Revival: An Historical and Theological Survey
5
Revival: An Historical and Theological Survey
We are dealing with this subject because this year is the exact centenary of the revival of 1859 which took place, as you know, in various countries. But, still more important, we are calling attention to it because of the present state of the world. It is a good thing that at the end of our Conference we should be looking at a subject such as this, because the ultimate object of this Conference is not mere intellectual stimulation, it is that we may have a true and deep concern about the state of the church. If that is not our main object, then our study becomes just a sort of Puritan scholasticism, a mere barren intellectualism which, though interesting and entertaining, will finally prove to be of no value at all.
Let me make it clear before I go any further that I am not going to give what may be regarded as a formal address on “revival” as such. For twenty-six Sunday mornings this year I have tried to preach on “revival.” I am not going to do that this evening. I am speaking primarily to ministers and ministerial students, and my purpose is not to give an address on “revival,” but to attempt to face some of the problems and difficulties which seem to surround this whole subject.
I
There is no need to take any time in giving a definition of what is meant by revival. It is an experience in the life of the church when the Holy Spirit does an unusual work. He does that work, primarily, amongst the members of the church; it is a reviving of the believers. You cannot revive something that has never had life, so revival, by definition, is first of all an enlivening and quickening and awakening of lethargic, sleeping, almost moribund church members. Suddenly the power of the Spirit comes upon them and they are brought into a new and more profound awareness of the truths that they had previously held intellectually, and perhaps at a deeper level too. They are humbled, they are convicted of sin, they are terrified at themselves. Many of them feel that they had never been Christians. And then they come to see the great salvation of God in all its glory and to feel its power. Then, as the result of their quickening and enlivening, they begin to pray. New power comes into the preaching of the ministers, and the result of this is that large numbers who were previously outside the church are converted and brought in. So the two main characteristics of revival are, first, this extraordinary enlivening of the members of the church, and, second, the conversion of masses of people who hitherto have been outside in indifference and in sin. (There are many other consequences which I do not stay to mention, such as the needed provision of larger church buildings, the establishing of new causes, large numbers of men offering themselves for the ministry and beginning to train, and so on.) Here, then, in its essence is a definition of what we mean by revival.
II
Having said that, our best approach perhaps is to start with the actual historical facts. The title of this address states that it is to be partly an historical survey. And the first thing I would mention is this. There has never been a revival in the Roman Catholic Church. That is a significant fact as a starting point. Individuals in that church have known and experienced what can be called revival, but the church as such has never known revival. Why? I would say that the main explanation is this—it is a direct consequence of their whole doctrine of the Holy Spirit. They confine the Holy Spirit to the church and the priesthood, and particularly to the sacraments, and more particularly still to that of baptism. So, dealing with the Holy Spirit and His operations in that way, they leave no room for revival at all, and the result is that they never have revival.
In the same way there has never been revival in the Unitarian Church. I am simply stating facts.
The next observation I would make—and here I would be very careful to indicate that I am in no sense concerned to offer criticisms, I am simply trying to face facts—is that on the whole it is true to say that the Anglican Church has not known much about revival. There have been occasions when men in her ministry have undoubtedly been part and parcel of a revival, and greatly used, as we shall see, but, looking at her history, there has been no such thing as a general revival in the Anglican Church. That again is surely a fact of great significance. There was a little experience of revival in the Anglican body in Ireland a hundred years ago, but very little as far as I can find out anywhere else in the Anglican communion. Now why is this? Is it possible that there is something in her form of service that militates against the freedom of the operation of the Spirit? Is it also possible, perhaps, that her association with the state operates in the same direction, and that the whole character of the church and her view of herself and her parochial system tend to discourage the phenomenon of revival within her ranks? There, at any rate, is a big fact which stands out in the history of the Anglican Church.
Looking at it now a little more in terms of the centuries, and leaving the Reformation out of account for a moment because I shall come back to it in a later section, we find that in the seventeenth century there was a remarkable revival, or, indeed, series of revivals in Northern Ireland. This was in the 1620s. There were similar sporadic revivals in different churches in Scotland under the ministry of people like Welsh and Bruce and Livingston and David Dickson and Rutherford and Blair. And surely we must agree that in England in the case of Rogers of Dedham, and Baxter at Kidderminster, we are entitled to speak of revival. Then when you come to the eighteenth century there was that remarkable revival that took place about 1727 in the Moravian community at Herrnhut in Germany. That amazing movement of the Spirit is graphically described in the early part of the Journals of John Wesley, and of course in many manuals on the history of the Moravian Brethren. Then in the United states of America you have Jonathan Edwards and the “Great Awakening,” in which George Whitefield also took such a prominent part. In England under the ministry of Whitefield, again, and of the Wesleys and various other men, almost right up to 1790, there were clear outpourings of the Spirit in revival. Indeed, this whole period, in a sense, and looked at broadly, can be described as an age of revival.
Exactly the same thing was true of Wales from 1735 onwards. Both Howell Harris and Daniel Rowlands received their “baptism of power,” as they would put it, and a great revival broke out. It lasted a number of years, then it began to wane, then it came back again. There was a succession of revival after revival; it came in several waves right up to the end of the life of Rowlands and even beyond that. There were periodic revivals right through to the end of the century. The same thing, of course, was true of Scotland. All who know the story of the eighteenth century have heard about Cambuslang and what happened there on the occasion of that famous communion service, and later at Kilsyth and various other places.
