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HISTORY of Christian Theology

Pietism and the American Great Awakenings

Great Awakening

Pietism

Shortly before his graduation from theology school in Germany, August Hermann Francke (1663–1727) pondered his life and his decision to become a Lutheran pastor. When he originally entered college, he had wanted to devote his life to God, but now he feared that he was an atheist.

A century of religious wars on the European continent had ended nearly fifty years earlier with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. In this treaty, the warring parties agreed that the official religion of each land would be the religion of its ruler, and those who belonged to one of the other three acknowledged Christian traditions (Catholic, Lutheran and Reformed) would retain certain limited rights. Since that time, each tradition had made concerted efforts to reinforce the legitimacy of their theology. At the same time, they were pressured on two fronts: one from the scientific community and the second from reliance on reason as the universal arbiter of truth. To address these threats, the Protestant theology schools borrowed the scholastic approach found in the Catholic universities during the Middle Ages, when scholars like Thomas Aquinas constructed logical arguments to support Catholic theology. This is referred to as the Protestant scholastic period. The problem was that they stressed a religion of the head at the expense of a religion of the heart.

Francke knew that something was amiss in his life. He did not feel the connection with deity that he read about in the Lutheran pastor Johann Arndt’s book True Christianity and in Philipp Jakob Spenser’s book Pious Desires. Francke fell to his knees and began to pray. He later recounted his conversion:

When I knelt down, I did not believe … there was a God, but when I stood up, I believed it to the point of giving up my blood without fear of doubt . . . Reason stood away; victory was torn from its hands.1

Francke became the quintessential pietist. Spenser is credited with starting the pietist movement, which stressed a religion of the heart instead of a religion of the head. Pietism started in Lutheranism to counter the sterility of religious activity within its tradition at that time. Spenser organized intimate Bible study groups in Lutheran congregations, where the laity would meet on a regular basis to study the Bible and discuss how they could live more devout Christian lives. They emphasized the need for personal transformation and increased piety, which was brought about through heartfelt spiritual renewal. Contrary to Luther, who stressed the importance of relying on the promise of grace found in the baptismal sacrament, Francke taught:

You ought not to say, “I am baptized. I go to church. I am a Christian.” The hypocrites do the same. There are many people baptized who nonetheless . . . are faithless and fall out of his baptismal covenant. Many people go to the Lord’s Supper and misuse it and receive it to their judgment and death. You must make no decisions because you follow externals.2

Thus, Pietism stressed the importance of an inward rebirth and not depending on the external signs of the sacraments. This movement did not completely change Lutheran doctrine, but it infused its practice with more emotion.3 As the Enlightenment matured, with its emphasis on reason, it spawned the birth of deism. But people began to realize that something was missing from their rational religion: feeling.

John Wesley and the Methodist Movement

The pietist movement grew and crossed religious and continental boundaries. John Wesley (1703–1791) and his brother Charles formed the Holy Club as students at Oxford. This club followed the pietist model. They prayed, read and discussed scripture and how they could more fully live true Christian lives. To that end, they visited the poor, the hungry, prisoners and any lost soul overlooked by society. A couple of years later, a new student named George Whitefield (1714–1770) joined their club. Their mutual experience in this club informed their lives and was instrumental in the creation of the Methodist movement of similar study groups in the Church of England, which later grew to become a separate denomination. Both Wesley and Whitefield would soon play major roles in the revival movements in England and America, which gave birth to Protestant evangelicalism.

Jonathan Edwards

Francke was not the only person who felt the need for a deeper emotional connection with God through worship during this period which emphasized rationality. In Northampton, Massachusetts, the colony was becoming anxious because its rapid growth was straining its meager resources. Beginning in 1734, several individuals in Jonathan Edwards’s Puritan congregation proclaimed moving spiritual conversions as they turned to God to help them deal with this economic anxiety. Edwards saw the Holy Spirit working among his flock and made a concerted effort to assist it, creating the first revival in America.

Edwards’s revival did not involve enthusiastic preaching, like subsequent Protestant revivals. Instead, he tapped into individuals’ emotions in a much more primal way; through fear. Puritans were Calvinists who had such a strong belief in predestination that they would not extend an offer of grace to the congregation because Jesus only died for those God elected to save, which likely was not everyone in attendance. Edwards instead preached the horrible consequences of not being one of those individuals God had chosen to save. He wanted his congregants to see themselves as sinners awaiting their just conviction and eternity in hell. His sermons were delivered in a slow, direct monotone to stress the seriousness of the situation. His famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” compared his listeners to a spider which God held dangling over a roaring fire; any moment they could die and find themselves in hell. Individuals sat quietly while they rationalized their behavior in their minds, bargained with God, and strove to earn their salvation through their own strength, with no success. Finally, they reached the turning point where they gave up trying to justify themselves, so they surrendered to God. That was when they suddenly felt God’s love and mercy in their hearts and were converted to living a serious Christian life.

