Lecture 2-3: The Awakenings — Revival and Its Machinery

The prophet asks for a renewal he cannot produce. He is not planning it; he is petitioning for it. That posture — asking, not organising — is where the chapter's argument in this lecture begins, and it is precisely what will be contested at the end of it.

3.1 The state of things beforehand

Eighteenth-century Protestant Europe and its colonies were, on paper, thoroughly Christian. Parish attendance was often required by law or by social pressure. Nearly everyone was baptised. What the awakening preachers complained about was not unbelief but formality: people who could recite the catechism of lecture 2-2 without any evident sense that it concerned them.

Whether that complaint was fair is a real historical question — clergy in every century have described their own age as uniquely cold. What is not in doubt is that between roughly 1735 and 1745, in Wales, England, Scotland, the Netherlands, Germany and the American colonies, an unusual number of people at the same time began to take the question personally.

3.2 Jonathan Edwards: the man who kept score honestly

Edwards is important to a course on evangelism for one reason above the others. He was inside the revival, he wanted it to be real, and he was still the person who asked hardest whether it was.

His mature answer is in Religious Affections (1746). He argues that the signs people usually reach for prove nothing either way. Intense feelings, tears, physical collapse, fluent religious talk, even a great deal of Scripture coming suddenly to mind — none of these show that God has done anything, and none of them show that he has not. What distinguishes a real work, Edwards says, is a changed disposition that shows up in practice over time: a new love of God for what he is, and a life that follows.

That conclusion did him no favours with either party. It denied the enthusiasts their proof and denied the critics theirs. It is also, for the purposes of this course, the single most useful sentence the eighteenth century produced: the fruit is the evidence, and fruit takes time, which means the verdict cannot be issued on the night.

Edwards had already applied the test to the movement's own excesses. Some itinerant preachers were denouncing settled ministers as unconverted; in 1742 James Davenport led a crowd at New London to burn books and fine clothing as tokens of worldliness, an episode that embarrassed the awakening's own supporters. Edwards defended the revival as genuine while naming such things as disorders within it, which is a harder position to hold than either enthusiasm or contempt.

3.3 George Whitefield: the parish boundary broken

Whitefield was a different kind of figure: an Anglican priest in his twenties with an extraordinary voice, who crossed the Atlantic thirteen times and preached outdoors to crowds that no church building could have held — to colliers at Kingswood with the coal dust marked by tears on their faces, in Boston, in Philadelphia, in the fields of Wales.

Three contributions matter here.

He went where the people were. Field preaching was a breach of parish order and was resented as such. It also reached miners, sailors and labourers who did not go to church and were not going to start.

He worked across denominations. Whitefield co-operated with Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists and Anglicans, and his standard line was that he did not ask what denomination people were but whether they loved Christ. Some of the earliest transatlantic evangelical co-operation is traceable to his tours, and it is a genuine achievement of the period.

He used the press. The historian Frank Lambert has documented how deliberately Whitefield employed newspapers, advance notices and printed journals to build audiences. This is not a hostile finding; it is simply the beginning of promotion as part of evangelism, and everything in lecture 2-4 grows from it.

He must also be reported accurately in another respect. Whitefield lobbied for the legalisation of slavery in the colony of Georgia, arguing that his orphanage at Bethesda could not otherwise be sustained, and he came to own enslaved people himself. He was not merely a man of his time in this: his contemporaries in the same movement, including the Quaker abolitionists and later John Wesley, argued the opposite case in his lifetime. Naming this is not a way of dismissing his preaching. It is a reminder that the most effective evangelist of the century was capable of a blindness that damaged the people his message was for, and that effectiveness is not a certificate of soundness.

3.4 What the awakenings did

Fairly stated, the gains were substantial. Formal religion was made personal for very large numbers of people. Denominational walls became crossable for the sake of a common message. Ordinary people — including, in the American colonies, enslaved Africans and poorer whites who had been outside the religious establishment — found themselves addressed directly and, in some cases, permitted to speak. Thomas Kidd documents both this widening and the harsh reaction it produced from established clergy who found it disorderly.

The costs were equally real. Congregations split into "New Light" and "Old Light" parties. Some itinerants passed judgement on ministers they did not know. And revival by its nature ends: the letdown after an awakening, and the temptation to try to restart it, is the specific pressure that produces the next section.

3.5 Where readers will not agree

This is a point where readers will not agree. In the 1820s and 1830s Charles Finney developed what were called the new measures: meetings continued night after night, the "anxious bench" placed at the front for those under conviction, women praying aloud in mixed assemblies, individuals prayed for by name. In his Lectures on Revivals of Religion (1835) he argued directly that a revival is not a miracle but the right use of appointed means, as a farmer uses means to get a crop. Those who defend him say he recovered apostolic urgency from a fatalism that had learned to wait indefinitely for God to move while nobody was told anything; they point out that Finney's converts were mobilised into abolitionism and reform, and that Oberlin under his leadership admitted black students and women when almost nowhere else did. Those who oppose him, most forcefully Iain Murray, say the shift is exactly what it looks like: the means were transferred from God's freedom to the preacher's technique, so that pressure applied skilfully enough will produce a countable response, and the later collapse of many of those responses is the evidence. What this course requires is less than either side. You should be able to state both positions in a form its holders would accept, and you should notice which one your own church's practice assumes. Every method in this chapter organised what had begun unorganised, and each one gained something and paid for it — the new measures are simply the case where the gain and the cost are hardest to separate.