the Spirit, which greatly effected the generation of Presbyterians and New England Congregationalists even before Edwards, George Whitefield (1714–1770), and Gilbert Tennent (1703–1764) spoke of these things.
Chapter 6: 5. Edwards’s Revival Instinct and Apologetic in American Presbyterianism: Planted, Grown, and Faded
Highlight
Chapter progress: 17.72%
Highlight: Under Yale’s president Timothy Dwight (1752–1817), Edwards’s grandson, one-third of the students were converted, and half of the converts entered into full-time vocational Christian service.
Chapter 6: 5. Edwards’s Revival Instinct and Apologetic in American Presbyterianism: Planted, Grown, and Faded
Highlight
Chapter progress: 18.99%
Highlight: After a student’s mother offered Joseph Alleine’s (1634–1668) Alarm to the Unconverted to him, Hill locked himself in his room. After much knocking, a fellow student caught him and said, “Hill, do you read such books?” Hill admitted he did, and the two of them joined another behind locked doors in their first ever prayer meeting.
Chapter 6: 5. Edwards’s Revival Instinct and Apologetic in American Presbyterianism: Planted, Grown, and Faded
Highlight
Chapter progress: 22.78%
Highlight: . In 1815 Princeton President Ashbel Green, Archibald Alexander, and Samuel Miller took turns preaching on Sunday mornings, and every evening at eight o’clock almost the entire college attended prayer meetings.
Chapter 6: 5. Edwards’s Revival Instinct and Apologetic in American Presbyterianism: Planted, Grown, and Faded
Highlight
Chapter progress: 24.05%
Highlight: After the founding of the nation and a national Presbyterian church, a wave of revivals became the occasion for Presbyterians to lead the way. As revivals and revival narratives came regularly from colleges and the West between 1790 and 1860, conservative Presbyterians grew increasingly ambivalent toward the promotional methods of revival and divided over Edwards’s revival apologetic. Presbyterians became “associated intimately” with notable revival controversies throughout this tide of religious fervor in America’s Second Great Awakening, a period that extended into the revival of 1857–1858.
Chapter 6: 5. Edwards’s Revival Instinct and Apologetic in American Presbyterianism: Planted, Grown, and Faded
Highlight
Chapter progress: 25.32%
Highlight: At the end of the Revolution, evangelical Christianity was at a low ebb in the Southern states, as elsewhere in America. Deism and skepticism increased as the rationalistic spirit in the writings of Voltaire (1694–1778), Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), and Thomas Paine (1737–1809) grew in popularity. “One of the principal reasons why religion is so slighted and almost scouted,” Caldwell added, “is that it is taught only by Methodists and ranters with whom it seems to consist only in the power of their throats, or wildness and madness of their gesticulations and distortions.”
Chapter 6: 5. Edwards’s Revival Instinct and Apologetic in American Presbyterianism: Planted, Grown, and Faded
Highlight
Chapter progress: 26.58%
Highlight: “Men of education and especially the young men of the country thought it a mark of independence to scoff at the Bible and the professors of religion.”
Chapter 6: 5. Edwards’s Revival Instinct and Apologetic in American Presbyterianism: Planted, Grown, and Faded
Highlight
Chapter progress: 26.58%
Highlight: Presbyterian James McGready of western Pennsylvania went to the South with the two-hundred-year-old revival methodology of his Scottish ancestors, but with a more intensive revival instinct that lacked the same degree of theological commitment. McGready employed Edwardsean and Presbyterian means to promote revival: a solemn covenant for members to pray for the outpouring of the Spirit, the concerts of prayer, and the sacramental, weeklong meetings
Chapter 6: 5. Edwards’s Revival Instinct and Apologetic in American Presbyterianism: Planted, Grown, and Faded
Highlight
Chapter progress: 29.11%
Highlight: Many, very many fell down, as men slain in battle, and continued for hours together in an apparently breathless and motionless state—sometimes for a few moments reviving, and exhibiting symptoms of life by a deep groan, or piercing shriek, or by a prayer for mercy most fervently uttered. After lying thus for hours, they obtained deliverance. The gloomy cloud, which had covered their faces, seemed gradually and visibly to disappear, and hope in smiles brightened into joy—they would rise shouting deliverance.
