CHAPTER 19: Jonathan Edwards and Revival
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Jonathan Edwards and Revival
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Jonathan Edwards, saint, scholar, preacher, pastor, metaphysician, theologian, Calvinist, and revival leader, lived from 1703 to 1758. He was a tall, reserved, soft-spoken man, strong-minded and humble-hearted. In 1727, after five years in the ministry, he became co-pastor of the large and fashionable church at Northampton, New Hampshire, where his grandfather. Solomon Stoddard, the grand old man of ecclesiastical life in the Connecticut Valley, now a patriarchal eighty-three, had ministered since 1669. Northampton was a town of perhaps 2,000 inhabitants, and its church was the best known and most influential in New England outside Boston. Stoddard himself was almost idolised by the congregation, most of whom had grown up under his ministry. Two years later, in 1729, Stoddard’s death brought his sixty-year pastorate to a close, and from then on Edwards was sole minister. In 1734–35 and 1740–42 he saw remarkable movements of the Spirit of God in his congregation and, in the latter case, throughout all New England. From 1743, however, Edwards was for various reasons in trouble with his church, and in 1750 he was dismissed from the pastorate because he insisted on restoring the demand, which Stoddard had dropped, for a personal confession of faith as the sine qua non of communicant church membership. Edwards then moved to a mission station in the frontier hamlet of Stockbridge, and it was here that he wrote his great treatises on The Freedom of the Will and Original Sin. In 1757 he was made President of Princeton College. He travelled to Princeton to take up his appointment in February, 1758. His first move was to be inoculated against smallpox; but the inoculation itself brought on fever, and in the following month he died.
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Edwards was a Puritan born out of due time. It is hardly too much to say, with a recent writer, that Puritanism is what Edwards was. All his roots were in the theology and outlook of the founding fathers of New England, men like Hooker and Shepard, Cotton and Davenport. He was a true Puritan, first, in his devotion to the Bible. All his life he laboured, fearlessly and tirelessly, to understand and apply the Bible, and his written works (apart, perhaps, from those on prophecy) reveal an exegetical acumen comparable with that of Calvin, or Owen, or Hodge, or Warfield. All his life he fed his soul on the Bible; and all his life he fed his flock on the Bible.
Again, he was a true Puritan in his doctrinal convictions. In a day when, as in England, a rationalistic Latitudinarianism—the ‘free and catholic’ outlook of Charles Chauncy and his friends—was eating away the Puritan heritage, Edwards stood forth as an uncompromising and unashamed Calvinistic supernaturalist, diagnosing the fashionable view as Arminianism and opposing it, as the Puritans has opposed the Arminianism of their day, on the grounds of its religious implications. Edwards argued that Arminianism in any form—any form, that is, of the synergism which makes conviction of spiritual truth God’s work, but conversion itself man’s—undercuts true piety. It makes God less than God; it is three-quarters of the way to deism, and half-way to real atheism. It destroys due reverence for God, because it denies our complete dependence on him. It ministers to pride by representing the decisive act in our salvation as all our own work. Thus it introduces a principle of self-reliance into religion; which is in effect to render religion irreligious, and to base the form of godliness upon a denial of the matter of it. These were Puritan points, and in making them Edwards showed himself a true heir of the Puritan tradition in theology.
In the third place, Edwards was a true Puritan in his view of the nature of Christian piety. In essence, Edwards maintained, godliness is a matter of glorifying the Creator by humble dependence and a thankful obedience. In Christian terms, this means acknowledging our complete dependence upon God, as for life and health, so for grace and glory, and loving and praising and serving him for all that he has so freely given us through his Son. Edwards struck this note in 1731 in his first published sermon, a discourse on 1 Corinthians 1:29–31 entitled; ‘God glorified in man’s dependence.’ The theme of the sermon is that ‘God is glorified in the work of redemption in this, that there appears in it so absolute and universal a dependence of the redeemed on him’. And it concludes thus:
Let us be exhorted to exalt God alone, and ascribe to him all the glory of redemption. Let us endeavour to obtain, and increase in, a sensibleness of our great dependence on God … to mortify a self-dependent and self-righteous disposition. Man is naturally exceeding prone to exalt himself, and depend on his own power of goodness.… But this doctrine should teach us to exalt God alone; as by trust and reliance, so by praise. Let him that glorieth, glory in the Lord. Hath any man hope that he is converted and sanctified … that his sins are forgiven, and he received into God’s favour, and exalted to the honour and blessedness of being his child, and an heir of eternal life? let him give God all the glory; who alone makes him to differ from the worst of men in this world, or the most miserable of the damned in hell.… Is any man eminent in holiness, and abundant in good works, let him take nothing of the glory of it to himself, but ascribe it unto him whose ‘workmanship we are, created in Christ Jesus unto good works’.
The thought of man’s complete dependence on a free omnipotent God controlled Edwards’ whole religious outlook, and acted as the guiding principle of his entire theology.
To Edwards, therefore, true religion was much more than either orthodoxy, or ethics, or the two put together. Edwards held no brief for easy believism, or moralism, or formalism of any sort. True piety was to him a supernatural gift, dynamic in character and intensely experimental in its outworking. It was, in fact, a realised communion with God through Christ, brought into being by the Holy Spirit and expressed in responsive affections and activities.