Edwards wrote a book published in 1737 titled A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God in the Conversion of Many Hundred Souls in Northampton and the Neighboring Towns and Villages of New Hampshire in New England, laying out the formula for his success and documenting the results to combat naysayers.

John Wesley and the English Revival

Meanwhile back in England, a revival movement was also beginning, directed primarily by John Wesley. He had returned to England discouraged after an unsuccessful three-year mission to Savannah Georgia. Wesley became acquainted with the Moravians in Georgia and was impressed with their faith when faced with what appeared to be imminent drowning in a violent storm at sea. A few months later, on May 24, 1738, Wesley had an emotional conversion experience while attending one of the Moravian worship services. This changed his life and the way he preached the gospel. Instead of dry sermons in a formal church setting, he began preaching a gospel of love and grace with his friend George Whitefield in the open fields close to where the poor miners lived. Wesley followed the Arminian persuasion of a strong belief in free will rather than predestination. His message brought hope to the outcasts and downtrodden of society, and his movement caught fire. His unorthodox ways and ideas met with resistance from the Anglican tradition, but when he died years later, he was referred to as the most loved man in England.4

George Whitefield and the American First Great Awakening

Wesley’s friend George Whitefield had his own evangelical conversion that convinced him to join the ministry. Whitefield was a showman. His antics got him banned from preaching in the respectable Anglican churches in England, so he preached outdoors where his theatrics attracted large crowds. When Wesley was a missionary in Georgia, he invited Whitefield to come to American to preach to his congregation. This is where Whitefield found a receptive audience. He returned to England to raise funds for his return to the colonies and turned over his ministry in England to Wesley when he returned.

In essence, Whitefield and Wesley swapped places. Wesley led the Methodist revival in England while Whitefield became an American sensation, gathering crowds as large as twenty thousand to hear him preach in the open air and in churches up and down the Eastern seaboard, creating the first great awakening during the 1730s and 1740s. Whitefield used newspapers and handbills for publicity so people would be curious to find out what the excitement was all about. When they arrived, he used music to stir up the crowd’s emotions. He was a dynamic speaker who spoke extemporaneously, so his messages felt more authentic than typical Sunday sermons.

Whitefield’s tactics and message troubled Jonathan Edwards and others who viewed him as a charlatan promising salvation which he could not deliver. Substantively, it was a dispute about free will. Edwards was so upset that he wrote a book titled On the Freedom of the Will, attacking the Arminian belief in free will as opposed to the Calvinists’ belief in double predestination. Whitefield, however, was a Calvinist. He simply ignored that aspect of its theology. Instead, he emphasized the first half of Edwards’s own argument: since there is nothing physically preventing us from obeying God, we are responsible for our damnation. He ignored Edward’s second point that we are so corrupted by original sin that we are incapable of obeying God. Even though Whitefield believed in predestination, he realized that diminishing the concept of free will did not work well in a revival setting, where everything focused on motivating individuals to consciously choose to accept God’s grace to be saved. So he did not mention it.

Wesley was an Arminian with a strong belief in free will. He combined the emotionalism of Whitefield and the Moravians with the pietist quest for sanctification and added an offer of free grace to everyone, particularly the outcasts of society. He preached that everyone else might have abandoned them, but God hadn’t. Jesus was aware of them and loved them so much that he died for them. Wesley’s approach resonated with a large segment of society and his movement grew rapidly.  It became a major influence in the development of Protestant evangelicalism which transcended denominational boundaries.

Wesley also had a long-term vision that was not shared by Whitefield. Wesley was a brilliant organizer. He set up a self-regenerating system of Bible study groups and organized them into circuits which were visited on a regular basis by ministers. These study groups grew and became thriving congregations. During Wesley’s life, he viewed his movement as a part of the Anglican communion, but it developed distinct characteristics and years later separated from the Anglican communion.

