While Asbury University’s current revival appears a modern anomaly, it is very much in keeping with the history of higher education in America.
by Gary David Stratton (Adapted from Gary’s article, “Revivalism and Higher Education,” in The Encyclopedia of Christian Education.)*
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While most Christian traditions look to the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost as the historical birth of the church [1], seventeenth and eighteenth-century Puritans in England and colonial America emphasized the outpouring of the Spirit as God’s ongoing means for awakening unbelievers to seek the Lord and reviving the spiritual life of believers.[2] The Puritans believed in religious education and the personal catechizing of every family in every parish every year.[3] However, their pastoral experience warned them that such efforts would eventually fall upon deaf ears and hard hearts if not for the continual renewing work of the Spirit.[4] They developed an ecclesiology that all but demanded outpourings of the Spirit recur periodically for ongoing reformation of the church and society.[5]
Jonathan Edwards
No one did more to help set Old World revivalism on its feet in the new world than Congregationalist minister Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758). A “towering intellectual figure”[6] often described as “America’s greatest theologian,”[7] Edwards viewed the outpouring of the Spirit as an acceleration or intensification[8] of the Holy Spirit’s normal activity so that much is “done in a day or two, as at ordinary times … is done in a year.”[9]
Like all Puritans Edwards held that such outpourings were God-granted events to be sought by ministers and their congregations as their only hope for advancing the gospel on the earth: “(F)rom the fall of man to this day wherein we live the Work of Redemption in its effect has mainly been carried on by remarkable pourings out of the Spirit of God.”[10] (See, Do America’s Colleges Need ‘Revival’?)
Edwards wasn’t talking in mere theoretical language. In 1734 over 300 men and women—nearly a quarter of Northampton’s population—professed conversion to Christ in a single six-month period. “There was scarcely in the town, old or young, left unconcerned about the great things of the eternal world… The work of conversion was carried on in a most astonishing manner… and the number of true saints multiplied… (until) the town seemed to be full of the presence of God.”[11] Edwards’ popular account of Northampton’s revival, Faithful Narrative (1737), caused churches across the colonies to pray for similar outpourings. It wasn’t long before the answer came.
The First Great Awakening
The First Great Awakening was a broad religious awakening felt throughout much of the British Isles and American colonies from roughly 1734 to 1742. Early movements included field preaching revivals in the United Kingdom under the leadership of Methodist leaders John and Charles Wesley, a revival in the Connecticut River valley that eventually spread to Jonathan Edwards’ church, as well as revivals among Dutch Pietist immigrants in New Jersey under the leadership of Theodore Freylinguysen, and New Jersey Presbyterians under the leadership of Gilbert Tennent.[12] The awakening reached its zenith in the theatrical preaching of British Methodist George Whitefield, whose evangelistic tour of the colonies in 1740-1741 became the first genuinely “national” event in American history.[13]
In ten weeks, Whitefield spoke to audiences whose total attendance equaled at least half the population of the colonies he visited,[14] including “virtually every New England inhabitant.”[15] By the time the awakening subsided, as much as twenty percent of the total population of the American colonies had professed faith in Christ.[16] Due to the tremendous evangelistic impact of these revivals, leaders became known as evangelicals and the movement first became known as the Evangelical Awakening. As Noll concludes, The Great Awakening, “marked the beginning of a distinctly evangelical history . . . (and) a consistent pattern of convictions and attitudes that have been maintained over the centuries since.”[17] (See, The Great Awakening & the Birth of American Celebrity Culture)
Religious Affections and Religious Education
Despite the apparent victory of revivalism, Edwards was convinced that the weakness of the First Great Awakening rested in ministers’ uncritical acceptance of revival experiences and mere professions of faith as signs of genuine conversion. Like his Old World forebears, he sought a thorough reformation of both the individual and society. He penned A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1743) to challenge ministers to guide those who professed faith away from short-lived counterfeit conversions and towards genuine faith. [18] Edwards believed that only an encounter with the “divine and supernatural light” provided by Holy Spirit was capable of transforming human affections out of the sinful lowlands of self-interest and into love of God for God’s sake.[19]
This meant that the only uncounterfeitable fruits of genuine repentance were neither emotional experiences nor ecstatic visions, but rather a sacrificial love of others and passion to grow in the knowledge of Christ for no other reward than knowing his love. Parents and ministers were charged with catechizing the next generation, as well as reminding them of the glory of heaven and the ever-present threat of hell so that by rigorous discipline, they might experience genuine conversion.[20] Edwards exhorted his congregation, “The religious education of children is one of the principal means of grace that God has appointed in his church.”[21] (See, Jonathan Edwards Goes to the Movies: Religious Affections and Story Structure.)
