come-holy-spirit-july-august-1998

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EFORMATION VOLUME 7 NUMBER 4

Come, Holy Spirit

Come, Holy Spirit FEATURES 4 Do You Hear the Spirit?

Michael S. Horton God has joined together the Word and the Spirit. Let no revivalist rip them asunder.

18 Battling “A Whole Babel of Extravagance” Page 24 Page 4

Lawrence R. Rast, Jr. How two nineteenth-century theologians responded to American revivalism and reclaimed the solace of confessional Christianity.

24 A Sixth Sola?

John R. Muether The Church in the world is as important as the ark in the flood.

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30 Revivalism and the Me Generation John Armstrong The “important” words heard at many contemporary “revivals” are not redemption and justification, but communication and individual relationships.

38 “Reformed” or “Revived”? Why Words Matter D. G. Hart Revivalism’s focus on the individual’s internal state generally devalues important external realities such as creeds and confessions, liturgy, and church government.

42 Faith Healing and the Sovereignty of God C. Everett Koop A well-known surgeon dissects an infected theology related to revivalism.

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DEPARTMENTS 2 In This Issue…

3 Letters 19 Altar Calls and Effectual Calls 29 Quotes 36 In Print

47 Interview with Iain Murray 50 Endnotes 51 White Horse Inn Log 52 On My Mind

Cover photo: Robert Holmes/©Corbis

EFORMATION

IN THIS ISSUE…

By Michael S. Horton

Editor-in-Chief Dr. Michael S. Horton Assistant Editor Benjamin E. Sasse

Come, Holy Spirit

Production Editor Irene H. Hetherington

t was powerful! The Spirit was really at work. Nobody could have predicted it: such an outpouring of the Spirit! It was no ordinary church service!”

These sentiments may be familiar to many of us who were reared in circles where “revival” meant business definitely not as usual. Sometimes it was simply the entertainment that we confused with the Holy Spirit, and the evangelist’s charisma that we confused with the power of God. And yet, these events may evoke wonder and praise as well, and we quite logically infer that if we experienced these extraordinary moments more frequently, our Christian lives would improve dramatically. Furthermore, many strangers to the covenant would be incorporated into Christ’s body: evangelism and missions would enjoy renewed vigor. The implication is that the ordinary means of grace, which is to say, the ordinary ministry whose locus is the Lord’s Day, is necessary but not sufficient for the Christian life. We need something more. Preaching, teaching, and Sacraments: these are fine, but… .

Like the storms in the Caribbean, a “revival” may consume the horizon, dominating the popular press and Christian conversation, only to pass as quickly as it came. A year ago Promise Keepers made headlines for dramatic growth in size and revenues, yet this spring nearly closed down completely due to funding shortfalls. The churches in America never come close to such publicity, probably because they (at least the better ones) are engaged in more long-term endeavors. As recent writers have observed, revivalism early-on helped to create the culture of publicity and immediate notoriety. It is the successive outbursts of revivalism which continually undo and reconfigure the American religious landscape. You can get the impression that although Jesus founded a church, the Holy Spirit started a revival, and the two have been in competition ever since.

How do we know where and when the Holy Spirit is at work? At least for Reformation-minded folk, it is where and when “the Word is rightly preached and the Sacraments are rightly administered.” That is how we know the Holy Spirit is present in his mighty power, raising the dead, making the lame to walk and the blind to see.

Here, the weak say, “I am strong,” and the poor say, “I am rich.”

Just as our Savior saw the demand for miracles as a sign of faithlessness rather than of great faith, is it possible that the same could be said for the feverish interest in finding a new revival from year to year? Are we not creating a generation of seeds sown among the thorns, to be choked out with the first grip of life’s tribulations, or the seed which fell on rocky ground and was never able to grow deep roots and thus perished in the afternoon sun?

But how much of this is just a cop-out for “dead orthodoxy”? How much of it is a rationalization for “business as usual,” a lazy approach to evangelism, missions, discipleship, social justice, and genuine community?

What is meant by “revival”? Is it biblical? And NEXT ISSUE: what should we expect from the Holy Spirit in these days? These are all the important questions Ecumenism we will be addressing in this timely and practical issue. Let us know what you think.

Copy Editors Ann Henderson Hart Deborah Barackman

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A publication of Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals

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Layout and Design Lori A. Cook Proofreader Alyson S. Platt Production Assistant Kathryn Baldino Alliance Council Dr. John H. Armstrong The Rev. Alistair Begg Dr. James M. Boice Dr. W. Robert Godfrey Dr. John D. Hannah Dr. Michael S. Horton Mrs. Rosemary Jensen Dr. J. A. O. Preus Dr. R. C. Sproul Dr. Gene E. Veith, Jr. Contributing Scholars Dr. D. A. Carson Dr. Sinclair B. Ferguson Dr. D. G. Hart Dr. Carl F. H. Henry Dr. Arthur A. Just Dr. Robert Kolb Dr. Tremper Longman III The Rev. Donald Matzat Dr. John W. Montgomery Mr. John Muether Dr. Richard A. Muller Mr. Kenneth A. Myers Dr. Tom J. Nettles Dr. Roger Nicole Dr. Leonard R. Payton Dr. Lawrence R. Rast Dr. Kim Riddlebarger Mr. Rick Ritchie Dr. Rod Rosenbladt Dr. David P. Scaer Ms. Rachel S. Stahle Dr. David F. Wells Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals © 1998 All rights reserved. The Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals exists to call the church, amidst our dying culture, to repent of its worldliness, to recover and confess the truth of God’s Word as did the Reformers, and to see that truth embodied in doctrine, worship and life. For more information, call or write us at: ALLIANCE OF CONFESSING EVANGELICALS 1716 Spruce Street, Philadelphia, PA 19103 (215) 546-3696 • ModernRef@aol.com

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LETTERS I must express my utter delight at your two recent issues on apologetics. As both a pastor trying to equip his flock to respond to the competing worldviews of our day and a wet-behind-the-ears doctoral student, perhaps I’m a bit biased, but I found your approach balanced, informed, and well written. I especially appreciate the irenic spirit shown in the panel discussion with Godfrey, Sproul, and others. Apologetics has been an evangelical battleground in the past, and to encounter folks with differing views treating one another with profound respect was refreshing.

— Clay Brown Lubbock, Texas I am writing to express my great interest in and appreciation of the contribution by Dr. Philip Ryken in the March/April 1998 MR. Please give us more articles by this gentleman. He is quite an able communicator.

— Barry Passmore Via Internet Once again I found my issue of modernReformation to be informing. However, the article by Kim Riddlebarger (“For the Sake of the Gospel: Paul’s Apologetic Speeches,” March/April 1998) was good right up until the end—and then he blew it. Paul’s “proclamation-defense” is indeed an outstanding method, but Dr. Riddlebarger makes a gelding out of the method he propounds. He states, “Paul does not attempt to ‘prove’ God’s existence typical of so-called ‘classical apologetics’; instead he proclaims Christ crucified, and then attempts to refute his opponents showing the futility of unbelief.” The implication is that theistic proofs are never necessary because they weren’t in this context. But would we really expect Paul to use a classical apologetic approach on men who were already theists? The men Paul was addressing may have been “practical atheists” but they were by no means “theoretical atheists.” Paul doesn’t try to “prove” God’s existence because doing so would have been absurd. Whenever we see Paul using his method of “proclamation-defense” we see him refuting his opponents at their point of opposition. If the classical apologetics approach is invalid, as it seems Riddlebarger implies, then Paul would not be able to defend the Gospel against the likes of Sartre, Camus, and other modern day atheists.

— Ted Sims Huntsville, Texas

Michael Horton’s defense of the reality of Christ’s resurrection (March/April 1998) assures us that there is now a real glorified Son of Man in heaven who “always lives to make intercession” for us, and who fully intends to return to us in reality, just as his disciples saw him go.

Christ’s crucifixion, resurrection, and intercession prove as you said, that “Jesus Christ is the Lord of history, who has won the right to interpret its past, present, and future...salvation for believers and judgement for unbelievers” (page 10). As J. I. Packer has written, the resurrection “demonstrated Jesus’ deity; validating his teaching; attested the completion of his work of atonement for sin; confir ms his present cosmic dominion and his coming reappearance as Judge...and guarantees each believer’s own re-embodiment by resurrection in the world to come.”

— Norman L. Meager Sonora, California Since I always seem to be issues behind in reading MR, I am slow to respond to the July/August 1997 article on “Divine Impassibility and Our Suffering God.” However, when I read the critical letters in later issues regarding this article, I decided that “más vale tarde que nunca.” Thank you for this article which addressed precisely a question I had been considering for a couple of years without much progress. Namely, if only the human nature of Christ suffered for our sins, how could this be an offering sufficient to cover the sins of all his people? On the other hand, if the divine nature of Christ suffered (that is, if God suffered), how can he be immutable (impassible)? I must say that I did not have my question satisfactorily answered in one reading of the article. However, I was grateful to see the issue addressed and grateful for an article that is worth rereading.

— Larry Trotter Guadalajara, Mexico

Let us hear from you! modernREFORMATION: Letters to the Editor 1716 Spruce Street, Philadelphia, PA 19103 Fax: (215) 735-5133 ModernRef@aol.com www.AllianceNet.org

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Do You Hear the Spirit?

REVIVALISM AND THE ORDINARY MEANS OF GRACE MICHAEL S. HORTON Duke historian Grant Wacker tells us that in the winter of 1887, a group calling itself the Evangelical Alliance for the United States met in Washington, DC. It was an appropriate site for a noble assemblage of scholars, pastors, college presidents, and other leaders who were intent on recapturing the moral, spiritual, and political clout which they had once garnered in American society. As Wacker explains, The first session opened with the hymn, “Come Gracious Spirit, Heavenly Dove.” The participants then read the second chapter of the Book of Acts… . At the end of the week, William E. Dodge, president of the Evangelical Alliance, asked the delegates to search their hearts to see if they too were open to the Spirit’s guidance. “Christ is waiting for us,” he urged. “Are we ready?”1

fact, a significant contributing factor in the success of the Social Gospel movement at the turn-of-the-century.

Higher critics with Americanized Hegelian bents (identifying God with progress) preached beside Wesleyan-Holiness revivalists and evangelical preachers.

When doctrinal differences divide, such movements often turn to the Holy Spirit as the tie that binds. Invoking the “Spirit” hardly proves as controversial as appeals to the Father and the Incarnate Son do. As many modern feminist and radical theologians are also discovering, the “Spirit” rarely embarrasses. Even the Hopi tribe worships the Great Spirit.

But is this “Spirit,” the Holy Spirit, as in “the Lord and Giver of Life who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified, who spoke through the prophets”? That one? Is he the Spirit who is identified in Scripture as “the Spirit of Christ,” that is, the One whose person and work is essentially as well as instrumentally united to that of the Son of Man? Harry Emerson Fosdick,

John Deerstyne, pen and ink

This could have been a common event in contemporary evangelicalism, but it was, in

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scion of liberalism and champion of modernism against the likes of J. Gresham Machen, wrote a book titled The Secret of the Victorious Christian Life, which was well received by the evangelical masses despite its moralistic optimism (perhaps because of it). And we all know how Norman Vincent Peale, a quite outspoken liberal, was so well received. Billy Graham even counted Peale among his closest allies. The World Council of Churches and similar groups arose out of missionary conferences in which doctrinal differences (i.e., the Word) were set aside in favor of common mission and experience, especially conversion and the New Birth (i.e., the Spirit).

In the past few decades, the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), based in Wheaton, Illinois, has reflected the breadth of these older heirs of American Protestantism in a more conservative form. But denominations no longer steer the evangelical ship (or, more accurately, the evangelical regatta). Rather, it is the successive outbursts of revivalism which continually define and redefine the American religious landscape. It is not churches or schools, but movements, which shape American church life. Though Jesus founded a Church, an observer of American evangelicalism might surmise that the Holy Spirit started a revival as competition.

Of course, this state of affairs is tragic for a number of reasons. First, it is deeply dishonoring to God and his Word and Spirit. But second, it is a serious danger for those to whom we wish to bring the good news. In this article, I want to emphasize the important link between Word and Spirit and its consequence for our expectations about extraordinary works of God in our day.

The Historical Problem As early as the Book of Acts, we see characters like Simon Magus who sought to market their own brand of Christianity by circumventing the Church. It was St. Paul especially who was vexed with these “superapostles” as he called them: itinerant, self-appointed Christian leaders who made up their theology as they went because they considered themselves “apostles” who received divine revelation of deeper mysteries than those revealed by the ordinary apostles in Jerusalem. They thought that their “ministries” could evangelize, disciple, and perform similar functions to those entrusted to the visible Church. Facing this “sect-spirit” directly in 1 Corinthians, Paul warns, “According to the grace of God which was given to me, as a wise master builder I have laid the foundation, and another builds on it. But let each one take heed how he builds on it. For no other foundation can anyone lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ” (3:10-11). On that day of God’s judgment, the work of so-called “ministries,”which tried to lay another foundation, says Paul, will be burned as hay, wood, and straw (v. 12-15).

KEY FIGURES OF AMERICAN REVIVALISM JONATHAN EDWARDS 1703–1758

Grandson of Massachusetts intellectual Soloman Stoddard, Edwards was widely respected for both his theological and his literary gifts.

Though the beginning of the Great Awakening is generally dated to the Dutch Reformed preaching of Theodore Frelinghuysen in New Jersey in 1720, the movement was not widely noticed or considered until the outbreak of revival in Edwards’ Northampton, Massachusetts in 1734.

Edwards produced four treatises evaluating and defending the awakening. The initial work, A Narrative of Surprising Conversions, began as an extended letter to Boston’s Benjamin Colman, who immediately recommended its publication. The work thus became a benchmark by which true and false revival would be evaluated. It is because of these writings that Edwards is often called the intellectual defender of the Great Awakening. For though it was by the preaching of George Whitefield that the revival was largely spread up and down the eastern seaboard, he certainly depended on Edwards’ theological reputation and Colman’s establishment connections for broader credibility. Edwards’ reputation as an analyst of the movement grew with his 1746 publication of the Treatise on the Religious Affections1 He died from a smallpox vaccination the year he was named President of Princeton.

