Dr. Nathan Busenitz · The Master's Seminary · 57 minutes
Lecture by Dr. Nathan Busenitz, from The Master's Seminary's public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
This lecture tells the story of two things wearing one name. The Second Great Awakening began, like every true revival, as an unplanned work of the Spirit through ordinary gospel preaching. It ended with evangelists convinced they could schedule, stage, and manufacture revival, a shift Iain Murray captures in his title Revival and Revivalism. Watch the hinge closely: once emotion is mistaken for fruit and conversion is redefined as a decision, the door opens to a pragmatism that still shapes American evangelicalism today.
True revival is the ordinary preaching of the gospel extraordinarily blessed: unplanned, unmanipulated, unforced, like the wind in Jesus' words to Nicodemus in John 3. The Reformation and the first Great Awakening were exactly that. Revivalism, Murray's word, is the later attempt to orchestrate that work by human machinery, until churches could put revival on the calendar for Thursday through Sunday, an approach the lecture compares to the pressure tactics of a timeshare pitch.
Murray marks three differences: duration, three to five years for the first versus a quarter century or more for the second, roughly 1798 into the 1820s; geography, New England versus the whole seaboard from Maine to Georgia and beyond; and breadth, two Puritan denominations versus Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, Methodists, and even Episcopalians together.
The new lights' college in New Jersey, led from 1768 by John Witherspoon, signer of the Declaration, saw campus revival, and among its converts was John McMillan, who took the gospel to the western Pennsylvania frontier. Called the apostle of the West, he founded the academy that became the University of Pittsburgh, trained over a hundred ministers, and preached over six thousand sermons. His testimony breathes Edwards: the law he had resented became lovely, and he began to see God in everything.
McMillan and fellow Princeton men planted Presbyterianism in the West; Awakening-stirred Baptists like Daniel Marshall preached through the South; and Methodist circuit riders, logging astonishing miles on horseback, made Methodism America's fastest-growing movement. From here forward American Protestant history runs chiefly through three denominations: Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists. Frontier color included Peter Cartwright, the Methodist who might descend from the pulpit to thrash a heckler, and whose famous sermon compared Calvin to the devil.
Despite the first Awakening's legacy, the mid to late 1700s brought spiritual decline, the Revolutionary War interrupting any national revival. Then, around 1798 to 1800, awakening came again, and Murray's point is decisive: no special means were used. The same men had preached the same message for decades with modest results; God was sovereignly pleased to bless, so the success could be attributed to him alone. Faithfulness is the preacher's charge; the harvest schedule is God's.
The revival built lasting structures: the American Board of Foreign Missions in 1810, Princeton Theological Seminary in 1812, the American Bible Society in 1816, and the American Tract Society in 1825, the organizational backbone of nineteenth-century evangelicalism and missions.
James McGready, a student of McMillan, adapted the Scottish outdoor communion season for the churchless frontier: at Gasper River in July 1800 he told visitors to come prepared to camp, and people traveled forty and even a hundred miles. Camp meetings multiplied and turned interdenominational, real church for people with no church, and, at the same time, hothouses for doctrinal error and emotional excess once the restraints of the meetinghouse were gone.
At the camps, falling became the signature phenomenon: people dropped as if shot and lay for hours. The first Awakening had read emotion as neither proof nor disproof, with a changed life as the only fruit that counts. The second began to read the emotion itself as the fruit, the mark of the Spirit's work, the ancestry, the lecture notes, of the modern notion of being slain in the Spirit, which comes from the Second Great Awakening, not from the Bible.
If salvation finally hangs on the sinner's free choice, the preacher's job becomes securing that choice by whatever means work. The lecture argues this is where pragmatism enters American Christianity: Methodists, and increasingly Arminianized Baptists, kept the camp-meeting machinery precisely because mass gatherings, prolonged singing, and heightened emotion could multiply, even guarantee, results. The Presbyterians, alarmed at the excesses, withdrew from the very model they had begun. The altar call is born here, not in the New Testament.
Charles Finney, an Arminian Presbyterian shaped by Nathaniel Taylor's New Haven theology, systematized the machinery: encouraged physical responses like falling, meetings protracted over days, and above all the anxious seat, the altar call and mourner's bench under another name. Seasoned evangelists of real revivals, Asahel Nettleton chief among them, sounded the alarm that a generation would arise not knowing revival ever existed without these evils; Lyman Beecher resisted before eventually joining Finney.
Finney's sermon title says everything: where Calvinistic preaching bid the sinner plead with God for a new heart, Finney taught that conversion is the sinner changing the governing purpose of his life, as a man resolves to become a lawyer, a simple volition, all the Bible requires. Redefine conversion as a decision and decisions can be manufactured; count the decisions and the evangelist looks mighty. The aftermath tells the truth: the regions so evangelized became known as the burnt-over district, gospel-hardened by salesmanship, and the pattern of counted decisions without fruit still haunts evangelicalism.
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Key TermsTap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all thirteen are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. Murray's distinction between revival and revivalism is that
2. Compared with the first, the Second Great Awakening was
3. John McMillan, converted during a Princeton revival, became known as
4. From the Second Great Awakening forward, the lecture tracks American Protestantism chiefly through
5. Murray's decisive observation about the Awakening's beginning around 1800 is that
6. James McGready's camp meetings adapted
7. The first Awakening judged emotional responses to preaching as
8. The modern notion of being slain in the Spirit, the lecture argues, descends from
9. The lecture locates the birth of evangelical pragmatism in
10. The altar call originated
11. Finney's new measures included
12. Asahel Nettleton warned that Finney's techniques would
13. In Make Yourselves a New Heart, Finney taught that conversion is
All thirteen correct. Lecture 20 is complete.
Murray observes that the same preaching God ignored for decades he suddenly blessed around 1800. How does that truth steady a believer, or a church, laboring faithfully in a dry season?
The hinge of this lecture is mistaking emotion for fruit. Where do churches today still read intensity of experience as evidence of the Spirit, and what would Edwards' test say?
Finney counted decisions; Scripture looks for a changed life. How should a church invite response to the gospel without manufacturing it?
The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound but cannot tell where it comes from or goes; so it is with everyone born of the Spirit.
The lecture follows Iain Murray's Revival and Revivalism closely and commends it as the best treatment of this era; Edwards' Distinguishing Marks remains the standard for testing any claimed work of the Spirit.