Revivalism

A movement within the Christian tradition which emphasizes the appeal of religion to the individual as well to their intellectual and rational nature. It believes that vital Christianity begins with a response of the whole being to the gospel's call for repentance and spiritual rebirth by faith in Jesus Christ. This experience results in a personal relationship with God.

The Reformation Roots. Modern revival movements have their historical roots in Puritan-pietistic reactions to the rationalism of the Enlightenment and the formalized creedal expression of Reformation faith that characterized much of seventeenth century Protestantism. People such as Philipp Spener, and August Francke resisted this depersonalization of religion. They discovered a more experiential element in Reformation faith which emphasized personal commitment and obedience to Christ and a life regenerated by the indwelling Holy Spirit. They also emphasized witness and missions as a primary responsibility of the individual Christian and the church. Subjective religious experience and the importance of the individual became a new force in renewing and expanding the church. These concerns gradually permeated much of Protestantism, especially the developing churches in America.

The Eighteenth Century Birth. The appeal for the gospel that came to characterize revivalism sprang up almost simultaneously in both England and America in the eighteenth century. The initial signs of the First Great Awakening in the American colonies occurred in the congregation of the Dutch Reformed pastor Theodore J. Frelinghuysen in northern New Jersey in 1725, a decade before John Wesley and George Whitefield began their field preaching in England. Frelinghuysen had come under the influence of pietism before coming to America. In 1726 William Tennent, the Presbyterian leader of the Great Awakening, started his "log college" to prepare ministers who would preach a personalized Gospel which called men and women to repentance.

By the time George Whitefield began recurrent revivalistic tours of the American colonies in 1738, Jonathan Edwards, the theologian of the colonial awakening, had already experienced a small revival in Northampton, massachusetts. Edwards accepted the validity of much of the religious emotion that accompanied the conversions among his parishioners and wrote in defense of the proper role of emotion in true religion. The revival continued to move south until it touched all the colonies. In England the recognized leader of the "Evangelical Revival" was John Wesley, founder of Methodism and close friend of Whitefield. Whitefield had encouraged Wesley to take up the field preaching that brought the gospel directly to the masses of working people.

The success of this appeal to the heart as well as the head could not be doubted. Religious interest was renewed, and people flocked to the churches in significant numbers in both America and England. American historians recognize that the sweep of religious fervor from north to south (prior to the Revolution) was one of the few unifying factors among the otherwise disparate American colonies. In England the revival left an indelible religious and social impact for stability in the midst of the revolutionary unrest which pervaded most of Europe at the time.

It was the Second Great Awakening at the beginning of the nineteenth century that defined the theology and method of the tradition. The revival began at Hampden-Sidney and Washington colleges in Virginia in 1787. It continued at Yale under Timothy Dwight and at Andover and Princeton at the end of the eighteenth century. It was popularized in the great camp meetings on the frontier. The Cane Ridge, Kentucky, camp meeting in August, 1801, became the most famous of all. The strange emotional phenomena which had shown themselves in the earlier colonial revival reappeared in intensified form. "Falling," "jerking," "rolling," and "dancing" exercises engaged many of the twenty thousand worshipers present. These demonstrations moderated as the revival continued, but physical phenomena have always existed in some measure in revival movements.

Camp Meetings and Revivalism. The Presbyterians who organized these first camp meetings abandoned their use. The Methodists and Baptists, however, continued to use them. The ambience of the natural setting in which the camps were held, the release from the ordinary routines of home and church, the freedom to worship together in a less sectarian context, the family reunion, community-center flavor, all contributed to a mystique that made the camp meeting a continuing factor in future revivalism. The frontier camp meetings declined after the Civil War, but the Holiness revival which began to flourish after the Civil War utilized them extensively in both rural and urban settings. Camp meetings became the religious centers that shaped the theology and ethos of the numerous Holiness churches organized at the end of the century.

In Holiness and Pentecostal churches the camp meeting remains an essential expression of their revivalistic worship. Even there, however, the camp meeting has become more of a church family rally or reunion than a time for evangelistic outreach to the unchurched.

Charles Finney

The outstanding figure in early nineteenth century revivalism was Charles Finney. Finney took the revival ethos of the frontier camp meeting to the urban centers of the northeast. His success there and his widespread influence as a professor and later president of Oberlin College gave him a platform for propagating a theology and defense of the revival methods he espoused. In his Revival Lectures Finney contended that God had clearly revealed the laws of revival in Scripture. Whenever the church obeyed those laws, spiritual renewal resulted. The importance which Finney attached to the necessity for prayer and the agency of the Holy Spirit in his revival practice, had a great effect on the opposition to revival .

Finney's "new methods" raised as much controversy as his attachment to "New School theology." Preaching was direct,addressed to the individual, and usually delivered without manuscript or even notes. The public nature of the conversionexperience was focused by the introduction of the "anxious bench," by which the serious seeker placed his intentions onrecord before the congregation. The critics were especially wary of the public platform given to the laity and especiallywomen as they prayed and testified in the revival services. After the dramatic Fulton Street or Layman's Revival of 1858,however, most of the critics were silenced, and revival meetings began set the predominant pattern of AmericanProtestantism until about 1870. Perfectionist Revivalism

A significant new development in revivalism between 1835 and 1875 was the rise of perfectionist revivalism. Finney introduced a perfectionist note into his evangelism after his move to Oberlin College in 1835. He and his colleague Asa Mahan, president of Oberlin, joined perfectionist leaders in Methodism, such as lay leaders Walter and Phoebe Palmer, in a new Holiness revivalism in the churches. The movement used revivalistic methods to call Christians to a second crisis of faith and total commitment subsequent to conversion, commonly called among Americans a "second conversion," a "rest of faith," or the "deeper" or "higher life"; to Methodists it was "entire sanctification," "perfection in love," or "the second blessing." The revival ultimately gave prominence to a personal "fullness" or "baptism" of the Holy Spirit in speaking of the experience.

The creation of the National Camp meeting Association for the Promotion of Holiness by John Inskip and other Methodist ministers in 1867 spread the movement beyond Methodism around the world. In England the Holiness revival gave rise to the Salvation Army and the Keswick Movement.

Large audiences continued to attend the "revival campaigns" of R. A. Torrey, Gypsy Smith, and others after the turn of the century. However, without the emphasis on Holyness, without the prayer, we no longer saw revivals such as Charles Finney had been used of God to produce. The results was the "social Gospel." Critics such as H. L. Mencken, who turned the people toward a gospel of social concern among the larger denominations, could lead only to a decline in the influence of revivalism in the churches and in American life.

Revivals of religion and the theological presuppositions and practices which have accompanied them through their history have consistently raised a common pattern of criticism. The strongly emotional nature of the revivalist's appeal, the greater the outcry from the Devil and his people!

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