The Second Great Awakening
Revival Colleges
This quest to educate and revive an entire generation toward genuine faith and experiential knowledge of God drove Edwards’ spiritual descendants in the development of perhaps the most influential educational movement in American history—the revival college. When the faculties at Harvard and Yale rejected the First Great Awakening, friends of the revival (known as “New Lights”) founded of a flurry of liberal arts colleges with a revival bent. Some, like Dartmouth,[22] Amherst,[23] and Mount Holyoke[24] were founded directly on Edwardsean principles.
Others, like Williams,[25] Princeton,[26] Rutgers and the University of Georgia[27] were later captured by followers of Edwards’ educational vision. In the end, nearly all colleges of the era were eventually influenced by the Edwardsean project. As noted higher education historian and Edwards biographer George. M. Marsden notes, “Much of the antebellum collegiate education was shaped by New Englanders with an Edwardsean heritage, (who) controlled most of the nation’s leading colleges, including the state universities.”[28]
Timothy Dwight and Yale College
The power of the revival college movement was made possible in no small degree due to the influence of Edwards’ grandson, Timothy Dwight (1753-1817). Dwight was appointed president of Yale College in 1795 in a striking pro-awakening takeover of what had once been an anti-awakening institution.[29] Yale experienced four revivals under Dwight and these outpourings of the Spirit were clearly a welcomed and promoted aspect of the president’s educational program.[30] Yet Dwight was so committed to the life of the Spirit flowing through the normal day-to-day life of the college he refused to cancel classes during seasons of spiritual awakening, even when petitioned by the student body to do so.
Dwight instead carefully guided them his students to a more holistic approach to the Spirit’s work in the life of college, an approach which eventually spread to many if not most of America’s colleges. [31] Under Dwight’s presidency Yale grew into the largest and most influential college in the Americas and the educational center of what came to be known as the Second Great Awakening (c. 1790-1840)—a society-wide transformation of much greater duration and depth than the more short-lived First Great Awakening.[32] (See, The College Chapel: Puritan Relic or Campus Hot Spot.)
Revival Colleges and Social Reform
The best of these revival colleges formed the intellectual backbone of a transatlantic revivalism that became a dominant theme in America from 1800 to 1860, and a “central mode of our search for national identity.”[33] In these colleges, literature, art and the sciences moved into the academic curriculum for the first time, the anti-slavery movement found a welcomed sanctuary, the largest foreign missionary movement in history found its origin, a vision for universal public education found a champion, women and African-American students matriculated for the first time,[34], a resilient ethic of moral citizenship found a remarkable incubator [35], and a generation of national leaders marked by both the knowledge of learning and the knowledge of God was born. (See, Higher Education and the Knowledge of God.)
Mark A. Noll notes that the leaders of these colleges were key to a “surprising intellectual synthesis” of revival and common-sense moral philosophy that dominated American thinking from 1790 to 1865 and which led to the remarkable “Christianization” of American society.[36] Dramatic church growth among all revival-oriented denominations—particularly Baptists and Methodists led to the formation of nearly 500 new revival colleges across the Western frontier. These educators were revivalists first and foremost [37] Their effectiveness as educators came, not in spite of their commitment to the work of the Holy Spirit in higher education, but rather because of it. (See, The Holy Spirit and the Liberal Arts)
Revivalism Ruined and Renewed
Sadly, the success of revivalism eventually led its undoing as churches and colleges began to rely upon periodic seasons of awakening to produce spiritual maturity in their members rather than ongoing religious education and discipleship. Highly volunteeristic conceptions of conversion and high-pressure tactics to secure decisions gradually eroded Edwardsean concerns regarding counterfeit conversions and safeguards to encourage the genuine fruit of Spirit-created repentance.[38] The publication of Christian Nurture (1847) by Congregationalist minister Horace Bushnell (1802- 1876) began an intellectual and practical backlash against revivalism’s over-emphasis upon public professions of faith, and birthed the modern religious education movement.[39]
While educational leaders such as A. B. Simpson (Nyack College), A. J. Gordon (Gordon), and V. Raymond Edmond (Wheaton), as well as Baptist, Wesleyan, Pentecostal, and Charismatic renewal movements preserved concern for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit and even sparked modest revivals in many churches and colleges, modern evangelicalism has yet to produce a synthesis of revival and Christian education capable of effecting a society-wide movements on the level of the First and Second Great Awakenings.
