One observer called the Great Awakening the greatest working of the Spirit of God since Pentecost. Today, W. Robert Godfrey takes us back to this period of widespread repentance and renewal. With your donation of any amount, request A Survey of Church History, Part 4 A.D. 1600–1800. You’ll receive W. Robert Godfrey’s teaching series on DVD, plus lifetime digital access to the messages and study guide: https://gift.renewingyourmind.org/3811/survey-of-church-history Meet Today’s Teacher: W. Robert Godfrey is a Ligonier Ministries teaching fellow and chairman of Ligonier Ministries. He is president emeritus and professor emeritus of church history at Westminster Seminary California. He is the featured teacher for many Ligonier teaching series, including the six-part series A Survey of Church History. He is author of many books, including God’s Pattern for Creation, Reformation Sketches, and An Unexpected Journey. Meet the Host: Nathan W. Bingham is vice president of ministry engagement for Ligonier Ministries, executive producer and host of Renewing Your Mind, host of the Ask Ligonier podcast, and a graduate of Presbyterian Theological College in Melbourne, Australia. Nathan joined Ligonier in 2012 and lives in Central Florida with his wife and four children. Renewing Your Mind is a donor-supported outreach of Ligonier Ministries. Explore all of our podcasts: https://www.ligonier.org/podcasts
When I was first introduced to Ligonier Ministries, I felt like I found something that I had been searching for, which was good Bible teaching.
From listening to R.C. Sproul, God's up my eyes.
Some of the first things that I was seeing from Ligonier were the Q&A sessions, panels with Sproul and Ferguson. I began to understand, whoa, this is much bigger than I thought.
These are the stories of people like you, men and women around the world who have been awakened to the holiness of God through the faithful teaching of His Word. Dr. R.C. Sproul founded Ligonier Ministries with a singular vision to flood the world with knowledgeable and articulate Christians. And we strive to reach as many people as possible with God's life-changing truth.
Will you join with Ligonier at year's end to reach even more people in 2025? Make your gift today at Ligonier.org slash donate or at renewingyourmind.org. Thank you.
They used the word awakening as a very technical term. And what they meant was that sometimes you saw in a congregation or in several congregations or even more broadly sometimes, a responsiveness, an unusual responsiveness to the preaching of the gospel. But they all remembered the parable of the wheat and the tares.
They knew that it was possible for the sound doctrine of the word to fall on ground where it appeared there was response. But in fact, weeds soon choked it out.
Have you heard of the Great Awakening? It was a time of great religious interest that began in New England and spread throughout the American colonies. That will be our focus on this Saturday edition of Renewing Your Mind. On Saturdays, you're hearing highlights from W. Robert Godfrey's six-part monumental study series on church history.
He's taken us to the early church, the Middle Ages, and the Reformation. And today we're visiting the 18th century, and he'll introduce us to the Great Awakening. If you'd like to continue studying this time in church history, really our family history, you can add part four of this overview of church history to your library when you make a year-end donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org.
And to thank you for your generosity, we'll send you the DVD and unlock lifetime streaming access to this 12-message installment. Well, here's Dr. Godfrey, the chairman of Ligonier Ministries on The Great Awakening.
Well, in a sense, we have been talking together about revolutions, revolutions in thinking about society and the way it's put together and about truth as it began to emerge in the Enlightenment in the late 17th and on into the 18th century. And now we've begun to look at revolutions in religion.
It's hard for us who are attached to the Reformation to realize how much religion has changed since the 16th century. Not the doctrine, but the whole notions of how church relates to society, how church relates to state, how toleration should or should not exist in the world. And part of the revolution that came in to the world of religion came in through religious events in the 18th century.
And that's what we've started to look at when we were looking at how Wesley and Whitefield began to emerge as great preachers against a dead established religion.
and how the Lord began to use them to really work in the hearts of people to bring them out of a situation in which they felt they had to, some of them, wait forever to come to the Lord and had to be part of a state church that was increasingly in trouble. So there are these...
These rumblings, these beginnings of change, and those rumblings were not just taking place in England with Wesley and Whitfield as young men, but they also began to take place in New England. The clearest example of that was in the case of Jonathan Edwards.
