So political, intellectual and social history will form the background to our study. The eighteenth century was the time when the world changed from ancient to modern. Massive changes in science, in intellectual thought and in industrial practice introduced a way of life which was radically different from the period of the Renaissance and Reformation.
In the field from which the Revival sprang, there were many other species. Some competed with gospel religion and some assisted its growth.
Let's look at some of the influences and groups that were part of eighteenth century life. The Dissenters were the heirs of the Puritans. After the Act of Uniformity in thousands of puritan clergy left the Church of England. By the eighteenth century four groups had survived. The Quakers had drifted apart as a distinct group. One such spiritually dead clergyman was John Wesley, who later became the founder of Methodism although he never intended to form a separate church.
Wesley had gone to Georgia with James Oglethorpe to work as a missionary to the Indians. He soon returned to England in despair and wrote, "I went to America to convert the Indians; but O who will convert me! Back in England, as Wesley struggled with his own sinfulness and need of salvation, he received spiritual counsel from the Moravian Peter Boehler.
On May 24, , during a meeting at Aldersgate, Wesley experienced God's saving grace and wrote, "I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation; and an assurance was given to me that he had taken away my sins. From George Whitefield, Wesley learned the importance of preaching in the open air to reach the masses.
At first he could not imagine souls being saved unless they were in Church, but Jesus' "open-air preaching" of the Sermon on the Mount convinced him it was okay. To the poor and discouraged Wesley was not welcomed in many of the Church of England churches.
He was looked down upon as one of the contemptible religious "enthusiasts. Excessive taunts, verbal abuse, and even occasional physical violence could not deter Wesley. Wesley traveled over , miles in the cause of the gospel. In his preaching he talked continually of Christ and emphasized repentance, faith, and holiness. Add to Cart. Save Cite Email this content Share link with colleague or librarian You can email a link to this page to a colleague or librarian:.
Your current browser may not support copying via this button. Asian Studies. Modern History. Religious Studies. History of Religion. Theology and World Christianity. World Christianity. Table of Contents. Sign in to annotate. Delete Cancel Save. Cancel Save. View Expanded. View Table. View Full Size. Corporate Social Responsibility. Mission Statement. Indeed, the most important sign of sanctification was the degree of one's willingness to enlist in the ongoing evangelical campaign to convert the world.
For further discussion of the evangelical convert's role in the world see under Nineteenth Century, Evangelicalism as a Social Movement. Revivalism and the Second Great Awakening A second distinguishing feature of nineteenth-century evangelicalism was its approach to religious revivals.
The phrase "religious revival" was originally coined in the eighteenth century to describe a new phenomenon in which churches experienced an unexpected "awakening" of spiritual concern, occasioned by a special and mysterious outpouring of God's saving grace, which led to unprecedented numbers of intense and "surprising conversions" that "revived" the piety and power of the churches.
In the early nineteenth century, however, as "the revival" became a central instrument for provoking conversions, it became as much a human as a divine event. In the terms of Charles Grandison Finney, a revival was something preachers and communicants did. It was a deliberately orchestrated event that deployed a variety of spiritual practices to provoke conversions especially among the unconverted "youth" men and women between 15 and 30 in the community.
The new, self-consciously wrought revivals took several forms. They first emerged at the turn of the eighteenth century with the invention of the camp meeting in western Virginia and North Carolina and on the Kentucky and Ohio frontier by Presbyterians, Methodists, and Baptists. At these meetings, the most famous or notorious of which took place at Cane Ridge, Kentucky in , hundreds and sometimes thousands of people would gather from miles around in a wilderness encampment for four days to a week.
There they engaged in an unrelenting series of intense spiritual exercises, punctuated with cries of religious agony and ecstasy, all designed to promote religious fervor and conversions. These exercises ranged from the singing of hymns addressed to each of the spiritual stages that marked the journey to conversion, public confessions and renunciations of sin and personal witness to the workings of the spirit, collective prayer, all of which were surrounded by sermons delivered by clergymen especially noted for their powerful "plain-speaking" preaching.
The second, major variant of the new revivalism consisted of the "protracted meetings" most often associated with the "new measures" revivalism of Finney but which by the late ls had become the characteristic form of most northern and western revivalism. Once a person had gone through the experience of conversion and rebirth, he or she would join the ranks of visitors and exhorters, themselves becoming evangelists for the still unconverted around them.
One important result of the new revivalism was a further erosion of older Calvinist beliefs, especially the doctrine of predestination.
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