Then when we come to the nineteenth century we find that a notable revival broke out in Northern Ireland in 1858 (though it is generally called the ’59 Revival), and this spread later to Scotland. There was a similar movement of revival in Wales lasting right throughout that year. And the same thing had happened, as you know, in America, starting in 1857.
It would be very interesting to stop with these revivals and to give an account of them. There is, however, no need to do so, as excellent books giving an account of them have appeared recently. Two, for instance, have been published on the revival in Ireland, and one has just come off the press about the revival in Wales in 1859.1 There are various other older books covering the same ground, but in all cases they are simply accounts of the happenings and events. They do not, therefore, deal with our particular difficulties. Even a book like Sprague’s Lectures on Revivals, recently re-published,2 is too general in its treatment to do that. However, there is the history, right up until 1860. It is a story of over a century of recurrent revival. I cannot but be interested in this fact, that between 1760 and 1860 there were at least fifteen major revivals in Wales alone.
We now come to the striking fact that there seems to have been a great change in people’s outlook on this whole matter after about 1860, or 1870. There seems to be a kind of dividing line at that historical juncture. Before that, we find that people thought in terms of revival, and we hear of frequent revivals in the history of the church; but after that, revivals become rather exceptional phenomena. By now, I believe, we have reached an age in which the vast majority of church members have almost ceased to think in terms of revival at all. Up until 1860 it was the instinctive thing to think in terms of revival. If there had been a period of spiritual drought, if things were not going well in the church, the first thing they thought of was this—“should not we have a time of confession and humiliation and prayer to God to visit us again?” They did it almost instinctively. But we do not do that. Why not? What is the explanation of this change that seems to have come into the thinking of the church? I think I can suggest some of the factors.
The first factor, beyond any doubt, is the decline in Reformed theology. The whole modernist movement that had started in the forties of the last century gained great momentum in the sixties. It increased at an alarming speed and the Reformed theology in particular fell into the background. Until that date—speaking at any rate for Nonconformity—the prevailing theology was almost entirely Calvinistic, apart from that of the Methodist bodies. But there was a very sad decline and sudden waning of all that. The change took place very rapidly, and those who are familiar with the life of Charles Haddon Spurgeon will know how he not only saw the fact but deeply regretted it and bemoaned it.
Second, there was the influence of the writings of Charles G. Finney. Because of the numerical success of his campaigns and his meetings, his work attracted great attention, and his volume of lectures, Revivals of Religion, soon became very popular and almost a best-seller. Finney’s whole outlook and teaching seems to have become a governing factor in the outlook of the church. It has led to the notion of what we call “evangelistic campaigns.” Finney is the man of all men who is responsible for the current confusion with regard to this matter. Our American brethren even get confused about the very terms. They talk about “holding a revival meeting”; they mean, of course, an evangelistic campaign. That is the result of Finney’s influence, and it has really befogged the whole situation. The influence of Finney’s teaching upon the outlook of the church has been quite extraordinary. People now, instead of thinking instinctively about turning to God and praying for revival when they see that the church is languishing, decide rather to call a committee, to organize an evangelistic campaign, and work out and plan an advertising programme to “launch” it, as they say. The whole outlook and mentality has entirely changed.
Third, we come to a matter which is a little controversial. I am not certain about it myself—but increasingly I feel that this is a very important factor. I am still dealing, remember, with the change that took place about 1860, and I cannot but feel that theological seminaries have been an important factor in the change. Here is an attempt to explain how it worked. Up until, say, the 1830s the position was something like this. At first the preaching was done by clergy and ministers who had themselves been revived. Numbers of men who had been converted then began to feel a call to preach, or it was suggested to them by some of these leaders that they had a preaching gift. They had manifested it in prayer or in taking part in a class meeting or in a discussion, and now they were encouraged to preach. These men were farmers, workers, manual workers, and so on. They had not been to a theological seminary. They were men who had a living experience of God in their hearts, who read and studied their Bibles and books about the Bible. They were men of strong natural talents and were very largely self-taught. This was the class of men who largely became the preachers after the death of the first great leaders. But then, the idea came in that as education had spread among the masses and the congregations were now more sophisticated and more learned, the ministry of these simple ordinary men was no longer adequate. (I am not criticizing that attitude; I am trying to put the actual facts before you.) It was felt that there was a need for training and that you must have learned men in the ministry. This started with an undoubtedly good and right motive. Nor is there any a priori reason why spirituality and learning should be incompatible; but nevertheless it does seem to be the case in practice that as men become more and more learned they tend to pay less and less attention to the spiritual side of things. Now this is almost inevitable, of course, for we are yet in the flesh, and are still imperfect. Whether a man wants to or not, he gradually finds himself becoming more and more interested in things in a purely intellectual manner. I have known this very thing in my own life. Unconsciously one can become so interested in the purely intellectual aspect of Christianity, and in learning and understanding and knowledge, as to forget the Spirit. I am therefore putting it simply as a possibility for consideration that perhaps the increase in theological seminaries may have been a factor in discouraging people from thinking about revival. The more learned we become, the more respectable we tend to become. As we become “men of weight” and important, we feel that we have to be very careful as to what we do or allow to happen to us. It is extremely difficult for such men to maintain that “simplicity which is in Christ Jesus”; certainly more difficult than for the other type of man whom I have just been describing. I do not want to exaggerate this, but I am suggesting that it may very well have been a serious factor.