The root of piety, Edwards maintained, is a hearty conviction (in his phrase, a ‘cordial sense’) of the reality and glory of the divine and heavenly things spoken of in the gospel. Such a conviction is more than an intellectual grasp of theological ideas, or a taking Christian truth for granted under the constraining pressure of community opinion; it is, rather, the result of direct divine illumination accompanying the written or spoken word of God, as Edwards explained in 1734 in his second published sermon, on Matthew 16:17, entitled, ‘A divine and supernatural light, immediately imparted to the soul by the Spirit of God, shown to be both a Scriptural and rational doctrine’.
The divine enlightenment issues in conversions.
This light is such as effectually influences the inclination, and changes the nature of the soul. It assimilates our nature to the divine Nature.… This knowledge will wean from the world, and raise the inclination to heavenly things. It will turn the heart to God as the fountain of good, and to choose him for the only portion. This light, and this only, will bring the soul to a saving close with Christ. It conforms the heart to the gospel, mortifies its enmity and opposition against the scheme of salvation therein revealed: it causes the heart to embrace the joyful tidings, and entirely to adhere to, and acquiesce in, the revelation of Christ as our Saviour: it causes the whole soul to accord and symphonize with it … cleaving to it with full inclination and affection; and it effectually disposes the soul to give up itself entirely to Christ.… As it reaches the bottom of the heart, and changes the nature, so it will effectually dispose to a universal obedience. It shows God as worthy to be obeyed and served. It draws forth the heart in a sincere love of God … and it convinces of the reality of those glorious rewards that God has promised to them that obey him.
From this inward renewal by vivifying light issue good works and changed basic attitudes.The scepticism of rationalists, and the delusions of ‘enthusiasts’, about authentically Christian frames of mind and heart forced Edwards to devote special attention to this subject, and in his Treatise concerning Religious Affections (published in 1746, first preached as a course of sermons in 1742–43) he gave the world the fruit of his study. He begins by arguing that, inasmuch as the affections are the fundamental functions of the will, the fount of action, it follows of necessity that ‘true religion, in great part, consists in holy affections’. Edwards explains:
As the affections not only necessarily belong to the human nature, but are a very great part of it, so (inasmuch as by regeneration persons are renewed in the whole man) holy affections not only necessarily belong to true religion, but are a very great part of such religion. And as true religion is practical, and God hath so constituted the human nature, that the affections are very much the springs of men’s actions, this also shows, that true religion must consist very much in the affections.
Having established this, Edwards proceeds to characterise ‘truly gracious and holy affections’ with a pastoral and theological acumen that has secured for his book an unchallengeable place among the all-time classics of discipleship and devotion.
In all this, what Edwards is doing is clarifying and vindicating the Puritan conception of experiential religion against the cold moralism of the school of Tillotson. It is as the spiritual heir of Shepard, Flavel, and Stoddard, all of whom he constantly cites in his footnotes (the former especially), that Edwards is writing. With them, he is concerned to insist that true and vital Christianity is a religion of the heart as well as of the head, and to show as accurately as possible how the heart should be engaged in it. This, as we have seen, is a peculiarly Puritan interest, and Edwards shows his oneness with the Puritan outlook by pursuing it.
Fourthly, Edwards was a true Puritan in his approach to preaching. Like his seventeenth-century predecessors, he preached with a threefold aim: to make men understand, feel, and respond to gospel truth. Like them, he set out the matter of his sermons according to the threefold ‘method’ of proposition, proof, and application—‘doctrine, reason, and use’, as the Puritans called it. Like them, he studied plainness of style, concealing his learning beneath a deliberately bald clarity of statement. It is sometimes imagined that, because in the pulpit he read a manuscript in a steady, quiet, even tone, and avoided looking at his congregation as he spoke, he did not share the Puritan concern to preach with directness, authority, and felt power—the concern which Baxter voiced when he spoke of his desire to be ‘a plain and pressing downright preacher’, one who
Preached as never sure to preach again,
And as a dying man to dying men.
But this is a mistake. Edwards knew very well that ‘the main benefit obtained by preaching is by impression made upon the mind at the time, and not by an effect that arises afterwards by a remembrance of what was delivered’. And when the evangelistic earnestness and vehemence of Whitefield and the Tennents during the revival of 1740 came under fire from the Latitudinarians, who saw it as a regrettable lapse into ‘enthusiasm’, in the sense of fanatical fantasy, Edwards ran to their defence:
I think an exceeding affectionate way of preaching about the great things of religion, has in itself no tendency to beget false apprehensions of them; but on the contrary, a much greater tendency to beget true apprehensions of them, than a moderate, dull, indifferent way of speaking of them.… If the subject be in its own nature worthy of very great affection, then speaking of it with great affection is most agreeable to the nature of that subject … and therefore has most of a tendency to beget true ideas of it.… I should think myself in the way of my duty, to raise the affections of my hearers as high as possibly I can, provided that they are affected with nothing but truth.… I know it has long been fashionable to despise a very earnest and pathetical way of preaching; and they only have been valued as preachers, who have shown the greatest extent of learning, strength of reason, and correctness of method and language. But I humbly conceive it has been for want of understanding or duly considering human nature, that such preaching has been thought to have the greatest tendency to answer the ends of preaching.… An increase in speculative knowledge in divinity is not what is so much needed by our people as something else. Men may abound in this sort of light, and have no heat.… Our people do not so much need to have their heads stored, as to have their hearts touched; and they stand in the greatest need of that sort of preaching, which has the greatest tendency to do this.
