We All Need To Wake Up III

The Presbyterian Meeting House

at Cane Ridge--sight of a key

Revival Meeting in the Second

Great Awakening

The Second Great Awakening is often said to have begun with a revival meeting at Cane Ridge in Bourbon County, Kentucky in 1801, but in fact, Cane Ridge was only one of a series of revivals that had been going on for over a decade and would continue into the 1840’s. 

The more traditional denominations—Catholics, Episcopalians (formerly known as Anglicans), and Congregationalists stayed aloof from the revivals and, for the most part, the revivals were on the American frontier—in what is today Kentucky, Southern Ohio, and Tennessee though there were also revivals in the rural areas of the South, in particular the Carolinas and Georgia and western Virginia.  Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians predominated in the revival movement and each of those denominations grew considerably as a result of the converts the revivals drew. 

The revival movement fragmented the Presbyterians as the more staunchly Calvinist—and in general the more theologically sophisticated Presbyterians—found many deserting their ranks for breakaway groups headed by Barton Stone and the father and son team of Thomas and Alexander Campbell.  These groups would eventually evolve into what is today known as the Churches of Christ and the Disciples of Christ.  The Stone-Campbell movement is known as “restorationism” and was an attempt to transcend Christianity’s having fractured into denominations by going back to what was perceived as the New Testament model of Church.  I hope to do some entries on the Campbellite movement in the future, suffice it to say for now that what began as frontier revival has developed into some fairly sophisticated Christian denominations. 

Far more impact was felt in what happened to Baptists and Methodists as a result of these revivals.  As the movement spread like wildfire on the frontier, both denominations came to rely more and more heavily on lay preachers who were generally poorly educated and without any theological formation.  In the case of the Methodists this established a radical discontinuity with the original Methodist spirit of the Wesleys which was both theologically sophisticated (the Wesley brothers were Oxford men) and highly sacramental (they were also high-church—by 18^th century standards and favored frequent communion as well as traditional Christian spirituality).  Frontier Methodism, propagated by lay preachers, had little time for formal worship or sacraments, and was characterized by wildly emotional preaching and doctrinal imprecision.  Even worse were the Baptists who, though in their Rhode Island origins were theologically sophisticated, in the frontier became both biblical fundamentalist and doctrinally loosey-goosey with individual congregations ranging from strictly Calvinist predestinatarian with the gloomiest theologies of fallen human nature to wildly Arminian semi-pelagians.  Religious truth was reduced to whatever the individual thought that it was and religious experience was nothing more than raw subjectivity.  It ended up, of course, with Jesus telling President Bush to invade Iraq, but that is a story for another day.    

The end result of the Second Great awakening was the snapping of the cord that ties religious faith to human reason.  Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, and John Calvin all rolled over at once in their individual graves.  This sort of fundamentalism combined with religious subjectivity has come since World War II to infect American Catholicism as well.  The Katholik Krazies just feel that it isn’t Mass if you can understand it and it isn’t Jesus if you aren’t receiving on your knees with your eyes closed and your tongue stuck out.  The happy-clappy crowd, on the other extreme, just wants to hold hands and sing Kumbaya as some just-beyond-middle-aged two-bellied and three-chinned creature in capri pants hands them a piece of French bread or a glass goblet of wine.  (Lest I be accused of chauvinism, I have two bellies and three chins, though I never—ever—wear capri pants, not even at the beach.)  I think the first thing we need to do—even before we send Cardinal Burke packing to permanent retirement with the boys in blue at Gricigliano, or even have another synod—is restore the proper balance between religious faith and human intellect.  Don’t get me wrong, I am not opposed to emotions, but they are no basis for the commitments of Christian discipleship.  We Catholics were once known for our keen intellects, our spirit of inquiry, our willingness to refine our theology in the light of expanding human knowledge.  We cannot afford to be intellectually sloppy in this post-Christian world or else the credibility of Christ and his Gospel will be lost. The Second Great Awakening is over.  Move on.

We All Need To Wake Up II

John Wesley

Let me pick up on the theme of the Great Awakenings because I think that this is a topic on which a knowledge of history can help us understand the present situation—and, in this case, in particular some of the flaws in the American approach to religion—and options for the immediate future.