Chapter 6: 5. Edwards’s Revival Instinct and Apologetic in American Presbyterianism: Planted, Grown, and Faded
Highlight
Chapter progress: 32.91%
Highlight: Sometimes the children of God when first converted, and not infrequently afterwards, are the subjects of great bodily agitations. Here we would remark, that mankind are apt to run into extremes upon this subject—contending that all bodily exercises in religion are delusive effects of diabolical agency, or that they are the evidences of a gracious work. And there are not a few, who suppose that the Spirit of God can be in no public assembly, unless there are bodily agitations. Now, both of these opinions are erroneous; for although bodily exercises are no evidence of grace, nor at the same, a proof of the want of it, it is very clear, that they are sometimes the effects of the mighty power of God.—And yet we know the Devil is capable of imitating this work.
Chapter 6: 5. Edwards’s Revival Instinct and Apologetic in American Presbyterianism: Planted, Grown, and Faded
Annotation
Chapter progress: 35.44%
Highlight: Shortly after the revival season, Stone led a group desiring to be know simply as “Christians” out of Presbyterianism, and this group adopted the practice of baptism by immersion for the remission of sins in 1807. McNemar associated with the Shakers and their identification of the Spirit’s presence with “the jerks”—physical phenomena of shaking in the context of corporate worship. In this upper region of the South, Presbyterians began to divide and lose members to the Methodists, the Baptists, and Alexander Campbell’s Christian Movement. In addition to these, a new Presbyterian denomination was formed—the Cumberland Presbyterian Church.
Notes: All of these a more theologicaly liberal groups.
Chapter 6: 5. Edwards’s Revival Instinct and Apologetic in American Presbyterianism: Planted, Grown, and Faded
Highlight
Chapter progress: 36.71%
Highlight: It is an interesting fact that most of the great American revival movements have come largely through Presbyterianism, and the great Revival in the West is no exception.
Chapter 6: 5. Edwards’s Revival Instinct and Apologetic in American Presbyterianism: Planted, Grown, and Faded
Highlight
Chapter progress: 37.97%
Highlight: Edwards’s classic apologetic warning the “friends of revival” had been unheeded—the most zealous friends of revival are often its greatest enemies.
Chapter 6: 5. Edwards’s Revival Instinct and Apologetic in American Presbyterianism: Planted, Grown, and Faded
Highlight
Chapter progress: 41.77%
Highlight: The greatest use and misuse of Edwards’s revival apologetic happened between 1824 and 1835 during the revivals under the leadership of Charles Grandison Finney (1792–1875), ordained a Presbyterian minister in upstate New York. Finney won many Presbyterian supporters in western New York and in the upper Midwest. During the 1830s a party emerged within Presbyterianism opposed to the “new measures” and methods that Finney employed to promote revivals. A split among Presbyterians took place in 1837 between Old and New School Presbyterians.
Chapter 6: 5. Edwards’s Revival Instinct and Apologetic in American Presbyterianism: Planted, Grown, and Faded
Highlight
Chapter progress: 44.3%
Highlight: Samuel Miller wrote in a letter dated March 8, 1832, that the “triumphs of gospel truth” exhibited with proper discrimination in “the fourth part of the venerable Edwards’s treatise on that revival” were different from “the rapid multiplication of superficial, ignorant, untrained professors of religion” and “every species of disorder” associated with the Second Great Awakening.
Chapter 6: 5. Edwards’s Revival Instinct and Apologetic in American Presbyterianism: Planted, Grown, and Faded
Highlight
Chapter progress: 46.84%
Highlight: Old School Presbyterians in the South were inclined to regard both Edwards and later Edwardseans as largely mistaken.
Chapter 6: 5. Edwards’s Revival Instinct and Apologetic in American Presbyterianism: Planted, Grown, and Faded
Highlight
Chapter progress: 49.37%
Highlight: Edwards permitted “loud outcries, fainting, and bodily agitations” in “public worship,” even giving the impression that they were a “probable token of the favour of God.”
Chapter 6: 5. Edwards’s Revival Instinct and Apologetic in American Presbyterianism: Planted, Grown, and Faded
Highlight
Chapter progress: 56.96%
Highlight: While one in three American Protestants were Methodist by 1840, fewer than one in ten were Presbyterian. The Presbyterians declined by almost 50 percent from the time of their first General Assembly.
Chapter 6: 5. Edwards’s Revival Instinct and Apologetic in American Presbyterianism: Planted, Grown, and Faded
Highlight
Chapter progress: 63.29%
Highlight: Long’s keen observation offers an explanation, in part, for the apparent loss of the revival instinct among Presbyterians, who increasingly discontinued the habit of praying for the Spirit’s outpourings in successive revivals. What would this “disassociation of revivalism from its theological and ecclesiastical roots” mean for American Presbyterians? The synthesis between revival and Presbyterianism was shattered, and Edwards’s revival legacy became more historical than practical. Although revivalism remained in popular evangelicalism, Edwards’s theology of revival was fading out.