In fact, Edwards’ own preaching was powerful in a high degree. Humanly speaking, he had a unique gift for making ideas live by the luminous precision with which he expounded them. He uncoils a length of reasoning with a slow, smooth exactness that is almost hypnotic in its power to rivet attention on the successive folds of truth sliding out into view. Had Edwards been no more than a pagan don teaching economics, he would without doubt have been a performer of ‘Ancient Mariner’ quality in the lecture-room. To this compelling expository power was added in the pulpit a terrible solemnity, expressive of the awe of God that was constantly on his spirit; and the result was preaching that congregations could neither resist nor forget. Edwards could make two hours seem like twenty minutes as he bore down on his listeners’ consciences with the plain old truths of sin and salvation, and the calm majesty of his inexorable analysis was no less used of God to make men feel the force of truth than was the rhapsodic vehemence of George Whitefield. One of his hearers, asked whether Edwards was an eloquent preacher, replied:
If you mean by eloquence, what is usually intended by it in our cities; he had no pretensions to it. He had no studied varieties of voice, and no strong emphasis. He scarcely gestured or even moved; and he made no attempt, by the eloquence of his style, or the beauty of his pictures, to gratify the taste, and fascinate the imagination. But, if you mean by eloquence the power of presenting an important truth before an audience, with overwhelming weight of argument, and with such intenseness of feeling that the whole soul of the speaker is thrown into every part of the conception and delivery, so that the solemn attention of the whole audience is riveted, from the beginning to the close, and impressions are left that cannot be effaced, Mr. Edwards was the most eloquent man I ever heard speak.
‘His words,’ wrote his first biographer, Hopkins, ‘often discovered a great deal of inward fervour, without much noise or external emotion, and fell with great weight on the minds of his hearers; and he spake so as to reveal the strong emotions of his own heart, which tended, in the most natural and effectual manner, to move and affect others.’ Such a feeling communication of felt truth was, in fact, precisely what the Puritans had had in mind when they spoke of ‘powerful’ preaching.
As a Bible-lover, a Calvinist, a teacher of heart-religion, a gospel preacher of unction and power, and, above all, a man who loved Christ, hated sin, and feared God, Edwards was a pure Puritan; indeed, one of the purest and greatest of all the Puritans. American historians of culture have recently rediscovered Edwards as a major contributor to the American philosophical and literary heritage. It is to be wished that evangelical Christians today might themselves rediscover the important contribution that this latter-day Puritan made to the elucidation of the biblical faith.
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Last-century evangelicals, on the whole, admired Edwards, but nonetheless they did him a threefold disservice. First, they accused him of being unreadable. But one has only to make the experiment to find that this is not so at all. The levelling of this charge was in fact a case of the mote and the beam. It is true that Edwards does not go in for the flowery padding which the nineteenth century regarded as essential to good style, but this is to his credit rather than otherwise. He is today far more palatable as a writer than are many of his older critics. The most one can say against him is that on occasion his desire for a clinical precision of language leads him to write sentences that are too long and complex for easy assimilation on first reading. But this is his only stylistic fault, and that not a common one; most of the time he is admirably clear, exact, and pointed.
Then, in the second place, the last century treated Edwards as an essentially philosophical theologian, chiefly on the strength of The Freedom of the Will. Now, it is true that Edwards had a genius for abstract reasoning, and that he indulged it to the full in that particular treatise. But we need to remember what sort of a treatise The Freedom of the Will is. It is not a work of biblical theology, but an elaborate polemical essay directed against what is, as Edwards truly saw, an essentially speculative and philosophical position—that of rationalistic Arminianism, which builds everything on the axiom that divine control of human action is incompatible with man’s moral responsibility, and cannot therefore be a fact. Edwards chose the most obviously crushing way to deal with this position—to turn its own weapons against itself; to give it points and a beating, so to speak, on its own home ground. But The Freedom of the Will was an occasional performance, and is not characteristic of the rest of Edwards’ work. It is clear from his private notes and memoranda that metaphysical speculation fascinated him and was, indeed, his hobby, but he never let philosophy teach him his faith, or lead him away from the Bible. He philosophised from faith, not to it; he did not regard speculation as necessary to salvation, and no hint of his philosophical interests intrudes into his sermons. He took his convictions and concerns from the Bible, and it is as a scriptural theologian that his true stature is to be measured.
Finally—and this was the worst disservice of all—Edwards’ last-century admirers quite overlooked Edwards’ most original contribution to theology: namely, his pioneer elucidation of biblical teaching on the subject of revival. This oversight is, perhaps, pardonable, since Edwards’ thoughts on this subject were put out piecemeal in five early works which he composed in his thirties: A Narrative of a Surprising Work of God in the Conversion of many hundred souls in Northampton and the neighbouring Towns and Villages (1735); A History of the Work of Redemption (sermons preached in 1739, published in 1744); The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God (1741); Thoughts on the Revival of Religion in New England in 1740 (1742); and the Treatise on the Religious Affections (1746). All these save the second are concerned, in one way or another, to vindicate the two revivals which Edwards had himself seen against the current charge that they were mere outbreaks of fanaticism. This immediate aim might seem to limit their interest for later generations of readers. Embedded in them, however, is a fairly complete account of revival as a work of God—in other words, a theology of revival—which is fuller than any produced before Edwards’ time, and is of lasting value. It is, perhaps, the most important single contribution that Edwards has to make to evangelical thinking today.