The bridge connecting the First and Second Great Awakenings is Methodism and the Wesleys.  I will be dealing with Methodism again and in more detail when I get to the 18^th century in my series on the history of the Church of England, but I will sketch it out in this posting so that we can see how it affects American Protestantism—and by extension, American Catholicism. 

Methodism began in the Church of England as part of the First Great Awakening.  Eighteenth century Anglicanism had devolved into a pretty tepid shadow of its once great self.  It lacked the intellectualism of an Anselm, the courage of a Becket, the industry of a Cranmer, the piety of a Laud, or the pastoral care of a Tillotson.  Indeed it was upper-crust, entitled, lazy, and blind to the social realities of the day.  One wag called the Church of England “The Tory Party at Prayer.” 

At Christ Church College in Oxford in 1729 two brothers, John and Charles Wesley, the sons of a Church of England priest, the Reverend Samuel Wesley and his deeply pious wife, Susannah, gathered a group of like-minded students and formed “The Holy Club”—a society in which the members studied together the scriptures, the classics of Christian literature (including the Fathers), and engaged in devotional practices such as fasting and frequent communion, as well as giving time for the service of the poor and the education of poor children.  Their zeal and devotion won them only the scorn of the more secular university members, faculty and students alike.  A number of members of the Holy Club went on to be ordained in the Church of England and several of them: the Wesleys, George Whitefield, and Benjamin Ingham became famous evangelists.  The Wesleys had brief ministries in the American Colonies, but Whitefield made over seven preaching tours of the Colonies and was probably the single most influential preacher of the First Great Awakening, at least in the Americas.

The pious practices of the Holy Club formed the backbone for a renewal in the Church of England, at least in parts of the Church of England, led by the Wesleys.  John was an outstanding preacher and Charles Wesely had an extraordinary gift for composing hymn lyrics that were both theologically sound and deeply moving.  Methodism, with its emphasis on personal piety, frequent communion, and spiritual discipline proved attractive to many who had grown weary to the spiritual tedium of mainline Anglicanism.   

John Wesley, on his journey to America, had an experience that would not only change his life, but which would fashion American religion from his day to ours.  On the ship from England to Georgia, Wesley encountered a group of German pietists known as the Moravian Brethren.  The Moravian Brethren, known officially as the Unitas Fratrum (The Unity of the Brothers) are a Protestant denomination that traces their origins back to the preaching of Jan Hus in 15^th century Bohemia and Moravia (today’s Czech Republic).  During a frightful storm in which the boat was being tossed about by high waves, while the English were terrified, the Moravian  Brethren very calmly prayed and sang hymns.  Wesley wanted for himself the deep religious sentiment that shaped the piety of these devout men and women. 

Even by the Wesleys’ time, there was still enough Calvinist residue in the Church of England to trouble those few pious souls who remained among the Tories at prayer and make them anxious for some assurance that they were among the elect.  John Wesley was desperate for the sort of religious experience that would assure him of his salvation.  Wesley describes what happened when he attended a Moravian prayer gathering on May 24, 1738.

"In the evening I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street, where one was reading Luther’s Preface to the Epistle to the Romans. About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation, and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death."

This was the pivotal experience for the remainder of Wesley’s ministry and as Methodism was rooted profoundly in Wesely’s own piety, the desire for that “warm feeling” of God’s love and election became an irreducible part of the Methodist Gospel.  Now for Wesley and his immediate disciples—all university trained preachers—this subjectivism was balanced by a keen appreciation for both sound Scripture and the Tradition of the Church Fathers.  The problem would be when Methodism crossed to the Americas and, due to an insufficiency of theologically trained preachers, fell into the hands of lay preachers with stronger hearts than brains.  We will talk about that in the next posing on the Second Great Awakening, but suffice it say it has given an emphasis for Americans that religion is primarily about feelings and emotions. 

Wesley remained an Anglican for the rest of his life and the movement long remained within the Church of England.  Wesley also encouraged his English followers to remain in the Church of England and to receive the sacraments in the Established Church. However when the American Church needed ministers at the time of our Revolution and the Anglican Bishops would not ordain clergy for the rebellious colonies, Wesley ordained Thomas Coke as “superintendent” of the American Methodists and also ordained two ministers to work with him in the American missions.  Wesley’s brother Charles was appalled at John’s ordaining on his own authority and saw the threat it would eventually pose to the Methodists remaining in the Church of England. 

