Along the Atlantic coast in the British colonies in North America between 1735 and 1750, there arose a movement of revivals known collectively to historians and theologians as the Great Awakening. The Great Awakening impacted congregational churches in New England, Presbyterian and Reformed churches in the middle colonies, and Baptist and Anglican churches in the Southern colonies. It is fair to say that every Protestant denomination in the Atlantic British colonies was affected, especially as Awakening-minded and revivalist pastors preached cross-denominationally. For example, the Anglican itinerant preacher, George Whitefield, preached in Jonathan Edwards’s Congregationalist church as did Gilbert Tennent, the Presbyterian revivalist. Gilbert Tennent was also exhorted and encouraged by the Dutch Reformed revivalist Theodor J. Frelinghuysen. Whether Anglican, Baptist, Congregationalist, Dutch Reformed, or Presbyterian, the revivals were afoot under a generally Reformed rubric, towns and countryside spoke of God moving through fervent preaching and response to the terrors of the Law proclaimed, the grace of God in Christ Jesus, justification by faith alone, and the work of the Holy Spirit to change the motions, affections, hearts, and whole person. Pastors pressed the urgency of the dangers of Arminian synergism, antinomian living, and deist unbelief. But more than this, these preachers urgently placed before their hearers both the imminent danger of the eternal wrath of God and the peace of God that only comes through divinely wrought regeneration, evidenced in a thorough conversion.
. . . there is an imminent spiritual danger to those who have much learning of Christ but little experience of him.
Four figures from this period taken in three points give helpful insight into controversies and content of the Great Awakening, namely Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), George Whitefield (1714–1770), Gilbert Tennent 1703–1764), and John Thomson (c. 1690–1753). Jonathan Edwards’s works on the revivals both by account and doctrinal treatise form much of the backbone and backdrop of Great Awakening emphases, such as A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising work of God in the Conversion of many hundred souls (1737), The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God (1741), and Thoughts on the Revival in New England (1742). His works became not just, as he intended, an account of the revivals, but in the hands of followers, a formula and process of conversion. George Whitefield’s sermons, many of which we have in volumes of collected sermons today, illustrate the state of affairs in the period as well as the basic urgency of regeneration and its experience. Gilbert Tennent and John Thomson illustrate how the revivals caused a schism in the Presbyterian churches and—in something too rare to overlook in the history of orthodox Reformed Presbyterians— even caused a reunion. Tennent, zealously in favor of the revival measures, and Thomson, being deeply concerned about them, can be apprised in conjunction. Understanding these figures and this movement, even by way of overview, will help us appreciate the joy of the gospel and the wonderful work of God in regeneration even as we seek to acknowledge the potential challenges and dangers to congregants, congregations, and ministers.
Jonathan Edwards and the Surprising Work of God
In a sleepy New England town in the winter of 1734, “the Spirit of God began extraordinarily to set in” to the congregation of Northampton, MA. The congregation became the site of a surprising work of God, as Edwards would recount it. For there was now “a great and earnest concern about the great things of religion” which brought over 300 people to Christ. Here Edwards noted how, in terror of the Law of God and his wrath, young people began fleeing to Christ with joy in God’s free grace in Christ. By June of 1735, this first awakening—a growing corporate and personal awareness of sin, joy in Christ, and a desire for holiness— abruptly ended when a prominent lawyer in the town, a melancholic soul, despairing of grace, suddenly committed suicide. The wind of revival receded from the town. But in 1740, with the arrival of George Whitefield, an Anglican itinerant preacher to Northampton, Edwards was brought to tears and life came again to his congregation. By 1742, the revival fervor had become raucous and the religious experiences more controversial. Edwards observed, “There were some instances of persons lying in a trance . . . for perhaps a whole twenty-four hours motionless.” Also in the spring of that year, Edwards sought to curb the laxity that had crept into application for church membership wherein applicants previously had need only to give assent to doctrines and practices without account of their experience of faith and conversion. The change in practice led to controversies that roiled the church of Northampton, leading eventually to Edwards’s dismissal in 1750.