One can only hope and pray that February revivals at Asbury and other colleges are harbingers of such a movement.
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Next: The College Chapel and American Higher Education: Puritan Relic or Future Hope
Part of ongoing series: The Holy Spirit and the Liberal Arts
Notes
[1] Joel 2:28-32; Ezekiel 39:29; Acts 1:4-8; 2:1-21; 4:24-31.
[2] Thomas S. Kidd, The Great Awakening: the Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 2; Mark A. Noll, The Rise of Evangelicalism: the Age of Edwards, Whitefield, and the Wesleys (Downers Grove, Ill: InterVarsity Press, 2003), 18. Richard F. Lovelace, Dynamics of spiritual life: an Evangelical Theology of Renewal (Downers Grove, Ill: Inter-Varsity Press, 1979), 121.
[3] Richard Baxter, The Reformed Pastor (Morgan, PA: Soli Deo Gloria Publications, 2002), 67-122. See also, Perry Miller and Thomas Herbert Johnson, The Puritans (New York: Harper & Row, 1963). J.I. Packer, The Redemption & Restoration of Man in the Thought of Richard Baxter: a Study in Puritan Theology (Carlisle, UK: Paternoster Press, 2003).
[4] Donald G. Bloesch, The Holy Spirit: Works and Gifts (Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press, 2000), 106-110. See also, Geoffrey F. Nuttall and Peter Lake. The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 15ff.
[5] George M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: a Life New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 152. See also, Noll, Rise of Evangelicalism, 53-60.
[6] Harry S. Stout, The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 228. See also, Noll, Evangelicalism, 44.
[7] Gerald R. McDermott, Understanding Jonathan Edwards: an Introduction to America’s Theologian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Robert W. Jenson, America’s Theologian: a Recommendation of Jonathan Edwards (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
[8] Samuel C. Storms, Signs of the Spirit: an Interpretation of Jonathan Edwards’ Religious Affections (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2007), 25.
[9] Jonathan Edwards, “A faithful narrative of the surprising work of God in the conversion of many Souls in Northampton, and neighbouring towns and villages of the County of Hampshire, in the Province of the Massachusetts-Bay in New England (1737),” in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 4: The Great Awakening, ed. C. C. Goen (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1972), p. 21.
[10] Jonathan Edwards, A History of the Work of Redemption (1755) (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 138.
[11] Ibid, 13-14.
[12] Noll, Evangelicalism, 71-99.
[13] Harry S. Stout,The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 1991).
[14] Noll, Evangelicalism, 13. See also, Gary David Stratton, “Paparazzi in the Hands of an Angry God: Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, and the Birth of American Celebrity Culture,” The Other Journal (Fall, 2010), 23-35.
[15] Stout,Divine Dramatist, 90; Frank Lambert, Pedlar in Divinity: George Whitefield and the Transatlantic Revivals, 1737-1770 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 128; Arnold Dallimore, George Whitefield: The Life and Times of the Great Evangelist of the Eighteenth-century Revival (Westchester, IL: Cornerstone Books, 1979), 527; and Harry S. Stout, “Whitefield, George,” Dictionary of Christianity in America, ed. Daniel G. Reid (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1990), 1252.