Chapter 6: 5. Edwards’s Revival Instinct and Apologetic in American Presbyterianism: Planted, Grown, and Faded
Highlight
Chapter progress: 74.68%
Highlight: This may have prompted Timothy Keller, a popular author and minister of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, to remark: “There has been a withering critique of revivalism going on now for twenty years within evangelical circles. Most of it is fair, but it often goes beyond the criticism of the technique-driven revivalism of Finney to insist that even Edwards and the Puritans were badly mistaken about how people should embrace and grow in Christ.”
Chapter 7: 6. “The Glorious Work of God”: Revival among Congregationalists in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Highlight
Chapter progress: 17.95%
Highlight: Given the sporadic nature of revival, Stoddard realized that revivals were a mighty work of God affected by His gracious outpouring of the Spirit. “The Spirit of the Lord must be poured out upon the People,” he wrote just after the revival of 1712, “else Religion will not revive.”
Chapter 7: 6. “The Glorious Work of God”: Revival among Congregationalists in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Highlight
Chapter progress: 17.95%
Highlight: The individual and society need no new rules or regulations, but regeneration. For that, he said, the church must pray. “We should beg of God,” he counseled, “that Religion may revive in this land.”
Chapter 7: 6. “The Glorious Work of God”: Revival among Congregationalists in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Highlight
Chapter progress: 21.79%
Highlight: He kept detailed notes on the conversion experiences of his parishioners. Lessons learned from these informed his preaching to that end. Like Stoddard, Timothy never shied away from preaching on the reality of hell. Unlike Stoddard, however, he required a public profession of faith from new converts before inclusion in the church rolls.
Chapter 7: 6. “The Glorious Work of God”: Revival among Congregationalists in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Highlight
Chapter progress: 23.08%
Highlight: Jonathan Edwards lived in a world full of revivalistic expectations. As a child, he observed firsthand the glorious work of God in his father’s parish. He watched as the dry bones of Northampton rattled with the last work of the Spirit under Stoddard’s ministry.
Chapter 7: 6. “The Glorious Work of God”: Revival among Congregationalists in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Highlight
Chapter progress: 26.92%
Highlight: “The young people shewed more of a disposition to hearken to counsel, and by degrees left off their frolicking, and grew observably more decent in their attendance on the public worship, and there were more that manifested a religious concern than there used to be.”
Chapter 7: 6. “The Glorious Work of God”: Revival among Congregationalists in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Highlight
Chapter progress: 28.21%
Highlight: In all, three hundred souls out of the twelve hundred in town came to know God’s grace within six months of His first moving in their midst.
Chapter 7: 6. “The Glorious Work of God”: Revival among Congregationalists in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Highlight
Chapter progress: 28.21%
Highlight: As both his grandfather and father experienced, Edwards found the spiritual highs of revival to be short-lived. What once burned hot quickly faded to barely glowing embers. Declension quickly returned to the foothills of the Berkshires. Though he tried as he might to forestall the impending disaster, Edwards soon lamented that his church, which had once “been filled with praises,” was soon “filled with backbitings.”
Chapter 7: 6. “The Glorious Work of God”: Revival among Congregationalists in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Highlight
Chapter progress: 30.77%
Highlight: If the Spirit were to descend once more on Northampton, He would come only in response to humbled prayer and desires for the glory of God.
Chapter 7: 6. “The Glorious Work of God”: Revival among Congregationalists in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Highlight
Chapter progress: 35.9%
Highlight: Though the awakening would end all too soon and the problems of earlier generations would return with malevolent force, Edwards cemented his legacy as the theologian of revival with these volumes and set the course for succeeding generations seeking a revival of their own.
Chapter 7: 6. “The Glorious Work of God”: Revival among Congregationalists in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Bookmark
Chapter Progress: 37.18%
Chapter 7: 6. “The Glorious Work of God”: Revival among Congregationalists in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Highlight
Chapter progress: 39.74%
Highlight: Though the common complaints of the revival’s opponents might describe the circumstances or message of some revivals, they proved nothing definitively, Edwards argued.
Chapter 7: 6. “The Glorious Work of God”: Revival among Congregationalists in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Bookmark
Chapter Progress: 39.74%
Chapter 7: 6. “The Glorious Work of God”: Revival among Congregationalists in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Highlight
Chapter progress: 41.03%
Highlight: (3) Increased regard for Scripture accompanies such a work of God as well.53 (4) For that reason, a spirit of truth arises that convinces all of the revival’s validity. (5) All these, Edwards concluded, produce a change of heart that evidences itself in love to God and man.