Eventually after John Wesley’s death the Methodists separated out of the Church of England and joined the various dissenter Churches such as the Congregationalists and the Presbyterians.  In America the break was almost immediate with Coke and his ministers working solely with Methodists and without reference to the Anglican/Episcopal structures in the colonies. Methodism quickly grew into the second largest American denomination, second only to the Baptists.  In the Second Great Awakening, the emotionalism that characterized Methodism was spread throughout American Protestantism and has eventually come to color American Catholicism as well.  

Some Background About Baptists

  

First Baptist Church of
Providence, the oldest
Baptist Congregation
in the United States

Some readers weren’t overly happy with my pointing out that four of the dunces on the Congressional Israel Allies Caucus who expressed their outrage that Pope Francis recognized Palestinian Statehood were Baptists.  It makes Baptists look stupid was the gist of their complaint.  As long as we are at it, let me point out that the four are also Republicans. 

I don’t mean to imply that all Baptists or all Republicans are stupid.  Far from it.  True, I have no respect for anyone of any party or religion who drinks the ideological Kool-Aid and liberal Democrats and Katholik Krazies can do that as blindly and blithely as conservative whacko-Jesus Tea-partiers.  I have only contempt for those of any party or religion who serve up the toxic potion—they know better—and I would put our four Congressional horses’ asses of the Apocalypse in this category.  I can’t pray “Father, Forgive them for they know not what they do” as they very well know how they are manipulating the truth for the most unsavory of political ends.  But how does this relate to their being Baptists?

Let’s look at Baptist history and perhaps we can discover the flaw that skews our friends both intellectually and morally.

In our series on the history of Anglicanism we saw that the Baptists developed out of the radical congregationalism of non-Conformist groups that broke with historic Established Church in England during the period of the Commonwealth/English Civil War. 

A Church of England priest, John Smyth, had gone to serve an English congregation in Amsterdam as early as 1609 because he had come to believe that the privileged position under English Law of the Established Church was contrary to the scriptures.  Smyth also believed that one must first believe and then be baptized—that the practice of infant baptism was contrary to the Scriptures.  In the Netherlands Smyth had become familiar with Mennonites, a sect who came out of the Anabaptist tradition.  The Mennonites had been founded by Menno Simmons, a Dutch Catholic priest who, in the 1530’s had broken with the Catholic Church over several practices, including infant baptism, which he considered contrary to scripture.  Smyth would eventually himself become a Mennonite as did many of his followers.  Some of his followers under Thomas Helwys returned to England and established a congregation at Spitalfields in today’s East End of London.  Helwys, like Smyth, rejected the idea of an Established Church and believed that the King (that is to say, the Government) had no right over the conscience of his subjects and that all should be free to worship God as he pleased.  This led to his imprisonment in Newgate prison where he died in 1616. 

Meanwhile, Roger Williams who had apprenticed in Law under the great English jurist, Sir Edward Coke, but who had been ordained in the Church of England left England in 1631 for Boston in the great Puritan migration fleeing the High Churchmanship of Charles I and his Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud.  Williams had moved from a position of Puritanism within the Church of England to a more radical Congregationalist Puritanism, but one that was a bit extreme even for the Boston Puritans.  Williams insisted that the civil authorities must have no power to punish religious dissent.  His principles were: separation from the Established Church, freedom of conscience, and separation of Church and State.  The Puritans at Boston, while not anxious to be part of the Established Church of England, were not about to reject the use of civil power to enforce conformity to their own particular brand of religion, nor were they about to let each person worship as they might please.  When Williams’ opinions rendered him unacceptable to Puritan authorities in Boston, he moved to Salem and later to Plymouth where the Church employed him, but eventually the more traditional Puritans managed to have him summoned before the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony to answer for his separatist views.  He was accused of spreading “diverse, new, and dangerous opinions” and before he could be apprehended he fled to Raynham Massachusetts where he was sheltered for the winter by the Native Americans, and from there in the spring he and a band of followers settled in what is now Providence, Rhode Island.  Within two years of his settling in Rhode Island, Williams became convinced of the importance of believer’s baptism and had himself rebaptized by Ezekiel Holliman before the end of 1638.  Williams and his followers constituted the first Baptist congregation in the United States and the congregation survives today as the First Baptist Church of Providence, Rhode Island.  Williams did not long a Baptist; he was troubled by the lack of an apostolic continuity and came to believe that Christians must await the Divine appointment of new apostles who would restore the Church.  The Baptist congregation which he established, however, did and does survive as I just noted. 