[16] For further exploration into the realities versus myths of the Great Awakening see, Frank Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening” (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); Harry S. Stout, “Religion, Communications, and the Ideological Origins of the American Revolution” The William and Mary Quarterly: A Magazine of Early American History 34 (1977), 519-541; and Michael J. Crawford, Seasons of grace: colonial New England’s revival tradition in its British context (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 13ff.
[17] Noll, The Rise of Evangelicalism, 18-19.
[18] Jonathan Edwards, A treatise concerning religious affections, in three parts (1746), in The Works of President Edwards, vol. 2, ed. John E. Smith and H. S. Stout(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959).
[19] Jonathan Edwards, “A divine and supernatural light (Matthew 16:17).” In Sermons and Discourses, 1730-1733, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, 17, ed. M. Valeri and H. S. Stout (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 405-426.
[20] Marsden, Edwards, 28-29.
[21] Jonathan Edwards, In Sermons and Discourses, 1743-1758, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, 25, ed. Wilson H. Kimnach (Jonathan Edwards Center, Yale University, 2008), 723.
[22] Leon. B. Richardson, History of Dartmouth College (Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth College Publications, 1932), 239-40.
[23] Claude M. Fuess, Amherst, the Story of a New England College (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1935), 30.
[24] Joseph A. Conforti, Jonathan Edwards, Religious tradition & American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 69-89.
[25] David W. Kling, “The New Divinity and Williams College, 1793-1836” (Religion and American Culture, 1996): 195-223.
[26] Frederick Rudolph and John R. Thelin, The American College and University: a History (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1990).
[27] Ian H. Murray, Revival and Revivalism: the Making and Marring of American Evangelicalism, 1750-1858 (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1994), 132.
[28] Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 499. George M. Marsden and Bradley J. Longfield (Eds.), The Secularization of the Academy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 8-9.
[29] Brooks Mather Kelley, Yale: a History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974).
[30] Revivals were noted in 1802, 1808, 1812-1813, 1815 by Chauncey Goodrich, “Narrative of revivals of religion at Yale College from its commencement to the present time.” Journal of the American Education Society X, 1838, p. 295-302. See also, Charles E. Cunningham, Timothy Dwight, 1752-1817: a Biography (New York: Macmillan, 1969), 300-334.
[31] John Wolffe, The Expansion of Evangelicalism: the Age of Wilberforce, More, Chalmers and Finney (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2007).
[32] Noll, Evangelicalism, 200.
[33] George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth Century Evangelicalism, 1870-1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 222. See also, Richard Carwardine, Transatlantic Revivalism: Popular Evangelicalism in Britain and America, 1790-1865 (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1978)
[34] William C. Ringenberg, The Christian College (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2006), 85-96.
[35] Julie Reuben, The Making of the Modern University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 74-77.
[36] Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 9.
[37] Smith, Revivalism and Social Reform, 5. Author’s italics.
[38] Allen C. Guelzo, “An Heir or a Rebel? Charles Grandison Finney and the New England Theology,” Journal of the Early Republic, 17 (1997): 61-94. See also, Allen C. Guelzo, “Oberlin perfectionism and its Edwardsean Origins, 1835-1970,” In Jonathan Edwards’ writings: text, context, interpretation, ed. S. J. Stein (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996) and Allen C. Guelzo and Douglas A., Sweeney, The New England theology: from Jonathan Edwards to Edwards Amasa Park. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006).
[39] Horace Bushnell, Views of Christian Nurture, and of Subjects Adjacent Thereto (1847) (Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1975). See also, Conrad Cherry, Nature and religious imagination: from Edwards to Bushnell. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980), Robert Bruce Mullin, The Puritan as Yankee: a Life of Horace Bushnell (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 2002).Harold William Burgess, Models of Religious Education: Theory and Practice in Historical and Contemporary Perspective. Wheaton, IL: Victor Books, 1996), 81-83. Ironically, Bushnell and Charles G. Finney, perhaps the most famous revivalist of the era were great friends and admirers of each other’s work. See, Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, Charles G. Finney and the Spirit of American Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 1996), 253, 274-275,298.
*Adapted from, Gary David Stratton. “Revivalism,” in George Thomas Kurian and Mark A. Lamport, eds. Encyclopedia of Christian Education, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littleton Academic Press of America, 2015.