Now, we're going to talk in the next lecture primarily about Jonathan Edwards, but here it's appropriate just to say that Edwards was a rather young minister in Northampton. He had gone to Northampton to be the assistant minister to his grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, who had been a strong supporter of the halfway covenant and the idea of the Lord's Supper as a converting ordinance.
His grandfather had died in 1729, And Jonathan Edwards had taken over as the senior minister there in Northampton. And he had begun to preach as the senior minister. And he experienced late in 1733 and early in 1734 what he called the stirrings of the spirit or the beginnings of an awakening there in Northampton. He saw an unusual responsiveness there.
to the preaching taking place in the congregation. And it's interesting, he was preaching on justification by faith. That would be an interesting study, how many people have been converted by hearing sermons on justification by faith alone. But he began to see this in his own congregation.
Now, the Puritans, like Jonathan Edwards, and Edwards is certainly a late Puritan, they used the word awakening as a very technical term. And what they meant was that sometimes you saw in a congregation or in several congregations or even more broadly sometimes, a responsiveness, an unusual responsiveness to the preaching of the gospel.
But they all remembered the parable of the wheat and the tares. They knew that it was possible for the sound doctrine of the word to fall on ground where it appeared there was response, but in fact weeds soon choked it out. And so they were hesitant to say we're having a revival, or they were hesitant to say we're seeing a lot of conversions. What they would say is we're seeing an awakening.
People are interested. People seem responsive. And we hope it will lead to sound conversion. But they were very cautious in their evaluation. They didn't leap to the conclusion of conversion. They said, it's an awakening, and we hope it will lead to conversion. That's what Edwards said. observed in Northampton in 1734 and in the local region a little bit around him.
And he wrote an account of this because he and others like him believed that it was very important to be in communication about what God was doing. in the hopes that the word about what God was doing in one place could be taken to another place, and that God might use that to begin an awakening even more broadly.
And so Edwards wrote the first of his revival treatises entitled, A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God. And this account actually was very widely published and became very influential. So we're beginning to see stirrings of the Spirit, it appears, to awaken the church, to cause new life and faith to come into the church.
And this would ultimately come to be called the Great Awakening in America, or the Great and General Awakening, as the Puritans would have said, because what they experienced was not an awakening just in a few locations, but now an awakening spreading through New England and even to other colonies as well. And the chief catalyst of that was George Whitefield.
Whitefield actually came preaching to New England in 1740. And when Jonathan Edwards heard him there preaching, Edwards sat and wept because he felt this was the man sent by God. This was the man God was going to use. He thought there was such power in that preaching that certainly God would honor it and bless it.
And Edwards could look around and see what dramatic response there was taking place to the preaching there in 1740. New England. And it was dramatic. It was amazing. Whitfield was still quite a young man. And to a certain extent, it may be that this remarkable success went to his head a little bit.
Whitfield, I think, was only 26 at the time, and saw this remarkable response to his preaching and the praise of other ministers labeled upon him. And he did comment of his preaching tour through New England, "'Dagon falls daily before the ark.'" So he compared himself to the Ark of God. It was maybe a little much, but it was true that there was just this remarkable response wherever he went.
And he said rather boldly that the great problem in New England was that dead men were preaching to dead men. Now that criticism of the clergy became a rather repeated element of the Great Awakening. And we'll come back and talk about that more later.
But here it's important to say that although there was criticism of the clergy, it was always in the context that it wasn't all the clergy that were to blame. And as long as the preachers like Whitefield weren't blaming all the clergy, then you could always conclude as a clergyman they weren't talking about you, they were talking about others.
But certainly a criticism of the settled ministry, a criticism of the old way of doing things. Because remember, in New England, just as in England, there was a parish system in place. If you were a churchgoer, you went to your nearest church building. You didn't pick and choose. You were part of a parish, and the parish was established by where you lived, not what preacher you wanted to hear.
You should all think, what church would you go to if you went to the nearest building to you? You might not want to be there at all. But it was a parish system. And to attack the clergy was suddenly to begin to raise questions about the validity of the parish system. But in any case, this great awakening began to shake America.
There was great anticipation that had been waiting for God to do something, and at last it seemed God was doing something absolutely remarkable, absolutely unheard of, never really experienced before. And one of the observers said, this is the greatest working of the Spirit of God since Pentecost. Now, that's a big claim.