It is a notable fact that interest in the subject of revival is increasing at the present time: witness the growth of revival fellowships of various kinds within the Protestant denominations. More and more the conviction is spreading that only a visitation from on high can touch the needs of the churches today. But most of us find ourselves uncertain as to what exactly revival is, and what might be expected to happen if revival came. And there are in particular two types of mistakes at this point to which we are all prone.
The first is the antiquarian fallacy. We fall victim to this mistake when we form a conception of revival from the history of a particular revival in the past, and then set up our conception, thus formed, as a norm and yardstick for any movement of revival in the future. To do this is to expose ourselves to a double danger.
On the one hand, we predispose ourselves to be too hasty in identifying with revival outbreaks of religious excitement which exhibit certain outward features that marked some revival of the past—prostrations, visions, spontaneous singing, or whatever the features are that have impressed us. We have to remember that the devil can produce the outward forms of religious excitement, as well as the Spirit of God, and that in fact Satan has often wrought havoc in the church through movements of self-deceived fanaticism which announced themselves, doubtless in all good faith, as movements of the Holy Spirit in revival. We need a criterion for telling the two apart; otherwise Satan will be free to fool us as he pleases by gratifying our hunger for revival with his own particular brand of ‘enthusiastic’ delusions. And precedent—‘former observation’, as Edwards calls it—is not of itself a sufficient criterion for this purpose. In Edwards’ words, ‘what the church has been used to, is not a rule by which we are to judge’ in such cases, one way or the other. We need a better touchstone than this for telling the spurious from the true.
Then, on the other hand, by conceiving of revival wholly in terms of some particular past revival, we make it harder for ourselves to recognise any future revival that God may send. For it is not God’s habit to repeat himself. There is no ground for supposing that the externals of the next revival will be just like the externals of the last one, any more than there would be for expecting two people to pass through exactly the same sequence of experiences in their conversion. Those who will only allow that God is at work when they see him repeating exactly something that he has done before, Edwards tells us, ‘limit God, where he has not limited himself. And this is especially unreasonable in this case [i.e., that of revival]’. He continues:
For whosoever has well weighed the wonderful and mysterious methods of divine wisdom in carrying on the work of the new creation—or in the progress of the work of redemption, from the first promise to the seed of the woman to this time—may easily observe that it has all along been God’s manner to open new scenes, and to bring forth to view things new and wonderful … to the astonishment of heaven and earth.…
The second mistake that threatens us is the romantic fallacy. We fall into this when we let ourselves imagine that revival, once it came, would function as the last chapter in a detective story functions—solving all our problems, clearing up all the difficulties that have arisen in the church, and leaving us in a state of idyllic peace and contentment, with no troubles to perplex us any more.
A study of Jonathan Edwards on revival forewarns us against both these mistakes. In the first place, Edwards shields us from the antiquarian fallacy by teaching us the biblical principles for determining whether an outbreak of religious excitement is an outpouring of God’s Spirit or not. ‘We have a rule near at hand,’ he claims, ‘a sacred book that God himself has put into our hands, with clear and infallible marks, sufficient to resolve us in things of this nature.’ And he labours to show us in thorough detail just what these marks are.
Then, in the second place, Edwards shields us from the romantic fallacy by constantly directing our attention to the problems which revival brings in its train. Revival means renewal of life, and life means energy. It is true that revival delivers the church from the problems created by apathy and deadness, but it is equally true that revival plunges the church into a welter of new problems created by the torrential overflow of disordered and undisciplined spiritual vitality. In a revival, the saints are suddenly roused from a state of torpor and lethargy by a new and overwhelming awareness of the reality of spiritual things and of God. They are like sleepers shaken awake and now half blinded by the unaccustomed glare of the sun. They hardly know for the moment where they are; in one sense, they now see everything as they never saw it before, yet in another sense, because of the very brightness of the light, they can hardly see anything. They fall into pride, delusions, unbalance, censorious modes of speech, extravagant forms of action. Unconverted persons are caught up in what is going on; they feel the power of truth, though their hearts remain unrenewed; they become ‘enthusiasts’, deluded and self-confident, harsh and bitter, fierce and vainglorious, cranky and fanatical, quarrelsome and disruptive. Then, perhaps, they fall into spectacular sin, and apostatise altogether; or else remain in the church to scandalise the rest of men by maintaining, on dogmatic perfectionist grounds, that while what they do would be sin in others, it is not sin in them. Satan (who, as Edwards somewhere observes, was ‘trained in the best divinity school in the universe’) keeps step with God, actively perverting and caricaturing all that the Creator is doing.
A revival, accordingly, is always a disfigured work of God, and the more powerful the revival, the more scandalising disfigurements we may expect to see. Hence we cannot wonder if the revival comes to be bitterly opposed by respectable church members of limited spiritual insight, on account of the excesses linked with it; nor can we be surprised to find—as we regularly do—that many ministers stand aloof from the revival, and even preach against it and try to suppress it, on the grounds that it is not a spiritual phenomenon at all. Edwards had had to face all this in his own experience, and he makes us face it too. ‘A work of God without stumbling-blocks is never to be expected,’ he wrote grimly in 1741; ‘ … we shall probably see more instances of apostasy and gross iniquity among professors.… ’ No; revival, though in itself a purging and purifying work of God, is never free from attendant disfigurements. We need not read beyond the New Testament to appreciate that. Yet this must not blind us to the fact that revival is a real and glorious work of God, and a blessing much to be desired when the church’s vitality is low. We proceed now to examine Edwards’ theological account of it.