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Elsewhere, Paul portrays the Church as a divine household, a temple, “having been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief cornerstone, in whom the whole building, being fitted together, grows into a holy temple of the Lord, in whom you also are being built together for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit” (Eph. 2:19-22).

With both of these passages (1 Cor. and Eph.), the interpretation often goes something like this: Make sure that you build a solid foundation when you build your “house” (i.e., ministry). But that is far from Paul’s instruction. In fact, it is closer to the assumption he is trying to refute! His point is that the apostles lay the foundation. This foundation-laying is what he is accomplishing in his ministry (which no one other than an apostle can lay). Not even Timothy is a foundationlayer but is one who “builds on it.” In fact, Timothy becomes a leader of the first generation of pastors who are called to the “ordinary ministry.” This holy temple’s foundation is the ministry of the apostles and prophets— what our theologians call the “extraordinary ministry.”

When revivalistic enterprises gain followers, their ad copy almost invariably casts the leaders or promoters as new “apostles” for a new “pentecost.” If they are not actually identified as such, they are often nevertheless viewed as fulfilling the same function. Campus Crusade’s Bill Bright claims to receive divine revelation about many things, from starting a campus ministry to founding a university. His latest venture is a prayer-andfasting movement that will surely force God to move powerfully in revival fires.2 Among enthusiasts there is no sense of redemptive history, no sense of things happening “in the fullness of time.” Rather, time is flattened, so that Mr. Bright can invoke the classic text, 2 Chronicles 7:14 (“If my people… .”), as though it were a spiritual law as predictable as gravity. The Bible gives us techniques, principles, laws. This “fasting/revival” formula is not a revelation of God’s particular saving action in a particular time and place in the history of his people but is rather one of those laws or principles. The same hermeneutic is often used when Pentecost and the apostles are considered. Enthusiasts simply lift these events and their exegetical roots from the soil of their sur rounding context. No time, no place, just disembodied, spiritual laws.

But the truth is that we cannot have another Pentecost any more than we can have another Incarnation. These are not abstract, universal principles, but rather historical events which were significant stages in advancing redemption. What Paul is saying is that the foundation has already been laid. No other foundation can be laid than the one which was laid by the apostles who were appointed by—and witnesses to—the Risen 6

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Christ. If the “super-apostles” (who were Paul’s contemporaries) were not to lay a new foundation, then certainly a new one cannot be laid now. There are then no apostles and there is no extraordinary (i.e., miracleworking) ministry today because that was the foundation, and it has already been laid. It is not a timeless truth that Paul is offering here (“Be sure you don’t build a bad foundation”), but a truth about redemptive history: The apostolic foundation is unique and after it is finished, ordained successors of the apostles will build on it in their ordinary ministry of Word and Sacrament, in the power of the Holy Spirit.

In the third century, Montanus claimed to be one of the last prophets. Organized under Maximilla and Priscilla, followers of Montanus, this sect gained numerous converts by promoting itself as a movement of the Spirit rather than of the dead letter (i.e., the official Church). At once “pentecostal” (tongues understood as ecstatic utterances rather than human languages) and chiliastic (millennialist, predicting the date of Christ’s return and the end of the world), Montanism enjoyed great popularity. Although the Church found the movement practically irrepressible, the most decisive event was the failed prophecies of Montanus and his prophetesses.

Throughout the Middle Ages, popes (representing the church) and abbots (representing the monasteries) were frequently locked in fierce competition. The official church, centered in Rome, had become too worldly and bureaucratic, while the monastic movements had called men and women out of the world and provided a model for Christian perfection. But eventually these institutions too would fall prey to lethargy and worldliness, and new orders were frequently formed out of attempts to purge old ones.

Neither Rome Nor Fanaticism The Reformation, however, challenged both the Roman church and these monastic movements.

Fur ther more, it faced another foe in the radical Protestants, whom the Refor mers identified as “enthusiasts,” “fanatics,” and “swarmers.” Martin Luther warned against those in his day who were “swarming everywhere, deranged by the devil, regarding Scripture as a dead letter, extolling nothing but the Spirit and yet keeping neither the Word nor the Spirit.”

But Scripture is not pure spirit, as they sputter that the Spirit alone must do it, that Scripture is a dead letter and can give no life. But it is like this: Although the letter does not in and of itself give life, yet it must be there, must be heard and received, and the Holy Spirit must work through it in the heart … for if it were to let the MODERN REFORMATION

Word go, it would soon entirely lose Christ and the Spirit. Therefore you had better not boast much about the Spirit if you do not have the visible, external Word; for it will surely not be a good spirit but the wretched devil from hell.3 John Calvin was just as direct in his insistence on the inseparable link between Word and Spirit:

KEY FIGURES OF AMERICAN REVIVALISM GEORGE WHITEFIELD 1714–1770

Two things are connected here, the Word and the Spirit of God, in opposition to the fanatics, who aim at oracles and hidden revelations apart from the Word … “The Word” must not be separated from “the Spirit,” as fanatics imagine, who, despising the Word, glory in the name of the Spirit, and swell with vain confidence in their own imaginations. It is the spirit of Satan that is separated from the Word, to which the Spirit of God is always joined.4 In his polemics, Calvin frequently equated Rome with the “fanatics,” since both boasted of the Spirit even beyond and apart from the Word. The written and preached Word of God was foundational, of course, for such people. But it was viewed as merely ordinary, so both groups sought to establish an ongoing revelational ministry of the Holy Spirit. The Word was necessary, but not sufficient.5 Central to their confusion, said Calvin, was their identification of “Spirit” and “letter” in Paul’s writings with “spiritual” as opposed to “material.” Attempts to correct their misunderstanding were carried forward into the confessional writings. For instance, the Second Helvetic Confession interprets “letter” not as the written Scriptures in general, but as “the doctrine of the law which, without the Spirit and faith, works wrath and provokes sin in the minds of those who do not have a living faith. For this reason, the apostle calls it ‘the ministry of death’” (Chap. XIII).

And it goes on to add that this is diametrically opposed to the spirit-matter dichotomy of the sects. Later, it warns against opposing “the Spirit” to the church’s ordinary ministers, “inasmuch as God effects the salvation of men through them,” not in their person but in the exercise of their ministry. “Hence we warn men to beware lest we attribute what has to do with our conversion and instruction to the secret power of the Holy Spirit in such a way that we make void the ecclesiastical ministry” (XVIII). Furthermore, ministers are not themselves means of grace, as if they could save people or promote the growth and success of the church by their own cleverness. “The duties of ministers are various; yet for the most part they are restricted to two, in which all the rest are comprehended: to the teaching of the Gospel of Christ, and to the proper

Often called the “Great Itinerant,” Whitefield is the father of modern religious revivals. If Jonathan Edwards is first remembered as a thinker and John Wesley as the leader of the Methodist movement, then their eighteenth century peer Whitefield is remembered first as a preacher.

Though English, he has been called America’s first celebrity. Partly because of his volume and his delivery (people reportedly fainted at his pronunciation of “Mesopotamia”), record crowds gathered wherever he went. His journals were best-sellers and his utilization of the press awed even Benjamin Franklin. Though he defended Calvinism against Wesley, some scholars (e.g., Yale historian Harry Stout) have wondered about Whitefield’s role in elevating the subjective element of faith over the objective, and the New Birth over confession and church. Whether judging him invigorating in the presence of formalism or individualistic to the detriment of ordered communions, most analysts agree with historian Nathan Hatch that Whitefield was “the herald of the revival-centered voluntary movements that have been so characteristic of American Religion.”2 His seven trips to America were the catalyst of the Great Awakening.

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administration of the sacraments” (XVIII). A frequently asked question in evangelical gatherings is, “How can I know where and when the Spirit is really at work?” Our response is easy: “where the Word is correctly preached and the Sacraments are correctly administered according to Christ’s institution.”

Revivalists bristle at such statements. What a simplistic view of the ministry! How could Finney’s “new measures” be regarded as means of grace if this were true? We would have no justification for the mass movements which we attribute to the Spirit if this were true. Indeed, and we would be better of f for it. The Canons of the Synod of Dor t reminds us that (a) the Holy Spirit does not ordinarily save apar t from means and (b) those means are limited to Word and Sacraments:

traditions of men. Never theless, we acknowledge the inward illumination of the Spirit of God to be necessary for the saving understanding of such things as are revealed in the word … (Westminster Confession, I, 6).

Ask the average conservative Protestant today (including pastors) what they regard as the most effective tools employed by the Holy Spirit in evangelism, personal discipleship, and church growth. Most likely “the Word preached and Sacraments administered” would be crowded out by scores of “new measures.”

Even in many of our Reformed churches, the spirit of revivalism and fanaticism has undermined confidence in the ordinary means of g race which were instituted by our Savior as sufficient for every blessing under heaven.

As theologian Louis Berkhof expresses it,

So shall My word be that goes

forth from My mouth; it shall not return to Me void, but it shall accomplish what I please, and it shall prosper in the thing for which I sent it (Is. 55:11).

Just as the almighty work of God by which he brings forth and sustains our natural life does not rule out but requires the use of means … so also the aforementioned supernatural work of God by which he regenerates us in no way rules out or cancels the use of the gospel, which God in his great wisdom has appointed to be the seed of regeneration and the food of the soul … So even today it is out of the question that the teachers or those taught in the church should presume to test God by separating what he in his good pleasure has wished to be so closely joined together (Article 17).

The Holy Spirit does not save us directly or in an unmediated manner, but uses the preaching of the Gospel as his instrument. The sufficiency of Scripture in revelation is clearly upheld, and yet this does not cancel out the work of the Spirit: The whole counsel of God, concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man’s salvation, faith, and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture: unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelations of the Spirit, or 8

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Strictly speaking, only the Word and the sacraments can be regarded as means of grace, that is, as objective channels which Christ has instituted in the Church, and to which He ordinarily binds Himself in the communication of His grace … They are in themselves, and not in virtue of their connection with things not included in them, means of grace … The Word and the sacraments are in themselves means of grace; their spiritual efficacy is dependent only on the operation of the Holy Spirit … This means that they are not associated with the operation of God’s grace merely occasionally or in a more or less accidental way, but are the regularly ordained means for the communication of the saving grace of God and are as such of perpetual value … The preaching of the Word (or, the Word preached) and the administration of the sacraments (or, the sacraments administered) are the means officially instituted in the Church, by which the Holy Spirit works and confirms faith in the hearts of men [emphasis in original].6 Both great Reformation traditions, the Lutheran and the Reformed, concur with the ancient Church in MODERN REFORMATION

resisting the slightest breach between Word and Spirit.

But as Protestant Orthodoxy and Pietism came into increasing conflict, defining themselves in antithesis to each other, a fissure grew into a chasm. The caricature was that the Protestant Orthodox took the Word without the Spirit, while the Pietists took the Spirit without the Word. Our purpose here is to argue—as indeed the better Orthodox and Pietist representatives did—against the very possibility of such a separation.

If we were ever to meet a “word” that was not accompanied by the power of the Holy Spirit, effecting faith and repentance, it would surely not be God’s Word.

And a spirit who is active apart from this Word is surely not God’s.

With the rise of the “awakenings” in the early and mid-eighteenth century, New England Congregationalists and Presbyterians throughout the colonies were embroiled in debates over “Old Light” and “New Light” doctrine and practice. These groups represented two distinct (and often antithetical) expressions of religion which remain, despite their differences, significant for contemporary debates. Settled ministers (generally “Old Lights”) were publicly rebuked by revivalists (“New Lights”) as unregenerate. In fact, itinerant (i.e., traveling) ministry was beginning to make celebrities out of a handful of preachers who often mocked the established ministry, including its high educational requirements. Regardless of their commitment to missions and evangelism, established ministers who did not support the revivals were often denounced in the press as obstacles to the work of the Spirit. Similarly, the Dutch Reformed divided until the 1770s into two groups: the pietistic-revivalistic (called the “Coetus”) and the “Conferentie,” which as Calvin College historian James Bratt explains, was “New Yorkbased, holding more to the Amsterdam connection and confessional-liturgical traditions.”7 In the nineteenth century, and in Charles G. Finney’s wake especially, revivalism ate away at the confessional base of various Protestant bodies. Finney’s “new measures” were not merely neutral church growth and evangelism techniques but grew (as all methods do) out of a theological framework. In Finney’s case, that framework was Pelagian. In the nineteenth century, innumerable sects proliferated, sharing an orientation quite similar to those radical Protestants who had been identified as “fanatics” and “enthusiasts.” The warfare between the entrepreneurial movement (and its “spiritfilled” caste) and the institutional church (and its often bureaucratic and worldly leadership) continues unabated in our day. (See other articles in this issue which review the parallels with contemporary movements, the pedigree of revivalism in our day.) For our purposes in this article, I want to emphasize the importance of this

KEY FIGURES OF AMERICAN REVIVALISM CHARLES FINNEY 1792–1875

A Presbyterian lawyer, Finney one day experienced an additional “baptism of the Holy Spirit,” which he described as “waves of liquid love.” Leaving law, he refused to attend seminary, instead beginning his own revivals in upstate New York. One of his most popular sermons was “Sinners Bound to Change Their Own Hearts.”

He borrowed and introduced a number of “new measures”—that is, new evangelistic techniques— such as the “anxious bench” (precursor to the altar call) and “excitements” or emotional tactics that led to weeping and fainting. He attacked the Westminster Confession, causing many divisions in the Presbyterian Church, and ultimately wrote his own Systematic Theology. Though his text is more an ethical work than a theological one, he manages nonetheless to deny many essential Protestant doctrines: original sin, substitutionary atonement, the supernatural character of the new birth, and justification as a legal or forensic verdict. He announces, “The doctrine of an imputed righteousness, or that Christ’s obedience to the law was accounted as our obedience, is founded on a most false and nonsensical assumption.”3 Historians later began to refer to the central area of Finney’s revivals (western New York) as the “burned-over district” because of the region’s nurturing of many perfectionistic cults.

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doctrinal point. In other words, we are not engaged in a debate merely over “how-to” methods, but face a serious doctrinal crisis in the face of revivalism.

