Dr. Nathan Busenitz · The Master's Seminary · 69 minutes
Lecture by Dr. Nathan Busenitz, from The Master's Seminary's public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
How does the church go from the greatest revival in Western history to needing another one just two centuries later? This lecture answers with a single idea: authority. The Reformation recovered revelation as the foundation for how people view the world; the Enlightenment replaced it with reason and science, and Romanticism answered with feeling. Along the way Dr. Busenitz traces the rise of Arminianism and the Synod of Dort, the systems of covenant and dispensational theology, and the spiritual drift in Old and New England that set the stage for the Great Awakening.
Protestant is a Reformation-era word, born of protest; Evangelical is as old as the New Testament, Luther having merely germanized the Greek word for gospel. The lecture prefers it precisely because it spans all two thousand years: we are the people of the gospel, however muddied the label has become in modern usage.
Martin Chemnitz, called the second Martin of Lutheranism, defended justification by faith alone using nothing but the church fathers, evidence again that the Reformation recovered something both biblical and historical rather than inventing it. His Book of Concord work unified Lutheranism, yet the state-church system still drifted into dead orthodoxy, and Pietism rose to answer it, with strengths and pendulum swings reviewed from last time.
Citing Carl Trueman, the lecture ranks the Enlightenment, with the medieval translation of Aristotle, among the few paradigm shifts of Western history; C. S. Lewis called it the Great Divide. Its importance lies in one thing: it changed the authority by which Western people build their view of reality.
Medieval Christendom rested on religious tradition; the Reformation recovered revelation, the word of God, as the only right foundation; the Enlightenment enthroned human reason and science. Descartes reasoned outward from his own mind, I think, therefore I am; Bacon developed the scientific method; Locke championed empiricism, reasoning from the observed world back to the self. Different directions, same shift: autonomous human reason became supreme.
Rationalism bred naturalism, and naturalism bred deism: a clockmaker God, transcendent but never immanent, whose world runs on discoverable laws. Skeptics called the Bible's miracles irrational, Jefferson literally cut them from his gospels, and even some later evangelical commentators reach for red algae in the Nile or landslides damming the Jordan. The lecture's counsel is blunt: just don't do that. Miracles are supernatural; science submits to revelation, not revelation to science, and modernism's confidence that reason would solve everything has already soured into postmodern relativism.
Rationalism feeds the brain but starves the soul, and Romanticism answered with feeling, beauty, art, and nature, drifting toward pantheism in the transcendentalists Thoreau and Emerson. Friedrich Schleiermacher, shaken by rationalist attacks he thought unanswerable, rebuilt Christianity on the feeling of dependence on God, abandoning the miracles, the substitutionary atonement, and the resurrection, and so became the father of liberal theology, a story a later lecture will tell in full.
Looking ahead, the lecture rescues the word fundamentalist from its stereotypes: historically the fundamentals were precisely the supernatural elements of the gospel that rationalist skepticism attacked, the virgin birth, Christ's miracles, his substitutionary atonement, his resurrection, and his return. Liberalism kept the ethics and cut the supernatural; fundamentalists were those willing to stand for what had been cut.
After Calvin, Beza built reformed scholasticism on Scripture, tradition, and reason, with reason subject to revelation. The Heidelberg Catechism and the Synod of Dort anchor the tradition; the persecuted Huguenots carried it in France. In the Netherlands covenantalism was systematized by Cocceius and Witsius, and the lecture notes that as systems, covenant theology and dispensationalism arose in roughly the same era, so neither can dismiss the other as the newcomer, and that premillennialism, not amillennialism, was the early church's view.
Jacob Arminius, reacting to the supralapsarian strain of Dutch reformed scholasticism, taught that prevenient grace restores the sinner's ability to choose or refuse the gospel, with election conditioned on God's foresight of that free response. After his death in 1609 his followers issued the five articles of Remonstrance against total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and perseverance. The real issue, the lecture presses, is where the credit lies: with man's response or with God's initiative.
The Synod of Dort in 1618 and 1619 answered the Remonstrance point for point, and its five formulations, rendered in English, give us the TULIP acronym. Arminius never debated Calvin, who died when Arminius was a small child; the quarrel was with Calvin's systematizers. The lecture happily claims all five points as biblical when biblically articulated, and notes that Free Will Baptists and Wesley's modified evangelical Arminianism carry the other side forward to today.
In England, Locke's empiricism and Hume's skepticism fed a deep spiritual decline that set the stage for the Evangelical Revival of Whitefield and the Wesleys. In New England, Harvard was founded in 1636 and Yale in 1702 as Puritan divinity schools, but the fervor of the founding generation faded in its children, and apathy crept over the churches.
Solomon Stoddard, Jonathan Edwards' grandfather, pastored Northampton for fifty-five years and watched the decline firsthand. His Halfway Covenant admitted the unconverted to church membership, intended almost evangelistically, to keep people under the preaching of the word. It would create the tangle his grandson later had to cut. The lecture closes where it began: the secret of the coming Great Awakening is the same as the Reformation's, the recovery of the word of God as the authority in people's lives.
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Key TermsTap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all fourteen are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. The lecture prefers the word Evangelical over Protestant because
2. Martin Chemnitz defended justification by faith alone using
3. The Enlightenment matters so much, the lecture argues, because it changed
4. Descartes and Locke differed in that
5. Deism pictures God as
6. On naturalistic explanations of biblical miracles, red algae, landslides, shared lunches, the lecture's counsel is
7. Schleiermacher, previewed here as the father of liberal theology, rebuilt Christianity on
8. Historically, the fundamentals of fundamentalism were
9. On the age of the rival systems, the lecture holds that
10. Arminius taught prevenient grace, meaning
11. The TULIP formulation comes from
12. Arminius never debated Calvin because
13. Solomon Stoddard's Halfway Covenant
14. The lecture's closing claim is that the coming Great Awakening, like the Reformation, would spring from
All fourteen correct. Lecture 15 is complete.
The lecture argues every worldview finally rests on an authority: tradition, revelation, reason, or feeling. Where do you see each of these functioning as an authority in the people around you, and in yourself?
Pietism answered dead orthodoxy, Romanticism answered rationalism, and each swung its own pendulum. What keeps a corrective movement from becoming a new distortion?
Stoddard opened church membership to the unconverted, with good intentions. What do churches today do with similar intentions, and what does his story counsel?
Jesus told Nicodemus that unless a person is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.
The lecture cites Carl Trueman's Reformation21 essay on church historians and paradigm shifts, and the course reading in Olson's The Story of Christian Theology covers Pietism, Arminianism, and the Enlightenment in fuller detail.