Chapter 7: 6. “The Glorious Work of God”: Revival among Congregationalists in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Highlight
Chapter progress: 42.31%
Highlight: The Spirit excites to love on these motives, and makes the attributes of God as revealed in the Gospel and manifested in Christ, delightful objects of contemplation; and makes the soul to long after God and Christ, after their presence and communion, and acquaintance with them, and conformity to them; and to live so as to please and honor them. And also quells contentions among men, and gives a spirit of peace and goodwill, excites to acts of outward kindness and earnest desires of the salvation of others’ souls, and causes a delight in those that appear as the children of God and followers of Christ.
Chapter 7: 6. “The Glorious Work of God”: Revival among Congregationalists in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Highlight
Chapter progress: 46.15%
Highlight: And in order to this, I should think ministers, above all persons, ought to be much in secret prayer and fasting, and also much in praying and fasting one with another. It seems to me it would be becoming the circumstances of the present day, if ministers in a neighborhood would often meet together and spend days in fasting and fervent prayer among themselves, earnestly seeking for those extraordinary supplies of divine grace from heaven, that we need at this day.
Chapter 7: 6. “The Glorious Work of God”: Revival among Congregationalists in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Highlight
Chapter progress: 48.72%
Highlight: Thus Edwards, as early as 1742, was promoting “societies” dedicated to praying for the coming of the Spirit of God.
Chapter 7: 6. “The Glorious Work of God”: Revival among Congregationalists in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Highlight
Chapter progress: 51.28%
Highlight: Such being the state of things in this future promised glorious day of the church’s prosperity, surely ’tis worthy praying for. Nor is there any one thing whatsoever, if we viewed things aright, which a regard to the glory of God, a concern for the kingdom and honour of our Redeemer, a love to his people, pity to perishing sinners, love to our fellow creatures in general, compassion to mankind under its various and sore calamities and miseries, a desire of their temporal and spiritual prosperity, love to our country, our neighbors and friends, yes, and to our own souls, would dispose us to be so much in prayer for, as for the dawning of this happy day, and the accomplishment of that glorious event.
Chapter 7: 6. “The Glorious Work of God”: Revival among Congregationalists in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Highlight
Chapter progress: 51.28%
Highlight: Again, he reminded his audience, God may be withholding extraordinary grace until such a time as people seek His face humbly in prayer.
Chapter 7: 6. “The Glorious Work of God”: Revival among Congregationalists in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Highlight
Chapter progress: 55.13%
Highlight: By the end of the eighteenth century, only 10 percent of the population of the growing nation was in fellowship with a local congregation.
Chapter 7: 6. “The Glorious Work of God”: Revival among Congregationalists in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Highlight
Chapter progress: 55.13%
Highlight: Unlike its predecessor, this revival burned brightly, not for years, but decades. For that reason, Mark Noll called the Second Great Awakening the “most influential revival” in United States history.
Chapter 7: 6. “The Glorious Work of God”: Revival among Congregationalists in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Highlight
Chapter progress: 58.97%
Highlight: Of the immediate change that swept over his life, Nettleton noted, “The character of God, and the doctrines of the Bible which I could not meditate upon before without hatred, especially those of election and free grace, now appear delightful, and the only means by which, through grace, dead sinners can be made the living sons of God.”
Chapter 7: 6. “The Glorious Work of God”: Revival among Congregationalists in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Highlight
Chapter progress: 62.82%
Highlight: This attitude would serve him well throughout his career as he came to see the role of the evangelist as one of help for pastors. In spite of his later fame, Nettleton refused to enter into territories where he had not been invited, nor would he go unless he was convinced of the sincerity of his potential host.
Chapter 7: 6. “The Glorious Work of God”: Revival among Congregationalists in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Highlight
Chapter progress: 66.67%
Highlight: Recognizing the degeneracy of the place, Nettleton called on them to pray for revival. To this he added, “Whether you do or not, it is possible there may be one; for Christians in other places have agreed to pray for you.”
Chapter 7: 6. “The Glorious Work of God”: Revival among Congregationalists in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Highlight
Chapter progress: 67.95%
Highlight: It may, perhaps, be new to some of you, that there should be such distress for sin. But there was great distress on the day of Pentecost, when thousands were pricked in the heart, and cried out: “Men and brethren, what shall we do?” Some of you may, perhaps, be ready to say: If this is religion, we wish to have nothing to do with it. My friends, this is not religion. Religion does not cause its subjects to feel and act thus. These individuals are thus distressed, not because they have religion, but because they have no religion and have found this out.
