Awakening, mission and modernity (c. 1700-1900)

What you'll learn

• Describe the Pietist movement, the Great Awakening and the Evangelical Revival, including the Calvinist-Arminian debate between Whitefield and Wesley, fairly.
• Trace the rise of the modern missionary movement through Carey, Judson and Hudson Taylor.
• Explain how Enlightenment thought and theological liberalism challenged the faith, and how Spurgeon and the Princeton theologians answered, and place the origins of the LDS, Watch Tower and Hebrew Israelite movements in this setting.

From orthodoxy to awakening

By 1700 the Protestant churches had their confessions. The danger now was not ignorance of doctrine but dead orthodoxy: correct beliefs held without heart, and state churches full of nominal members. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brought three great movements that still shape the church you belong to: revival (Pietism, the Great Awakening, the Evangelical Revival), world mission (Carey and those who followed), and, running the other way, modernity's challenge to the Bible (the Enlightenment and theological liberalism).

For an apologist this period matters in two ways. It shows that biblical, confessional Christianity can be warm, missionary and culturally fruitful; and it shows where many modern objections to Scripture actually came from. The arguments you will hear on the street ('miracles can't happen', 'Moses didn't write the Torah', 'the Gospels are myth') mostly took shape in this era.

Pietism and the Moravians

In Lutheran Germany, Philipp Jakob Spener published Pia Desideria ('Pious Desires') in 1675. He proposed small groups for Bible study ('little churches within the church'), a greater role for laypeople, Christianity practised and not just known, charity in controversy, more devotional training of pastors, and preaching aimed at the heart. Spener's house meetings in Frankfurt (the collegia pietatis) marked the start of Pietism, a name first used by its critics. August Hermann Francke taught at the newly founded University of Halle from 1692, and in 1695 began a school for poor children that grew into an orphanage and a great complex of schools (the Francke Foundations), a centre of education and mission.

Count Nikolaus von Zinzendorf, a former pupil at Francke's school, sheltered refugees from Moravia on his estate at Herrnhut. In 1727 a powerful revival renewed this community, the Moravian Church, which became one of the most missionary-minded churches in history. Moravians would later play a part in John Wesley's spiritual journey.

Reformed Christians can learn from Pietism's call to heart religion, while noting its weakness: a tendency to prize experience over doctrine, which later fed into Schleiermacher's theology of feeling (see below).

The Great Awakening: Edwards and Whitefield

In New England, Jonathan Edwards (5 October 1703 - 22 March 1758), pastor at Northampton, Massachusetts, saw a revival that peaked in 1734-35. His A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God (1737) described it. On 8 July 1741 he preached Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God at Enfield, Connecticut. Edwards was the most profound theologian America has produced. Religious Affections (1746) asks how to tell true conversion from counterfeit emotion; Freedom of the Will (1754) defends the Reformed view that we always choose according to our strongest inclination, so that sinners are both responsible and unable to turn to God without grace. Dismissed by his church after a dispute over who should be admitted to communion, he served as a missionary pastor at Stockbridge (from 1751), was installed as president of the College of New Jersey (Princeton) in February 1758, and died weeks later after a smallpox inoculation he took to encourage others.

George Whitefield (1714-1770) was the Awakening's great preacher. A member of the 'Holy Club' at Oxford with the Wesley brothers, he began open-air preaching in 1739 to the coal miners of Kingswood near Bristol since he had no parish of his own. He crossed the Atlantic thirteen times (seven visits to the colonies). Benjamin Franklin, who was not a believer, measured how far Whitefield's voice carried and estimated that more than 30,000 people could hear him in the open air. Whitefield was a convinced Calvinist. He also owned slaves to support his orphanage in Georgia and campaigned for slavery's legalisation there (1748-1750), a stain that honest history must record, in contrast to John Wesley, who denounced the slave trade as the sum of all villainies and wrote Thoughts upon Slavery (1774). He died at Newburyport, Massachusetts, on 30 September 1770.