The Link in Scripture The unity of Word and Spirit is so well-attested in Scripture that we should hardly have to prove it. I will, however, focus on two passages which make this point— Ezekiel 37 and Romans 10. Along with much of Jerusalem’s population, the prophet Ezekiel was carried off into Babylonian captivity in 597 BC. While false prophets promised peace and prosperity, Ezekiel (like Jeremiah) told the truth. And yet, that truth included good news as well as bad: The hand of the LORD came upon me and brought me out in the Spirit of the LORD, and set me down in the midst of the valley; and it was full of bones. Then He caused me to pass by them all around, and behold, there were very many in the open valley; and indeed they were very dry. And He said to me, “Son of man, can these bones live?” So I answered, “O Lord GOD, You know.” Again He said to me, “Prophesy to these bones, and say to them, ‘O dry bones, hear the word of the LORD! Thus says the Lord GOD to these bones: “Surely I will cause breath to enter into you, and you shall live. I will put sinews on you and bring flesh upon you, cover you with skin and put breath in you; and you shall live. Then you shall know that I am the LORD”’” (Ezek. 37:1-8).

Especially in the prophets, God’s Word comes as a two-edged sword: Law and Gospel. As Louis Berkhof explains, The Churches of the Reformation from the very beginning distinguished between the law and the gospel as the two parts of the Word of God as the means of grace … The law comprises everything in Scripture which is a revelation of God’s will in the for m of command or prohibition, while the gospel embraces everything, whether it be in the Old Testament or in the New, that pertains to the work of reconciliation and that proclaims the seeking and redeeming love of God in Christ Jesus.8 By means of this Word, both death and life proceed.

The Law does not come to reform the sinner, or to improve the self-confident, but to condemn and to kill (Rom. 3:19-20). But this is not the only “Word” which God speaks by his Spirit, for God has made his officers 10

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“sufficient as ministers of the new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” (2 Cor. 3:4-6). In fact, Paul refers to the Law as “the ministry of death” and “the ministry of condemnation” as opposed to “the ministry of righteousness” (v. 7-10). As a mirror, the Law shows us our true selves and pronounces our condemnation.

Think of the substitutes we have devised for the ordinary preaching of the Law: every gimmick, slogan, or event that can possibly shift the focus from the sinner’s peril to some behavioral change. Personal testimonies of changed lives, while not in themselves wrong, constitute neither Law nor Gospel, for they are neither a serious word of condemnation (not merely for particular sins, but for our sinful condition) or of redemption (not merely from sinful patter ns of behavior, but from the wrath of God).

But in Ezekiel 37, that word of judgment has already been pronounced upon Israel. That is why they are in exile. Now God has his Word of grace to pronounce through his prophet in the vision of death valley. There could hardly be a starker image of spiritual death: a valley floor littered with the skeletal remains of a vast army. The Holy Spirit inquires of Ezekiel, “Can these bones live?”, to which the prophet wisely replies, “O Sovereign LORD, only you know.” So the Spirit commands Ezekiel to preach to the dry bones. But notice the kind of preaching occurring here. No one needs to be slain: death is already taken for granted. It is “Gospel” that is now required. But notice what Ezekiel is told to say to the bones—or rather, what he is not told to say. He is not told to exhort the bones, to encourage them, to manage them, or to identify himself with them in sympathetic feeling. He is not told to share his personal testimony or to hire a praise band.

He is told, “Prophesy to these bones, and say to them, ‘O dry bones, hear the word of the LORD!’” (v. 4).

This is what, in speech-action theory, is called a perlocutionary speech-act. The late Oxford philosopher J. L. Austin suggested that all locutionary acts (i.e., meaningful speech) are of two types: illocutionary and perlocutionary. Examples of the former include, “I assert that…,” “I command you to…,” “I asked…,” and so forth. By saying or writing something (locutionary act), I am cer tainly doing something (asser ting, commanding, asking: illocutionary act). But in perlocutionary speech-acts, I actually bring about a certain state of affairs precisely by saying or writing something: “such as convincing, persuading, deterring, and even, say, surprising or misleading.” 9 So in an illocutionary speech-act, one might say, “He commanded me to jump into the water,” while in a perlocutionary speech-act, one might say, “He persuaded me to jump into the water.” In the former case, the speaker merely says MODERN REFORMATION

something to me; in the latter case, the speaker actually does something to me, producing some effect simply by saying or writing a particular sentence. To command or assert, to promise or to warn, is not to bring something about, but to persuade or mislead, to surprise or offend, does just that. The most obvious example of a perlocutionary utterance is, “I do,” in the context of a wedding ceremony. Simply by saying this, in its appropriate setting, it creates a certain state of affairs.

In its appropriate utterance, “I do” actually weds me to my bride.

I think that Austin offers us a helpful distinction for thinking about how we approach the task of preaching, and Ezekiel 37 provides the ideal example for this distinction’s validity here. The Holy Spirit does not tell Ezekiel to command these bones to come to life in the way in which commands are generally issued. After all, they are hardly capable of reviving themselves, much less of reconstructing entire bodies. There is no hope from the side of the bones. Now if there were, we might expect Ezekiel to be told to exhort or encourage the bones, to inspire them to enter into the Spirit-filled life.

And certainly there is exhortation in Scripture, since we have been raised with Christ from the grave of spiritual death. But that will not do for those who are “dead in trespasses and sins” (Eph. 2:1). Ezekiel is told to preach to the bones, to perform an operation upon them, to actually accomplish their revivification. And yet, it is not he himself who accomplishes this, but the Spirit working through the performative utterance.

Ezekiel is to have a blind confidence in the power of Word and Spirit to perform what is promised. He is not told merely to talk about God, Christ, salvation, the cross, faith, and so forth, but is told to preach God, Christ, salvation, the cross, and faith into the sea of skeletons.

Of course, he cannot himself impart saving faith to others any more than he could impart it to himself, but in his ministry of the Word, that life-giving Gospel, Ezekiel’s preaching actually performs what it promises. It does not merely promise (an illocutionary act), but effectually calls and vivifies. God’s Word is not merely a divine artifact (i.e., something created by God), but belongs to God’s very being. So to say that the Word saves, whether the preached Word or the “visible Word” (viz., the Sacraments), is simply shorthand for saying that God saves. Thus, “This is my comfort in my affliction, for Your word has given me life” (Ps. 119:50). What a difference such a thought could make in our ministries!

Instead of viewing preaching as discourse on a religious topic or even a scriptural exposition, we would once again see it as the act of God, through his fallible vessel, calling the dead to life, creating faith where there is only unbelief. “So shall My word be that goes forth from My mouth; it shall not return to Me void, but it

KEY FIGURES OF AMERICAN REVIVALISM D. L. MOODY 1837–1899

Born in Northfield, Massachusetts, Moody was a shoe clerk in Boston and then a shoe salesman in Chicago. As his involvement in Sunday school coordination grew at Chicago’s Plymouth Cong regational Church, Moody decided that the skills acquired in the promotion of shoes could be utilized in the promotion of Christ. He thus decided to abandon secular employment. His popularity grew via Sunday school conventions and he ultimately became president of the YMCA. His administrative skills were put to additional use in the founding of evangelization societies and Bible institutes, and in the publication of inexpensive religious literature.

He gained great notoriety and contributed to the acceptance of nineteenth century American evangelistic techniques and music in England during his 1873–75 tour of Great Britain with songleader Ira Sankey.

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shall accomplish what I please, and it shall prosper in the thing for which I sent it” (Is. 55:11). God’s Word is the good seed that produces a good crop, far beyond expectations (Luke 8:4-15). Crushing all their hopes for saving themselves, Jesus told the multitude that they could not even come to him unless the Father drew them. “It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing.” But he was hardly pitting the Spirit against the Word and the ordinary means, adding, “The words that I speak to you are spirit, and they are life” (John 6:63). Do you see the inseparable connection between Word and Spirit, as well as the link between the sign and the thing signified? The words spoken are themselves life-giving, not because there is some magical power inherent in a string of utterances, but because of the Holy Spirit’s efficacy working through the Word. By this Word he actually perfor ms what is threatened in the Law and what is promised in the Gospel.

over the face of the deep, a formless void which possesses no inherent creative power, now hovers over the preached Word and creates a new world with Jesus Christ as its sun. This prophecy, the Lord tells Ezekiel, will be fulfilled when the people’s hopes are entirely lost. When that happens, they are to be given the preached Gospel: Then he said to me, “…Therefore prophesy and say to them, ‘Thus says the LORD GOD: “Behold, O My people, I will open your graves and cause you to come up from your graves, and bring you into the land of Israel. Then you shall know that I am the LORD, when I have opened your graves, O My people, and brought you up from your graves. I will put My Spirit in you, and you shall live, and I will place you in your own land.

Then you shall know that I, the LORD, have spoken it and performed it,” says the LORD’” (v. 11-14) [emphasis added].

The preaching of the Word, like the Incarnation itself, is an instance of divine condescension, a moment when power takes the form of weakness and wisdom takes the form of foolishness.

So I prophesied as I was commanded; and as I prophesied, there was a noise, and suddenly a rattling; and the bones came together, bone to bone. Indeed, as I looked, the sinews and the flesh came upon them, and the skin covered them over; but there was no breath in them. Also He said to me, “Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, son of man, and say to the breath, ‘Thus says the LORD GOD: “Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe on these slain, that they may live.”’”

So I prophesied as He commanded me, and breath came into them, and they lived, and stood upon their feet, an exceedingly great army (Ezek. 37:7-10).

Ezekiel here is not told to talk to the breathless skeletons about wind, lecturing them about the nature of spiritual life. To be sure, such content is necessary, but Ezekiel’s sermon is surely more than that. He is told to preach breath into the slain. Ezekiel did as he was commanded, and the Holy Spirit raised up a vast army from the dereliction of spiritual death. This is just one more re-creation scene in which the Spirit who hovered 12

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Like a new Exodus, this day will bring God’s elect out through the waters of destruction and lead them finally and forever into the land of Sabbath rest. “David My servant shall be king over them, and they shall all have one shepherd” (v. 24).

Faith By Hearing, and Hearing By the Word We find the same emphasis in Romans 10. The New Testament claims to be a fulfillment of all these Old Testament promises, but if that is so, where is Israel in God’s plan? Paul has labored the point already in chapter nine that “it is not that the word of God has taken no effect. For they are not all Israel who are of Israel, nor are they all children because they are the seed of Abraham … That is, those who are the children according to ancestry are not the children of God, but the children of the promise are regarded as the seed” (v.

6-9). While, by God’s grace, some of his fellow-Jews were indeed being saved (as it has always been “a remnant according to election,” 11:5), the great majority sought to be justified by their own obedience to God’s law rather than by grace alone, through faith alone, because of Christ alone. So, like the gentiles, they too MODERN REFORMATION

are climbing stairways to heaven, trying to pull God down, or searching for him in the depths. “Seekers” frantically striving to “find God” fail to realize, says Paul, that “the word of faith which we preach” is at hand, ready to be embraced. God has already come down to us and continues to condescend in the person of his Holy Spirit whenever the Word is preached and the Sacraments are administered.

But a “righteousness of faith,” as opposed to a “righteousness of the law,” is something to be believed, not something to be done. It is not waiting to be achieved but is there to be received. This is why it is called “Gospel,” meaning “good news.” If we were saved by works, we might expect any number of techniques to scale Zion’s heights. But if we are saved by grace alone, our Savior having fulfilled all righteousness in our place, the form which this reconciliation takes is news. Think of the difference in everyday experience between good directions and good news. When communication reaches the level of news, that which is communicated is already a completed event. The World War II headline, “Victory in Europe!”, does not elicit our cooperation. It comes as news, an accomplished success that is announced. It is because salvation is by grace alone and according to “the righteousness which is by faith” that the preached Word is so central.

News is announced, proclaimed, declared. Skits could substitute for the preached Word if the object is to teach a moral lesson. Miracle-crusades could replace preaching if the goal is to fascinate. Lectures could suffice if the purpose is merely to inform. But it is preaching that is effectual to actually reconcile sinners to God. The preaching of the Word, like the Incarnation itself, is an instance of divine condescension, a moment when power takes the form of weakness and wisdom takes the form of foolishness. The result is clear. While fanatics and wisdom-seekers of every age will find it all too ordinary, says Paul, “I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God unto salvation, for everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek” (Rom. 1:16).

So, Paul inquires, “How then shall they call on Him in whom they have not believed? And how shall they believe in Him of whom they have not heard? And how shall they hear without a preacher? And how shall they preach unless they are sent?” (Rom. 10:14-15). The Apostle reasons from the necessity of preaching to the necessity of a regular, established, authorized ministry.

Preachers are not self-appointed but are “sent.” It is this ministry, and not a self-sent imitation, that brings life, for it is “the ministry of reconciliation” (2 Cor. 5:18), a ministry which Paul is willing to defend to his dying breath. By this Word, God kills and makes alive, wounds and heals, causes us to despair and then makes

KEY FIGURES OF AMERICAN REVIVALISM BILLY SUNDAY 1862–1935

An orphan, Sunday became a professional baseball player with the Chicago White Sox, Pittsburgh Pirates, and Philadelphia Athletics. He retired from baseball to work for the YMCA, which led to his revival tours. Like Charles Finney, Sunday believed in subjecting conversion techniques to evaluations of cause and effect. In one widely repeated quote, he announced that he was the most efficient living evangelist, gaining conver ts at $2 per soul. Though an early proponent of the “fundamentals,” Sunday was more widely known for his preaching against alcohol. His zeal was evident in his theatrics in the pulpit, his irreverent language, and his staunchly pro-America preaching. (See modernREFORMATION January/February 1995, cover, for another image of Sunday’s preaching gymnastics.)

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us rejoice. “So then,” Paul concludes, “faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God” (Rom. 10:17). Salvation comes from heaven, by grace, through faith, because of Christ. This reaches us by means of the “good news” being preached. Therefore, there is a need for a regular, established, “sent” (i.e., authorized) ministry of Word and Sacrament. This is Paul’s argument, the logic of grace.

Just as faith is the only instrument of justification precisely because it is a receiving instrument, hearing is the ordinary organ of reception for the same reason.