Whatever the explanation, we have come now to this extraordinary position that, unless I am greatly mistaken, there is a lack of interest today in this question of revival. I am speaking out of knowledge. I am interested in discussions, and I frequent certain circles where men meet for discussion. I suggest on the basis of such experience that there is not only a lack of interest in revival but also an antagonism to the idea. I am told by the publishers that the book on the subject which I commended, Sprague’s Lectures on Revival, has not been selling too well. I am amazed at that, but it is a fact. Why is there this lack of interest in revival? Why has the subject dropped out of the minds of people? And this is the interesting thing: what I am saying is not only true of the Arminian brethren, it is equally true of the Calvinistic brethren. Let us be clear about this. If you examine the books on the Holy Spirit, published during the past fifty years by men of all schools, you will find that they do not even mention revival at all. One is not surprised at this in some instances, because the writers’ particular outlook is one which, though it pays lip-service to the work of the Holy Spirit, really pins its faith on what man does himself, on what man organizes. That whole outlook expresses itself through evangelistic campaigns and their appendages. You first of all get your men to go to the evangelistic campaign to get them saved. Then you take them to another place where they get a further desired blessing. That is the outlook. I am not poking fun at it; I am simply describing what is actually the controlling thought: that you take them to the right places and the results can be expected to follow. “What more do you need?” say such people. “Why are you talking about revival? Things are going well. Look at the crowds, look at the masses of people who are coming; isn’t this enough? Why go any further?” Their attitude is perfectly logical if you grant its initial premise.
But that the same thing should be true of Reformed people—this is to me not only surprising but tragic. It is not only the books by Arminians which omit all reference to revival, the same is true of those by Calvinists. Dr. Lewis Sperry Chafer, for instance, in his great volume on pneumatology, does not mention revivals at all. Here is an example of a Calvinist who had on this point become infected by this general climate of opinion. But here is a still more tragic fact. As I was preparing this lecture, I turned to Charles Hodge, but I got no help. Charles Hodge does not seem to have been interested in revival. Why not? I would say it is for the reasons I have already been giving. A man like Charles Hodge becomes a theologian, and he tends therefore not to think as he should in terms of the church in its local concrete situation, but in terms of great abstract systems of truth. He lives in that realm of comparisons and arguments and contrasts, of systems and especially of philosophy, and almost inevitably he ceases to think as he should about revival and the immediate operations of the Spirit.
There is one very interesting point just here. I would say that this change of outlook on the part of Calvinists came in the U.S.A. somewhere between Archibald Alexander and Charles Hodge. Charles Hodge, as you know, was the successor of Archibald Alexander in the theological seminary at Princeton. Now Archibald Alexander had had experience of revival in his early days. Charles Hodge knew something about it, but not to the same extent as Alexander, who was an older man and who belonged partly to the previous century. It is just there that this change seems to me to have taken place.
Another interesting point to observe is that if you want any help at all on the subject of revival you are more or less driven back to books on the Holy Spirit and His work that were written before 1860. There are, for instance, The Doctrine of the Holy Spirit, by George Smeaton, and also Buchanan on the Holy Spirit. They both have a section on revival, but you will observe that they are both prior to the date I mentioned. Is not that an interesting fact? They belonged, you see, to the period when the church instinctively thought in the way I have described.
III
Let us now try to analyse this. Why is it that men belonging to the Reformed tradition, of all traditions, have apparently lost interest in this question of revival? I have already given you one reason, which is the danger of becoming theoretical and intellectual in one’s approach. A minister of the gospel is a man who is always fighting on two fronts. He first of all has to urge people to become interested in doctrine and theology, but he will not have been long at that before he will find that he has to open up a second front, and to tell people that it is not enough to be interested only in doctrine and theology, that there is a danger of becoming a mere orthodox intellectualist and of growing negligent about your own spiritual life and the life of the church. This is the besetting danger of people who hold the Reformed position. They are the only people who are really interested in theology, so the devil comes to them and drives them too far along the line of that interest and they tend to become pure theologians and interested in truth only intellectually.
Second, I am sure that this phenomenon was due to the fact that so much energy in the last century had to be given to the fight against modernism. The enemy was attacking along that particular line and all the energy of the orthodox was bent to quell him and to hold him back and to defeat him. Yes, but unconsciously they allowed this conflict to control their entire thinking, and apologetics became the chief thing with them instead of a positive message. The same thing had happened in the early part of the eighteenth century. Rationalism and deism had come in and the church became concerned about it. What did they do? They set up the Boyle Lectures, Butler wrote his “Analogy,” and so on. They tried to stem the tide by answering the objections and dealing with the intellectual position. Do not misunderstand me; I am not arguing against the value of apologetics altogether, but I am saying this, that a church which becomes governed by the apologetic interest is a church that is ceasing to function positively. The devil has got her, and she tends to be negative only and to fail to recognize the positive activity of the Holy Spirit. History shows that what the Boyle lecturers and Bishop Butler and others failed to do, God did by pouring out His Spirit upon men like Whitefield and Wesley.
