Myth: Calvinists Take a Dim View of Revival and Awakening

In the late 19th and early 20th century, it was still commonplace for historians standing in the Presbyterian and Reformed tradition to endorse the concept of revival. After all, they considered the Reformation of the 16th century to have been a classic example of the phenomenon. Thus writers such as T.M. Lindsay of Glasgow (1882) and Williston Walker of Yale (1918) wrote of the way in which the spiritual movements of the Reformation era had been characterized by the vitality that they associated with a rapid rise in zeal for the gospel. They were hardly the first to see it this way. The way had really been paved for them by the Victorian-era Swiss historian, J.H. Merle D’Aubigne (1794-1872) who took this perspective in his six-volume History of the Reformation in the Sixteenth Century. Yet after mid-20th century, it became rare to find reputable historians making this claim; I find it last made in 1968. What has caused the evaporation of this time-honored perspective? I find three contributing factors.

In 1940, Lewis Bevans Schenck in his Presbyterian Doctrine of Children of the Covenant (reprinted 2003) maintained that the Great Awakening era had been obsessed with the preaching of the doctrine of regeneration. He maintained that the children of believers had been adversely affected by this barrage, and claimed that the movement of revival in that era had helped to water down the covenant idea. Schenck made it respectable to question the welcome which the Presbyterian and Reformed churches had given to this movement; the late Schenck has made many disciples. His work strengthened the hands of those who see themselves continuing the perspective of the original opponents of the Great Awakening.

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Again, whatever we might think about the spiritual movements of the 18th century, there is still-wider agreement that the story of revival underwent a major overhaul in the 1820s and 1830s under the leadership of C. G. Finney (1792-1875). Determined to optimize the frequency and the effect of movements of revival, Finney first pursued innovations involving use of the “anxious bench” (close to, but not quite the equivalent of the later “altar call”), denunciatory prayers, and protracted series of meetings—and then wrote a manual commending these “new measures” to all who would try them. Finney’s approach polarized the Presbyterian and Reformed churches of America and of Britain (where he soon travelled) and opinion is still splintered three ways: some still promote pre-Finney era ideals of revival taken from the Great Awakening era, others acknowledge Finney’s shortcomings but still allow a kind of ‘succession’ of legitimate revival movements extending from D. L. Moody to Billy Graham, while still others believe that all dabbling in revival movements has been at the expense of Reformed theological integrity, and ought never to be repeated.

Third, to make an already-complicated situation more complex still, there has been in the past quarter-century an explosion of research about the 18th-century Great Awakening, the unforeseen consequence of which has been that we have been less and less inclined to view the movement in the era of Whitefield, Wesley, and Edwards as fundamentally different from what followed in the age of Finney. This research has pointed out what might be called the “entrepreneurial” side of the Great Awakening, i.e. the advancing of that movement through the circulation of newspapers such as the Christian History, the massive letter-writing efforts of George Whitefield’s travelling publicist, and the reading from pulpits and family hearths of Edwards’s Faithful Narrative of Surprising Conversions. Didn’t all this amount to “marketing”? And so, perhaps the valiant efforts to insist that the 18th century still provides us with a clear picture of what revival is, unsullied by developments in the Finney era, is all-for-nothing. Perhaps the whole history, the whole idea of revival is best left alone? But there is good reason to dissent from this, and to return to the judgment of a century ago that the Reformation was both itself a revival and provides a kind of paradigm for others to follow.

Revivals of Two Kinds

Though the actual terminology of “revival” cannot be traced to earlier than 1674, it is not difficult to trace back into the century of the Reformation movements of two kinds which each in their own way meet the definition of revival furnished by the Dictionary of American English (based on historic usage), “a period of renewed interest in, and devotion to religion.” These two types are multitudes won to Christ in a compressed period and a sluggish church stirred to fresh vigor. Let us take these in turn.

We do not often speak of the Reformation era as a period of aggressive evangelistic preaching; but it indeed was this. Away from the university faculties of theology and the city cathedrals where much of the story of the Reformation played out, there were the itinerant evangelistic preachers who went town to town decrying the virtual idolatry of medieval religion and preaching up the need for living faith in Jesus Christ. Lesser-known figures of the Reformation such as John Frith and Robert Barnes (in England), Patrick Hamilton and George Wishart (Scotland), Pierre Viret and Guillaume Farel (in France and Switzerland) did this kind of itinerant evangelistic preaching—often to very large crowds. There followed what were at first “underground cells” of evangelical believers which met in barns, orchards, and hedges. It is no stretch to call these 16th century events evangelistic awakening or revival. By the early 17th century, we have clear documentation of such events in Northern Ireland and in the west of Scotland with some well-known Reformed preachers such as David Dickson instrumental in evangelistic harvests that endured over years.

Recent writers such as Marilyn Westerkamp, Leigh Schmidt, and W. R. Ward have shown plainly that early immigrants to America from England, Ireland, and Scotland as well as central Europe had witnessed such movements before they ever crossed the Atlantic. But this is to speak only of one type of “a period of renewed interest in, and devotion to religion”; the other is the stirring of a sluggish church to renewed vigor.

We have from as early as 1596 an account of how the Scottish minister, John Davidson of Prestonpans, stood up in a General Assembly lamenting the decline of godliness in a church only 35 years past its formal reconstitution in Scotland’s Reformation. When pressed to provide a detailed accounting, he returned to cite pastors for too-easy admission of unfit candidates into the ministry, their singling out of for discipline only those guilty of gross sins, their frivolity (dancing, card playing and gambling), Sabbath breaking, drunkenness and brawling. The General Assembly dissolved into tears. And when those present were asked to raise their hands to indicate their resolve to walk in a new way “many were wonderfully moved at the sight of so many hands so readily held up.” This spiritual exercise was repeated across the land.

And we have not even reached the 18th century, in which the supposed “paradigm” of evangelical revival has been supposed to emerge in the Great Awakening. It is enough to say that such movements have been associated with aggressive preaching of the gospel and heartfelt calls to repentance since the Reformation dawned. How is it that, of late, we have become so fastidious, that we seem beyond considering that God might bless our preaching on such a scale that multitudes would be won to Christ rapidly and sickly churches re-directed in weeks rather than decades? To seek such breakthroughs by prayer and bold preaching is not to decline from some original Reformed ideal, but to maintain those ideals.