…the religious history of the late-colonial period, particularly the Great Awakening and its effects….is a story of unintended consequences. Leaders of the Awakening – from Jonathan Edwards in Northampton, Massachusetts, Joseph Bellamy in rural Connecticut, Gilbert Tennent in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and Samuel Davies in Virginia, to George Whitefield, who went everywhere – knew what they were after when they enlisted affective rhetoric to preach about intractable human depravity and supernal divine grace. They were trying to reawaken the church for the sake of the church itself, to reassert the sovereignty of God’s divine love in conversion, to exalt the substitutionary, penal work of Christ as God’s way of reconciliation with sinners, to demonstrate the necessity of conversion as a prerequisite for truly virtuous living, and by these means to check the worldliness promoted by the era’s new forms of commerce and entertainment. Yet the pursuit of such goals had ironic consequences. The awakeners preached a higher, more spiritual vision of the church, yet the result was decline in the very notion of church and a transfer of religious commitment from the church to the nation. They focused on God’s role in conversion yet brought about an exaltation of human activity in the process of salvation. They preached a traditional doctrine of the atonement yet opened the way toward redefining the work of Christ as an outworking of governmental relationships rather than the assuagement of God’s wrath. They rooted true virtue in supernatural conversion yet created conditions for a new concept of virtuous living as in principle available to every person by nature alone.
From Mark A. Noll, America’s God, Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 13-14.
Wow! What do you make out of that? How could they be preaching one thing and nearly get the opposite result? Could it be like Rosenbladt says (which he may have gotten from Luther): if you preach the Gospel properly then people will accuse you of antinomianism?
I don’t think that’s it, Aaron. I think it has much more to do with pietism and a misunderstanding (even by classical Reformed standards, let alone by Lutheran standards) of the nature of the Sacraments. Noll suggests that the Great Awakening was a “revival of pietistic popular Calvinism.” The emphasis was on what was happening in your heart rather than on what happens/has happened completely outside of you.
So even though the preaching of folks like Edwards et al might have been about the grace of God for sinners, for them the only true test of whether someone was a true believer was an inward-looking one (a credible “testimony” of a conversion experience). The sacraments became only for those who had already passed this test. I will be posting more quotes on this topic very soon.
Dawn,
I think you are right on. Edwards (and other Puritans) were great analyzers but they could never get away from the fact that under Calvinism there are no sacraments and thus no Gospel. All that’s left is “the human heart”.
More precisely, there is no ACTUAL forgiveness of sin GIVEN to the particular man (for me/you). Without that there is no Gospel but rather a distant dying echoing of the message, like news over seas of something happening to “someone” else but what’s that “to me”. The “gospel” in Calvinism is, thus, relegated to something 2000 years ago (time away) and somewhere else (space away), nothing “here and now”. This is how Calvinism, in truth, has no Gospel.
1. There is no universal grace, so you cannot have the “pro me” here.
2. There is no effectual baptism, no Spirit given, no actual washing or forgiveness of sins, so you cannot have the “pro me” here either.
3. There is no true flesh and blood in the bread and wine, so you cannot have the “pro me” here either.
Thus, no Gospel anywhere in that religious doctrine.
The parallel to the Gnostics is the “the finite cannot contain the infinite”, why their supper is not the LS. All gross gnostcism sought/seeks to make the humanity of Jesus not real or that He was not divine. As our pastor points out to us that attacks faith most egregiously, its not just “getting it wrong” per se. How so, the jesus that they then preach, teach and confess becomes nothing more than a sign or symbol or similarity that is to be “imitated” but not ACTUAL forgiveness given. The same with Calvin and Zwingli, the sacraments at length become signs of and symbols of the reality but NEVER the reality itself (which is a philosophical hermeneutic “wisdom of the world”). Hence the Reformed Gnostic statement “don’t confuse the sign with the thing signified”.
It ALL boils down, whether it is Arius himself, JWs, Gnostics of old, the protognostics of John and Paul’s time or Zwingli, Calvin, Reformed and Baptist today, that all of their root doctrine here is Gnosticism and denies either overtly or indirectly the incarnation of Christ. It is as a LCMS pastor wrote back in the 70’s that if you accept the axiom the finite cannot contain the infinite then you deny the incarnation and are making an axiom of human wisdom/philosophy your governing hermeneutic and not the Words of Christ, which is precisely what Zwingli and Calvin did.
Luther saw this and unabashedly called it what it was, namely another spirit. When he condemned Zwingli of this he very specifically condemned all of Zwingli’s teachings as “non of it being Christian whatsoever”. Keep in mind that Zwingli didn’t deny “Jesus being the only way…” etc…, and neither do any Gnostics. Yet John and Luther saw them for what they were. Why? Because at length that so called “tiny error” means that the rest of what you teach will flow from that and at length be utterly false through and through. It is as Sasse said what you believe/teach concerning the sacraments is how you will teach the rest of Scripture. Luther said pretty much the same of Zwingli, that’s why he what he said about the rest of his teachings. It is never a “small error” and never harmless, it affects everything. But we already know that do we not. It is no mystery why the Reformed and Baptist have no assurance at all but seek to express their works in order to glean some assurance somewhere. Figure out their sacraments/ordinances and its no mystery, A begets B begets C begets D…in all their teachings.
Larry
Hi Larry,
I really believe Calvinism (indeed, any system that downplays the Sacraments) inevitably leads to this kind of revivalistic pietism, even if it takes hundreds of years. But it eventually gets there. The Puritans are a case in point I think.
Dawn