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We shall expound his teaching under three main heads.
Principles Concerning the Nature of Revival
Here there are three propositions to consider, of which the first is the most important and fundamental, and will occupy us the longest.
First, revival is an extraordinary work of God the Holy Spirit reinvigorating and propagating Christian piety in a community. Revival is an extraordinary work, because it marks the abrupt reversal of an established trend and state of things among those who profess to be God’s people. To envisage God reviving his church is to presuppose that the church has previously grown moribund and gone to sleep. To speak of God pouring out his Spirit in an awakening, as Edwards, following Scripture, does, is to imply that God does something sudden and decisive to change a state of affairs in which the Spirit’s quickening influence, and a lively sense of spiritual realities, were conspicuous by their absence.
Revival is a work of reinvigorating and propagating Christian piety. Though it is through the knowledge of Bible truth that the Spirit effects his reviving work, revival is not merely, nor even primarily, a restoring of orthodoxy. It is essentially a restoring of religion. We have seen what Edwards conceived Christian religion to be: an experimental acquaintance with, and a hearty, practical response to, the divine realities set forth in the gospel. It is this that languishes during the time of sleep and barrenness before revival comes, and it is this that the outpouring of the Spirit renews. Hence the ‘distinguishing marks of a work of the Spirit of God’, i.e., of a revival, all have to do with a deepening of experimental piety. We may quote at length from Edwards’ exposition of these marks, in the superb little treatise on 1 John 4:1 which bears the phrase just quoted as its title. All that is said is germane to our subject, and the passage as a whole is a fine example of Edwards’ expository style.
I shall confine myself wholly to those marks which are given us by the apostle in the chapter wherein is my text, where this matter is particularly handled, and more plainly and fully than any where else in the Bible. And in speaking to these marks, I shall take them in the order in which I find them in the chapter.
1. When the operation is such as to raise their esteem of that Jesus who was born of the Virgin, and was crucified without the gates of Jerusalem; and seems more to confirm and establish their minds in the truth of what the gospel declares to us of his being the Son of God, and the Saviour of men; it is a sure sign that it is from the Spirit of God. This sign the apostle gives us in the 2d. and 3d. verses … [which speak of] a confessing not only that there was such a person who appeared in Palestine, and did and suffered those things that are recorded of him, but that he was Christ, i.e. the Son of God, anointed to be the Lord and Saviour, as the name Jesus Christ implies.…
The devil has the most bitter and implacable enmity against that person, especially in his character of the Saviour of men; he mortally hates the story and doctrine of his redemption; he would never go about to beget in men more honourable thoughts of him.…
2. When the Spirit that is at work operates against the interests of Satan’s kingdom, which lies in encouraging and establishing sin, and cherishing men’s worldly lusts; this is a sure sign that it is a true, and not a false, spirit. This sign we have given us in the 4th and 5th verses.… by the world … the apostle evidently means everything that appertains to the interest of sin, and comprehends all the corruptions and lusts of men, and all those acts and objects by which they are gratified.
So that we may safely determine, from what the apostle says, that the spirit that is at work among a people, after such a manner, as to lessen men’s esteem of the pleasure, profits, and honours of the world, and to take off their hearts from an eager pursuit after these things; and to engage them in a deep concern about a future state and eternal happiness … and the spirit that convinces them of the dreadfulness of sin, the guilt it brings, and the misery to which it exposes; must needs be the Spirit of God.
It is not to be supposed that Satan would convince men of sin, and awaken the conscience.…
3. The spirit that operates in such a manner, as to cause in men a greater regard to the Holy Scriptures, and establishes them more in their truth and divinity, is certainly the Spirit of God. This rule the apostle gives us in the 6th verse.… We are of God; that is, ‘We the apostles are sent forth of God, and appointed by him to teach the world, and to deliver those doctrines and instructions, which are to be their rule; he that knoweth God, heareth us,’ etc. The apostle’s argument here equally reaches all that in the same sense are of God; that is, all those that God has appointed and inspired to deliver to his church its rule of faith and practice; all the prophets and apostles … in a word, all the penmen of the Holy Scriptures. The devil never would attempt to beget in persons a regard to that divine word.… A spirit of delusion will not incline persons to seek direction at the mouth of God.… Would the spirit of error, in order to deceive men, beget in them a high opinion of the infallible rule, and incline them to think much of it, and be very conversant with it? Would the prince of darkness, in order to promote his kingdom of darkness, lead men to the sun?