The third reason, I would say, is a natural dislike of too much emotion. The theological thinker tends to be distrustful of emotion. “After all,” he argues, “other people can and do display emotion; but we are different.” In a most subtle manner such a man develops a dislike of emotion that becomes unhealthy and wrong; he loses his balance, and becomes guilty of quenching the Spirit.
Another closely related reason, which I think operates in particular today, is that there has been an excessive reaction against Pentecostalism and its phenomena. Many are so afraid of Pentecostalism and its excesses and aberrations that they are quenching the Spirit. There is always a danger of such extremes, of over-reacting against something and so losing the balance of the Scripture.
There is another factor worthy of careful consideration. I have known a number of men belonging to the Reformed constituency who really seem to be controlled by some such thoughts as this. “After all,” they say, “a man like John Wesley had a prominent part in the revival of the eighteenth century.” From that they seem to deduce that there is something undesirable and wrong about revival. “Can any good come from such a quarter? If men like Wesley and Finney and other Arminians can be involved in revival and used in it, well, we ought to be suspicious of revival.” The mistake here is that we all tend to think in terms of labels and parties, not realizing that God displays His sovereignty often in this way, that though a man may be muddled in his thinking, as John Wesley was at certain points, God may nevertheless bless him and use him. And if He cannot do this, then there is no such thing as the sovereignty of God, and His omnipotence. Thus because of party spirit we can go wrong in our thinking and be guilty of quenching the Spirit of God.
But perhaps the most important and most serious matter is this. The Puritans themselves do not seem to teach us anything about revival. Oh, that I could have quoted copiously and extensively out of the Puritans! But I cannot do so. As far as I can find, they did not write on the subject. Did they even recognize it? John Owen’s volumes on the work of the Holy Spirit do not deal with it. Try to discover what John Owen has to say on John 7:37–39, or what he has to tell us on Peter’s sermon in Acts 2, “this is that which was spoken by the prophet Joel,” or on Acts 3:19, “that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord.” He just does not deal with the subject of these verses; neither do the others. This undoubtedly creates a very real difficulty for many people. “The Puritans did not deal with revival,” they say; “they never talked about it. Can it therefore be right? Is there not something inherently dubious about this whole matter?”
We must address ourselves directly to this question. Why did the Puritans not deal with revival? I would like to suggest some reasons for your consideration. Was it not partly the fact that they lived in a particular age and had to meet a particular need? The Puritans in their day were up-to-date; they were modern men; they lived in their own century and faced realistically the actual conditions which confronted them. They had to fight on many fronts themselves. They had to fight not only the old Roman teaching, and the High Church teaching of Laud and his friends, but also the views of some of the “wilder men” amongst themselves, and of the sects. I do not like this epithet “wilder men,” but there were among the Puritans men like Walter Craddock and Morgan Llwyd, who differed in a radical way from men like John Owen and Thomas Goodwin. They were much more directly experimental in the pneumatic sense, and had leanings toward mysticism. This was certainly true of Morgan Llwyd and, of course, the Quakers. The leading Puritans, whose works we have, were fighting such men; they were gravely concerned about these excesses and afraid of them. The result was that much of their writing on the Holy Spirit was determined by this polemical interest, and hence very often they are too negative in their approach. I believe that is a partial explanation.
Dare I also hazard the opinion that the fact that some of these leading Puritans were brought up in a certain communion and carried over certain ideas and traditions with them may have had an inhibiting effect upon them? At any rate they were very concerned about order—perhaps too much so. So anxious were they that everything should be done “decently and in order” that I find it very difficult at times to acquit them of the charge of quenching the Spirit.
I am tempted to add another note. I wonder whether even temperament enters into this matter? I announced that I would speak on revival from an historical and theological standpoint. I very nearly added the word “geographical,” and even a further word, “ethnological”! I am not sure whether this comes in, but I think it does. Every man has a fight to wage; we are all temperamentally different, and we all have particular weaknesses of temperament to fight against. I wonder whether it is not true to say that the Englishman has a particular fight just here, and that he should be aware of it? Is it just an accident that these revivals in the history of the church have generally been outside England? Not, of course, entirely. The eighteenth century stands out, as I have reminded you, and there were those odd sporadic instances in the seventeenth century. But is there not a real danger that unconsciously, because of temperament and make-up, one man may be more prone to the sin of quenching the Spirit than others of different temperaments?
Whatever may be the true explanation, we can certainly agree about this as regards the Puritans—their primary interest was pastoral and experiential in a personal sense. That was their genius; and it was this that fitted them for the peculiar work that they were called upon to do—the analysis of cases of conscience, the resolution of doubts, and helping people who were in trouble. They excelled at that, and there can be no doubt that this was the thing that was needed particularly in their day and generation.
There, then, are some, at any rate, of the reasons as I see things for the lack of interest in revival amongst those who belong to the Reformed tradition.
IV
Let us come now to another section—difficulties and objections to the idea of revival. An obvious general objection (with which I unfortunately have not the time to deal at length) is the dislike of phenomena. Some people are so appalled and alarmed at the phenomena that sometimes occur in revival that they dismiss the whole subject. The answer is, of course, that you can have, and have had, revivals where there have been no such phenomena at all. Revivals differ greatly from time to time and from age to age and from place to place. I leave it at that.