Chapter 7: 6. “The Glorious Work of God”: Revival among Congregationalists in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Highlight
Chapter progress: 69.23%
Highlight: Of all this Francis Wayland once noted of Nettleton, “He was in an unusual degree obedient to impressions received in answer to prayer. I believe he never went to a place, unless he had received an intimation that he had a duty to discharge there; and he rarely visited a place where a revival did not follow him.”
Chapter 7: 6. “The Glorious Work of God”: Revival among Congregationalists in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Bookmark
Chapter Progress: 71.79%
Chapter 7: 6. “The Glorious Work of God”: Revival among Congregationalists in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Highlight
Chapter progress: 73.08%
Highlight: The fear of hell, Nettleton rebutted, naturally flows from the sinful condition. “But have not sinners reason to be terrified?” Nettleton asked. In fact, the lack of terror points to an even greater problem. “When persons have no fear of God before their eyes, it is a mark of great depravity.”
Chapter 7: 6. “The Glorious Work of God”: Revival among Congregationalists in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Highlight
Chapter progress: 75.64%
Highlight: The disparity between the spiritual haves and have nots can be plainly seen in the lasting effects of Nettleton’s ministry contrasted with the effects of Charles Finney’s ministry.
Chapter 7: 6. “The Glorious Work of God”: Revival among Congregationalists in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Highlight
Chapter progress: 78.21%
Highlight: Thus, nothing keeps the sinner from choosing to pursue God other than the opportunity and the immediate desire to do so, a desire that remains untainted by a nonexistent sinful nature. To that end, Finney gladly adopted and promoted “New Measures” that were “calculated to produce a given result,” convinced that revival was not the miraculous, glorious work of God but the “purely philosophical result of the right use of the constituted means.”
Chapter 7: 6. “The Glorious Work of God”: Revival among Congregationalists in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Highlight
Chapter progress: 80.77%
Highlight: Thus, taken as a whole, the Second Great Awakening did produce mixed results. For that reason, Nettleton could admit that many conversions in the revivals proved false. Yet, by his own experience, he knew that it wasn’t revival that produced false conversions, but false theology.
Chapter 7: 6. “The Glorious Work of God”: Revival among Congregationalists in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Highlight
Chapter progress: 82.05%
Highlight: The key, he believed, was the presence or absence of prayer: “If I were to find serious, praying people generally opposed to revivals, and all the impenitent and profane in favor of them, it would alter the case. But praying people pray for them, and rejoice in them.”
Chapter 7: 6. “The Glorious Work of God”: Revival among Congregationalists in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Highlight
Chapter progress: 84.62%
Highlight: The dangers of such an approach are legion. Excesses are counted as successes. Momentary enthusiasm is mistaken for spiritual renewal. Fads become formulas. And the church languishes longer in the throes of apathy as hopes are dashed upon the rocks of quick advances and long-term failures.
Chapter 7: 6. “The Glorious Work of God”: Revival among Congregationalists in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Highlight
Chapter progress: 100.0%
Highlight: explained that “genuine revivals” are those “where the gospel is preached in its purity, and where the people have been well instructed in the doctrines of Christianity.”
Chapter 8: 7. Baptist Revivals in America in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Highlight
Chapter progress: 23.66%
Highlight: The next year, as the war spread, the association word of greeting again recognized that civil strife was endangering spiritual life: “Be earnest and constant in attending on the duties of religion,” they urged. “Neglect not secret prayer; pray for and with your families; labor for a general humiliation for your own sins and the sins of the land seeing God, by his providence, calls loudly for it, and knowing that our civil and religious privileges are threatened.”
Chapter 8: 7. Baptist Revivals in America in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Highlight
Chapter progress: 37.63%
Highlight: He reported that a girl, about nine years old, requested and was given liberty to speak. She testified, most solemnly, that she had “discovered herself to be one of the greatest of sinners, and lamented her having lived in rebellion against God so long.” The law of God condemned her, and it was a good law and her condemnation was just. She gave a clear and orderly account of how she came to rely on Christ for salvation and how God’s nature and perfection appeared glorious to her soul. She “loved him above all other beings in existence” and delighted in singing His praises, attending His worship, and conferring with saints.
Chapter 8: 7. Baptist Revivals in America in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Highlight
Chapter progress: 58.06%
Highlight: In view of the spiritual self-loathing that such an understanding of sin induces, Taylor noted that the blinded heart could never grant such observations. At the same time he defied any person that had made such a discovery of his heart to “fall in with Ariainism [sic] or Socinianism or any other ism of the kind, for only an Almighty Saviour will suit his case.” Another view of sin might “lead a deluded soul to make use of a superficial saviour of some sort, but Jesus Christ did not come to our world to save self-helpers but the lost and helpless.”