English Baptists tended to reject the Calvinist doctrine of double pre-destination by which some have been destined from before time for salvation and others for eternal damnation.  With his strict Puritan roots, however, Williams was a staunch Calvinist.  Baptists who believe in double pre-destination are Particular Baptists; those who hold to Free Will are General Baptists.  Perhaps it would be clearer to explain that Particular Baptists hold that Christ died for each person who has been pre-destined by that atonement for salvation.  Salvation is thus particular.  General Baptists believe that Christ died for the atonement of the sins of all people and that while all are not necessarily saved, grace is available to all.   Salvation is thus general. 

Rhode Island was established on the principle of Religious Freedom and there was even a Jewish congregation founded before the end of the seventeenth century.  While there was no overt persecution of Catholics, they were never welcomed in Rhode Island and at the time of the American Revolution there is no record of a single Catholic living in the State which is very strange given that they were found in every other State of the New Republic, even Massachusetts, New York, and Virginia—all of which had strong laws against them. 

Baptists have a very strange intellectual history.  While both Smyth in England and Williams in America were products of the Oxbridge system and competent scholars, and while the Providence Church was associated with the establishment of Brown University, the predominance of Baptists—along with Methodists and Presbyterians—in the Second Great Awakening drastically changed the character of American Baptists. 

The Second Great Awakening was a religious revival, principally on the American Frontier, in the last years of the 18^th century and the first three decades of the 19^th.  The insufficient numbers of trained clergy to meet the spiritual hungers of the rapidly expanding frontier led to a predominance of lay preaching which replaced a biblical literalism for the more intellectually sound biblical theology of classic Protestant thought.  Indeed, the revival marks the triumph of raw religious emotionalism over intellectual integrity in a way that would only appall Luther, Calvin, Wesley, and the other Reformation Fathers.  The Bible came to mean whatever the preacher wanted it to mean, regardless of the eighteen hundred years of Christian prayer, reflection, and study that had gone before.  This fell right in line with the radical individualism that had blighted Protestantism since Luther’s profound conviction that Christ had died “for me” overshadowed the classic doctrine that Christ had “died for humankind.”  This emphasis on individual belief and individual salvation continues to undermine sound ecclesiology in modern America where even we Catholics tend to exalt individual opinion over adherence to a common creed. 

Contemporary Baptists range from the theologically sophisticated like Harvey Cox, Amy Butler, the late Warren T. Carr, Robert Bernard or Dale Wood Peterson to the self-anointed mad men at the other end of the spectrum such as the late Fred Phelps of Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka.  Unfortunately, the anti-intellectual approach of Biblical fundamentalism that totally ignores the biblical scholarship of the last two centuries tends to predominate among Baptists giving a rather dunce-like cast to their reputation.  Preachers like Pat Robertson, Franklin Graham, and the late Gerry Falwell have not helped improve the reputation. 

Franklin Graham’s father, The Reverend Doctor Billy Graham, was no bright light of Christian academia, but much like such Catholic figures such as Mother Theresa or Dorothy Day he exercised such a strong example of an applied Christian Faith that he has had an unparalleled moral influence on American life, a stronger influence than any theologian.  Other contemporary “evangelists” have often proved to be at best entrepreneurs, and too often just plain charlatans but Billy Graham is a true American icon.  Unfortunately his son and others have done much to dismantle the Empire of Christian credibility that Billy Graham built by his decades of walking the walk as well as talking the talk.   

A common Texas expression “A Baptist Bar,” for a bar concealed behind panels in a wall when fellow churchies come to visit, has come to typify “evangelical morality” which is seen to emphasize a public righteousness that conceals private iniquity.   Frankly in this 21^st century all Christians of any and all denominations need to clean up our act where we flaunt virtues that are no more than a phony veneer that make us appear more upright than we truly are.  Whether it is the sex scandals in our (and others’) church, the inordinate salaries and lifestyles of some preachers , the fiscal fleecing of the flocks entrusted to our care, or the just general dishonesty that is an universal after-effect of original sin, we need to do some repairs on our own houses before we start throwing stones at the unchurched.