4. Another rule to judge of spirits may be drawn from … the 6th verse … if by observing the manner of operation of a spirit that is at work among a people, we see that it operates as a spirit of truth, leading persons to truth, convincing them of those things that are true … for instance if we observe that the spirit at work makes men more sensible than they used to be, that there is a God, and that he is a great and sin-hating God; that life is short, and very uncertain; and that there is another world; that they have immortal souls, and must give account of themselves to God; that they are exceeding sinful by nature and practice; that they are helpless in themselves; and confirms them in other things that are agreeable to some sound doctrine; the spirit that works thus, operates as a spirit of truth; he represents things as they truly are.… And therefore we may conclude, that it is not the spirit of darkness that doth thus discover and make manifest the truth.…
5. If the spirit that is at work among a people operates as a spirit of love to God and man, it is a sure sign that it is the Spirit of God. This sign the apostle insists upon from the 6th verse to the end of the chapter … and speak expressly of both love to God and men; of love to men in the 7th, 11th, and 12th verses; and of love to God in the 17th, 18th, and 19th verses; and of both together, in the last two verses.… The spirit that … works in them an admiring, delightful sense of the excellency of Jesus Christ … winning and drawing the heart with those motives and incitements to love, of which the apostle speaks … viz. the wonderful free love of God in giving his only-begotten Son to die for us, and the wonderful dying love of Christ to us, who had no love to him, but were his enemies; must needs be the Spirit of God.… The spirit that … makes the attributes of God as revealed in the gospel, and manifested in Christ, delightful objects of contemplation; and makes the soul to long after God and Christ—after Their presence and communion, acquaintance with Them, and conformity to Them—and to live so as to please and honour Them; the spirit that quells contentions among men, and gives a spirit of peace and good will, excites to acts of outward kindness, and earnest desires of the salvation of souls … there is the highest kind of evidence of the influence of a true and divine spirit.
Edwards’ case is that wherever these fruits are appearing, there the Spirit of God is at work; and, therefore, that these are the signs which infallibly indicate whether an outbreak of religious excitement, disorderly and in some ways distressing as it may be, is a work of revival or not. The criterion of revival is not the excitement and hullabaloo of the meetings, but the fruit of the Spirit—faith in, and love to, the Father and the Son and the Scriptures and their teaching, and good works to benefit other men. Where these fruits suddenly begin to appear in a church or community, after a time of barrenness, there revival, in some degree, has begun, whatever attendant disfigurements may appear at the same time.
The substance of religion, as Edwards conceived it (and he was a true Puritan to stress this), is conscious communion with God, and under the intense influence of the outpoured Spirit in a time of revival the individual’s sense of God’s presence, and absorption in the knowledge of him, and joy in the assurance of his love, might be raised to very remarkable heights. Edwards saw a good deal of this among his people, but no case seemed to him more outstanding than that of his own wife, whose experience he described at length (without saying whose it was) in Thoughts on the Revival, I:v (a section headed simply: ‘The nature of the work in a particular instance’). The description should be read in full; we have space to quote only a few sentences. Sarah Edwards’ experience, writes her husband, included the following elements:
A very frequent dwelling for some considerable time together, in views of the glory of the divine perfections and Christ’s excellencies; so that the soul has been as it were perfectly overwhelmed, and swallowed up with light and love, a sweet solace, and a rest and joy of soul altogether unspeakable.… This great rejoicing has been with trembling, i.e. attended with a deep and lively sense of the greatness and majesty of God, and the person’s own exceeding littleness and vileness.… The things already mentioned have been attended with … an extraordinary sense of the awful majesty, greatness, and holiness of God.… The strength of the body was very often taken away with a deep mourning for sin, as committed against so holy and good a God.… There has been a very great sense of the certain truth of the great things revealed in the gospel; an overwhelming sense of the glory of the work of redemption, and the way of salvation by Jesus Christ.… The person felt a great delight in singing praises to God and Jesus Christ, and longing that this present life may be, as it were, one continued song of praise to God. There was a longing, as the person expressed it, to sit and sing this life away; and an overcoming pleasure in the thoughts of spending an eternity in that exercise.…
Such is the inward heart of the realised communion with God, the true, pure Christian piety, into which all the saints of God are led, more or less deeply, by the reviving work of the Holy Ghost. ‘If such things are enthusiasm, and the fruits of a distempered brain,’ writes Edwards with fine irony, ‘let my brain be evermore possessed of that happy distemper!’ Such experiences as these, he held (and, surely, with justice) were proof positive that the Holy Spirit of God was at work in the religious movements out of which the experiences came.
It should be stressed finally, under this head, that to Edwards revival meant the restoring of Christian piety in a community. The object of revival was the church, and the effect of the blessing was to spread the faith to the unconverted outside the church. Revival is a corporate affair. It was upon the company of disciples that the Spirit was poured out at Pentecost; it is to the church that God brings awakening (cf Is 51:17; 52:1). This is not, of course, to deny that an individual Christian may be spiritually vitalised while the church around remains dead, but simply to assert that the characteristic work of God which we are discussing at present under the name of revival is a work which in some sense has the church, and not just an individual Christian, as its object.
Second, revivals have a central place in the revealed purposes of God. ‘The end of God’s creating the world,’ declares Edwards, ‘was to prepare a kingdom for his Son (for he was appointed heir of the world).’ This end is to be realised, first through Christ’s accomplishing of redemption on Calvary, and then through the triumphs of his kingdom. ‘All the dispensations of God’s providence henceforward (since Christ’s ascension), even to the final consummation of all things, are to give Christ his reward, and fulfil his end in what he did and suffered upon earth.’ A universal dominion is pledged to Christ, and in the interim before the final consummation the Father implements this pledge in part by successive outpourings of the Spirit, which prove the reality of Christ’s kingdom to a sceptical world and serve to extend its bounds among Christ’s erstwhile enemies.
