- The Great Awakening represented a reaction against the increasing secularization of society and against the corporate and materialistic nature of the principal churches of American culture. Several colonial conditions contributed to the revival: arid rationalism in New England, formalism in liturgical practices, as among the Dutch Reformed in the Middle Colonies, and the neglect of pastoral supervision in the South. The revival occurred primarily among the Dutch Reformed, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Baptists, some Anglicans, and almost all Calvinists. By making conversion the initial step on the road to salvation and by opening the conversion experience to all who recognized their sinfulness, the ministers of the Great Awakening, some intentionally and others unwittingly, democratized Calvinist theology. Therefore, the Great Awakening was seen as a development toward evangelical Calvinism. Indeed, the evangelical styles of religious worship promoted by the revival helped make the religious doctrines of many insurgent church denominations—particularly those of the Baptists and the Methodists—more accessible to a broader cross-section of the American population.
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- The revival preachers emphasized the “terrors of the law” to sinners, the unmerited grace of God, and the “new birth” in Jesus Christ. They frequently sought to inspire their listeners with a fear of the consequences of their sinful lives and a respect for the omnipotence of God. This sense of the ferocity of God was often tempered by the implied promise that a rejection of worldliness and a return to faith would result in a return to grace and an avoidance of the horrible punishments of an angry God. However, there was a certain contradictory quality about Great Awakening theology. Predestination, one of the principal tenets of the Calvinist theology of most of the ministers of the Great Awakening, was ultimately incompatible with the promise that humans could, by a voluntary act of faith, achieve salvation through their efforts.
Title page of Jonathan Edwards’s A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God in the Conversion of Many Hundred Souls, 1737.
- Jonathan Edwards was the great academician and apologist of the Great Awakening. A Congregational pastor at Northampton, Massachusetts, he preached justification by faith alone with remarkable effectiveness. He also attempted to redefine the psychology of religious experience and to help those involved in the revival discern what were the genuine works of the Holy Spirit. Although the call for a return to complete faith and the emphasis on the omnipotence of God can be seen as the very antithesis of Enlightenment thought, which called for a more excellent questioning of faith and a diminishing role for God in the daily affairs of humankind, Edwards explicitly drew on the idea of men such as John Locke and Isaac Newton in an attempt to make religion rational. His chief opponent was Charles Chauncy, a liberal pastor of the First Church in Boston, who wrote and preached against the revival, which he considered an outbreak of extravagant emotion.
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- Edwards maintained that the Holy Spirit withdrew from Northampton in the 1740s, and some supporters found that the revival ended that decade. A revival known as the Second Great Awakening began in New England in the 1790s. Less emotional than the Great Awakening, the Second Great Awakening led to the founding of colleges and seminaries and the organization of mission societies.
- At the age of 27, Calvin published Institutes of the Christian Religion, which in successive editions became a manual of Protestant theology. Calvin agreed with Martin Luther on justification by faith and the sole authority of Scripture. He took a position between the radical Swiss and the Lutheran view of the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. Thus, he believed that the body of Christ was not present everywhere but that his spirit was universal and that there was a genuine communion with the risen Lord. Calvin likewise took a middle view of music and art. He favored congregational singing of the Psalms, which became a characteristic practice of the Huguenots in France and the Presbyterians in Scotland and the New World. Calvin rejected the images of sin and the crucifix (the image of Christ’s body upon the cross) but allowed a plain cross. These modifications do not, however, refute the generalization that Calvinism was primarily opposed to art and music in the service of religion, but not in the secular sphere.
While Lutheranism was confined principally to parts of Germany and Scandinavia, Calvinism spread into England, Scotland, France, the Netherlands, the English-speaking colonies of North America, and parts of Germany and central Europe. This expansion began during Calvin’s lifetime, and he encouraged it. Religious refugees poured into Geneva, especially from France during the 1550s as the French government became increasingly intolerant, and from England, Scotland, Italy, and other parts of Europe into which Calvinism had spread. Calvin welcomed them, trained many of them as ministers, sent them back to their countries of origin to spread the gospel, and then supported them with letters of encouragement and advice. Geneva thus became the center of an international movement and a model for churches elsewhere. John Knox, the Calvinist leader of Scotland, described Geneva as “the most perfect school of Christ that ever was on the earth since the days of the Apostles.”
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- Calvinism was immediately popular and was appealing across geographic and social boundaries. In France, it was attractive primarily to the nobility and the urban upper classes; in Germany, it found adherents among both burghers and princes; and in England and the Netherlands, it made converts in every social group. In the Anglo-Saxon world, Calvinist notions were found to be embodied in English Puritanism, whose ethos proved vastly influential in North America beginning in the 17th century. It seems likely, therefore, that Calvinism’s appeal was based on its ability to explain disorders of the age afflicting all classes and to provide comfort by its activism and doctrine.
- All things are triune, with binary interactive, like the holy trinity.
