The Great Awakenings Edwards and Revivalism

Historical Theology

Historical Setting

While the Enlightenment chilled the universities of Europe, a different fire was kindling in the parishes and fields of Britain and the American colonies. The early eighteenth century saw, in many places, a deadness of formal religion — orthodoxy without warmth, churches full but hearts cold. Into this spiritual winter came the Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s, a sweeping movement of conversion and renewed devotion.

It was no single planned campaign but a series of local revivals that gathered into a transatlantic phenomenon. In Northampton, Massachusetts, the young pastor Jonathan Edwards witnessed a “surprising work of God” in 1734–35. Soon the itinerant preaching of George Whitefield drew crowds of thousands across the colonies, while in England the Wesley brothers, John and Charles, fanned a parallel revival that would become Methodism.

What Was at Stake

The Awakening raised an enduring question: what is genuine revival, and how can it be discerned from mere emotional excitement or social contagion? Edwards’s critics charged that the bodily manifestations — weeping, crying out, fainting — were enthusiasm and delusion. His defenders saw the Spirit of God poured out. At stake was nothing less than the nature of true religion: does it reside in the affections, the will, the intellect — and how does the sovereign God work conversion in the soul?

A second question, sharpened in the Second Great Awakening, was whether revival is given by God or produced by human technique. The answer one gives reveals one’s whole theology of grace.

Key Players

Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) stands as the theologian of the Awakening and arguably the greatest mind in American church history. A thoroughgoing Calvinist, Edwards read the revival as a sovereign work of God, yet he refused to baptize every excess. His Religious Affections (1746) is a masterwork of spiritual discernment, distinguishing true gracious affections from counterfeits. His Freedom of the Will (1754) defended the compatibility of moral responsibility with the bondage of the fallen will to its strongest motive, demolishing the libertarian premises that would later underwrite Arminian and Pelagian revivalism. And in A Faithful Narrative and The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God, he applied Scripture’s tests to the events unfolding before him.

George Whitefield (1714–1770) was the great evangelist, a preacher of astonishing power and reach who carried the new birth across the colonies. Calvinistic in conviction, he labored alongside Edwards while gently differing with Wesley over election.

John and Charles Wesley preached an Arminian gospel of free grace offered to all and Christian perfection as the goal of sanctification. We must state their contribution generously: the Wesleys’ zeal for holiness, their care for the poor, and their organizational genius brought the gospel to multitudes the established church had neglected. Their theology of grace differs sharply from the Reformed, but their devotion does not.

Charles Finney (1792–1875) belongs to the later Second Great Awakening. A lawyer turned revivalist, Finney pioneered the “new measures” — the anxious bench, protracted meetings, direct emotional appeals, naming sinners in prayer. His revivals were marked by genuine zeal and lasting reform impulses, including abolitionism. He must be credited with earnestness and evangelistic energy.

The Outcome

The First Great Awakening reshaped American Christianity, multiplying conversions, spawning new colleges (Princeton among them), and laying groundwork for both the missionary movement and, some argue, a broader culture of religious liberty. The Second Great Awakening, especially through Finney, made revivalism a permanent feature of American religious life — but also embedded within it a man-centered theology of conversion whose effects endure.

Scriptural Grounding

Revival in the biblical sense is a work of God, not a product of method.

“I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh.” (Joel 2:28)

“So then it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God, who has mercy.” (Romans 9:16)

The new birth is sovereign and mysterious:

“The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” (John 3:8)

And the affections are central to true religion:

“As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God.” (Psalm 42:1)

Doctrinal Significance

Edwards’s enduring gift to historical theology is a Reformed account of religious experience that is neither rationalistic nor enthusiastic. True religion, he argued, consists in holy affections — but affections rooted in a transformed understanding and bearing the fruit of holy practice. This guards against two errors: the cold orthodoxy that knows doctrine without delight, and the hot enthusiasm that mistakes every emotion for the Spirit.

The Finney controversy crystallizes the doctrinal stakes. Finney explicitly denied original sin in the imputed sense, taught that the sinner has full natural ability to convert himself, and famously defined revival as “not a miracle” but “the right use of the constituted means” — a purely natural result of properly applied technique. This is, at root, Pelagian.

A Reformed Assessment — Wheat and Chaff

The wheat is abundant. The Awakenings were a genuine outpouring of the Spirit, and Edwards remains the gold standard for discerning the work of God: sober, biblical, neither quenching the Spirit nor crediting every fervor to Him. Whitefield’s God-centered evangelism and the Wesleys’ passion for holiness are gifts to the whole church.

The chaff lies chiefly in Finney’s theology and its legacy. By relocating the cause of conversion from the sovereign Spirit to the right deployment of means, Finney made revival a matter of marketing. We assess this fairly: Finney was no cynic; he believed in his methods and saw apparent fruit. But the long-term harvest of his Pelagian premises has been a decisionism that mistakes manipulated emotion for regeneration, and a church culture forever chasing the next technique. The Reformed verdict is firm: God-wrought awakening is to be sought in prayer and the faithful means of grace; it cannot be manufactured.

Connections

This guide engages Soteriology — regeneration, the bondage and freedom of the will, effectual calling — and Pneumatology. It connects to WCF 9 (Of Free Will) and WCF 10 (Of Effectual Calling), which ground conversion in God’s sovereign grace, not human ability.

Backward, Edwards stands in continuity with the Reformation’s sola gratia and Dort’s answer to Arminianism. Forward, the tension between God-wrought revival and manufactured revivalism feeds directly into the revivalist strand of the contemporary era and the evangelistic methods debated in 07_xx. Finney’s man-centered theology anticipates the broader accommodation that the Fundamentalist–Modernist controversy (07_01) would expose.

Lessons for Today

We learn to long for revival without engineering it, to value the affections without trusting emotion, and to test every claimed work of the Spirit by Scripture and fruit. Edwards teaches the church to hold head and heart together. Finney warns us how quickly a zeal for results can erode a theology of grace.