Idolatry demands sight, which is why those who cannot wait for the Beatific Vision in the future create images of it here and now. This can take the form of statues, but it can also take the form of well-staged theatrical productions. Hearing corresponds to faith, while seeing corresponds to the consummation. Influenced by Augustine’s Platonizing tendencies, medieval theology stressed vision (the Beatific Vision, the sight of God in his majesty, etc.). But the Reformers recovered the Pauline insistence on faith coming ex auditu—by hearing.10 Faith comes by hearing Christ preached, Paul says. Just as God created ex nihilo by his performative utterance, “Let there be light!”, so his preached Word is to be regarded as identical to God speaking in person.

This is why our confessions and dogmatics say that the preached Word is a means of grace, emphasizing the fact that it is this form that is especially suited to conveying the Gospel. Like the Gospel itself, this comes to us from the outside. It is not an echo of our own sinful hear ts, a reflection of our own subjective projections or religious consciousness, but is a Word from another place, something that we cannot really say to ourselves. It comes to us, rather than originating within us. As it is God’s grace and righteousness, it is God’s Word, not ours, which saves us. There is nothing magical about this: a deaf person may read God’s Word and be just as confident in Christ. But, exceptions notwithstanding, we have to take the logic of Paul’s arguments seriously here: A Gospel of grace requires means that do not obscure the fact that we bring nothing of ourselves in this transaction but sin and resistance. It is precisely because they are means of grace that the preached Word and administered Sacraments, weak and foolish in the eyes of the world (including the worldly church), are Gospel-giving. In preaching, we hear the good news and in the Sacraments we taste the good news. It is true that we taste and see that the Lord is good in this meal, but it is sight linked eschatologically to bread and wine and it is still by faith that we feed on Christ whom we do not see.

Dividing That Which God Has United For revivalism, though, such an ordinary ministry of 14

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Word and Sacrament is not good enough. We need to hear, feel, and see more. But this is tantamount to saying that we need more than Christ. Revivalism seems intent on dissolving some important marriages. First, the union of Word and Spirit. Without the Word, the Spirit will be reduced to a power source at the disposal of enthusiastic and clever spiritual technicians.

Gnosticism has been the perennial result. Without the Spirit, the Word can only be regarded as a “dead letter” indeed, but the promise is that the Spirit who inspired Scripture will always accomplish his purposes through its proclamation.

Second, the union of the human personality is at stake. Merely “Bible-centered” faith and piety tend to cut people off from the neck down, while so-called “Spirit-centered” religion tends to decapitate. Christcentered preaching, teaching, and liturgy will always warm the heart as it stokes the mind with redemptivehistorical proclamation. Neither the Word nor the Spirit (nor even both together) imparts saving life except as they have for their content the promises of God, as they are “yes” and “amen” in Christ (2 Cor. 1:20; John 5:39). Such an ordinary ministry is concerned with the whole person lying on the floor of death valley and wants to speak life into whole people, not just minds, hearts, or wills.

Third, the union of our understanding of the Trinity is put into question by the assumptions of “revivalism.”

The Trinitarian economy in salvation is underscored in the New Testament’s glad announcement that God’s redemption had arrived in the person and work of Christ and that the Holy Spirit is sent not to initiate a higher salvation, a “second blessing,” or a supplement to Christ.

Rather, he is called “the Spirit of Christ” precisely to emphasize that he is sent by the Father and the Son in order to call sinners from death to life by uniting them to Christ. As Jesus Christ is the center and substance of the entire Word, to say that the Spirit is inseparable from the Word is to say that the Spirit is inseparable from Christ.

To divide the Spirit from the written and preached Word, in other words, is an implicit denial of the perichoretic unity of the Trinity.

Fourth, “revivalism” divorces spiritual from material reality. Need we be reminded again of the affinities with the Gnostic heresy, which spawned repeated manifestations of super-spirituality? In this heresy, not only is the spiritual distinct from the physical or material; it is positively superior and, in fact, striving toward emancipation from the material. The Word, in such a formulation, inasmuch as it is ink and paper, human language, and entrusted to the ministry of sinful men, is inferior to the Spirit—identified as superior not necessarily because he is God, but because he is spiritual.

While the biblical categories are Creator-creature, the MODERN REFORMATION

Gnostic reads the universe in terms of spirit-matter, so the Holy Spirit simply becomes a cipher for “the spiritual” in general. “Letter” includes the “bare Word,” humble preaching, Sacraments and an official, educated, and properly organized ministry. “Spirit” refers to the exciting movements which normally occur outside of the precincts of the Church, or at least beyond its normal ministry. Related to this, as we have seen, is the division between “super-saints” who are pulling God down from heaven or bringing Christ up from the dead (Rom. 10:6-7), and the normal Christians who belong to “dead” churches where the ordinary means of grace are offered and people are actually nurtured and cared for in a community of sanity. All the while, such sectarian divisiveness and breaking of the bond of unity is praised as actually tearing down the walls. Every new “move of the spirit” leaves in its wake more disillusionment, more strife, more confusion among believers and pastors.

Finally, we have seen all too often in history how this separation of Word and Spirit has led to a division between the Church and parachurch “ministries.”

Nothing could be more foreign to the catholic and evangelical spirit than the modern evangelical arrogance of parachurch “ministries.” As a member of the council for the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, I do not deny the importance of occasional “working groups” being formed across denominational lines. Intent on not interfering with the ordinary ministry, we are nevertheless providing resources for better-informed general discussion. Our purpose is not to secure a union of our churches or to eventually create a common statement of faith: only church bodies have authority in these areas. We are an ad hoc group whose goal is to promote a wider understanding of the great truths which once defined genuinely “evangelical” (i.e., Reformational) Christianity. But we must not think for one moment that this Alliance is engaged in the ministry which Christ instituted. If we allow ourselves to form one more unaccountable body of “super-apostles” who extend their bounds of legitimate calling, then we are traitors to our own cause. Modern evangelicalism frequently demeans and sometimes even mocks the ordinary ministry, as if the real work of evangelism, missions, youth “ministry,” worship, and just about everything else relevant to faith and life, is being done by mailing list revivals rather than by the simple, quiet, cruciform ministry which, like its message, is weakness and foolishness in the eyes of the world.

Even where such blatant departures are resisted, one may still detect a tendency to speak as if the ordinary ministry of Word and Sacrament is inferior to the immediacy of the Holy Spirit’s direct activity. The Vineyard movement, the Toronto “Blessing,” and the Pensacola “revival,” did not appear ex nihilo, but are links

KEY FIGURES OF AMERICAN REVIVALISM THE AZUSA STREET REVIVAL 1906–1913

The Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles was the bir thplace of the moder n Pentecostal movement. Beginning in 1904, reports of revivals under holiness preachers in Wales and Chicago began to reach Los Angeles, where prayer meetings were established with hopes of a similar revival there. Some Baptist churches divided over these revival prayer groups, and especially over the “second work” or “second blessing” teachings of the holiness groups. Some of those who split off from these churches called a holiness preacher, William J. Seymour, from Houston. Upon his arrival in 1906, though, this group also divided, this time over Seymour’s belief in tongues. One faction rented 312 Azusa Street for the Apostolic Faith Mission (AFM), where people reportedly began to speak in tongues. The group received much publicity, not only because of the Pentecostal activity, but also because of its biracial composition (Seymour was AfricanAmerican) and because of the active roles taken by women. Related Pentecostal groups spread up and down the West Coast, back into the South and Midwest, and internationally. Almost every Pentecostal denomination in the United States today, including the Assemblies of God (1914), was either formed or became Pentecostal because of some connection to 312 Azusa Street.

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in a long chain throughout church history which has sought direct experience with God apart from his ordained means. There is nothing apart from the Word because there is nothing apart from Christ which the Holy Spirit wishes to give us (Eph. 1:3). When Bill Bright says that “Those who fast with pure motives will be drawn closer to the g reat hear t of God and experience a quality of life in the Spirit that is not possible apart from fasting,” he is implying that there is a higher “quality of life in the Spirit” than the ordinary life which is born of Word and Spirit.11 Subjecting extraordinary means to the ordinary (or even substituting the former for the latter) inevitably divides “first-class” Christians and churches (i.e., Spirit-filled) from “second-class” Christians and churches (i.e., Wordcentered). Thus, ironically, the separation of Word and Spirit which so dominates American super-spirituality has contributed to more division within the body of Christ than have traditional churches.

While we’re discussing the spiritual elitism which is often engendered by a celebration of extraordinary over ordinary means of grace and ministry, recall that the Gnostics were called the gnostikoi—those who were “in the know.” Pat Robertson reflects this tendency when he writes, “There are wonderful times when [God] shares a bit of His knowledge—a ‘word of knowledge’ as the Apostle Paul called it—with His people. This is intelligence that comes from God without reliance on sight, sound, taste, touch, or smell.” 12 “Wonderful times” correspond to those moments when the Spirit works directly and apar t from means, when he circumvents the ordinary human senses. While many would resist Robertson’s language, this kind of thinking is rife within our churches. Fur ther more, it is characteristic of our age. Madonna instructs us, for instance, in such antipathies: “Today is the last day that I am using words. They’ve gone out, lost their meaning, don’t function anymore. Traveling, leaving logic and reason. Traveling, to the arms of unconsciousness. Let’s get unconscious honey, let’s get unconscious. Words are useless, especially sentences. They don’t stand for anything. How could they explain how I feel?”13 Do We Need Another Revival?

I am convinced that the low ebb of spiritual vitality in the church is always due to a failure to faithfully execute the ordinary ministry. However it occurs—by being sidetracked by other interests or bored by truth— ministers lose their own sight of Christ and his benefits.

This may happen even in perfectly sound churches, as when lecturing about God and his saving will in Christ takes the place of actually proclaiming Christ and redemption. Preaching is not teaching, although both are important for a balanced ministry. If the preaching 16

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of Christ is obscured by turning the sermon into a lecture, it is no wonder that people begin to think that there must be something more. It is not because they want something more than Christ, but because they are not receiving Christ, the Bread of Life. This is not withheld intentionally, but because we fail to recognize the preached Word as an eschatological moment in which the Kingdom of Heaven and the Age to Come breaks in on this world and “this present evil age.” In many Reformed churches, we have to ask ourselves whether we have lost this sense that when we mount the pulpit, we are engaging in “power encounters.” Here we are involved in the cosmic battle, armed with the Word and Spirit: the Gospel, faith, truth (Eph. 6). In these events, we “taste of the powers of the age to come” (Heb. 6:5) and the borders of Jerusalem are enlarged.

With the Word and the Sacraments together, God’s own promise attached irrevocably to them, we are the ones who are engaged in a genuine “signs and wonders ministry.” So we do not need another Pentecost or another apostolic (i.e., extraordinary) ministry. We belong to the age prophesied by Ezekiel. We and our hearers once belonged to the valley of dry bones, but have been raised with Christ on the third day. How could we settle for less—or crave more—than this ordinary ministry in this extraordinary age of redemptive history?

Lack of vitality cannot be solved by trying to balance “dead orthodoxy” with charismatic emphases or slick marketing. In fact, “dead orthodoxy” is actually an oxymoron. It is not a result of having the Word without the Spirit, for that is impossible. As Calvin reminds us, “Wherever we see the word of God sincerely preached and heard, wherever we see the sacraments administered according to the institution of Christ, there we cannot have any doubt that the Church of God has some existence.”14 “Wherever the Word is rightly preached and the sacraments are properly administered”: that oftrepeated confessional refrain expresses the clear teaching of Scripture as to the location of the Spirit’s presence among his people. God is committed to dwelling among his people—this is one of the central themes of Scripture, especially in the prophetic literature—but he will do so only through an incarnate Mediator and through ordinary, physical means. The demand for a direct experience with God in our midst apart from these means is an overly realized eschatology. That is, it demands in the present that which God promises us in the future. Not content with faith (which waits upon God’s faithfulness), it is an erotic craving, a demand.

No matter how desperately we long to have our faith exchanged for sight, we must never turn from the Living God to idols because we couldn’t wait for the Age to Come. “For we were saved in this hope, but hope that is MODERN REFORMATION

seen is not hope; for why does one still hope for what he sees?” (Rom. 8:24).

Paul said, “Faith comes by hearing,” not by seeing, experiencing, praising, singing, loving, serving, deciding, feeling or striving. God has selected the Word as his means of implanting faith and the ear as the human organ of reception. Faith comes by hearing because in the preached Word the sinner is made aware of his or her lost estate and, just when all hope is lost, the Redeemer’s voice is heard, bestowing his forgiveness, justification, and sanctification by union with himself.

Through that preaching, the Holy Spirit grants faith in the life-giving Son, and this union with Christ supplies every single gift which God has for every single adopted heir. There are no first-class churches and Christians who have been able to go beyond the ordinary ministry of Word, Sacrament, and discipline, and live a fuller, deeper, more “victorious” life in the Spirit by extraordinary means. By virtue of their union with Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit, all believers share in common “the riches of God’s grace which he lavished on us in Christ Jesus” (Eph. 2:7), since the Father “has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ” (Eph. 1:3).

If every spiritual blessing is given through the ordinary ministry of Word and Sacrament, what is left for ostensibly “extraordinary” works of the Spirit? To

be sure, it would seem that God works more remarkably through his ordinary ministry in some times and places than in others, but this belongs to his secret working.

The reason is to be found not in any alleged distinction between ordinary ministry and times of revival, as if the Holy Spirit was more active or present in the latter, but resides in the private chambers of his own sovereign freedom. Meanwhile, we attend to the promise, which assures us that as long as the Word is proclaimed properly and the Sacraments are administered correctly according to Christ’s institution, there will most surely be a signs-and-wonders ministry, as those who are spiritually dead are raised, the sick are healed, those who mourn are comforted, the poor are made rich, and the weak are made strong. The world will demand the extraordinary: either in terms of what we can feel, or see, or experience, or know. But the believer, relying on a promise rather than on a beatific vision, will know that the place “where the action is,” the locus of the Spirit’s activity in resurrection power, is the proclamation of Christ in Word and Sacrament. Faith comes by hearing the preached Word. “He who has ears, let him hear.” MR Dr. Michael S. Horton, a member of the Council of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals is associate professor of historical theology at Westminster Theological Seminary in Escondido, California.

THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY Nathan O. Hatch (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989)

In this prize-winning book on American religious history, Notre Dame professor Nathan O. Hatch offers a provocative reassessment of religion and culture in the early days of the American republic, arguing that during this period American Christianity was democratized. The importance of ministers being sent by a constituted authority was minimized and selfpromotion became increasingly important.