Here is another particular difficulty. I do not know exactly what is believed by present-day Plymouth Brethren but I do know that the early Brethren taught, and taught very strongly, that it was wrong to pray for revival because, they said, the Holy Ghost had been given once for all on the Day of Pentecost. (In view of that, what right have you to ask Him to come now?) That was their teaching, and I believe it has had a very pervasive effect and has influenced large numbers who do not belong to that section of the church. The argument is, “Why do you pray for the coming of the Spirit—for an outpouring of the Spirit? He was outpoured on the Day of Pentecost. How can He be poured out again?” Such teaching actively discourages prayer for revival.
Another objection sometimes alleged is that nowhere in the New Testament are we taught to pray for revival. Here we come to a subject which might well occupy the whole of our time. There is an abundant answer to this objection. The main point of it is this—that the New Testament church was not exhorted to pray for revival because it was in the midst of a revival. What we read about the church in the New Testament is an account of revival. The New Testament church was full of the power of the Spirit. When you read the history of revivals, are you not reminded at once of the book of the Acts of the Apostles? The church always looks like the church in the New Testament when she is in the midst of revival. The New Testament period was a period of revival; the great outpouring on the Day of Pentecost was continued. The church of the New Testament was a pneumatic church, filled with the Spirit. I have often put the argument like this. Take 1 Corinthians 14, where Paul has to write to the church about speaking in tongues and speaking one at a time, and how, if a man is prophesying and sees another wanting to speak, he should stop, and so on. Would you need to write that chapter to the church today? Of course not! Why? Because the church today is not in this pneumatic condition. The New Testament church was a church that was filled and baptized with the Spirit. (Let me add here another controversial remark. It seems to me that the societies that were started in England and Wales by the Methodist fathers of both schools of thought in the eighteenth century were much nearer to the New Testament church than were the Puritan churches of the seventeenth century. There was more of the freedom of the Spirit, more spontaneity, more taking part by the mass of the people. I think that is something which is worthy of our consideration.)
That, then, provides a part of the answer to the objection that we are not told to pray for revival in the New Testament. But there is much more along the same line. I know that the exegesis of Acts 3:19 is somewhat doubtful. Buchanan and Smeaton, however, seem to be in no doubt as to the exegesis; they say it refers to revival, and I tend to agree with them. These “times of refreshing . . . from the presence of the Lord,” they say, are periods of revival, as if Peter’s message was this: “Well now, here you have had the first great sample of the Spirit’s power and blessing. This is going to keep on recurring until the time of the restitution of all things.” Again, in order to prove that the New Testament church was a church in revival, look at this further evidence. In 1 Thessalonians 1:5, Paul says, “Our gospel came unto you not only in word, but in power and in the Holy Ghost, and with much assurance.” What was it that turned the ancient world upside down? Was it just theological teaching? Was it mere enunciation of correct doctrine? Over and above that, there was this mighty “demonstration of the Spirit and of power.” How did those people turn the world upside down? The answer is that in the book of Acts we have an account of a great revival, of the Spirit outpoured. What happened could not have happened otherwise. How did all these churches come into being? Was it merely that the apostles taught correct doctrine? Of course not! It was the Spirit’s demonstration and power which accompanied the correct doctrine. Correct doctrine can leave the church dead; you can have dead orthodoxy; you can have a church that is perfectly orthodox but perfectly useless. Over and above, there was this demonstration, this unction, this authority, this outpouring of the Spirit’s power. It is the only explanation of the astonishing things that happened.
That brings us to the next difficulty, about which we are hearing a good deal at the present time. We are told that we must not talk about revival because we need reformation first. You cannot have revival, it is said, without prior reformation. You must be right with respect to your doctrine before you have a right to pray for revival. So we must concentrate on reformation alone. I grant that the relationship between these two things is an extremely difficult question, but I hold that the line is not quite as clear-cut as some would have us think. What happened in the Reformation of the sixteenth century? To start with, of course, there was this unique factor, that not only was the teaching of the church of Rome wrong, her entire church system was wrong too. We called what happened “the Reformation” largely because of the revolution that took place in men’s thoughts about the nature of the church and consequently in its organization. It was not only a change in doctrine. And let us never forget this, that there was a great revival in the period of the Reformation. You cannot read the account of a man like Latimer without realizing that obviously the man was being used as a revival preacher. Is it a feasible suggestion that the common people of England were influenced by a mere change of doctrinal teaching? Could that ever lead to such results? Can any examples of that be found? Of course not. No, no, there was a genuine revival then; the presence and the power of the Spirit were undoubtedly there. It is the only adequate explanation of what really took place in the sixteenth century.
Now let me say this on the other side. It is a fact of history that in Northern Ireland, before the revival of 1859, there had been a great period of doctrinal controversy. The Presbyterian Church had become very largely Arian, and the great and famous Henry Cooke had fought and won the great battle against Arianism well before the revival came. Actually, about thirty years before. That time interval is not without significance. To be fair, however, I have to recall these facts.