Wesley and the Calvinist-Arminian debate

John Wesley (1703-1791), an Anglican clergyman, returned discouraged from a mission to Georgia (1735-37) during which he had met Moravians whose calm faith in a storm struck him. On 24 May 1738, at a meeting in Aldersgate Street, London, while someone read from Luther's preface to Romans, he wrote that he felt his heart “strangely warmed” and trusted Christ alone for salvation. From April 1739, at Whitefield's invitation, he too preached in the open air. He organised converts into societies, classes and bands, travelled tirelessly and, with his brother Charles Wesley, the great hymn-writer, led the Methodist movement. He never formally left the Church of England. At his death the Methodist societies in Britain and America together counted well over 100,000 members (one common figure is about 135,000).

Wesley was an evangelical Arminian, and evangelical in the full sense: weeks after Aldersgate he preached Salvation by Faith before the University of Oxford (18 June 1738), proclaiming salvation by grace through faith in Christ. In 1739 he preached and published a sermon, Free Grace, attacking predestination. Whitefield replied in a letter dated Christmas Eve 1740. The two movements separated into Wesleyan (Arminian) and Calvinistic Methodism. State Wesley's view fairly: he taught that all people are fallen and unable to save themselves, but that God gives prevenient grace (grace that 'goes before') to all, restoring the ability to respond to the gospel; that Christ died for all; that believers can fall away; and that Christians may attain 'Christian perfection', which he preferred to call 'perfect love'. Reformed Christians reply that Scripture presents grace as effectual, not merely enabling (John 6:37, 44; Eph 2:1-5), and that the atonement actually saves those for whom it was made.

Yet the story has a gracious end. Within a few years the two men were reconciled, and at Whitefield's own request John Wesley preached his funeral sermon in London (1770), urging that on less essential points Christians may 'think and let think'. This is how the in-house debate should be conducted: firmly, biblically and as brothers. Wesley's heirs today include the Methodist and Wesleyan holiness churches, and many other evangelicals, including many Baptists, hold neither system fully. This course teaches the doctrines of grace as its conviction, but it counts these believers as true brothers and sisters who preach the gospel of grace.

In the following century, America's Second Great Awakening produced Charles Finney (1792-1875), whose Lectures on Revivals of Religion (1835) taught that revival is not a miracle but the result of the right use of means, and who promoted 'new measures' such as the 'anxious seat'. Finney denied that sinners inherit a sinful nature, treating depravity as wholly voluntary; B. B. Warfield later wrote that God might be eliminated from Finney's theology without essentially changing its character. Finney's methods shaped much later revivalism, which is why Reformed Christians still discuss him.

The modern missionary movement

Protestants had sent missionaries before (the Moravians especially), but the modern missionary movement is usually dated from William Carey (1761-1834), a Baptist shoemaker and pastor. In 1792 he published An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens, arguing that the Great Commission still binds the church. In May 1792 he preached at Nottingham on Isaiah 54:2-3 ('Enlarge the place of thy tent'); no copy of the sermon survives, but it is traditionally summarised as 'Expect great things from God; attempt great things for God.' That year twelve Particular Baptist ministers meeting at Kettering formed what became the Baptist Missionary Society, with Andrew Fuller among the founders. Carey sailed in 1793, joined the mission at Serampore in 1800, and with his colleagues printed the Bible in whole or part in dozens of Indian and Asian languages and dialects. He also campaigned against sati (widow-burning), finally abolished in 1829.

Notice that Carey was a convinced Calvinist. The idea that belief in God's sovereign election kills evangelism is refuted by the history: Carey, Fuller, Whitefield, Edwards (missionary to the Housatonic people) and Spurgeon were all Calvinists. They preached and translated precisely because they believed God had a people to gather from every nation (Acts 18:9-10; Rev 5:9). This is not to say that only Calvinists evangelise; Wesley's Methodist preachers were tireless evangelists too. The point is simply that belief in election does not kill mission.