Chapter 8: 7. Baptist Revivals in America in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Highlight
Chapter progress: 62.37%
Highlight: He believed in the existence of revivals, which he defined as “special seasons in which the minds of men, within a certain district, or in a certain congregation, are more than usually susceptible of impression from the exhibition of moral truth.”
Chapter 8: 7. Baptist Revivals in America in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Highlight
Chapter progress: 64.52%
Highlight: Common errors often attached to revival excitement, in Wayland’s observation, included reliance on mere means instead of the Spirit of God; a tendency to give emphasis to language, ideas, and means that have no biblical warrant; and a tendency to spiritual pride.
Chapter 8: 7. Baptist Revivals in America in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Highlight
Chapter progress: 65.59%
Highlight: This church, deeply concerned about the spiritual condition of its immediate neighborhood, passed a resolution on June 18, 1857, to “employ a suitable person or persons to be engaged in visiting the families in the vicinity, and inducing them to attend the services” of the church and also “to bring children into the Sabbath school, and to use such other means as may be deemed advisable for extending our Redeemer’s Kingdom in that portion of our city.”78
Chapter 8: 7. Baptist Revivals in America in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Highlight
Chapter progress: 69.89%
Highlight: The Domestic Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention sent preachers to labor throughout the army. Other denominations followed suit, and revivals were reported among many of the regiments and brigades of several state armies in the spring of 1863. One report by F. S. Petway stated that “it has continued up to the present time, without any abatement of the interest. Each night crowds of penitents throng the altar for prayer.”
Chapter 8: 7. Baptist Revivals in America in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Highlight
Chapter progress: 73.12%
Highlight: Fristoe recognized that enthusiasm often accompanied the ingathering of the elect but that “at the same time it is no way related to, nor forms any part of religion, and therefore blameworthy, and cannot be justified, and ought to be discountenanced by the wise.”
Chapter 8: 7. Baptist Revivals in America in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Highlight
Chapter progress: 75.27%
Highlight: Manly warned that a person’s profession of faith resulting from high-wrought excitement will pass away and damage him. The lust for great numbers creates carelessness and tends to make the church a harlot by allowing unbelievers, unconverted, and graceless persons to crowd into it without a careful and legitimate restraint.
Chapter 8: 7. Baptist Revivals in America in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Highlight
Chapter progress: 77.42%
Highlight: Unhelpful emotion was merely incidental to the depth of transaction that necessarily occurs in conversion, and thus the earnest Christian will find in “the principle of these extraordinary means of grace, one of the most admirable of the prescriptions of Grace.” We must not be “afraid of revivals and protracted meetings.”
Chapter 8: 7. Baptist Revivals in America in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Highlight
Chapter progress: 78.49%
Highlight: Taylor earnestly protested against any attempt to receive utter strangers who “come forward for prayer, profess conversion, and propose to join, all on the same occasion.”
Chapter 8: 7. Baptist Revivals in America in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Highlight
Chapter progress: 81.72%
Highlight: Cornelius Tyree (1860–1928) wrote carefully about his perceptions in “The Defects in Modern Evangelistic Preaching.” These defects had led to conversions of short duration and church members with unholy lives. He noted that “modern revivalists” did not give due prominence to repentance, and they failed to “preach the terrors of the law” or the “certain and endless perdition of the wicked.” Better to be too stringent like the Baptist fathers than to adopt the “hurried, easy, half-way conversions of some evangelists.”
Chapter 8: 7. Baptist Revivals in America in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Highlight
Chapter progress: 81.72%
Highlight: When asked about card signing as a means of expressing conversion one editor wrote, “We most heartily disapprove of this new-fangled piece of machinery for engineering people into the church,” and added, “We can scarcely conceive of a more ingenious contrivance of Satan for destroying the churches by filling them with unconverted people.”
Chapter 8: 7. Baptist Revivals in America in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Highlight
Chapter progress: 82.8%
Highlight: The methods used, Tyree implied, arise from “their love of money and over anxiety for numbers and quotable results,” and so they have “widened the strait gate, and popularized the gospel, to make it palatable to the carnal mind.” It is a devastating fact as well as an observable reality that the “preacher, who takes rising in a congregation, and coming forward for prayers, or coming to an inquiry meeting, or signing a blank card to live a better life, for conversion, will help in deceiving more souls than he will aid in coming to Christ.”
