The First Great Awakening: The Methods

As one reads about the various revivals in history, some traits seem to be repeated. For instance, the big one I keep seeing is the tension between the Old way and the New way; between the head and the heart; between the Confessions/Word, and Spirit; between Calvinism and Arminianism.

In the First Great Awakening of the middle 18th century in New England, we find the Old Lights, who were the pastors of the old Calvinistic intellectualism school where the future convert gradually grew into a realization of their need for a Savior, vs. the New Lights, the revivalists who placed more of an emphasis on crisis conversion. The new emphasis was on "anyone could be saved," a more individualistic and democratic process, seen as some historians as the seeds planted for the new fledgling democracy after the Revolution. These New Lights often used words in their sermons such as "breaking, crushing, storming, shattering and cracking" the stony hearts of the unconverted to bring this crisis evangelism about. If people "groaned, shrieked and/or fell under the power" which often happened, they were said to be "stabbed, wounded, pierced, shocked and cut" by the seriousness of the gospel.
The New Light revivalists also emphasized God's love and mercy instead of the Old Lights' emphasis on judgment, God's anger at sin, and His mysteriousness. God was seen by the New Lights as converting and persuading, instead of simply intellectual understanding.

And then there was the evangelism goal of the two. More and more of the revivalists, including Jonathan Edwards began to question the premillenialism of the Calvinists. The revivalists believed that instead of some holocaust-Armageddon preceding Christ's return, perhaps there were to be progressive revivals and evangelism to turn man into a better being and THEN Christ could return (sound familiar?) After all, the revivalists were seeing their environment and neighbors radically changing around them. What would happen if this could be a worldwide happening? Some even thought America might be chosen by God to begin this process (sound familiar?)
Edwards believed this could actually happen as man cooperated with God's grace. He writes,
"It is not unlikely that this work of God's Spirit, so extraordinary and wonderful, is the dawning or at least a prelude of that glorious work of God so often foretold in Scripture, which in the progress and issue of it, shall renew the world of mankind...And there are many things that make it probable that this work will begin in America."

Meanwhile, in the Middle Colonies, the Presbyterians were being divided between the old Calvinism, the Old Sides; and the new revivalism, The New Sides. The New Sides, like their New England counterparts, the New Lights, also felt that crisis conversion and an appeal to the emotions brought about the needed revivals and conversions. By the 1750's the congregations of the New sides had grown for the most part three times as much as those of the Old Sides. Later, in 1758 the Presbyterian Old and New Sides were able to reconcile.

And in the Southern colonies, it was completely a matter of class distinctions. The upper class elite landowners were the Old-time Anglicans. Many of the poor felt shut out of that system and so welcomed the itinerant revivalists. However, the Anglican parishes didn't appreciate these interlopers coming into their districts and preaching. In 1747 Virginia, for example, it was declared that no itinerant could preach in any of their churches. Some who did so were arrested and/or fined. If people attended their meetings they could also be arrested and/or fined for not attending "church" (that is the parrish church) on the Sabbath. At times, mobs, egged on by the upper classes, would break up these itinerant meetings and even beat up the revival preachers.
Rhys Isaac has documented this tension in the Southern colonies,
"When the Baptist movement is understood as a rejection of the style of life for which the gentry set the pattern and as a search for more powerful popular models of conduct, it can be seen why the grounds on which the battle was mainly fought was not the [big plantation] estate or the great house, but the neighborhood, the farmstead and the slave quarter. The struggle for allegiance in the homesteads between a style of life modeled on that of the leisured gentry and that embodied in evangelicalism was intense."

This was a phenomenon that more or less was happening in most of the colonies--that is resentment from the old school pastors toward the infringement on their territory and churches by the new school ones. It was because of this circumstance that the idea of separation of church and state began to be voiced throughout the colonies, instead of a one-denominational state-taxed church.

(Note: Some of this material was gleaned from William McLoughln's book, Revivals, Awakenings and Reform