Adoniram Judson (1788-1850) and his wife Ann sailed from America in February 1812. On the voyage he became convinced of believer's baptism and was baptised in Calcutta. In Burma (now Myanmar) he endured some seventeen months or more of brutal imprisonment during the Anglo-Burmese War; Ann died in 1826. He finished the Burmese Bible in 1834. At his death Burma had about 100 churches and over 8,000 believers.

James Hudson Taylor (1832-1905) reached Shanghai on 1 March 1854. On 25 June 1865, after a spiritual crisis on Brighton beach, he founded the China Inland Mission to take the gospel to China's unreached interior provinces. CIM missionaries dressed, ate and lived as Chinese people did, which was rare at the time. Taylor died in Changsha in 1905. Today China has one of the largest Christian populations in the world, though estimates vary widely.

The Enlightenment and the rise of liberal theology

Meanwhile European intellectual life moved toward autonomous human reason as the judge of all claims. David Hume's essay Of Miracles (1748) argued that testimony could never make it rational to believe a miracle had occurred. Deism allowed a Creator but no revelation or miracles. This is the root of the modern sceptic's starting assumption that the supernatural is impossible (see Foundations of Defence, Lesson 2, and later Secular Society, m05).

Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) tried to rescue religion for educated unbelievers in On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (1799) and The Christian Faith (1821-22, revised 1830-31). He grounded religion not in revealed doctrine but in the feeling of absolute dependence, so that doctrines became descriptions of Christian religious experience. He is often called the father of modern liberal theology.

Higher criticism applied the same naturalistic assumptions to the Bible. David Friedrich Strauss's Life of Jesus (1835-36) treated many Gospel narratives, especially the miracles, as myth. Julius Wellhausen's Prolegomena to the History of Israel (first published 1878, retitled 1883) gave classic form to the documentary hypothesis, which divides the Pentateuch into sources (J, E, D and P) and dates the law after the prophets. Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (24 November 1859) was widely taken to remove the need for a designer. By 1900 many leading seminaries in Germany, Britain and America taught that the Bible was a fallible human record of religious experience. The Reliable Word (m02) shows how later evidence and scholarship answer many of these claims.

This era also produced a popular myth: that science and Christianity have always been at war. It was spread by two books, John William Draper's History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874) and Andrew Dickson White's A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896). Historians of science today regard this 'conflict thesis' as discredited. The trial of Galileo by the Roman Inquisition (1633) was real and wrong, but it involved church politics and personalities as much as theology, and Galileo himself remained a believer. Secular Society (m05) takes the science question further.

Faithful answers: Spurgeon and Princeton

Charles Haddon Spurgeon (19 June 1834 - 31 January 1892), converted on 6 January 1850 through a sermon on Isaiah 45:22 in a Primitive Methodist chapel in Colchester, was called to New Park Street Chapel in London in 1854 at the age of nineteen. The Metropolitan Tabernacle opened in 1861, seating about 5,000. A Calvinist, he founded the Pastors' College (1856) and an orphanage, and his printed sermons circulated worldwide. In March 1887 his magazine The Sword and the Trowel published 'The Down Grade' by his friend Robert Shindler, warning that ministers were abandoning core doctrines. Among the issues Spurgeon named were the infallibility of Scripture, substitutionary atonement and the finality of judgement for those who die outside Christ. He withdrew from the Baptist Union in October 1887, and in January 1888 the Union's council passed a vote of censure on him. The Downgrade Controversy cost Spurgeon dearly, but it is a lasting warning: doctrinal drift begins quietly, with leaders who keep the old vocabulary while changing its meaning.

In America, Princeton Theological Seminary (founded 1812, with Archibald Alexander as first professor) became the stronghold of confessional Reformed theology. Charles Hodge (1797-1878) taught some 3,000 ministers and wrote a three-volume Systematic Theology (1871-73). At the celebration of his fiftieth year of teaching on 24 April 1872, he remarked that he was not afraid to say that a new idea had never originated in the Seminary, meaning that Princeton aimed to hand on the faith, not invent a new one. B. B. Warfield (1851-1921), who co-wrote an influential 1881 article on inspiration with A. A. Hodge, defended the inerrancy of Scripture against the critics; his Counterfeit Miracles (1918) argued the classic cessationist position (Reformed continuationists disagree; see Lesson 8). Princeton's work laid the foundation for Machen's stand in the 1920s (Lesson 8).

