Observing Asbury University : History tells us there's no such thing as a perfect revival, but ...

As a church historian, it has been interesting to see how Christians have responded to the recently concluded revival at Asbury University. Some people thanked God for the outpouring of His spirit, while others cautiously encouraged the revival but warned that only time will tell if this bears fruit.

The charges leveled against this revival ranged from not teaching repentance of Asbury’s egalitarian position to delegitimizing its value because there is not an overt antiracist message. There were also the typical charges of emotionalism and lack of preaching. This is not surprising.

Jonathan Edwards wrote several works defending the First Great Awakening against people who discredited that revival because it did not meet their criteria. He also articulated the differences between genuine revival and false spirituality.

A look at the history of revivals teaches us that if we are looking for a perfect revival or a perfect revivalist who meets our specific criteria, we will not find them. But God uses them.

During the First Great Awakening in the early 18th century, the birth of the evangelical movement took place outdoors at Second and Market streets in Philadelphia, at Boston Common, and up and down the eastern seaboard, when itinerant preacher George Whitefield took the colonies by storm with his message of the new birth. We learn from Benjamin Franklin that Whitefield was not allowed to speak in many churches in Philadelphia because clergy disagreed with his message, so Whitefield took to the streets. Prior to these revivals, Edwards witnessed a revival in his own church in Northampton, Conn., and received attacks from fellow clergy.

If we were to judge the First Great Awakening by some criteria being used on social media today, we would say it was a failure, because Jonathan Edwards never repented of owning African slaves, and Whitefield never repented of using slaves to build his orphanage in Georgia.

But by doing that, we fail to see that it was during this revival when African-Americans began embracing Christianity in large numbers, even though Whitefield spoke blocks from one of Philadelphia’s slave markets.

Second, while Edwards himself could not see the sin of race-based chattel slavery, the young men of New England who were impacted by the revivals and studied with Edwards, including Jonathan Edwards Jr., went on to apply his father’s theology to oppose slavery. Another of Edward’s students, Samuel Hopkins, wrote to the Constitutional Congress asking for slavery to be outlawed.

Throughout the first half of the 19th century was a series of revivals known as the Second Great Awakening. Theologians have been critical of some of these revivals because of chief architect Charles Finney’s use of new measures that attempted to create revival with theatrics, prolonged services, decisionism, and a guilt-inducing preaching style.

These revivals led to some false conversions and a region of America in upstate New York to be referred to as the Burned-Over District. But not all revivals had Finney’s stamp, and 19th-century revivalism helped birth the abolitionist movement, the temperance movement, the Sunday school movement, public education, and women’s rights.

After an economic downturn, revivals erupted on Wall Street, known as the Businessmen’s Revivals of 1857-58. These revivals emerged with the sectional tensions in America at a fever pitch. Christians hoped that a revival would heal the nation, so they refused to allow slavery to be mentioned during the services because it was too divisive.

Of course, these revivals did not heal America and instead avoided the big elephant in the room, but it was during these events that the Holiness Movement made inroads in mainline evangelicalism, social reform grew, and denominations worked together. During the Civil War, revival also regularly took place in both Union and Confederate army camps.

Despite all the revivalism of the 19th century, Americans did not collectively repent of racism or slavery, and for some naysayers, this made them a failure. Had they led to that type of repentance, America would be a better place, and hundreds of thousands of men would not have died. After four years of bloodshed, in 1867, the Holiness Movement was birthed in Vineland, N.J.

The history of revivalism teaches us that revivals don't eradicate all sins — glaring ones nor our pet ones. In fact, not all Christians see the need for the same repentance. Edwards understood the complexity of revivalism and repentance when he wrote in Religious Affections, “… it is a mysterious thing, and what has puzzled and amazed many a good Christian, that there should be that which is so divine and precious, as the saving grace of God, and the new and divine nature dwelling in the same heart, with so much corruption, hypocrisy, and iniquity, in a particular saint.

Yet neither of these is more mysterious than real. And neither of them is a new or rare thing.” Ironically, Edwards could write this and not see his own blind spots. None of this justifies unrepentant sin, but it does help explain it.

Before anyone judges this latest revival too quickly, they should be cautious and pray that it leads to repentance of personal and national sins. However, we should not expect our list of sins to be eradicated as we think they should.

If history and Scripture are our guides, we may not know how God will use this revival for a generation and that God’s ways are inscrutable.

Dr. Mark Draper is Director of Library Services and a faculty member at Lancaster Bible College | Capital Seminary & Graduate School.

He earn his PhD in Historical Theology from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, where he where he was Jonathan Edwards Fellow, along with two master’s degrees from Drexel University and Bible Seminary and a bachelor’s degree in history from Temple University. His research interests include the history of evangelicalism and 18th and 19th century evangelical social reformers and theologians such as Edwards, John Wesley and Gilbert Haven.

Yes, yet:

Edwards purchased a succession of slaves during his career in Northampton and Stockbridge, Massachusetts. .. Other slaves that we know of that he owned were named Leah, and Rose, and a married couple, Joseph and Sue. Leah became a full member of the Northampton church during the mid-century revivals known as the “Great Awakening.” Rose, long after Edwards died and apparently manumitted, joined the Stockbridge church.