But now I want to put a fact on the other side again. There are people who say, “You have no right to talk about revival, you have no right to expect revival until people become Reformed in their doctrine.” The simple answer to that is that George Whitefield received his baptism of power in 1737, but did not become a Calvinist in his theology until about 1739, when he was out in America. Revival had come to him, and through him to many others, before his doctrine became right. Exactly the same thing is true of Howell Harris in Wales. He had his great baptism of power in 1735, and it was only two or three years later that he came to see the truth doctrinally. Once more, therefore, I would use this argument. If you say that God cannot give revival until first of all we have had a reformation, you are speaking like an Arminian, you are saying that God cannot do this until we ourselves have first done something. That is to put a limit upon God. It is to lapse into Arminian terminology and thinking, and to deny the fundamental tenet of the Reformed position. If you truly believe in the sovereignty of God, you must believe that whatever the state of the church, God can send revival. As a sheer matter of fact, that is what God did in the eighteenth century. There was the church under the blight of deism and rationalism, and generally dissolute in her living. That was true of the clergy and the leaders; and among the Nonconformists there was a deadness resulting from the Arianism that had even infected a man like Isaac Watts. In the midst of such conditions God did this amazing and astonishing thing, even while some of the men He used were still confused in their doctrinal views. It is amazing that any man holding the Reformed position can be guilty of such a contradiction as to say that you cannot have revival unless you have reformation first. Such a man should never speak like that; he has no right to put in conditions. Revival is something that is wrought by God in sovereign freedom, often in spite of men.
V
Let me now attempt to summarize and assess the position. The result of all this confusion is that the church seems to be divided at the present time into two main groups. There is a group of people that always talk about revival and only about revival. They are only interested in the exceptional and unusual, and they tend to “despise the days of small things,” the regular work of the church and the regular work of the Spirit in the church. The other group so emphasizes the ordinary, regular work of the church and of the Spirit in the church, that they distrust the whole notion of the unusual and exceptional. The answer is, of course, that both are wrong. Let me quote from Buchanan on the Holy Spirit. Buchanan was a professor in the Free Church College in Edinburgh, and this is what he wrote in 1856. “The Holy Spirit is not limited to any one mode of operation in the execution of His glorious work; and His sovereignty ought ever to be remembered when we are considering a subject of this nature. It has, unfortunately, been too much overlooked, when, on the one hand, some have insisted, as we think, with undue partiality and confidence, on a general and remarkable revival, as being in itself the best manifestation of the Spirit’s grace, and as being, in all cases, a matter of promise to believing prayer; and when, on the other hand, not a few have looked to the quiet and gradual success of the Gospel ministry, to the exclusion, or at least disparagement, of any more sudden and remarkable work of grace.” (Do you not know the two groups today?) “The former have given a too exclusive preference to what is extraordinary and striking; while the latter have fallen into the opposite error, of preferring what is more usual and quiet. We think it were better to admit of both methods of conversion, and to leave the choice to the sovereign wisdom and grace of the Spirit. It is equally possible for Him to convert souls successively or simultaneously; and in adopting either course doubtless He has wise ends in view. We have no sympathy with those who, overlooking the steady progress of the great work of conversion under a stated ministry, make no account of the multitudes who are added, one by one, to the church of the living God, merely because their conversion has not been attended with the outward manifestations of a great religious revival; nor can we agree with them in thinking, that the church has any sure warrant to expect that the Spirit will be bestowed, in every instance, in that particular way. But as little have we any sympathy with those who, rejecting all revivals as unscriptural delusions, profess to look exclusively to the gradual progress of divine truth, and the slow advance of individual conversion under a stated ministry. Both methods—the simultaneous and the successive conversion of souls—are equally within the power of the Spirit; and there may exist wise reasons why, in certain cases, the first should be chosen, while, in other cases, the second is preferred.” There, I believe, you have a remarkable statement synthesizing the characteristic experiences of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and God forbid that we should ever pit the one way of divine working against the other. Both happen, in the providence and wisdom of God.
What then is my final answer to all this? Once more, I can do nothing better than quote to you out of Buchanan. “We have been so much accustomed to look to the more slow, and quiet, and gradual method of maintaining and extending the Kingdom of Christ, that we are apt to be startled, and even to listen with some degree of incredulous surprise, when we hear of any sudden and general work of the Spirit of God,—nay, we cease even to expect and to pray for any more remarkable or more rapid change in the state of the church and world, than what is usually observed under her regular ministry.” I wonder how many are guilty of that today? “But God’s ‘ways are not as our ways, neither are His thoughts as our thoughts’; and often, in the history of His church, He has been pleased, for wise reasons, to manifest His grace and power in a very extraordinary and remarkable manner; partly to awaken and arouse a slumbering church; partly also, to alarm and convince gainsayers; and most of all, to teach them at once the sovereignty and the power of that grace which they are too prone to despise.”
Then listen to a quotation from Jonathan Edwards in Smeaton’s book where the same point is made again in a remarkable manner. “It may be observed that 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.” Notice that. He continues, “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 has been by remarkable effusions at special seasons of mercy.” Any impartial reading of church history must surely lead us to substantiate and to agree with the dictum of Jonathan Edwards. Surely the history of the progress and development of the church is largely a history of revivals, of these mighty exceptional effusions of the Spirit of God. There is no question that God has really kept His work alive and has advanced it most of all by these unusual, exceptional, signal manifestations of His glory and of His power. I am asserting that history alone proves that beyond any peradventure.