When God manifests himself with such glorious power, in a work of this nature [sc, such as the New England revival], he appears especially determined to put honour upon his Son, and to fulfil his oath that he has sworn to him, that he would make every knee to bow … to him. God hath had it much on his heart, from all eternity, to glorify his dear and only-begotten son; and there are some special seasons that he appoints to that end, wherein he comes forth with omnipotent power to fulfil his promise … to him. Now these are times of remarkable pouring out of his Spirit, to advance his kingdom; such is a day of his power.…
And Edwards goes further. He claims:
From the fall of man, to our day, the work of redemption in its effect has mainly been carried on by remarkable communications of the Spirit of God. Though there be a more constant influence of God’s Spirit always in some degree attending his ordinances; yet the way in which the greatest things have been done towards carrying on this work, always have been by remarkable effusions, at special seasons of mercy.…
On the assumption that every recorded renewal of vital piety among God’s people indicates an outpouring of the Spirit, Edwards seeks to show that this generalisation holds with regard to Bible history, and that we have no reason to doubt that it holds still. Edwards, as a post-millennialist, looked forward to the conversion of the world; and he confidently predicted that this would be the direct consequence of a mighty revival throughout the whole church, leading to an unprecedented missionary offensive to every quarter of the globe.
Accordingly, when the church’s life is ebbing out and God’s judgements are falling on it, and missionary work is in decline, the Christian should hope for an outpouring of the Spirit that will reverse that state of affairs. And he has warrant for entertaining such a hope, and expressing it in his prayers: warrant, not in any worthiness on the church’s part, but in the Father’s eternal resolve to glorify the Son in his kingdom.
Third, revivals are the most glorious of all God’s works in the world. Edwards insists on this, to shame those who professed no interest in the divine awakening that had come to New England, and insinuated by their attitude that a Christian’s mind could more profitably be occupied with other matters.
Such a work is, in its nature and kind, the most glorious of any work of God whatsoever [Edwards protests]. It is the work of redemption (the great end of all the other works of God, and of which the work of creation was but a shadow) … it is the work of new creation, which is infinitely more glorious than the old. I am bold to say, that the work of God in the conversion of one soul … is a more glorious work of God than the creation of the whole material universe.…
It follows, therefore, Edwards implies, that the theme of revival will be sweet and absorbing to the right-minded Christian man, whose heart rejoices when he sees the glory of God, and that the professed believer who can raise no interest in the subject must be spiritually in a very poor state.
Principles Concerning the Outward Form of Revival
We can be brief here, for we have already indicated how Edwards viewed this matter. He himself expounds all the points that fall under this head with particular application to the New England awakening, but we shall state them in a more generalised form.
Revival, Edwards tells us, is a mixed work. At each point Satan’s tares intrude among God’s wheat. From one standpoint, this makes the glory of God’s work more apparent.
The glory of divine power and grace are set off with the greater lustre by what appears at the same time of the weakness of the earthen vessel. It is God’s pleasure to manifest the weakness and unworthiness of the subject, at the same time that he displays the excellency of his power and the riches of his grace.
God is content to allow human weakness and sin to obtrude itself in times of revival, in order to make it evident beyond all peradventure that the spiritual fruits of the movement spring, not from any goodness in the persons concerned, but solely from his own work of grace. So Edwards writes again:
It is very analogous to the manner of God’s dealing with his people, to permit a great deal of error, and suffer the infirmity of his people to appear, in the beginning of a glorious work of his grace, for their felicity, to teach them what they are, to humble them, and fit them for that glorious prosperity to which he is about to advance them, and the more to secure to himself the honour of such a glorious work. For, by man’s exceeding weakness appearing in the beginning of it, it is evident that God does not lay the foundation of it in man’s strength or wisdom.
Accordingly, Satan is not restrained from working in times of revival. And Satan has a characteristic strategy which he employs at such times.
When he finds that he can keep men quiet and secure no longer, then he drives them to excesses and extravagances. He holds them back as long as he can; but when he can do it no longer, then he will push them on, and, if possible, run them upon their heads.
Thus, he seeks to carry away revived believers by exploiting the strength of their feelings, tempting them to pride, censoriousness, impatience with all established order in the church, and a persistent belief that the Spirit has more freedom to work when Christians leave themselves in a state of disorganisation, and when ministers preach without bothering to prepare their sermons; as if spur-of-the moment spontaneity is the supreme form or condition of spirituality. Satan further seeks to delude revived believers by immediate suggestions and inspirations, inviting them to conclude that all the thoughts and texts which come into their mind unbidden must be messages from God. By this and other means he seeks to lead them into imprudences of all sorts in the heat of their zeal. Such is his regular mode of procedure when a revival is in progress. Edwards delineates it very fully in the fourth part of his Thoughts on the Revival.
It is for this reason, Edwards insists, that it is so vitally important to judge spiritual movements, not by their immediate phenomena or by-products, but by their ultimate effects in the lives of those involved in them. If you concentrate on the phenomena, you can always find a great deal that is spurious, and ill-considered, and wrong-headed, and wild, and fanatical; and then you will be tempted to conclude that there is nothing of God in the movement at all. But, as we saw, the right way to assess what is happening is to see whether, amid all the tumult and disorder, the ‘distinguishing marks of a work of the Spirit of God’ are appearing. If they are, then we may know that it is God at work.
We shall be wise not to conclude too hastily that what Edwards is saying here has no message for us. We should be foolish to imagine that if God poured out his Spirit today, we should be able straightaway to recognise what was happening. Revival has always come in unexpected ways, through unexpected and often unwelcome people. We should not rule out the possibility that one day we shall ourselves stand nonplussed before an ebullient and uproarious spiritual movement, wondering whether it is of God, and finding ourselves strongly impelled by our instinctive distaste for its surface crudities and stupidities in theology, worship, and morals to look no further, but write if off at once. At such times, we shall need to bear in mind what Edwards has told us about the mixed character of revivals and the principles of judgement that should be applied in such a case.