B-HAT-1 Paperback, $16.00. To order call (800) 956–2644

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Battling “A Whole Babel of Extravagance”: CONFESSIONAL RESPONSES TO AMERICAN REVIVALISM LAWRENCE R. RAST, JR. “The system of New Measures lacks affinity whatever with the life of the Reformation, as embodied in the Augsburgh Confession and the Heidelbergh Catechism. It could not have found favor in the eyes of Zwingli or Calvin. Luther would have denounced it in the most unmerciful terms.”1 These are the words of John W. Nevin, and he is right. The revivalistic system of “new measures,” systematized and popularized by evangelist Charles G. Finney in early to middle nineteenth-century America, has little or no connection with the historic Christian Church.

American revivalism is an aberration peculiar to the United States—though, unfortunately, its export continues to increase.

On the other hand, confessional, Reformational Christianity has also had its defenders in America. This article will look at the confessional responses to revivalism offered by John W. Nevin (German Reformed) and Charles Porterfield Krauth (Lutheran). In the face of enormous pressure to accommodate their theology and practice to the prevailing American mood, these two nineteenth-century theologians articulated a Christological ecclesiology of the Church that was grounded in history.

They simultaneously rejected revivalistic theology and practice as contrary to true Christianity.

John Williamson Nevin John W. Nevin was reared Presbyterian, studied at Union College, and fell under the influence of revivalism. He later studied and taught at Princeton, as well as at Allegheny Seminary in Pittsburgh. Over the years Nevin’s position regarding American Protestantism slowly changed, particularly in response to the use of Finney’s 18

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“new measures.” With the publication of his book The Anxious Bench, in 1843, Nevin broke with the American evangelical tradition and called on the German churches to resist the pressure to conform to the new religious spirit that was overtaking the land.

Upstar t sects have set themselves to take possession if possible of the entire field in this way, on the principle that the old organizations are corrupt and deserve to be destroyed. Their reliance of course in this work of Reformation, is placed largely on New Measures! Thus a whole Babel of extravagance has been let loose upon the community, far and wide, in the name of religion, one sect vying with another in the measure of its irregularities.2 MODERN REFORMATION

The temptation to conform to the seemingly successful efforts of the revivalists confronted the German churches. When challenged by the extreme psychological methods employed by the revivalists, Nevin noted that it was difficult to find any church that had not succumbed to the enticement that the “new measures” offered over against so-called “dead” and “formal” religion.

The primary target of Nevin’s polemics was Benjamin Kurtz, who championed the “new measures” in the Church of Luther. Against Kurtz, Nevin sought to demonstrate the difference between genuine and counterfeit revivals. He rejected the charge that in exposing the “anxious bench” 3 he repudiated all evangelical religious endeavors such as Sunday schools, prayer meetings, and missionary work. These ventures, he maintained, reflected the true spirit of revival and as such did not depend upon the system of the bench for their positive effects or survival. The system of the bench fought against the life of Christianity.

The truth is, this system, as we have said, has a life and spirit of its own… . A false theory of religion is involved in it, which cannot fail to work itself out and make itself felt, in many hurtful results, wherever it gains footing in the Church. No religious community can grow and prosper, in a solid way, where it is allowed to have any considerable authority; because it will always stand in the way of those deeper and more silent forms of action, by which alone it is possible for this end to be accomplished.4 The system with which the bench is at war is the system of the catechism. Nevin, having been trained in the Larger and Shorter Catechisms of the Westminster Assembly, and looking back to the unrest that the revivalists of the earlier part of the century had caused in his own life, found in the catechism—be it Presbyterian, German Reformed, or Lutheran—the pure and certain route for the life of Christianity to take hold of people and integrate them into the collective life of the Church.

The system of the catechism stemmed from the historical Church and bore in itself the rooted religious consciousness of the Christian Church. The system of the bench, with its confusion and use of false psychological methods for conversion, replaced the work of the Spirit with human decision. In contrast, the system of the catechism, through the faithful ministrations of the representatives of Christ, quietly cultivated the life of the Christian. For Nevin the bench incorporated in itself the essence of individualism at the expense of the organic life of the Church. In the final analysis he found the two systems entirely irreconcilable;

ALTAR CALLS AND EFFECTUAL CALLS

by Sam Hamstra, Jr.

The “altar call” is a decisionist technique designed to lead an individual to a new level of commitment to Jesus Christ. It employs an external activity to confirm an internal impulse.

The typical altar call is an invitation by a preacher to believe in Jesus and to confirm that decision by “coming forward” to a predetermined location as a visible manifestation of the invisible decision, and for further instruction and prayer.

The Origin of the Altar Call The earliest record of the altar call is found in the late eighteenth century among congregations of the Methodist Episcopal Church.1 In the Anglican architectural tradition, the area before the communion table, at the front of the sanctuary, was called the altar. Occasionally the preacher called awakened sinners to the front of the sanctuary, that is, to the altar. Some years later Methodists organized camp meetings with an “anxious or mourner’s bench” replacing the altar. Awakened sinners were invited to come to the “anxious bench” (the front pew or row of chairs) to receive specific instruction toward repentance and faith, while the remainder of the congregation tarried in prayer specifically for the mourners. The apparent success of this technique led to its adoption by nearly every itinerant evangelist of the Second Great Awakening, including the infamous Charles Finney. In addition to resident pastors inviting itinerant evangelists to their pulpits, though, many resident pastors themselves also began to conclude their sermons with altar calls. Pressured by the numerical success of the itinerants and/or by church members who sincerely desired a work of the Holy Spirit in the congregation, these men adopted what came to be called the “new measures” of the itinerant evangelist.

For the Ar minian Finney, as for other proponents of the altar call, the preacher is a persuader who must employ whatever means are necessary to win the lost for Christ. For the confessional opponents of the altar calls, the

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preacher is a proclaimer of good news who humbly expects God to call effectually the listener to true faith.2 This conviction was not an excuse for cold, heartless preaching or the basis for a lack of passion for lost souls. Instead, it affirmed that conversion is dependent on God’s gift of regeneration. The Spirit moves when he wills, but God has made it clear that the Spirit does not work apart from the Word, so the preacher’s task is to proclaim the Word.

The Reformation Alternative If Reformation Christians are convinced by the arguments of their predecessors, how then should they evangelize? Evangelistic methods may vary but each one employed should be consistent with at least four biblical principles. First, evangelistic effor ts should reflect humble dependence upon God as the author and finisher of salvation. We know that before Christ we were dead in sin, but God loved us, chose us, and effectually called us so that as awakened sinners we could hear the Gospel and respond with repentance and faith. We are justified. We also know that human efforts will not keep us in Christ; rather God who began the good work will bring it to completion. Our evangelistic efforts should reflect these concerns and therefore not attempt what only God can accomplish.

Second, evangelistic efforts by Reformation Christians should reflect confidence in the power of the Gospel, especially that proclaimed by the preacher or evangelist. We know that faith comes through the hearing of the Gospel. We believe that God is working in the hearts and lives of those whom in love he has predestined to be adopted as his children through Jesus Christ. We trust that the proclaimed Gospel will fall upon the ears of sinners empowered by God’s Spirit to respond with repentance and faith.

Third, our evangelistic efforts should assume there is always more than what meets the eye. On one hand, the divine order of salvation begins behind the scenes with God’s election that leads to calling, justification, sanctification, and finally glorification. These gracious acts of God are not unveiled until an individual receives Christ. On the other hand, Jesus, in the parable of the sower, warned against assuming that everyone who professes faith in Christ is a regenerated believer. We should therefore resist efforts to quantify evangelism.

Fourth, our evangelistic efforts should reflect a deep commitment to the regular ministry of the

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where one flourished, the other would fail, and vice versa.

For Nevin, the bench fought against the true work of the Reformation and subsumed the life of Anabaptistic radicalism within itself. Thus, those who held to the system of the bench compromised the true work of the Reformers, particularly Luther, for the bench represented the worst of extremism. And yet, amazingly enough, aber ration from the churchly heritage of the Reformation was occurring with the most disastrous effects in the Lutheran Church. So far had the Lutherans of the United States departed from the communion of Luther that their right to designate themselves as the heirs of Luther was seriously in question.

Those who are actively laboring to bring the Church of Luther, in this country, into subjection to the system, cannot be said to be true to his memory or name. The challenge, Why Are You a Lutheran?, is one they would do well to consider. It is most certain that the interest they are pushing forward, in this view, is not Lutheranism in any sense that agrees with the true historical life of the Church… .5 From Nevin’s arguments in the Anxious Bench one can glean that his chief concern was not with the use or abuse of the bench, but with the idea that the bench represented in itself. The bench was the invention of sectarian groups, intent on destroying the life of the Churches through the false psychological, man-made means of bringing individual persons to a crisis point in their lives. The bench embodied the prevailing particularism of American evangelicalism over the organic life of the Church which assimilated the person into the mystical body of Christ.

The dangers of the bench were present and real, but instead of expending his efforts only in attacking the bench, Nevin proposed the positive system of the catechism. His exposition embraces many of Christianity’s doctrines. Man is born in sin, not because of his sinful actions, but due to his organic relation to Adam himself; Adam was the man and as such encompassed all humanity. The only provision that can be made for the redemption of man is for Christ to take on human flesh. The collective principle applies to the means through which the individual is brought into affiliation with the life of Christ. Thus, the Church is not a mere aggregation of like-minded individuals, but is the very organic life of Christ, the means of salvation.

The Church then works to ensure that those brought into the living organism grow and develop along with it, primarily through the administration of the Sacraments.

Corollary to the importance of the Sacraments is the ministry. In contrast to the revivalists, who merely seek MODERN REFORMATION

to force a conversion experience and then move on, the ministers of Christ, the very ambassadors of God, through patient and faithful ministrations seek to build up Christ’s body in the perfecting of the saints. Thus, despite the revivalists’ protestations to the contrary, the system of the catechism is no mere dead, formal organization, more concerned with outward forms than the life of piety. It is the very living and growing body through which Christ continues his work on earth.

Yet, always lying behind Nevin’s thought, was the reality of the American scene, with its continual fracturing of the church. He agonized particularly over the sectarian principle of subjectivism, which he held was encompassed in the appeal so frequently made to individual freedom. “With all his talk of following the Bible, the sectarian means by it simply, in the end, his own sense of what the Bible teaches. The Bible must be interpreted in some way; in order to enter any living mind, it must pass through a living medium of thought already at hand.”6 In the place of the teaching of the historical Church as embodied in the Apostles’ Creed, the sectarians set up their own reason as the judge for the tr uth of Christianity. This view departed from the true life of Christianity as expressed in its history, its creeds, and tradition, and supplanted it with the individual’s subjective view. The sectarianism of the United States distressed Nevin and thus he sought to overturn it, not merely by returning to the older confessional standards, but through rediscovering the tr ue life of the Reformation. There was only one possible way that the “diseases of Protestantism” could be cured, and that was in a reinvigorating of the evangelical ideas of the Reformation. Reinvigoration, however, did not equal repristination; it would not be a mere replica of the formulas and institutions of the sixteenth century. It would be instead an historically informed development of principles of the Reformation: justification by grace alone through faith alone, sola Scriptura, the freedom from the authority of the individual, as the Reformers outlined them.7 The controversy between Nevin and Kurtz over the anxious bench and its implications for the doctrinal positions of the Christian Church bore fruit. A movement was afoot in the Lutheran Church toward a stronger confessional expression in accord with the position of the historical Lutheran Church of Germany.

This movement, aided by Nevin, would rediscover the distinct Lutheran understanding of the mode of Christ’s presence in the Lord’s Supper and come to affect seriously the dominant position of the English-speaking Lutheran Church. The influence of Nevin and the Mercersburg theology8 on the American Lutherans was beginning to make itself felt.

Church, the mother of the faithful. A newborn baby is not kept among the specialists in the delivery room, but is quickly brought to his or her mother’s breast for nurture. So, too, with the born again believer. We should not usher newborn believers to an altar of strangers but into the family of God where they can receive a sense of belonging, empowerment for living, and spiritual growth unto maturity in Christ. Our evangelistic efforts, therefore, should reflect a confidence in the regular ministry of the Church that is witnessed by a speedy introduction of new converts to the local church.

Looking to the Local Church As a teenager I par ticipated in a denominational youth convention held in Bozeman, Montana. During one meeting, as I sat near the back row of a large amphitheater that later in the evening would host a country rodeo, a speaker-musician named Jim Bolden challenged me to believe in Jesus Christ. He sang “Right now!

Right now! Commit your life right now!” I praise God that, by his grace, I responded to that invitation to become a disciple of Jesus Christ.

My instructions at that time, as I remember them, were to share my decision with my pastor or elders.

So, I went home, attended the “pastor’s class” already in session, and publicly professed my faith before my elders and my church.

I wonder if I would have responded to an invitation to rise from my seat and go forward. A few years before that memorable convention, Billy Graham invited me to come forward before a capacity crowd at McCormick Place in Chicago. I thought seriously about responding then, but remained in my seat. I also wonder if Jim Bolden had offered an altar call and I had responded, what difference it would have made. Yes, the convention committee would have had statistics of “decisions” that they could have shared with the bureaucrats in the denomination. Yes, I could have joined a mailing list to receive discipleship material from the denominational youth office, a practice that could have been viewed as a lack of confidence in the effectiveness of my local church.

But, Jim Bolden did not offer an altar call. He encouraged me to return to my local church. By God’s grace I believed and by God’s grace I have been kept in the faith.

Now I preach each week. There have been times when I was tempted to conclude a message with an altar call. In retrospect, I sense that the

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temptation flowed from my own weakness: my desire for visible assurance that God was using me as an instrument of his grace. It may also have stemmed from pride, the chief occupational hazard of preachers. Whatever the motivation, I am determined to leave decisionist techniques with others whose theology allows such measures. At the risk of sounding elitist, my Reformed theology encourages the simple proclamation of the Gospel with humble dependence upon the triune God and him alone. With that conviction, I pray for humility of mind to submit to the Word of God and humility of ambition to desire nothing but an encounter between the living Christ and the people in the pew.3 In the end, my preaching “may not be wise or persuasive,” but I pray that, by God’s grace, it demonstrates the power of the Holy Spirit.4 — Dr. Sam Hamstra, Jr., who holds a Ph.D. from Marquette University, is pastor of Palos Heights Christian Reformed Church (CRC), in Palos Heights, Illinois.