But there could be no doubt that something very dramatic, very important, something that would change society as well as religion in America was taking place, and George Whitefield was at the center of it. Now, it's interesting. In the days of Whitefield and Wesley, they were preachers who would come and preach in a place and then move on.
was really only in the 19th century that you began to get what today we would call revival crusades, where the preacher would come and stay and preach for a week or two and build up excitement and build up interest. In these days, they would preach maybe once or twice in a place, and then they would move on. And the very responsiveness to that movement
way of proceeding was part of what convinced them that the Spirit of God was really at work. They just preached once, and there was all of this response. They did not have altar calls. That's also a 19th century invention. But they could see, as Whitefield saw when the tears came down people's cheeks, they could see the response.
And sometimes when Whitefield preached in New England, the emotional response was so great that people surmised screamed or people fainted. They couldn't contain themselves. And when Whitfield was criticized about that, they said, no one complains when you cry at a funeral. Why should we complain if people are weeping over the death of souls?
But it was one of the charges brought against some in the Great Awakening that it was too emotional, that there was too much reaction. Whitefield was not troubled by that, but he waited. He believed that people were being awakened, but he waited to see, are they really being soundly converted? Now, It was not just Whitefield, of course, who was the preacher of this awakening.
The awakening, we can say, roughly lasted from about 1739, when the general awakening began to manifest itself, down to about 1744. So for about... Five years, rather intensively, awakening was taking place all over the American colonies. There were things going on in Scotland and England as well, but we're concentrating a little more in the colonies. didn't stay the whole time.
He left and returned to England in 1741 and thought he ought to return and help Wesley with some of what he was doing there in England because Wesley was seeing great fruit to his labors there. And it was a very... difficult and sad return for Whitfield because one of the flaws of Wesley manifested itself when Whitfield returned.
And that flaw was Wesley really could not cooperate with people very well. He was great at running the show. He was great at being in charge. But he was not good at cooperation. And when Whitefield returned and wanted to go back to preach in some of the coal mining regions where he had started the work, Wesley told the people there not to listen to Whitefield.
Now, the excuse offered, maybe more than excuse, maybe that's a little hard on Wesley, but the excuse offered, I don't mind being a little hard on Wesley, the excuse offered was that Whitefield had become too much of a Calvinist in New England. And it's fairly certain that the influence of Edwards and others in New England had clarified Whitefield's theology in a more Calvinistic direction.
But it's also true, I think, that Wesley was very contented to use that theological difference to justify his refusal to cooperate as equals with Whitefield. And it's really from that time Wesley became much more self-consciously an Arminian.
I don't think Wesley cared overly about theology, but what we do see is that from that time on, one of the root concerns of Wesley came ever more to the fore, and that was a concern for holiness. Now, a concern for holiness is a good thing, but Wesley's theology was
flexible enough, thin enough, that he had trouble, I think, balancing a sound Protestant doctrine of justification with a sound concern for holiness. And sometimes when he talked about holiness, he seemed to do that almost in a way that compromised his commitment to justification by faith alone. And then, too, as his life went on, he developed this strange notion of Christian perfection.
He believed it was possible by faith for Christians to become perfect. And not everyone was persuaded that Wesley had made it. But this stress upon holiness did seem to be somewhat linked to aspects of Arminian theology and did serve to alienate Wesley from Whitefield. Wesley went on to be very successful as an organizer. He had great organizational abilities.
And he established all over England Methodist societies. He didn't call them churches. He was still in the Church of England. To the day he died, he remained a minister in the Church of England. He established societies that met...
uh... it looked a lot like worship but he said it wasn't worship because they did not compete with the church of england the societies never met at the same time as the church of england but he was setting up really kind of a church within the church and uh... even more importantly he established what were called classes class meetings where ten fifteen methodists would gather together regularly to study to pray
and to be disciplined by a leader of the class meeting. So not only were there societies that looked a lot like congregations, but there were cells or classes within the society that led to real discipline, real conversation. How are you praying? How is your spiritual life going? How is your sanctification going? There was accountability.
And all of that would come to make the Methodist movement a very powerful movement. And almost immediately after Wesley's death, these Methodist societies separated from the Church of England. It was really only Wesley individually that was keeping them in the Church of England. They separated and established the Methodist Church.