Prayer For Revival
It is God’s will, wrote Edwards,
through his wonderful grace, that the prayers of his saints should be one great and principal means of carrying on the designs of Christ’s kingdom in the world. When God has something very great to accomplish for his church, it is his will that there should precede it the extraordinary prayers of his people; as is manifest by Ezek. xxxvi. 37, ‘I will yet, for this, be enquired of by the house of Israel, to do it for them’ [see the context]. And it is revealed that, when God is about to accomplish great things for his church, he will begin by remarkably pouring out the spirit of grace and supplications, Zech. xii. 10.
This being so, Christians who desire revival have a strong incentive to pray for it. Nor is this all; Christians have a positive duty to pray for it. Edwards sought to prove this in A humble attempt to promote Explicit Agreement and Visible Union of God’s People in Extraordinary Prayer for the Revival of Religion, a treatise which he wrote in support of a memorial circulated throughout English-speaking Christendom in 1746 by certain Scottish ministers, calling for special, ‘extraordinary’ prayer on Saturday evenings, Sunday mornings and the first Tuesday of each quarter, over a period of seven years, for the conversion of the world. Edwards argued the duty of making such prayers from the biblical predictions and promises of the extension of the church which showed it to accord with God’s will that men should pray for worldwide revival, from the terms of the Lord’s Prayer, and also from the undoubted need of revival in the world church of Edwards’ own day. (The New England awakening had petered out in 1742.) We quote two thought-provoking passages:
If we look through the whole Bible, and observe all the examples of prayer that we find there recorded, we shall not find so many prayers for any other mercy, as for the deliverance, restoration, and prosperity of the church, and the advancement of God’s glory and kingdom of grace in the world … the greatest part of the book of Psalms is made up of prayers for this mercy, prophecies of it, and prophetical praises for it.…
The Scripture does not only abundantly manifest it to be the duty of God’s people to be much in prayer for this great mercy, but it also abounds with manifold considerations to encourage them in it.… There is perhaps no one thing that the Bible so much promises, in order to encourage the faith, hope, and prayers of the saints, as this; which affords to God’s people the clearest evidence that it is their duty to be much in prayer for this mercy. For, undoubtedly, that which God abundantly makes the subject of his promises, God’s people should abundantly make the subject of their prayers.…
It is natural to wonder what resulted from the 1746 call to prayer. We cannot of course know how much praying was done during the seven years that followed, nor whether ‘extraordinary’ prayer continued after 1753 among those who had formed the habit. Certainly, nothing very startling happened at first. The evangelical revival in old England cooled somewhat after its first amazing decade, 1735–45, and New England was spiritually dry for a generation after the Great Awakening. But from the 1770s on Methodist preachers in Britain and North America saw great growth and occasionally renewed revival conditions; the Second Great Awakening blossomed in the 1790s; and the same decade saw revival in Norway under Hauge and in Finland under Ruotsalainen, plus the start of the Protestant missionary movement, which within a generation gave evangelical Christianity at least a toe-hold in all parts of the then known world. Was this fresh outburst of vital spiritual energy related to prayers that had been made decades earlier? Would it have occurred as it did without them? It is fascinating to guess—though guesswork remains guesswork, when all is said and done.
But however that may be, here is a task for all God’s people in every age: to pray that God will build up Zion, and cause his glory to appear in her, by revival blessing. We shall do well to take Edwards’ words to heart, and with them his closing remarks in this treatise, with which we close this chapter:
And I hope, that such as are convinced it is their duty to comply with and encourage this design, will remember we ought not only to go speedily to pray before the Lord, and to seek his mercy, but also to go constantly. We should unite in our practice these two things, which our Saviour unites in his precept, Praying and Not Fainting. If we should continue some years, and nothing remarkable in providence should appear as though God heard and answered, we should act very unbecoming believers, if we should therefore begin to be disheartened, and grow dull and slack in seeking of God so great a mercy. It is very apparent from the word of God, that he is wont often to try the faith and patience of his people, when crying to him for some great and important mercy, by withholding the mercy sought, for a season; and not only so, but at first to cause an increase of dark appearances. And yet he, without fail, at last succeeds those who continue instant in prayer, with all perseverance, and ‘will not let him go except he blesses.… ’ Whatever our hopes may be, we must be content to be ignorant of the times and seasons, which the Father hath put in his power: and must be willing that God should answer prayer, and fulfil his own glorious promises, in His own time5
1.Jonathan Edwards, Works, II:7; the sermon starts on p 3.
2.Ibid, II:17; the sermons starts on p 12.
3.Ibid, I:237, 238.
4.Ibid, I:394.
5.Ibid, I:391.
6.Ibid, I:ccxxxii (from Dwight’s Memoirs of Edwards).
7.Loc cit.
8.Ibid, II:261.
9.Ibid, I:369.
10.Ibid, I:375.
11.Ibid, II:273.
12.Ibid, II:266–269.
13.Ibid, I:376f.
14.Ibid, I:584.
15.Ibid, I:583.
16.Ibid, I:380. Edwards refers in the context to Psalms 2 and 110.
17.Ibid, I:539.
18.Ibid, I:379.
19.Ibid, I:380.
20.Ibid, I:374.
21.Ibid, I:397.
22.Ibid, I:426.
23.Ibid, II:291.