When Americans started moving west onto the frontier, the American Methodist bishop Francis Asbury followed Wesley’s system in England. He established a network of itinerant preachers who traveled a set circuit on the sparsely populated frontier to preach and set up small congregations. These traveling preachers known as circuit riders, would share the news they gathered from other settlers along the way, making them welcomed guests on the lonely frontier. This formula worked so well that it sparked a Protestant revival movement called the second great awakening which lasted roughly from 1795 to 1835, helping the Methodist Church become the largest and fastest-growing denomination in the United States at that time. But with this growth, it faced internal strife over the issue of slavery and split before the Civil War.

Methodists were not the only ones preaching to Americans during the second great awakening. Charles Grandison Finney (1792–1875) was a Presbyterian (Calvinist) minister who followed in Whitefield’s steps. Finney used similar tactics with the innovation of camp meetings, where people would congregate for days to hear him and other rival preachers. Multitudes often experienced phenomenal spiritual manifestations at these revival camp meetings.

These revival movements permanently altered Protestantism in the United States. The evangelical movement transcended denominational boundaries and emphasized an outpouring of the Holy Spirit which created a deep personal conviction and desire to live a moral, upstanding Christian life.

Religion and the Founding of the United States of America

The first great awakening played a significant role in preparing American colonists for the American Revolution. This influence continued, along with the beginnings of the second great awakening, during the writing of the United States Constitution. The trans-denominational nature of the revivals fed the independent spirit of the American colonists. Preachers fused Locke’s ideas about natural law, religion, and liberty with America’s Puritan traditions to assert it was God’s will that they become a free and independent nation. The Protestant belief that all humans are totally depraved contradicted the king’s claim of a divine right to rule.

This skepticism regarding human nature played a critical role in creating the checks and balances embedded in the Constitution. One example of this balance is how they dealt with the issue of religious freedom. Previously, governments established one or more national religions. But the American revivals largely undermined the denominationalism (distinct denominations in contrast to non-denominational congregations) of that era. The country’s founders echoed that sentiment and felt that issues regarding religion were a personal matter. However, they recognized that Christianity provided a strong ethical foundation for society that they did not want to undermine. So, for the first time, a national government balanced these interests by inserting the antiestablishment clause and the free-exercise clause in the First Amendment, guaranteeing freedom of religion for all.5

Alexis de Tocqueville

A young French nobleman, Alexis de Tocqueville, visited this young nation in 1831 and wrote arguably the best book about democracy and America which has ever been written. He observed that democracy is more than a political form of government; it also includes communal values, culture, and structures. He paid close attention to what he called mores of democracy and habits of the heart. He noted that democracies are prone to being unstable due to the changing values exhibited by shifting majorities. Tocqueville believed that the universal adherence to Christianity, albeit by numerous denominations, provided the anchor to stabilize American democracy.  Christian values led believers to adhere to moral principles beyond their natural material selfish interests, and these shared values were not subject to the whim of the majority. The founders recognized this principle. James Madison warned, “To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea.”6 Tocqueville and the founders of the United States realized that the stability of a democratically elected government could only be preserved by a moral populace who valued the common good.7

James Madison

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1 Phillip Cary, The History of Christian Theology, (The Teaching Company, 2008), Lecture 26.

2 Phillip Cary, The History of Christian Theology, (The Teaching Company, 2008), Lecture 26.

3 Special credit is given to the following sources for this discussion of Pietism: Phillip Cary, The History of Christian Theology, (The Teaching Company, 2008), Lecture 26;

4 William R. Cook, The Lives of Great Christians, (The Teaching Company, 2007), Lecture 18.

5 Wikipedia, s.v. “John Weasley,” citing Kiefer, James (2019). “John & Charles Wesley: Renewers of the Church (3 March 1791)”. The Lectionary. Retrieved May 6, 2024.

6 Molly Worthen, The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch, (The Teaching Company, 2017), Lecture 16; Allen C. Guelzo, America’s Founding Fathers, (The Teaching Company, 2017), Lecture 30; William R. Cook, Tocqueville and the American Experiment, (The Teaching Company, 2004), Lectures 17–18.

7James Madison, Judicial Powers of the National Government, (1788), https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-11-02-0101.

8 William R. Cook, Tocqueville and the American Experiment, (The Teaching Company, 2004), Lectures 17–18.

IMAGES:

Camp meeting of the Methodists in N. America, M. Dubourg, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA [PD]

Constitution of the United States, page 1, 17 Sep 1787, National Archives and Records Administration [PD-US]

Alexis de Tocqueville, Théodore Chassériau, 1850, Museum of the History of France, Palace of Versailles [PD]

Portrait of James Madison by John Vanderlyn, 1816, Blue Room, White House Collection [PD-US]

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