Chapter 8: 7. Baptist Revivals in America in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Highlight
Chapter progress: 83.87%
Highlight: After discussing the lure of fame, numbers, and money and noting the churches’ eventual exclusion of large numbers of these supposed converts, Tucker wrote, “The Doctor makes many converts, but most of them are his converts—not the Lord’s.”
Chapter 8: 7. Baptist Revivals in America in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Highlight
Chapter progress: 86.02%
Highlight: “How careful church, preacher, and evangelist should be as they go up and down the earth seeking to convert men, women, and children, whom they present to the church as the work of their hands, as so many of them are, but not true converts of God’s grace.” For this reason, Hurst felt compelled to warn that “many of our unconverted, nominal members become infidels,” adding that “church infidels are the worst of all infidels.”
Chapter 9: 8. Revival and the Dutch Reformed Church in Eighteenth-Century America
Highlight
Chapter progress: 9.68%
Highlight: Modern scholar Arie de Reuver says of Teellinck’s beliefs that “the Holy Bible is the point of contact with the Holy Spirit…. The breath of the Spirit is poured over it and has ‘permeated it.’ Every page and every verse as a result breathes out the sacred movements of the Spirit.”
Chapter 9: 8. Revival and the Dutch Reformed Church in Eighteenth-Century America
Highlight
Chapter progress: 11.29%
Highlight: Herman Witsius (1636–1708) wrote, “And how, I ask, is it possible that he who knows the truth as it is in Jesus, should not be inflamed with His love and sanctified by His truth?” The minister must have a “true relish” for heavenly things and live with heavenly conduct in the image of Christ. He must “pant after the things which are above and eternal” while viewing the riches, honors, and pleasures of this world with contempt. Every preacher should be humbled by the holy calling God has placed upon him. But he should neither “lose courage” nor “lower the exact standard of duty,” but instead through the grace of God spare no efforts to be a faithful servant of the Lord.
Chapter 9: 8. Revival and the Dutch Reformed Church in Eighteenth-Century America
Highlight
Chapter progress: 12.9%
Highlight: Dutch divines spoke plainly to sinners. When Teellinck rebuked a drunkard, the man told him to mind his own business, saying, “Beer is not brewed for geese.” The minister gravely responded, “That’s true, my friend, but hell has also not been made for geese.”
Chapter 9: 8. Revival and the Dutch Reformed Church in Eighteenth-Century America
Highlight
Chapter progress: 32.26%
Highlight: Despite relentless criticism, Frelinghuysen faithfully continued his work as a minister. He not only preached himself but also trained lay preachers. Most notable among his students was Hendrik Visscher, who translated Frelinghuysen’s sermons from Dutch into English. Visscher’s own sermons were also influential; they were published and cherished for years by Reformed Pietists in the Raritan Valley. Frelinghuysen
Chapter 9: 8. Revival and the Dutch Reformed Church in Eighteenth-Century America
Highlight
Chapter progress: 35.48%
Highlight: Frelinghuysen himself said, “Though I would not prescribe a method of preaching to anyone, yet I believe that the application should be discriminating, adapted to the various states of all hearers (Jude 20–21; Jeremiah 15).”
Chapter 9: 8. Revival and the Dutch Reformed Church in Eighteenth-Century America
Highlight
Chapter progress: 46.77%
Highlight: In 1776, the onset of the American Revolution forced Laidlie to flee from New York to escape British troops. Reformed and Presbyterian churches were particularly under British attack because they were viewed as rebels in both ecclesiology and politics.
Chapter 9: 8. Revival and the Dutch Reformed Church in Eighteenth-Century America
Highlight
Chapter progress: 51.61%
Highlight: the first step in God’s work in the soul is conviction of sin, which leads sinners to ask, “What must I do to be saved?” The second step is diligent use of the means of grace, both in private and public worship. The third step is “joining in covenant to the Lord,” by receiving Christ as the Savior who has “fulfilled all the conditions of the covenant of peace by his active obedience [and] by his sufferings and death.”
Chapter 9: 8. Revival and the Dutch Reformed Church in Eighteenth-Century America
Highlight
Chapter progress: 53.23%
Highlight: From 1784 on he also served as a professor of theology for the denomination. The need was desperate: in 1784, eighty-five churches were served by thirty-two pastors, nearly half of whom were over fifty years old. Furthermore, open unbelief, profaneness, Deism, and Unitarianism were spreading rapidly, even among students at Princeton, Queens College (now Rutgers University), and Yale.
Chapter 9: 8. Revival and the Dutch Reformed Church in Eighteenth-Century America
Highlight
Chapter progress: 69.35%
Highlight: Alberthoma’s book described regeneration as an instantaneous and almighty work of new creation by the Holy Spirit that transforms the mind, will, affections, body, and conduct of a person so that he grieves over sin, thirsts for the gospel, seeks after Christ, loves God’s glory, and loves the brethren.