And although the Methodist Church in America was very small in the 18th century, it grew rapidly in the 19th century. And by the middle of the 19th century, the Methodist Church had become the largest church in America. And so the success of Methodism in 50 years in America is a story we'll talk about later, but a very remarkable story.
So Wesley brought all of his own abilities as a preacher, but even more as an organizer to the formulation of an Arminian Methodism. Whitefield would call himself a Calvinistic Methodist. And by that he meant, I believe in method, I believe in discipline, but I don't believe in Arminianism. But Whitefield was the greater preacher and the not-so-good organizer.
And so Whitefield did not leave as big an organization behind him as Wesley did. But in the Great Awakening in America, Whitefield remained really a very central figure as a preacher. But he was not the only figure. There were others as well. Jonathan Edwards preached significantly during the awakening. His preaching was greatly blessed.
And, of course, an indelible impression was left on history by his preaching of his famous sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, which created a great response. What's usually not remembered is the great response came the second time he preached that sermon. The first time he preached that sermon in his own congregation and nothing much happened.
Preachers are aware of that kind of phenomenon. It was the second time in a friend's congregation that he preached that sermon where there was the huge response. And that points to a very important part of the Great Awakening. The Great Awakening, by and large, was driven by preaching but by the preaching of ministers to congregations other than their own.
the great fire of the great awakening seemed to fall where ministers were visiting other congregations or preaching in other places and this is important from a historian's point of view because it again points how the awakening was beginning to disrupt the old order beginning to undermine the settled pattern of parishes and um...
That comes to expression most powerfully in a very important sermon that was preached during the Great Awakening by one of the famous preachers of the era, actually a man by the name of George Tennant. He was actually a Presbyterian. Tennant was one of those who was very successful in his preaching. His father had been a preacher. He had brothers who were preachers.
And Tennant was one of those also traveling around preaching in different places. And he preached a very famous sermon called The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry. And in that sermon, he talks about unconverted ministers and what a bane they are on the church. He says they are like caterpillars, crawling around, seeing to eat up everything green.
Wherever they saw any life, they wanted to destroy it. That's the danger of unconverted ministers. And many people have read that sermon and said, wow, you know, that's a really inflammatory sermon. That's a revolutionary sermon. And I respond by saying, no, that's not the revolutionary part of the sermon.
To say there are a bunch of unconverted ministers is no problem unless you start naming them. There was another preacher, James Davenport, that did some of that. That was problematic, that you could pretend to know who are the unconverted and unregenerate ministers. What's really...
revolutionary in Tennant's sermon is he said to the people to whom he was preaching and you need to decide if you have an unconverted minister and if you do you need to go to a congregation where there's a converted minister. This was a revolution in thinking. Up to this point the attitude of probably all Christians, certainly all Protestants was, I'm just a lay person.
I don't have a right to decide who's converted or not converted. I don't have a right really to decide if the minister's doing a good job or not. He's the minister. He's supposed to know whether he's doing a good job or not.
I remember as a young minister preaching in a Dutch Reformed congregation, and at the door a young man shook my hand and said, thanks for the good sermon, even though I know I shouldn't say that. I said, why shouldn't you say that? He said, oh, we were taught if you compliment the sermon this week, you might criticize it next week, and that's not our business.
I thought, I have a brief momentary experience of life before the Great Awakening. before what has come to be called the triumph of the laity. And we live in a world where the laity is triumphed.
That was W. Robert Godfrey from part four of his six-part complete overview of church history. Hi, I'm Nathan W. Bingham, and you're listening to the Saturday edition of Renewing Your Mind.
I've greatly benefited from Dr. Godfrey's series on church history, and I love the way that he's able to make these time periods come alive as we see the ups and downs, ebbs and flows of the Christian's family history throughout the centuries. If you'd like to add this fourth installment covering 1600 to 1800 A.D.,
You can request a copy on DVD when you give a year-end donation in support of Renewing Your Mind and the global outreach of Ligonier Ministries at renewingyourmind.org. Every day we hear stories of minds renewed and lives transformed thanks to the Lord's blessing upon the teaching resources that you enable to be produced and distributed.
So as our way of saying thank you, in addition to the DVD, we'll unlock lifetime digital access to this series and its study guide as well. If you're planning to give a year-end gift to Ligonier Ministries by check, remember all checks need to be postmarked by December 31st. Thank you. Are science and Christianity opposed to one another?
¶¶