New religious movements: where the course's groups came from

The religious ferment of nineteenth-century America produced several movements you study elsewhere in this course. Each claimed that historic Christianity had fallen away and needed restoring, which is why church history is such an important answer to them.

• Latter-day Saints (module m08): Joseph Smith published the Book of Mormon in March 1830 and organised the church on 6 April 1830, in upstate New York, an area swept by revivals. Its foundation is the claim of a total apostasy after the apostles.
• Adventism and the Watch Tower (module m07): William Miller predicted Christ's return, and when 22 October 1844 passed without it (the 'Great Disappointment'), several Adventist movements emerged, including the Seventh-day Adventists. In the 1870s Charles Taze Russell, influenced by Adventist end-times teaching, gathered a Bible study group in Pennsylvania, and in July 1879 began Zion's Watch Tower. His followers took the name Jehovah's witnesses in 1931.
• Hebrew Israelite roots (module m09): after emancipation some Black Americans read the Exodus as their own story. F. S. Cherry's Church of the Living God, the Pillar Ground of Truth for All Nations, is usually dated to 1886, and William Saunders Crowdy founded the Church of God and Saints of Christ in Lawrence, Kansas, in 1896. The street 'camps' came much later, in the twentieth century.
• Liberal Protestantism is not a separate group but a movement inside the churches; its clash with orthodoxy in the twentieth century is the subject of Lesson 8.

Key texts

• Matthew 28:18-20: The Great Commission, which Carey argued still binds the church in every generation, with Christ's promise of his presence.
• Isaiah 54:2-3: 'Enlarge the place of your tent': the text of Carey's 1792 Nottingham sermon.
• John 3:3-8: The new birth by the Spirit, central to the preaching of Whitefield and Edwards and the heart of true revival.
• Ephesians 2:1-10: Dead in sin, made alive by grace, saved through faith: key to the Calvinist-Arminian debate and to the gospel all evangelicals preached.
• Romans 10:13-15: 'How are they to hear without someone preaching?' The link between God's saving purpose and the church's mission.
• 2 Timothy 3:16-4:4: All Scripture is breathed out by God; Paul warns of a time when people will not endure sound teaching. Spurgeon's Downgrade in a sentence.
• Jude 3-4: Contend for the faith once for all delivered to the saints, against those who creep in unnoticed: the call Spurgeon and Princeton obeyed.
• Galatians 1:6-9: Even an angel from heaven preaching another gospel is accursed: a test for nineteenth-century movements claiming new revelation or a restored gospel.

Objections and answers

Try answering each one yourself before you open the response.

Written task

Write 300-400 words comparing two figures from this lesson who represent different responses to the challenges of their day: for example Spurgeon and Schleiermacher, or Whitefield and Wesley, or Carey and Finney. For each, give accurate dates and key facts, summarise their main theological convictions fairly, and assess them from Scripture. Conclude with one lesson for an apologist today.

Hand this in to Mr Scott. He will look for:

• Accurate historical facts and dates for both figures
• Fair, charitable statement of each person's views in terms they would accept
• Evaluation grounded in specific, correctly used Scripture
• Distinguishes in-house evangelical disagreements from departures from the gospel
• A clear, practical application for apologetics today

Further reading

• Jonathan Edwards: A New Biography by Iain H. Murray: A warm, Reformed biography of Edwards and the Great Awakening.
• The Forgotten Spurgeon by Iain H. Murray: Focuses on Spurgeon's doctrinal battles, including the Downgrade Controversy.
• The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield and the Wesleys by Mark A. Noll: A careful, balanced history of the eighteenth-century revivals by a leading historian.