Chapter 9: 8. Revival and the Dutch Reformed Church in Eighteenth-Century America
Highlight
Chapter progress: 72.58%
Highlight: Every person we have examined was a man of sound doctrine. Revival did not come by abandoning Reformed theology or by neglecting the catechisms and confessions of the church. The Spirit is free to work as He pleases, but the examples of the Dutch Reformed ministers show us there is no correlation between revival and an anti-intellectual, undisciplined approach to the Bible. Westerlo experienced the mighty workings of Christ in his life, yet he also diligently studied in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. Livingston labored both in preaching and in training theological students.
Chapter 9: 8. Revival and the Dutch Reformed Church in Eighteenth-Century America
Highlight
Chapter progress: 72.58%
Highlight: We need to recover the discriminatory preaching of our spiritual forefathers. Rather than offering vague and general applications, preachers must help people see their individual spiritual condition and feel their need for Christ.
Chapter 9: 8. Revival and the Dutch Reformed Church in Eighteenth-Century America
Highlight
Chapter progress: 75.81%
Highlight: We can and should oppose errors in doctrine, practice, and morals, but no faithful servant of God should ever oppose a genuine work of the Spirit among His people.
Chapter 9: 8. Revival and the Dutch Reformed Church in Eighteenth-Century America
Highlight
Chapter progress: 75.81%
Highlight: The irenic spirit of Bertholf and Westerlo was far more effective in overcoming evil with good in the midst of great divisions in the church.
Chapter 9: 8. Revival and the Dutch Reformed Church in Eighteenth-Century America
Highlight
Chapter progress: 79.03%
Highlight: How much do we love Christ? Do we pant after Him as a deer pants for the water brooks? Love for Christ is an essential aspect of true revival. How much do we love His church and long for her well-being and growth? And how much do we love sinners—as Christ loved them and laid down His life for their salvation? The answers to such questions may provide a major reason why revival tarries today and why, in former days, revival was sent to the churches of our nation.
Chapter 9: 8. Revival and the Dutch Reformed Church in Eighteenth-Century America
Highlight
Chapter progress: 82.26%
Highlight: A “classis” is an assembly representing a region of the Dutch Reformed church, similar to a presbytery in the Presbyterian church. In the Dutch system, each church was governed by a consistory of elders, a group of churches in a region was governed by a classis, and a group of classes was governed by a synod, and both synods in the Netherlands were governed by the national synod.
Chapter 10: A Concluding Word—A Call to Seek God for Revival Today
Highlight
Chapter progress: 33.33%
Highlight: The Reformation deposited a deep concern not only for theology and doctrine but also for spiritual life in the church. Reformed churches that do not seek help from and welcome the special presence of the Holy Spirit may assume wrongly that all that really matters is an intellectual understanding of doctrine. Honest leaders will admit that their congregations may grow cold and lifeless without the help and power of the Holy Spirit to make their love for and worship of Christ strong and vibrant. So a second reason for the study of revivals in this book is that it will enhance both truth and life among Reformed churches. A central concern among the various denominations represented in this volume is that those who would claim the Reformed faith would exhibit a vital expression of spiritual life and practice. God’s people must not only have light (truth), but they must also have heat (life).
Chapter 10: A Concluding Word—A Call to Seek God for Revival Today
Highlight
Chapter progress: 44.44%
Highlight: Many Reformed believers’ excessive reaction to Pentecostalism and revivalism has resulted in almost entirely abandoning the use of these terms once so commonly spoken and written by Reformed church leaders. The title of this volume, Pentecostal Outpourings, is a proactive measure to sweeten scriptural and theological language that has become quite distasteful to modern Reformed appetites, and a study of revivals helps readers to see that.
Chapter 10: A Concluding Word—A Call to Seek God for Revival Today
Highlight
Chapter progress: 66.67%
Highlight: Reformed theology loves to exult in the sovereignty of God, and revivals make this evident.
Chapter 10: A Concluding Word—A Call to Seek God for Revival Today
Highlight
Chapter progress: 88.89%
Highlight: What is interesting about Fuller’s sermon is that it was preached in response to the Congregationalist Jonathan Edwards’s Humble Attempt, which was sent to Reformed Particular Baptist minister John Sutcliff by the Scottish Presbyterian minister John Erskine. This historical connection represents the common perspective and efforts then and now in the British Isles, in America, and in spiritually dry places everywhere. We must all join in asking God for both reformation and revival.