VI
I close by putting this question. Why should Reformed people, above everybody else, be interested in the subject of revival? Surely, for the following reasons. First, nothing so proves that the church is the church of God. The graph of the church’s history is one of up and down, up and down. That in itself proves that the church is not a human institution. If it were, it would long since have perished and disappeared. It is the church of the living God. It is solely due to the fact that she is His and that He has graciously intervened from time to time for her preservation that she is alive.
Second, I would say this—that this history above everything shows man’s impotence when left to himself. However great a defender of the faith he may be, however doughty a champion of orthodoxy, he can fight and sweat and pray and write and do all things, but he is of no avail, he is impotent, he cannot stem the tide. We persist in thinking that we can set the situation right. We start a new society, we write a book, we organize a campaign, and we are convinced that we are going to hold back the tide. But we cannot. When the enemy comes in like a flood, it is the Lord Who will raise and does raise the banner. The fact of revival proves, I say, so clearly again and again the impotence and the smallness of man left to himself.
Here is another important point. What so proves that the work of salvation is the work of the Holy Spirit, and not a mere matter of moral suasion or argumentation, as revival? How? Well, by the very suddenness of revival. If salvation is the result of argumentation and moral suasion, then you need to engage in it for some time. That was the whole fallacy in the thinking of a man like Charles G. Finney. Though he pays lip service to the Holy Spirit, he virtually excludes the Spirit. The work of conversion is achieved by a rational argument. That has always been the position of Arminianism, ultimately. But the Reformed man says, “No, no, it is the work of the Holy Spirit, the direct operation of the Spirit upon the man in his mind and heart and will, in illumination and renewing.” And when and where is that seen more clearly than in a revival? Look at the suddenness of the conversions; yes, look especially at the fact which is found so abundantly in the history of revivals, that many people have been converted even before they reached the meeting or heard the preacher. They were converted on the road; conviction suddenly came upon them. You cannot say that is moral suasion. They had not even heard the sermon; there had been no preliminary argumentation whatsoever. Revival thus establishes and proves the great point which was in a sense the point of contention at the Synod of Dort—in conversion where does the Holy Spirit come in? The ultimate defect and error in the Arminian argument and all that has emanated from it is that it excludes the Holy Spirit from the real decision, and asserts that man is able to convert himself. Revival demonstrates the contrary contention that this is always and invariably the work of the Holy Spirit. In revivals you see that on a big and dramatic scale, and so attention is called to that truth.
In the fourth place, I would ask, Is there anything that so demonstrates the sovereignty of God as revival? Think of it in terms of the timing of revival. When does revival come? The answer is not that it is when we have produced certain preliminary conditions, as Finney taught. No, God does it at most unexpected times. You never know when He is going to do it; there is always a suddenness and an unexpectedness about it. It is Arminian thinking that teaches in some shape or form, “If only we do certain things then . . .” No, the history of revivals proves the exact opposite, both as regards the beginning, and equally with respect to the ending. This is something which is most glorious. Man not only cannot start a revival, he cannot stop it either. Nor can he keep it going when it has stopped. Men have tried to do all these things, but they have never succeeded. The sovereignty of God appears in the timing. Yes, and also the sovereignty of God appears in the place where revival starts. I do not understand Christian people who are not thrilled by the whole idea of revival. If there is one respect in which God confounds the wisdom of the wise more than in any other it is in revival. Look at the places in which He starts revival—little villages, hamlets, places you have never heard of. It is men who start their movements in London, in St. Paul’s Cathedral, or in some great hotel. But God does not do that. He ridicules the wisdom of man and the cleverness and the importance of man both in the matter of time and in the matter of place, and also in the matter of the men used. Look at the men He has used. If you want a perfect exposition of 1 Corinthians 1:25–31, read books on revival. “Not many wise men after the flesh, not many noble,” but the foolish, the nobodies, the unwise—God ridiculing, turning upside down the wisdom of men and exposing it. The sovereignty of God is seen in revival above everything.
Last, nothing so shows the irresistible character of grace as revival. This is seen, of course, in every true conversion, but it is in revival that it is seen on the grand scale, and unmistakably. Men who went to the meetings to upset them and to destroy them are suddenly struck, thrown down, their eyes are opened, and they are given life. There is nothing that is so obvious in a revival as just this irresistibility of the grace of God. Not only “the fools who came to scoff,” but the enemies, the arrogant, are humbled, subdued, converted, and born again. Revival thus underlines and emphasizes this particular biblical doctrine in a striking manner.
The conclusion of the whole matter is this: that we are called at this moment above everything else to pray for revival. God forbid that we should become a body of people who just denounce activism and do nothing. That is what is said about some of us. God forbid it should be true. Are we to be merely negative, merely to point at the faults of others, to point out the holes in their system and to be always denouncing negatively and ridiculing them? Of course not. What then are we called upon to do? We are called upon to go on with our regular work of preaching the gospel in all its fulness, in all its wholeness, after the manner of the Puritan preaching that we were told about yesterday afternoon. Let us do everything we can by every biblical and legitimate means to propagate and to defend the faith. Let us use our apologetics in their right sphere. Let us do all that, and let us go on with the work of reformation in which we are engaged; but let us at the same time maintain the balance of which we were reminded by Buchanan. Let us pray for revival, because nothing else will avail us in the fight in which we are engaged. Thank God our efforts are producing results, and far be it from any of us to despise them or to underestimate them; but it is not enough. The age in which we are living and the condition of the church, not to mention the world, call for a mighty conviction of the sovereignty of God, the absolute necessity of the work of the Spirit, and these various other points I have been trying to emphasize. And that means that nothing less than revival is needed.