Charles Porterfield Krauth The prevailing mind of Lutheranism in America as the nineteenth century moved toward its midpoint was decidedly antagonistic to the Lutheran orthodoxy of the seventeenth century. However, during the second third of the nineteenth century a doctrinal change in the Lutheran Church started to unfold. A movement that looked back to the Church’s historic confessional stance began to emerge and make its presence felt.

The confessional movement was influenced by two distinct groups. First, the great waves of immigration from Ger many and Scandinavia brought church members into the United States who were far more conscious of their Lutheranism. The other source was indigenous and, in line with Nevin, grew from a disenchantment with the prevailing revivalistic ideas.

These two groups provided the impetus to challenge the prevailing Lutheranism of the United States. They found the American evangelicalism of Benjamin Kurtz and Samuel Simon Schmucker unsatisfactory and sought to develop a Lutheranism that would be true to both its history and its doctrine, and which centered on the person and work of Christ and the Sacraments.

The main Lutheran leader in the American confessional revival of the nineteenth century in the 22

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United States was Charles Porterfield Krauth. Born March 17, 1823, in Martinsburg, Virginia, Krauth entered Pennsylvania College in 1834 and the Gettysburg Seminary in 1839. While at the Gettysburg Seminary, Krauth was Samuel Simon Schmucker’s student and lear ned the basics of American Lutheranism. 9 Schmucker had distinguished himself in his Fraternal Appeal, in which he offered a generic creed, based upon what he believed were the fundamental articles of faith upon which all Protestants could agree and thus unite.10 There is no indication that Krauth diverged in the least from the views of his instructor when he assumed his first pastorate in Maryland in 1841; while there he vigorously busied himself with the pursuits of Protestant evangelicalism, including protracted meetings and temperance work. Soon, however, he would initiate certain studies that laid the groundwork for later confrontations with the proponents of a less confessional American Lutheranism.

During the last part of the 1840s, Krauth read more of Nevin and of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Reformers, and became convinced that the Lutheranism of nineteenth-century America was not true to its historical roots. In the end, Krauth determined, like Nevin, that Christology occupies the center of Christian doctrine. Also key to Krauth’s thinking was the nature of the Church and its place in history. In “The Relation of Our Confessions to the Reformation,” he seconds Nevin’s thinking about the historical Church.

In contrast to Schmucker and Kurtz, who saw Rome as anti-Christian, Krauth traced the lineage of the Lutheran Church from the early church through Roman Catholicism out of which then emerged the Reformation. Roman Catholicism was to be reformed, not supplanted.

The spirit of the Reformation was no destroying angel, who sat and scowled with a malignant joy over the desolation which spread around. It was overshadowed by the wings of that spirit who brooded indeed on the waste of waters and the wildness of chaos, but only that he might unfold the germs of life that lay hidden there, and bring forth light and order from the darkness of the yet formless and void creation.11 In this principle lies the idea of a conservative reformation, not evangelical radicalism; and from this it follows that: It is vastly more important, then, to know what the Refor mation retained than what it overthrew; for the overthrow of error, though often an indispensable prerequisite to the MODERN REFORMATION

establishment of the truth, is not truth itself; it may clear the foundation simply to substitute one error for another, perhaps greater for less… . The overthrow of Romanism was not its object at all.12 Like Nevin, Krauth finds error in Rome, but Rome is no more dangerous than those rationalists who extol their own ability to interpret the Scriptures apart from the common confession of the Church. The purpose of the historical confessions, the ecumenical creeds, and the entire Book of Concord is to guard against individualistic rationalism. Furthermore, these writings are not merely histories of the Reformation; they “are parts of the reformation itself… . In them you are brought into immediate contact with that sublime convulsion itself.”

Confident that Luther would not feel at home in the present Lutheran Church in the United States, John Nevin celebrated the fact that with the emergence of the confessional Lutherans a time was coming when the Lutheran Church would move away from the rationalism and individualism of the sects, much as he hoped for in his own German Reformed Church. Thus, with the two antitheses working against and for one another, Protestantism could complete itself; apart from one another they are always lacking.

It [the Refor med Church] can become complete, (as Lutheranism, also,) only by recognizing the weight that actually belongs to its twin-born counterpoise, and so leaning toward it as to come with it finally into the power of a single life, that shall be neither one nor the other, separately taken, but both at once thus raised to their highest sense.13 Krauth, however, did not view the Reformed in the same manner as Nevin regarded the Lutherans. Though Krauth appreciated Nevin’s historical and theological acumen, he disagreed with the position of Mercersburg and the Reformed on the mode of Christ’s presence in the Sacrament. While Nevin viewed the Lutheran Church as a necessary component of organic Christianity as it developed toward its ideal expression, Krauth saw the Lutheran Church, as embodied in her confessional writings, as the purest expression of Christ’s Church on ear th.

Krauth, though respectful of other denominations, sought to correct their errors and bring them into the truth as professed by the Lutheran Church.

Church government; Evangelical as against all legalism and rationalism, against all restricted atonement and arbitrary limitation of God’s love; and by a historical necessity, created not by herself but by her enemies, she is Lutheran, over against all perversions, mutilations, and misunderstandings of the Word under whatever name they may come, though that name be Reformed, Protestant, Evangelical, Catholic, or Christian, or by false assumption Lutheran itself. We claim, in a word, as the explanation of the being of the Lutheran Church, and of her right to be, that Lutheranism is pure Christianity… .14 One must grant the disagreements between Nevin and Krauth. The former was influenced significantly by Hegel, the latter tended toward mere repristination.

Even in the midst of their disagreements, however, they retained the highest respect for one another as theologians and Christians. And their fundamental ag reement on the g reatest danger to or thodox Christianity never wavered: American sectarianism with its revivalistic practice.

The cause of the Reformation was endangered more by its own caricature, namely the wild fanaticism of the Anabaptists, than the opposition of Rome. Luther saved it, not by truckling compromise, but by boldly facing and unmasking the false spirit, so that all the world might see that Lutheran Christianity was one thing, and wild Phrygian Montanism, with its pretended inspiration, quite another.15 MR Prof. Rast specializes in the history of Christianity in America, at Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where he is also supervisor of the S.T.M. program. He is assistant editor of Concordia Theological Quarterly.

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A Sixth Sola?

JOHN R. MUETHER

It was Cyprian, the third century bishop, who is generally credited with the formulation, “outside of the Church there is no salvation.” He compared the Church in the world to the ark in the flood. “If there was any escape for one who was outside the ark of Noah, there will be as much for one who is found to be outside the Church.” Since there was only one ark, so there is only one Church, and it was the Christian’s only hope. (The ark/Church relationship often survives in church 24

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architecture even where it does not survive in churchmen’s memories.) For Cyprian, extra ecclesia nulla salus literally meant that salvation was impossible outside of membership in the institutional Church.

Sacerdotalism?

As the doctrine of the church developed in medieval Catholicism, salvation took on a sacerdotal character.

Viewed as the perennial incarnation of Christ, the church was the automatic dispenser of the gift of salvation through its sacraments. By themselves, the sacraments granted salvation to the partaker ex opere operato.

The Reformers were quick to reject sacerdotalism. God alone is the actor in our salvation. He works salvation in his elect, through the redemptive work of Jesus Christ, the one mediator between God and man, and the efficacious power of the Spirit working directly upon human souls. Contrary to medieval Catholic dogma, there was nothing mechanical or magical about the instrumentality of the church. In short, the sacerdotal confusion of the mediation of Christ with the mediation of the church was a denial of solus Christus.

Their reform of the doctrine of the Church, however, did not prompt the Refor mers to jettison Cyprian’s for mula.

Instead, they sought to recover it, freeing it from the abuses of sacerdotal interpretation. In his Large Catechism, Martin Luther wrote, “But outside the Christian church (that is, where the Gospel is not) there is no forgiveness, and hence no holiness… . Therefore they remain in eternal wrath and damnation… . Outside of [the Christian church] no one can come to the Lord Corey Wilkinson, scratchboard

Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus. There is no salvation outside the Church. In the good old days of American religious warfare these were perhaps fighting words for many Protestants, as they smacked of the mysterious and repressive haughtiness of Catholic sacerdotalism. Today, claims of the Church’s exclusivity seem quaint and inconceivable, not least among Roman Catholics themselves, who are given to speak of even atheists being “anonymous Christians,” and Eastern Orthodox and Protestant communicants as “separated brethren.”

Such incredulity testifies to Americans’ ignorance of church history, because the statement goes back to the ancient Church. Nor are such claims the exclusive property of Rome, because they were frequently invoked by the Reformers.

Beyond historical illiteracy, such claims’ incoherence betrays the biases of our anti-ecclesiastical age.

MODERN REFORMATION

Jesus.” Cyprian’s teaching was put in no less striking terms by Calvin in his Catechism: Minister: Why do you subjoin the forgiveness of sins to the Church?

Child: Because no one obtains it, unless he has previously been united with the people of God, cultivates this unity with the body of Christ up to the end, and thus testifies that he is a true member of the Church.

Minister: You conclude from this that outside the Church there is no salvation but only damnation and ruin?

Child: Certainly. Those who disrupt from the body of Christ and split its unity into schisms, are quite excluded from the hope of salvation, so long as they remain in dissidence of this kind.

KEY FIGURES OF AMERICAN REVIVALISM AIMEE SEMPLE MCPHERSON 1890–1944

While rejecting the claim that the church functions as a subject of salvation, the Reformers still upheld the instrumentality of the Church. Christ has faithfully served the Father’s purpose to call out a people to himself, and the benefits of his redemption are extended among the Church that the Father has called and the Spirit has blessed. So Ursinus comments in his Commentary on the Heidelberg Catechism: “outside the church there is no Saviour, and hence no salvation.” Similarly, in the Second Helvetic Confession of 1562 we read: “we deny that those can live before God who do not stand in fellowship with the true Church of God, but separate themselves from it.”

The Invisible Church?

Simply put, there can be no Christian life apart from the Church, according to the Reformers. No one can come to faith alone nor live by faith alone. Our faith is not from the Church, it is a gift from God (Eph. 2:8). But it comes through the Church, through whom the wisdom of God is made known (Eph. 3:10).

But what did the Reformers mean by the Church? It is rightly claimed by low church Protestants that the Reformers developed the distinction between the visible and invisible Church in part to refute the sacerdotal claims of Catholics. The invisible (to us), universal Church is “the whole number of the elect” from all ages (WCF 25.1), the “church of the firstborn, whose names are written in heaven” (Heb 12:23). The visible Church consists of confessing Christians and their children (WCF 25.2). The latter, of course, contains sinners and hypocrites, and is thus always, in this age, an imperfect embodiment of that Church visible only to God. This distinction is often misunderstood, and contemporary interpreters in evangelical circles make more of it than the Reformers intended. The Reformers

McPherson became Pentecostal at 17 under the influence of preacher Robert Semple, whom she married the next year. After her husband died while they were missionaries in China, she returned to North America as a Full Gospel preacher. After two unsuccessful marriages, she began to travel more frequently, crisscrossing the continent many times. Known as a captivating preacher, she was the first woman to preach on the radio (1920). In 1927, she established a Pentecostal denomination, the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel. These “four pillars of her denomination were: Jesus—Savior, Baptizer by the Holy Spirit, healer of human infirmities, and returning King of Kings.” Today, there are 9,000 congregations in this denomination.4 She suffered a nervous breakdown in 1930 and died in 1944, apparently of a drug overdose.

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never suggested that the visible Church was of little or no importance. As the manifestation of the invisible Church to the world in time and place, the visible Church, though imperfect, remains the true Church, because it displays the marks of the Church. And it is the only Church that we can see and with which we can have fellowship. We have no Gnostic recourse to any other church than the visible Church.

Further, since the elect are in the invisible Church, to say that outside the invisible Church there is no salvation, is simply to say that outside of salvation there is no salvation.

So to apply Cyprian’s formula to the invisible Church is to render the expression a mere tautology. Lest we make that mistake, the tie to the visible Church is made explicit in the Westminster Confession of Faith:

released in a uniform and predictable way at the command of the church, as the sacerdotalists claim.

To be sure, there are cases of individuals who are saved and yet are not united to the visible Church (we need only think of the penitent thief on the cross). But the Confession understands these situations as exceptional, and no Christian ought to presume to be the recipient of God’s extraordinary operation. We have only the outward and ordinary means, which he dispenses only through his Church. For the Westminster divines, the Church remains as essential an instrument for the salvation of God’s people as the Word, Sacraments, and prayer. A. A. Hodge comments: “God requires every one who loves Christ to confess him in the regular way of joining the community of his people and taking the sacramental badges of discipleship.”

“The visible church, which is also catholic or universal under the gospel (not confined to one nation, as before under the law), consists of all those throughout the world that profess the true religion; and of their children: and is the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ, the house and family of God, out of which there is no ordinary possibility of salvation” [emphasis added].

The Church Our Mother To explain the centrality of the Church, Cyprian also employed the metaphor of the motherhood of the Church. “You cannot have God for your Father,” he wrote, “unless you have the Church for your Mother.”

This image also was embraced by the Reformers, especially by Calvin:

The Confession’s clarification is accompanied by the qualification: “no ordinary possibility of salvation.”

What does “ordinary” mean? Does the Confession create a loophole in the Reformed teaching on the Church’s necessity through which one could drive busloads of crusade-attending evangelicals? By no means. “Ordinary” must be understood in a precise way, and light is shed on this from the Westminster Shorter Catechism, Question 88: Q. What are the outward and ordinary means whereby Christ communicateth to us the benefits of redemption?

A. The outward and ordinary means whereby Christ communicateth to us the benefits of redemption are, his ordinances, especially the Word, sacraments, and prayer; all which are made effectual to the elect for salvation.

The Divines speak of the means of grace as “ordinary means” of salvation. They are “ordinary” in the sense that this is how God is pleased to work in his elect.

They are the Christian’s regular diet, the diligent pursuit of which God has promised to bless. Thus, “ordinary” is not a qualifier that expands options for the Christian.

We are not free to pursue other means of salvation.

Rather, it is to protect the freedom of the Spirit of God to operate extraordinarily, when and where he chooses. It guards us from assuming that his grace is on tap, to be 26

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“[L]et us learn even from the simple title “mother” how useful, indeed how necessary, it is that we should know [the church]. For there is no other way to enter life unless this mother conceive us in her womb, give us birth, nourish us at her breast, and lastly, unless she keep us under her care and guidance until, putting off mortal flesh, we become like the angels. Our weakness does not allow us to be dismissed from her school until we have been pupils all our lives. Furthermore, away from her bosom one cannot hope for any forgiveness of sins or any salvation.1 Calvin’s recognition of human weakness and frailty, nurtured and attended by an enduring and all-embracing mother, carries important implications for the Church today that are frequently overlooked. Consider, for example, the current emphasis on the doctrine of adoption in Christian counseling. The line of reasoning goes much like this: “Yes, you have been abused, by your family, by your friends, even perhaps by your church. And you may have reason to conclude that no one is trustworthy. That is what God wants you to learn. God is teaching you that no one is trustworthy. You must distrust people in order that in your brokenness, when you learn that everything else will fail you, you can understand that God alone is to be trusted. And so, orphan, go home to Father, and live like sons and daughters.”

Is this the biblical doctrine of adoption? What is MODERN REFORMATION

dangerously reductionistic in this logic is the implication that adoption is the act of joining a single-parent family.

Yet the very chapter of Paul that includes the principle proof text for adoption (Gal 4:5-7) argues also for the motherhood of the Church: “But the Jerusalem that is above is free, and she is our mother” (v. 26). Calvin comments on this verse: “The Church is the mother, and she has the milk and the food that the Father has provided to nourish his adopted children.” He concludes: “This is why the Church is called the mother of believers. And certainly, he who refuses to be a son of the Church desires in vain to have God as his Father. For it is only through the ministry of the Church that God begets sons for Himself and brings them up until they pass through adolescence and reach manhood.”

Current thinking on adoption, in short, is too often laced with the individualistic and antinomian assumptions of our age. To choose simply to live on your own (as an orphan) or to trust in God alone (as a son) is to distort the biblical picture, because, as Calvin put it, we are sons also of the Church. We are to trust in God alone, but that trust is never alone. It is among the community of believers, the Church of Christ, under whose discipline that trust is cultivated and nurtured. In other words, just as sanctification is a consequence of justification, so also is adoption by the Church a consequence of our adoption by God. “Jerusalem is our mother,” and it is her duty to feed her children. God has entrusted to her the spiritual growth of his people.

To be sure, most American Christians will make some beg r udging acknowledgement of church membership, even submitting to the baptism of the church. But increasingly they are drawn to lower common denominator parachurch institutions that draw their loyalties away from the Church. For example, one of the promises of a Promise Keeper is “supporting the mission of the church.” But that support is undermined when one also promises to reach “beyond any racial or denominational barriers to demonstrate the power of biblical unity.” In its implicit moral equivalence of the evils of racism and denominationalism, Promise Keepers restricts the mission of the Church by preventing the Church from cultivating spiritual maturity through theological reflection.

This inclusive, “big tent” ecclesiology finds fuller expression in Westminster professor John Frame’s recent book, Evangelical Reunion. Because we live in postdenominational times, Frame suggests that we must realign our priorities by establishing “transdenominational loyalties.” He writes: “Presbyterians ought to be good Christians first and good Presbyterians second, without neglecting either loyalty.” This logic is to pit our Father against our mother. We have no Church beside the visible Church. It is her doctrine and worship

KEY FIGURES OF AMERICAN REVIVALISM CHARLES FULLER 1887–1968

Converted at 29, Fuller enrolled at the Bible Institute of Los Angeles (later Biola). As a convert to R. A. Torrey’s dispensationalism. Fuller ran into conflict with the Presbyterian Church at which he taught Sunday school. He thus led his followers out of that church to found an independent Baptist congregation, which he pastored from 1925 to 1932.

An early champion of radio preaching, he ultimately devoted himself to this almost exclusively, through his “The Pilgrim Hour” and “The Old-Fashioned Revival Hour” programs. Heard by over twenty million faithful listeners at their peak popularity in the early 1940s, the programs were a mix of Christcentered preaching and “decisionalism,” combined with nostalgic and emotional songs and letters from listeners. A 1950s survey reported that “almost twothirds of the Fuller audience were over forty-five years old and…[one-third] had no church affiliation.”5 Radio stations in this period typically gave airtime to both Protestants and Roman Catholics on Sundays.

Due to institutional arrangements, though, mainline Protestants generally and Harry Emerson Fosdick particularly received the bulk of Protestant time.

Largely under the leadership of Fuller, the fundamentalists/evangelicals developed an independent network of stations, the forerunner of today’s Christian radio. Later in life, concerned about the next generation of revivalist preachers, Fuller joined with Harold John Ockenga, pastor of Park Street Congregational Church in Boston, to found FullerTheological Seminary in Pasadena (1947).

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we must uphold, and it is her peace and purity that we must maintain. And so a Presbyterian can be a good Christian only by being a good Presbyterian. In the same way, a Lutheran can be a good Christian only by being a good Lutheran. Good Christians are good churchmen.

Parachurch organizations have flourished in the fertile soil of American individualism. In Thomas Luckmann’s words, American Protestantism is an “invisible religion,” liberated from social attachment and devoid of institutional expression.2 The depressing polling data that confirms this is all too familiar to us. While 95% of Americans believe in God, 44% of them are neither members nor regular attendees of any church, and further, even those who attend church have increasingly tenuous commitments, switching churches like brands of laundry detergent. As the Gallup organization concluded, “large majorities churched and unchurched agree that ‘one should arrive at their religious beliefs independent of any church or synagogue.’”3 Church attendance becomes incidental to the Christian life, resulting in what some have called “churchless Christianity.”

It is often in the pursuit of an “Acts 2 Christianity,” a spontaneous and Spirit-filled Christian life, that contemporary Christians react against the stifling “organizationalism” of today’s churches. But ironically, that is to miss the very message of the story of Pentecost. Consider the masses that came to faith on that day. They were baptized and added to the Church (Acts 2:41), and then they immediately devoted themselves to the life of the Church, falling into the rhythm of observing the outward and ordinary means of g race (2:42). This is no Spirit-quenching institutionalization, but a manifestation of the order and unity in the Church that only the Spirit can provide.

Ecclesiastical Docetism As we noted, the Reformers embraced the centrality of the Church without the sacerdotal errors of Rome.

Still, we must concede that a high and necessary view of the Church will inevitably be mistaken for sacerdotalism in our low-church evangelical subculture. Indeed, if we are taking the Church as seriously in our day as Calvin and the Reformers did in theirs, we should expect that the false charge of sacerdotalism will gain currency.

On the other hand, those who level that charge ought to reflect on whether they are docetics. Duke University theologian William Willimon has observed that fundamentalists and liberals both share an embarrassment over the visible Church, and he rightly labels this impulse as docetic. In its ancient manifestation, Docetism claimed that Christ did not take on a fully human nature, but he only appeared human. In its modern form, docetics claim that the church is not really the body of Christ. Modern 28

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docetics would claim to love Christ all the while despising his body.

God’s gathering of his people—the Church—lies at the heart of our identity as Christians. He has decreed to save a people for himself for the revelation of his glory. And he has foreordained all the means by which such is to be accomplished. It is to the Church that Christ has entrusted this ministry for the gathering and perfecting of the saints. It is the Church that God graciously endows with the means of grace, and he is especially pleased to make the preaching of the Word an effectual means of accomplishing that end.

And it is the Church which has the structure and location where theological reflection is to take place. As Richard Lints has argued, theology belongs to the Church, and either will abandon the other only at great peril. It is the Church, and only the Church, that is the definer and defender of orthodoxy, through its creeds and confessions—not Christian radio or television, not the academy, not the Evangelical Theological Society or even the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals.

The Christian life is the ecclesial life. The Bible lets us imagine no other. Faith in Christ inevitably prompts life in the Church. As the Belgic Confession puts it, the Church is “an assembly of those who are saved, and outside of it there is no salvation” (Art. 28). Thus “no person of whatsoever state or condition he may be ought to withdraw from it, content to be by himself.” If we refuse to submit to its doctrine and discipline, we simply have no reason to think that we are saved.

Christians who seek to recover the theology of the Reformers in order to lead the Church into a modern Reformation are wise to reappropriate the “five solas” of the sixteenth century. In our anti-ecclesiastical context, we would do well also to consider a sixth sola. For any effort to renew our doctrine of God our Father, outside of whose love there is no salvation, will prove futile unless it is accompanied by a renewal of our doctrine of the Church our mother, outside of whose nurture there is no salvation. Sola Ecclesia. MR John Muether is the Director of the Library of Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando and the co-editor of the Nicotine Theological Journal.

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QUOTES “It makes no difference how you get a man to God, provided you get him there.”

—D. L. Moody, quoted in William McLoughlin, Billy Sunday Was His Real Name, 158.

[The circuit riders] evolved a kind of crude pietistic pragmatism with a single essential tenet: their business was to save souls as quickly and as widely as possible.

For this purpose, the elaborate theological equipment of an educated ministry was not only an unnecessary frill but in all probability a serious handicap; the only justification needed by the itinerant preacher for his limited stock of knowledge and ideas was that he got results, measurable in conversions. To this justification very little answer was possible.

— Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, 97.

As the crowds increased, Jesus said, “This is a wicked generation. It asks for a miraculous sign.”

— Luke 11:29 For more than 50 years, I have prayed for revival for our nation and its people. The need for revival is even more urgent today. Our society has an appetite for immorality and corruption that seems insatiable. As we approach the new millennium, the battle rages for the fate of our nation….

I am convinced that the biblical discipline of prayer with fasting is essential to winning this battle. Above all, it helps us to be rightly related to God in humility.

Fasting unleashes God’s supernatural power through our prayers, and I believe it is the key to meeting the requirements of 2 Chronicles 7:14… . I strongly encourage you to join us in this historic and vitally important focus on the spiritual needs of our country.

Ask God if you are one of the 2 million fasting intercessors He has impressed me to pray for since 1994.

…For myself, I have never enjoyed g reater fellowship and intimacy with God than during my 40day fasts. I have seen God honor our obedience to His call with extraordinary and miraculous answers to prayer… . This is not just another “project,” this is an urgency that directly effects [sic] you and the legacy you leave your children and your grandchildren.

— Bill Bright’s cover letter to “Fasting & Prayer ‘98” promotional literature [The man who has never experienced a medical or financial miracle] has either failed to grasp the points we have been making … about the operation of the kingdom or is not living according to the major principles we have been exploring.

— Pat Robertson, The Secret Kingdom: A Promise of Hope and Freedom in a World of Turmoil, 78.

The danger of mistaking our merely natural, though perhaps legitimate, enthusiasms for holy zeal, is always great.

— C. S. Lewis, “Meditation on the Third Commandment,” God in the Dock, 198.

From a metaphysical point of view, Russia and America are the same; the same dreary technological frenzy, the same unrestricted organization of the average man….When a boxer is regarded as a nation’s great man, when mass meetings attended by millions are looked on as a triumph … a question still haunts us like a specter: What for?—Whither?—And what then?

— Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 37.

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Revivalism and the Me Generation JOHN ARMSTRONG The decade of the nineties has witnessed a dramatic new interest in revivals. From reports out of Toronto during the early years of the decade, to college campus stirrings in 1995, and now from the excitement generated in Pensacola, Florida, growing numbers conclude we are presently in the throes of a mighty spiritual awakening. This “new” awakening, many insist, is not like any previously witnessed in American history. We are repeatedly told that this awakening is here, or at least in its nascent stages. Proponents even assure us that the crest of this new wave of revival will rise as tides of great blessing flood our land.

The evidence for these claims abounds. One television reporter says, “The greatest revival since Pentecost has recently begun.” A confident preacher tells us if we want to experience this new mighty move of God, we need to “step into the river of God which is powerfully flowing.” Only those who “quench the Spirit” will miss out on this new worldwide move of the Holy Spirit.

God? I even wonder to myself, “What will be the results of this kind of revival talk? More skepticism?

Even further confusion regarding the gospel itself ?”

The Los Angeles Times ran a well-written story several years ago with the caption: “God Is Up to Something, and It’s Big.” Religion writer Larry Stammer described what I have seen in my own travels across the country.

Stammer observed that, “For growing numbers of Christians, especially evangelicals and Pentecostals, there is a palpable sense that the kingdom of God is near, that God is up to something big—and that it is going to happen soon.”1 He noted that interest in the “literal return of the cosmic Christ” has often fostered wrong predictions. In spite of this recent history of failed prophetic speculations, Stammer wrote that a growing number of evangelicals are saying these times are different. Campus Crusade founder Bill Bright was

“God Is Up to Something”— But What?

I have been studying revival, from a biblical and historical perspective, for nearly three decades. I witnessed a brief college shower, or “visitation,” in 1970. I confess that I simply do not see this great move that so many talk about. Have I missed out on this new move of 30

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quoted in the same article, saying: “Through the years we’ve seen the harvest. We’ve see all these tens of millions of people respond to the Gospel. But … what’s happening today has been unprecedented, I’m sure, in all of history. I doubt there has ever been a time like this” (italics mine).

But what are the signs of the great revival these evangelicals speak about so enthusiastically? Stammer offered several answers from the evangelicals themselves—thousands attending Promise Keeper rallies and the 1997 Promise Keepers march on Washington; college campuses where students were then making public confessions; the fall of atheistic communism; racial reconciliation; growing movements of prayer and fasting worldwide; and the reports of unprecedented conversions in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Stammer adds, “And the approach of the year 2001— the third millennium—only serves to heighten expectations among believers that God will soon show himself in dramatic ways. Pat Robertson, speaking at Pray & Fast ‘95, openly stated the vision of most: “We’ve all expected that God is getting ready to send a mighty move of his Spirit upon the earth.”

A Historical Perspective A great deal of what is happening in our time can be explained by the history and phenomenon of Finneylike revivalism, the enduring bitter fruit of the later Second Great Awakening and the 1830s. Historians are almost universally agreed that the church in America was profoundly altered from that time to the present.

But there is actually much more to this new round of revivalistic movements than the old-fashioned revivalism of previous decades. To conclude that the sole explanation for all of this noise and excitement is “Finneyism” would be too easy a conclusion to draw, especially if you disag ree with the theological expostulations of Finney as profoundly historical Protestants do.

Some of what is happening, even where it could be viewed positively at times, can be simply explained by several major cultural factors of the ’90s. Whereas evangelical Christianity was once defined theologically, and was clearly driven by a desire to preach a message, now it is captive to the very spirit of our age. Gordon-Conwell theologian David Wells has demonstrated repeatedly how the Church of our time views people as consumers. The products in question, notes Wells, are “the activities, the experiences, the amenities, and the message of the Church.” The problem with all of this is that people are now coming to our evangelical churches, and to our revival meetings, not primarily due to interest in personal salvation by and from a holy God, but rather for how God can fulfill their voracious felt needs. If the evidence of several recent surveys is accurate at all we are not seeing

KEY FIGURES OF AMERICAN REVIVALISM ORAL ROBERTS 1918—

Born in Oklahoma, Roberts followed his father as a pastor in the Pentecostal Holiness Church. Convinced that he possessed the gift of healing, he started an independent evangelistic and healing organization in the late 1940s.

Through his successful utilization of radio and especially television, Roberts became one of the most recognized evangelists in America by the early 1960s. In 1968, he joined the United Methodist Church. In the last two decades, he has been best known for his controversial fund-raising tactics and claims of bizarre visions from God. He has claimed that a 900-foot Jesus assured him his university’s medical center would be completed on budget. Another time God allegedly told Roberts that he would die if many million dollars were not raised within a given period. Neither prophecy was fulfilled.

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a wide scale recovery of the power of the gospel. (In fact, one wonders how many who profess to be “born again” are really interested in the message of the Gospel at all, since most of them do not have even an elementary grasp of the facts of this liberating message!)

Why then are people coming to these huge “revival” events?

The answer would appear to be this: personal well-being. We are able to make all of this work precisely because evangelicals have learned well how to be successful as a religious movement. 2 This leads us to consider why this revival message and paradigm works so well in terms of moder n life and culture. How did we get to this point? What do “self,” and the present condition of things, have to do with these revivals?

church historian Sidney Mead that “the American denominations have successfully lent themselves to the sanctification of current existing expressions of the American way of life.”4 At the end of the last century liberalism was ascendant in the major Protestant denominations. Evangelical Christianity, often the cultural and theological result of revival movements earlier in the same century, sought to preserve truth within historic Protestantism.

This attempt led to ecclesiastical conflict in the early twentieth century. New denominations sprang up in protest while scores of independent mission agencies and non-churchbased institutions were born. Many of these have been used by God to write a missionary success story in this century. Publishing houses, schools, and the media have all helped to expand a burgeoning evangelical enterprise. But as we near the end of the century all is clearly not well within American evangelicalism.

“Not only does democracy make each man forget his ancestors, it hides his descendants from him, and divides him from his contemporaries; it continually turns him back into himself, and threatens, at last, to enclose him entirely in the solitude of his own heart.”

The Me Generation American life has always been individualistic. This is not new. The pattern is as old as America itself. This individualism was a direct reaction against Protestant life in Europe. It led these immigrants to develop a uniquely American way of thinking and feeling. The American desire for individual freedoms caused the French observer Alexis de Tocqueville to question how all of this disrupted the stream of what he called “time’s pattern.” He wrote: “Not only does democracy make each man forget his ancestors, it hides his descendants from him, and divides him from his contemporaries; it continually turns him back into himself, and threatens, at last, to enclose him entirely in the solitude of his own heart.”3 This uniquely American Protestant stress on the solitary person is not altogether bad, but this particular modern strand of the present decade has evolved into a rampant individualism that is profoundly narcissistic.

This self-oriented focus lends itself to some strange, anti-Christian and often bizarre emphases in the contemporary church. Much of this is akin to ancient Gnosticism, with its pursuit of the self through private revelation. Evangelicalism has increasingly followed such thought patterns, thereby proving accurate the words of 32

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The Triumph of Private Vision Theologian Ernst Troeltsch noted that the liberal Protestantism of his day advocated a “theology of subjective experience in contrast to the theology of objective revelation; the sole value it assigns to Jesus is that of serving as the original stimulator of the religious consciousness.”5 This is the story of most mainline churches. The facts of the Scriptures are treated as paradigms of universal religious truths that can be experienced in a manner that will help you live better in the world. This liberal Protestantism is embarrassed, however, with facts themselves. It has never wished to be confined in its free spirit by an objective revelation. In this liberal atmosphere the Spirit can lead one to be for abortion—or against it. The Spirit can lead one to be for capital punishment—or against it. Anyone with spiritual insight can make personal judgments about these things, and a host of other ethical matters. Why is this so? Gnosis, or personal revelation, is available to everyone individually.

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But what happened to the protest movement of midcentury that went by the name evangelical (or for that matter, fundamental, conservative, or biblical)? In this regard, Presbyterian pastor/author Philip J. Lee notes appropriately that: “Evangelicals gain from their religion feelings of comfort and assurance regarding their eternal salvation along with emotional evidence that, unlike the common herd of humanity, they have not been abandoned in this present earthly struggle.”6 While liberalism struggled for relevance at the end of the last century, wishing to make the Christian faith acceptable to its “cultured despisers,” evangelicalism generally sought to stress an objective salvation that was to be found only in the person and work of the Christ as revealed in Scripture and history. Later, in the 1970s, evangelicalism would defend the integrity of the written Scriptures because it knew that without this objective revelation in a “God-breathed” form the Church would be left with mystical revelations and personal knowledge.

This kind of revelation would ultimately be useless for the community of faith. It could offer as many theologies as there were people.

Since the 1960s, though, evangelical Christianity has increasingly taken on a more privatized and personal direction that looks increasingly like ancient Gnosticism.

Faith, for most modern evangelicals, has more to do with the relationship between the individual and God, one to one, than with God as mediated through the historic Church and its faith. This is nothing less than the triumph of Pietism in a uniquely Americanized version. Consequently, orthodoxy is becoming a nonissue in almost every cor ner of the evangelical subculture. The real world for evangelicals is not the physical world but rather the inner (spiritual) world where I hear God and where I receive his truth privately, especially in these modern revivals.

Just listen to the conversations of many in our time.

“Do you have a personal (i.e. private, inner) relationship with Christ?” “Have you made him your own (i.e. just for you) Savior?” We owe more to this emphasis upon the self, as well as the powerful influence of a generation of positive thinkers, than to any of the Protestant Reformers. Happiness—whether physical, marital, social, or material—is our private American birthright.

And the evangel, in this framework of things, has been given to help you recover your lost birthright. After all, haven’t we accepted Jesus into our lives and begun a new life of abundance (i.e. our own version of John 10:10 now popularized to the level of received orthodoxy)?

The Worship of Me One of the first American critics to recognize how clearly this popular preoccupation with the self had reached religious proportions was journalist-essayist,

KEY FIGURES OF AMERICAN REVIVALISM BILLY GRAHAM 1918—

Born in North Carolina and educated at Bob Jones, Florida Bible College, and Wheaton, Graham became convinced during a four-year stint as a Baptist pastor that itinerant evangelism was his calling. After five years of preaching, primarily with Youth for Christ, Graham rose to national attention in Los Angeles in 1949 when journalist William Randolph Hearst decided to “puff [publicize] Graham.” Inter national prominence followed the successful London crusade of 1954. Through straightforward preaching, due to cooperation with fundamentalist, mainline, and Roman Catholic congregations, as well as with virtually any parachurch group, and by his counsel to nearly a dozen presidents and by consistently stressing Christian theism as America’s only hope in the Cold War, Graham—while yet the evangelical icon—transcended Evangelicalism. Despite his early and frequent utilization of radio and television, it is his travel that is most shocking: he has preached to more people in person (well over 100 million) than anyone in the history of Christianity.

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Tom Wolfe. Wolfe, a secular social critic, wrote an essay in 1977 titled, “The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening.” This essay reads like a prophecy which has now been fulfilled.

Wolfe noted that until fairly recent times humanity had shared a “belief in serial immortality.” Whatever people believed about life after death, “they have seen themselves as inseparable from the great tide of chromosomes of which they are created and which they pass on. The mere fact that you were only going to be here for a short time and would be dead soon enough did not give you license to try to climb out of the stream and change the natural order of things.” Now, however, we have “climbed out of the stream” and have thereby arrived at a new religious awareness that is profoundly self-oriented. By the 1960s Wolfe said, “[even] the common man was also getting quite interested in this business of ‘realizing his potential as a human being.’”7 What is most remarkable about the American experiment in Me-ism is that we are the only society ever that has been able to invest vast material resources, and at all levels, in Me. In ancient times only royalty could have lived this way. This interest was expected of the rich and famous. We have a long-running show called, “The Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,” but now we make it increasingly possible for the average person to be rich and famous, at least within his own little private world. Wolfe again writes, It was remarkable enough that ordinary folks now had enough money to take it and run off and alter the circumstances of their lives and create new roles for themselves … but simultaneously still others decided to go … all the way. They plunged straight toward what has become the alchemical dream of the Me Decade. The old alchemical dream was changing base metals into gold. The new alchemical dream is: changing one’s personality—remaking, remodeling, elevating, and polishing one’s very self … and observing, studying, and doting on it (Me!).8 The present analysis of the self is unceasing. There are two common assumptions behind this influence upon culture. First, it is believed that with the help of others (groups, sessions, etc.) I must strip away all the excess baggage of society and my background to find the real Me, a Me that is both precious and special. Wolfe notes, profoundly, that “[it] is at this point that the new movements tend to take on a religious or spiritual atmosphere.” Second, it is assumed that “there is an other order that actually reigns supreme in the world. Like the 34

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light of God itself, this other order is invisible to most mortals but he who has dug himself out from under the junk heap of civilization can discover it. And with that the Me movements were about to turn righteous.”9 The Evangelical Revivals of the 1990s and Me In the late 1960s the whole Me emphasis came on the scene with incredible effect. Thirty years of prosperity, culture-wide self-centeredness, and the loss of any personal responsibility for actions, has only increased this movement’s influence. The important words from the pulpit in our time, especially in these contemporary revivals, are not redemption and justification. They are communication and relationship.

And if you haven’t been personally touched by one of these revivals, you have missed the “move of God.” The only solution is to travel to the site of a revival (shrine?) and “get it.” Hundreds of thousands are doing exactly that every year. I believe that it is likely we will see even more of these revival movements in the coming days.

The emphasis, sadly, will remain more on self and Me, unless the historic pattern of orthodoxy and biblical Christian experience is regained. This will probably lead, tragically, to more of my experience of God. We must understand that biblical Christianity is not an ecstasy. It is not about what has happened to me at the stadium, at the time of confession, or at the great prayer meeting. True Christianity includes Christian experience for sure. But is not defined by experience. True Christianity is centered around the person of Christ, who was and is a true promise keeper.

We know this Christ, by the Spirit, through a body of belief—in the New Testament this is “The faith.” This body of belief creates a community by the work of the Spirit. This community possesses a faith that was given publicly and historically to it through the apostles.

These twelve were commissioned by Christ to put down a foundation that was given but once (since it is a foundation, then it obviously can only be put down once). It is a foundation that is discovered in Scripture.

It is established through the ages by the faithful traditions of the Christian Church. It is found in the stuff of history, not inside me through an overwhelming ecstasy or trance, a vision or hallucination. In short, “an actual neurological event, a dramatic change in metabolism, something that has seemed to light up the entire central nervous system” is never to be the basis of Christian faith.

It is important to note that these evangelical movements, of the sort that has produced revivalism, have never produced confessing churches built on “the faith once for all delivered to the saints.” What these modern movements all have in common is this flood of ecstatic experience. What we are seeing, I suggest, is MODERN REFORMATION

simply more of the Me generation. It is producing a newer and more virulent revivalism that is far more opposed to the historic faith than anything which came out of the Second Great Awakening. (The Second Great Awakening produced heresies galore and the sects and cults that resulted are still very much with us to this time.)

Whatever we can say about the increased interest many have in revival and spiritual things, if these contemporary movements do not bring people back to the Law and the Gospel, the results will be serious.

Only by the recovery of truth can we have anything like unto a real revival. MR

KEY FIGURES OF AMERICAN REVIVALISM BILL BRIGHT 1921—

John Armstrong, who served as a pastor for twenty-one years and has written and edited a number of books, is the director of Reformation and Revival Ministries. He is the editor of Reformation and Revival Journal, and is the author of a forthcoming book on revival, When God Moves (Harvest, July).

THE HEIDELBERG CATECHISM (Cleveland: United Church Press, 1962)

One of the most ecumenical of the confessions of the Protestant Churches, the Heidelberg Catechism is a historic symbol of the catholic Christian faith, “reformed according to the Word of God.” This 400th Anniversary Edition is a translation from original German and Latin texts by Allen O. Miller and M. Eugene Osterhaven.

B-RG-4 Paperback, $5.00 To order call (800) 956-2644.

Born in Oklahoma, business ventures led Bright to California. There Henrietta Mears (1890–1963), the director of Christian education at Hollywood Presbyterian Church, well-known for building Sunday school enrollment from 450 to 6,000 at that congregation, was influential in his conversion experience and his subsequent decision to move from business into evangelism. After stints at Princeton and Fuller Seminaries, Bright—while studying for a Greek final exam—claims to have received a vision to get on with the task at hand: the evangelization of the world in this generation (prior to 2001). Leaving school, he became the founder and president of Campus Crusade for Christ. Known for its evangelistic tracts and highly optimistic conception of the Christian life (distinguishing between “carnal” and “Spiritfilled” Christians), Crusade consistently receives acclaim as one of the most efficiently managed non-profit organizations in the world. Of late, Bright has been highly involved with Charles Colson and Fr. Richard Neuhaus in the work of “Evangelicals and Catholics Together.” Shown here (on the right) in 1996 receiving the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, Bright devoted the prize money to promoting fasting.

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IN PRINT When God Moves John Armstrong (Eugene: Harvest House, 1998) When God Moves carefully leads readers through the theological, historical, practical, and present concerns about revival. Addressing both the mind and the spirit, