Theologies of the American Revivalists: From Whitefield to Finney

Abstract

In this closely argued study, Robert Caldwell III, Associate Professor of Church History at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, provides a comprehensive overview of the major theologians who shaped the First and Second Great Awakenings, which did so much to shape the religious landscape of America.Caldwell begins by exploring the Moderate Calvinist theology of early New Light revivalists like George Whitefield that inspired the First Awakening, notable for its protracted conversion process inherited from English Puritanism. Such an inheritance came under fire from Congregationalist Andrew Croswell, who contended instead that salvation was available immediately ‘in right and grant’ to all who believe (48). Although closer to New Light orthodoxy, Jonathan Edwards developed a somewhat convoluted understanding of free will wherein humans had a moral inability to choose Christ apart from the Spirit's work, but a natural ability to repent and believe. An Edwardsian ‘New Divinity School’ of theologians, including John Bellamy, Samuel Hopkins, and John Edwards Jr, subsequently built on Edwards's foundations.Further variations on Edwardsian theology were behind many of the developments in revivalist theology outlined by Caldwell, from developments amongst Congregationalists and Presbyterians during the Second Awakening through to one of the most famous revivalists of all, Charles Finney. Finney's espousal of ‘new measures’, including protracted meetings and ‘the anxious bench’, were controversial and remain so, but Caldwell is keen to show that behind his showmanship, Finney was deeply influenced by the New Divinity School and had an Edwardsian framework undergirding his revival theology, albeit one that affirmed that the sinner has moral ability to repent and believe.Caldwell concludes his study by looking at two sceptical responses to revivalism. The Princeton Old Light Calvinism of Archibald Alexander and Charles Hodge saw a return to an earlier Calvinist orthodoxy, while Restorationists like Alexander Campbell and Walter Scott offered a biblicist critique of revivalism that espoused a purely cerebral reductionist view of faith as ‘the notional affirmation of the simple facts of the Christian gospel’ (219).The varieties of revivalist theologies espoused by autonomous Baptist congregations are covered in a separate chapter, and the impact of the Arminian theology of Methodism during the Second Awakening is also explored. Allowing for their own bias, Wesleyan readers may here be struck by the relative uncomplicatedness of the treatment of themes of free will and sovereignty in their theological tradition in comparison to some seeming ‘forest of fallacies’ (134) produced by Edwardsian attempts to differentiate moral and natural ability in repentance. Caldwell's perfectly justifiable decision to end his study of revivalism in the 1840s does regrettably preclude the exploration of perfectionist developments in the Wesleyan tradition leading to holiness revivalism. The subsequent career of Phoebe Palmer (1807–74) as a revivalist and theologian might be reasonably appended to Caldwell's description of Finney's writings as ‘one of the last major expressions of revival theology to appear in America’ (163), and her inclusion would have brought gender variety to an understandably male history. Palmer's theology and praxis, arising as it did from her own experience of holiness rather than from any academic training, offers a challenge to Caldwell's concluding theory that revival theology failed to continue to develop after the 1840s due to the effect of deleterious liberal theology in Edwardsian seminaries.Caldwell's thorough scholarship covers a wide variety of disputed theological themes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century revivalism, including the nature of conversion, conviction of sin, the bondage and freedom of the will, and sanctification. The men whose ideas Caldwell explores were principally pastors preaching for conversions, and so the essential relationship between their theology and revivalist praxis is explored, particularly in the case of the Baptists and Finney. The book is a helpful counterpoint to any who would argue that revivalism is historically short on theological underpinning, and deserves to be widely read and carefully studied.