VII
Very well then; let us pledge ourselves to pray for an outpouring of the Spirit of God, and let me put the appeal to you to do so first of all in these words taken from Smeaton. “As to the peculiar mode of praying, we may say that in every season of general awakening the Christian community waits just as they waited for the effusion of the Spirit, with one accord in prayer and supplication in the interval between the Ascension and Pentecost. No other course has been prescribed; and the church of the pres-ent has all the warrant she ever had to wait, expect, and pray. The first disciples waited in the youthfulness of simple hope, not for a spirit which they had not, but for more of the Spirit which they had; and Christianity has not outlived itself. Ten days they waited with one accord in prayer, when of a sudden the Spirit came to give them spiritual eyes to apprehend divine things as they never knew them before, and to impart a joy which no man could take from them. It was prayer in the Spirit (Ephesians 6:18) and prayer for the Spirit, the great ‘promise of the Father.’ But the prayer which brought down the Holy Ghost was not that style of petition which ceases if it is not heard at once, or if the heart is out of tune. The prayer which prevails with Him Who gives the Spirit is that which will not let Him go without the blessing. When the spirit of extraordinary supplication is poured out from on high,—when an urgent desire is cherished for the Holy Ghost,—when the Church asks according to God’s riches in glory, and expects such great things as God’s promises warrant and Christ’s merits can procure,—the time to favour Zion, the set time, is come (Psalms 102:16–18). When we look at the prayers in Scripture, we find that God’s glory, the Church’s growth and welfare, her holiness and progress, were ever highest in the thoughts and breathings of the saints than personal considerations. And if we are animated with any other frame of mind, it is not prayer taught by the Spirit, nor offered up in the Name of Christ. The praying attitude of the Church in the first days after the Ascension, when the disciples waited for the Spirit, should be the Church’s attitude still. I need not refer to the copious references of the Apostles to the urgent duty of praying ‘in the Spirit’ and praying ‘for the Spirit,’ nor shall I refer at large to the habits of all true labourers, such as Luther, Welsh, Whitefield, and others, in proof of the great truth that prayer is the main work of the ministry. And no more mischievous and misleading theory could be propounded, nor any one more dishonouring to the Holy Spirit, than the principle adopted by the Plymouth Brethren, that because the Spirit was poured out at Pentecost, the Church has no need, and no warrant, to pray any more for the effusion of the Spirit of God. On the contrary, the more the Church asks the Spirit and waits for His communication, the more she receives. The prayer of faith in one incessant cry comes up from the earth in support of the efforts put forth for the conversion of a people ready to perish. This prayer goes before and follows after all the calls to repentance.”
There is nothing better that one can do, therefore, in the light of that than to suggest that the urgent call that comes to us at this moment is to offer unceasingly the prayer that was offered up by Isaiah in the terrible day in which he found himself living. Listen:
“Look down from heaven, and behold from the habitation of thy holiness and of thy glory: where is thy zeal and thy strength, the sounding of thy bowels and of thy mercies toward me? are they restrained? Doubtless thou art our father, though Abraham be ignorant of us, and Israel acknowledges us not: Thou, O Lord, art our father, our redeemer, thy name is from everlasting. O Lord, why hast thou made us to err from thy ways, and hardened our heart from thy fear? Return for thy servants’ sake, the tribes of thine inheritance. The people of thy holiness have possessed it but a little while: our adversaries have trodden down thy sanctuary. We are thine: thou never barest rule over them; they were not called by thy name.”
And then having asked God to look down he goes further.
“Oh that thou wouldest rend the heavens, that thou wouldest come down, that the mountains might flow down at thy presence. As when the melting fire burneth, the fire causeth the waters to boil, to make thy name known to thine adversaries, that the nations may tremble at thy presence! When thou didst terrible things which we looked not for, thou camest down, the mountains flowed down at thy presence. For since the beginning of the world men have not heard, nor perceived by the ear, neither hath the eye seen, O God, beside thee, what he hath prepared for him that waiteth for him. Thou meetest him that rejoiceth and worketh righteousness, all that remember thee in thy ways: behold thou art wroth: for we have sinned: in those is continuance, and we shall be saved. But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away. There is none that calleth upon thy name, that stirreth up himself to take hold of thee; for thou hast hid thy face from us, and hast consumed us, because of our iniquities. But now, O Lord, thou art our father; we are the clay, and thou art our potter; and we are all the work of thy hands” (Isaiah 63:15–64:8).
How many of us have stirred ourselves up to take hold of God? How many? This is typical biblical teaching; this was also the teaching of our fathers. They waited upon God and cried and cried until He did rend the heavens and come down. Let us lay hold upon Him and plead with Him to vindicate His own truth and the doctrines which are so dear to our hearts, that the church may be revived and masses of people may be saved.
1 Ian R. K. Paisley, The “Fifty Nine” Revival; John T. Carson, God’s River in Spate; Eifion Evans, When He is Come.
2 By the Banner of Truth Trust.