Yet, as Edwards aged, he came to oppose the slave trade, by which Africans were forcibly taken from their homes and sold into bondage. In the only known document in which he is known to discuss slavery, he claimed that it was unjust to “disfranchise” people who had been born free, and that some biblical arguments used to defend slavery and the slave trade were wrongly applied. Where apologists for the slave trade argued that individuals owed equal consideration only to those who were their “neighbors,” Edwards criticized this as too narrow a definition of the biblical concept, and affirmed that everyone was one’s neighbor and entitled to just treatment. - https://yaleandslavery.yale.edu/jonathan-edwards

It was in the context of the labor intensive ancient near Easthat a regulated form of slavery was first allowed i - not commanded - (“shall” in Leviticus 25:44 is not in the Hebrew) and in and slave states in the NT, which dealt with as an accommodation to the culture the people of God existed in, in which slavery was an established economic institution - (and often the best means of security). Which under Moses rudimentary laws restricted permanent slavery to foreigners or Hebrews who choose to remain, except that (in principal) in the case of debilitating injury by the owner any slave was to go free, as was the case of negligent care for a female slave taken as a wife.

As was the case of leaving: “Thou shalt not deliver unto his master the servant which is escaped from his master unto thee: He shall dwell with thee, even among you, in that place which he shall choose in one of thy gates, where it liketh him best: thou shalt not oppress him.” (Deuteronomy 23:15-16) Which was a deterrent to abuse in this frontier-type environment. Yet foreigners could buy Hebrews as 6 year indentured servants, and slaves could themselves have many slaves. (2 Samuel 19:17 KJV). And under the New Covenant, the primitive church as an organic community had no slavery (Acts 2:41-47), but the church initially grew within Greece and Rome, both slave states. In ameliorating the cultural system of slavery, Christian slaves were admonished to obey their masters, "as to the Lord, and not to men", (Ephesians 6:5-8; Colossians 3:22-25 1 Timothy 6:1; Titus 2:9-10; 1 Peter 2:18) with the like attitude being required of masters toward their servants, as they also had a Master in Heaven.

Masters were to act without threatening, (Ephesians 6:9) rendering just and equal recompense to their servants, (Colossians 4:1) with freedom being the ideal for slaves if it could be lawfully obtained. (1 Corinthians 7:21-23)

In his letter to Philemon, the Apostle Paul returned a slave to his master, though he made it clear he was not returning a slave, but one whom was to be received back no longer "as a slave, but as a brother beloved" (he had been converted by Paul while both were imprisoned), even as Paul's own son or Paul himself. Paul further offered to pay for any debt owed by Philemon. (Philemon 1:1-25).

See https://web.archive.org/web/20160327223256/http://www.astorehouseofknowledge.info/w/Slavery

And:

In the United States, the abolition movement faced much opposition. Bertram Wyatt-Brown notes that the appearance of the Christian abolitionist movement "with its religious ideology alarmed newsmen, politicians, and ordinary citizens. They angrily predicted the endangerment of secular democracy, the mongrelization, as it was called, of white society, and the destruction of the federal union. Speakers at huge rallies and editors of conservative papers in the North denounced these newcomers to radical reform as the same old “church-and-state” zealots, who tried to shut down post offices, taverns, carriage companies, shops, and other public places on Sundays. Mob violence sometimes ensued."[14]

A postal campaign in 1835 by the American Anti-Slavery Society (AA-SS) – founded by African-American Presbyterian clergyman Theodore S. Wright – sent bundles of tracts and newspapers (over 100,000) to prominent clerical, legal, and political figures throughout the whole country, and culminated in massive demonstrations throughout the North and South.[15] In attempting to stop these mailings, New York Postmaster Samuel L. Gouverneur unsuccessfully requested the AA-SS to cease sending it to the South. He therefore decided that he would “aid in preserving the public peace” by refusing to allow the mails to carry abolition pamphlets to the South himself, with the new Postmaster General Amos Kendall affirming, even though he admitted he had no legal authority to do so.[16][17][18][19] This resulted in the AA-SS resorting to other and clandestine means of dissemination.

Despite such determined opposition, many Methodist, Baptist, Adventist, and Presbyterian members freed their slaves and sponsored black congregations, in which many black ministers encouraged slaves to believe that freedom could be gained during their lifetime. After a great revival occurred in 1801 at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, American Methodists made anti-slavery sentiments a condition of church membership.[20] Abolitionist writings, such as "A Condensed Anti-Slavery Bible Argument" (1845) by George Bourne,[21] and "God Against Slavery" (1857) by George B. Cheever,[22] used the Bible, logic and reason extensively in contending against the institution of slavery, and in particular the chattel form of it as seen in the South. In Cheever's speech entitled, "The Fire and Hammer of God’s Word Against the Sin of Slavery", his desire for eliminating the crime of slaveholding is clear, as he goes so far as to address it to the President.

Other Protestant missionaries of the Great Awakening initially opposed slavery in the South, but by the early decades of the 19th century, many Baptist and Methodist preachers in the South had come to an accommodation with it in order to evangelize the farmers and workers. Disagreements between the newer way of thinking and the old often created schisms within denominations at the time. Differences in views toward slavery resulted in the Baptist and Methodist churches dividing into regional associations by the beginning of the Civil War.[23] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_abolitionism#Christian_abolitionism_in_the_United_States

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