The accounts of the 1734 conversions in his A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God in Conversion (1737) became an international best seller. It was first published in England, then in Boston in 1738, and eventually was translated into Dutch and German. The general account of the revivals as starting in personal realizations of hypocrisy, condemnation under the Law, the beauty of Jesus Christ offered freely in the gospel, and the conversion to God with an intention of holy faithfulness was neither new nor terribly controversial. What was controversial were the accounts of swooning, trances, outcries, and convulsions as signs of the Holy Spirit. Edwards’s book The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit (1741) did not so much decry the incidental excesses as point to the essence of the experiences. This was highly controversial, for some interpreted these signs as necessary marks of conversion and others as outward marks of false religion. Edwards’s defense of his theory of conversion is evidenced in more philosophically and theologically technical terms in his Religious Affections (1746), which is a fundamental text for understanding revivalism and the Great Awakening. But in the period, it was precisely the marks of conversion that became contested ground among pastors in all these denominations. Tennent and Thomson help us understand the Presbyterian receptions and critiques of the Great Awakening in that period.
Whitefield on the Necessity of the New Birth
What does 2 Corinthians 5:17 mean? “Therefore, if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature.” George Whitefield pressed this point in a sermon on regeneration by challenging not settled orthodoxy but those who had settled in orthodox profession but may not be settled in Christ.
The doctrine of our regeneration, or new birth in Christ Jesus, though one of the most fundamental doctrines of our holy religion . . . nay though it is the very hinge on which the salvation of each of us turns, and a point to which in all sincere Christians of every denomination agree; yet it is so seldom considered, and so little experimentally understood by the generality of professors, that were we to judge the truth of it, by the experience of the most who call themselves Christians, we should be apt to imagine they had not so much as heard whether there be any such thing as regeneration or not. It is true, men for the most part are orthodox in the common articles of their creed; they believe “there is but one God, and one Mediator between God and men, even the man Christ Jesus,” and that there is no other name given under heaven, whereby they can be saved, besides his; but then tell them, they must be regenerated, they must be born again, they must be renewed in the very spirit, in the inmost faculties of their minds, ere they can truly call Christ, “Lord, Lord,” or have an evidence that they have any share in the merits of his precious blood; and they are ready to cry out with Nicodemus, “How can these things be?”
Here we see an emphasis in Awakening preaching and Whitefield’s target: there is an imminent spiritual danger to those who have much learning of Christ but little experience of him. They have much of head and little of heart. They are comfortable in their mercantile and agrarian life of colonial profit and consumption. The rhythms of planting and harvest, of investment and profit, had become a society of religious respectability. Professing much, they were in danger of experiencing little: great knowledge of the faith but little zeal in the holy life of faith. Whitefield and other Awakening pastors also saw a lurking danger not just in the pew, but in the pulpit as well. There was a real danger of taciturn moralistic preaching and “do-good” piety; settled professors who keep some measure of outward conformity, who know God is good but the question remained: have these Christians truly tasted and seen the goodness of God in their heart?
In open air assemblies, as Whitefield’s words lofted and fell like thunder on the ears of his hearers, Christ did come as a propitiation for our sins, to give his life a ransom for many. Praise the Lord! But the forensic reality of Christ’s work is not a simple fact to be comprehended. There is still need of a deep and abiding change, a transformation of the heart.
[For] if the benefits of our dear Redeemer’s death were to extend no farther than barely to procure forgiveness of our sins, we should have as little reason to rejoice in it, as a poor condemned criminal that is ready to perish by some fatal disease, would have in receiving a pardon from his judge. For Christians would do well to consider, that there is not only a legal hindrance to our happiness, as we are breakers of God’s law, but also a moral impurity in our natures, which renders us incapable of enjoying heaven . . . till some mighty change have been wrought in us. It is necessary therefore, in order to make Christ’s redemption complete, that we should have a grant of God’s Holy Spirit to change our natures, and so prepare us for the enjoyment of that happiness our Savior has purchased by his precious blood. Accordingly the Holy Scriptures inform us, that whom Christ justifies, or whose sins he forgives, and to whom he imputes his perfect obedience, those he also sanctifies, purifies and cleanses, and totally changeth their corrupted natures.
Whitefield’s ministry can be characterized as itinerant, and in terms of modern Presbyterian polity for a ranging ministry, out of bounds. In approximately 1736 or 1737, Whitefield first entered pastoral ministry. His first open-air sermon was near Bristol, England in February 1739 to coal miners. He died in Newburyport, MA on September 30, 1770. For over thirty years he preached almost daily. A sober estimate of his sermons and exhortations on various occasions is about 1,000 a year. A historian’s caution is in order: we do not have a strict record, diary, or day planner accounting for his speaking and preaching engagements. Some scholars retrospectively estimate about 18,000 extemporaneous sermons, even if preaching the same message again. As to scope and range, Whitefield preached across the American colonies seven times, well over a dozen preaching tours in Scotland, two in Ireland, a preaching tour each in Bermuda, Gibraltar, and the Netherlands. As to crowds, in 1739 it is estimated he preached to about two hundred people. Later in his career, Whitefield preached to tens of thousands. Benjamin Franklin, ever an empiricist and skeptic, remarked by way of geometric calculation, “Imagining a semicircle, of which my distance should be the radius, and that it was filled with auditors to each of whom I allowed two square feet, I computed that he might be heard by more than thirty thousand. This reconciled me to the newspaper accounts of his having preached to twenty-five thousand in the fields.” Now ponder that Whitefield not only raised the hearts of his hearers but encouraged hundreds, if not thousands, of pastors in his day to preach with as much fervency, urgency, and agency as he had, even beyond their own presbyterial bounds. That call was heard but not without some controversy.
Presbyterians Debating Conversion and Grace
Whitefield’s itinerant ministry was a popular endeavor, but it did not scruple about boundaries of diocese, parish, or presbytery. For geographically bounded church polities, this practice had potential variously to include or exclude ministers in a disruptive way. There was also some measure of debate over the implications of the revivalist methods for the doctrinal understandings and pastoral practices of the various denominations. Among Presbyterians, Gilbert Tennent was not only inspired by Whitefield’s work but actively emulated it as a proponent of the revival measures. John Thomson, while deeply committed as well to Reformed doctrines of grace, regeneration, conversion, and lively preaching, questioned the wisdom of the revival measures as well as the often strident and inflammatory accusations of the hotter revivalists against other ministers.
Among the Presbyterians, seven revivalist doctrinal tenets and emphases surfaced as impinging on the doctrine of regeneration, personal assurance of salvation, and ministerial calling. These were the most contested features surrounding the revivals and awakenings sweeping the Presbyterian churches. John Thomson outlined and engaged these tenets in his 1741 sermon and treatise, The Doctrine of Convictions set in a Clear Light. First, prior to any saving work of grace in the heart of a sinner, the Awakening revivalists held that “there must be an awakening conviction of sin and misery raised in the Soul in a way of common operation.” This common operation has nothing of saving grace in it such that one may have these preparatory convictions of sin but still fall short of regeneration. Their work is only to terrify the soul through the teaching of the Law since they were described as the spirit of bondage to fear (cf. Rom. 8:15). Second, “all true converts are as sensibly assured of their converted state, of the grace of God in them, and the love of God unto them and of the Spirit’s working in them, as they are or can be of the Truth of what they perceive by their outward senses of seeing, feeling, hearing, and so forth.” Third, “all who are not thus assured of their own conversion are yet in a damnable unconverted state.” Fourth, that “one true convert may [be] awhiles in conversation with another person, [and] know whether he be converted or no.” Fifth, that “the principal and great mark and criterion by which to judge of our own spiritual state or to form a judgment of charity concerning others, is not an orthodox profession accompanied with a godly and righteous walk and conversation, but only those inward exercises which persons have felt in themselves, or that others declare that they have felt at the time of their conversion.” Personal experience then would rule over Scripture instead of Scripture ruling experience. Sixth, regarding the calling of a person to pastoral ministry after appropriate trial of their gifts, “yet if he be not converted, or have not an inward call of the Spirit to that work, that such a person hath not the call of God but only the call of Man to ministry.” And finally, an unconverted minister with only the call of man “cannot in an ordinary way, be the means of conversion to others in preaching the Gospel.”
Five of these touched upon how one should understand conversion and regeneration, and two focused directly on ministers. While the first five were controversial and debated, the last two unsettled and had split the denomination in 1741. To his credit, Thomson did not disagree in substance with the necessity of conversion at the heart of the debate, nor was he willing—as the anti-revivalist Congregationalist Charles Chauncy had done often, loudly, and in print—to attribute the work of revivals totally to false, malign, and diabolical spirits. Thomson apprehended that these tenets
are not a little dangerous to the interest of true religion, as tending to corrupt the great fundamental doctrine of conversion or regeneration, which they bear a more particular relation unto, and so to hurt many poor souls, as to their interest in, and endeavors after the same; while some . . . induced groundlessly not only to doubt but also positively deny all interest in [regeneration], and do, in some measure to disgrace, because they cannot positively assert their experience of the particulars which are asserted by those tenets . . . to be necessary unto it, altho’ the Word of God, by which we ought to regulate our thought about these things, is wholly silent concerning them.
It was not that Thomson was against true heart reformation and conversion. The truth was far to the contrary as evidenced by his writings and sermons. His point was simple with manifold effect: the grace of God is evidenced in different ways with variable strength. The corollary, then, is that it is problematic and dangerous to insist that all Christians must have the same rote pattern of experience. Jonathan Edwards would have agreed with that. However, in practice by the 1740s, some were using the accounts of Edwards to insist that such experiences were normative and even pushing towards more extraordinary evidences. In asserting the liveliness of a robust faith as the ideal, revivalist pastors could upend, disparage, and even trample over the weak and struggling faith of many. Although Thomson does not make this point explicitly, it is worth mentioning that the Northampton revivals under Edwards came to a somewhat abrupt end when two people, despairing of grace due to their lack of such experiences, committed suicide in close succession.
Thomson also was identifying a potential danger in presumption. “I’m afraid that many poor souls are led by these same tenets to be puffed up with strong presumptuous conceits of their own conversion, because as they apprehend, they have felt such symptoms of exercises in themselves, as by these tenets, are the main criterion or marks of a work of grace.” Most significantly, Thomson did not view the exercise of saving faith as a preparatory ladder of steps, but argues from a radical regeneration in the heart of a person.
I take it for granted that when the Spirit of God begins this great and supernatural work in the Soul of a sinner, what ever be the external means, he doth not first work one grace and afterwards another, and again a third, viz. he doth not first work faith and afterwards repentance, and again love, and then good resolutions and so forth but rather that the very first beginning of true grace consists of one entire radical grace or good heavenly qualification, which is at once diffused and spread through the whole soul and all its faculties, and is therein the seed and root of all particular graces, viz. of faith, repentance, love, humility, etc. It is light in the understanding, it is faith in the soul, it is love to God and hatred of sin in the affections even as a principle of natural life, when breathed into our nostrils becomes the spring of all action, motion, sense, and exercise in the person who has it.
This one principle of life in the body is evidenced in various degrees just as organs operating properly gives rise to desire and appetite after meat or drink. It is not the desire that gives power to the organs, but the organs, because alive, give rise to the desires. So it is with regenerating grace. It is not desire and affections that give faith its transformative power. No, it is regenerating grace that evidences in various ways spiritual life. Thus, in Scripture this general principle is called
the New Man, the New Creature, a quickening to Life, a Resurrection, a new Heart, and a new Spirit all which denote one general principle of spiritual action, motion or exercise in the convert as life is in a person the common spring of all human exercises.
For Thomson, who was concerned about the strident insistence of the New Lights on the revival experiences, the issue was whether the grace of God was always evidenced just as suddenly.
It is not desire and affections that give faith its transformative power. No, it is regenerating grace that evidences in various ways spiritual life.
At the heat of the revivals, revivalist and anti-revivalist ministers often inveighed in the hottest terms against one another as false shepherds. Gilbert Tennent, whom George Whitefield named a “true son of thunder,” would often call out pastors as unconverted (sometimes with no personal knowledge of them), and that only based on the report that they were opposed to the revival measures. In print vaguely but also pointedly in private, Tennent had called out John Thomson as an unconverted minister. In 1738, the Presbyterian synod had cordoned off revivalist Presbyterian ministers into their own presbytery of New Brunswick in order to prevent overt conflict. Tennent responded by brazenly conducting itinerant preaching tours outside of the bounds of his pastoral call into jurisdictions where he judged ministers were unconverted or where ministers spoke out against revival measures. This continued even after an intrusion act was passed in 1739 by the church courts to interdict the divisive and critical preaching by the young firebrands. Tennent’s most renowned sermon was “Danger of an Unconverted Ministry” at Nottingham, PA in March 1740. Here he exhorted congregants to exercise their right to leave congregations he deemed as less than satisfactory. Supporters and detractors understood him to be beating a drum towards schism. Under the influence of his rhetoric, charges were filed by congregants against pastors, as was done against the pastor John Thomson in 1741. In Thomson’s case, these charges were later dropped in 1743 at least in part because it was determined under scrutiny that many of the signatories were fictional and signatures forged. To say that the matter was closely and hotly felt by all is an understatement. This is perhaps one of the salient lessons in defending fervent preaching and doctrinal fidelity. Thomson had observed,
[T]he very foundation and spring of all the unusual stir, that hath appeared in this country, and particularly in this province, is, in my apprehension, that woeful, uncharitable, presumptuous principle of rash judging; some ministers taking upon them to judge and condemn their Brethren, as carnal unconverted Men, who cannot nor are desirous to do good to the souls of others.
The split between the Old Side and New Side in the young Presbyterian denomination occurred in 1741 with the ejection of the revivalist preachers of the New Side. This schism split the Presbyterian denomination into two and continued until 1758 when the two sides reconciled, albeit favoring the New Side measures, with tolerable compromises and a kinder rhetoric towards one another. After the split, for the last twenty years of his life, Tennent seems to have realized how his rhetoric had contributed to the controversies. He wrote his Irenicum Ecclesiasticum (1749) as an endeavor to heal the rifts between the two factions. Even then, it still took nine more years to bring the sides back together into one denomination. Given the vitriolic nature of the rift in 1741, by 1749 with the same urgent zeal Tennent now encouraged both sides to peace with a lengthy but salutary exhortation in these and similar sentiments:
If we would but defend an accused Brother in his absence, as far as reason directs, as far as we would desire him to defend us in the like circumstances, and be hardly induced to believe what is bad of them; and even when we are constrained to it by sufficient and credible evidence, to yield an unwilling assent; and in the mean time to impute the faulty sentiment, the criminal conduct to good design, or to ignorance, oversight, and inconsideration, rather than malignity, as far as we reasonably can, it would probably have a happy influence to promote peace and union. And farther, if to kind thoughts we add candid courteous speech, and friendly behavior and action, it will crown the scene, soften their prejudices, invite mutual respect, from all that are not entirely lost to a sense of ingenuity and gratitude, and so preserve peace and union where they are, and at least prepare the way for them where they are not. If such conduct is like to have influence upon an enemy, surely much more upon a displeased friend and brother.
All of these figures surveyed would herald the need for an explicit and personal reception of the grace of God. There was great debate and concern as to how people were to respond to God’s grace. The revivals of the Great Awakening and the debates about them were not a dispute between those who cared about regeneration and those who did not, but they were a dispute about the form regeneration’s evidence must have. Insisting on uniformity of experience produced both spiritual harm, in the forms of despair and presumption, as well as ecclesial harm and public schism. Thomson’s key insight—that radical regeneration is a single diffused principle evidenced variously and not sequentially—is both pastorally helpful and theologically responsible. And whereas Edwards, Tennent, and Thomson all experienced in their own ministries something of the pain of church splits and denominational schisms, it is both a warning and an encouragement that in pursuit of evident fruit of God’s grace in our congregations and communities, that with as much zeal for the gospel we do so with the charity of the same.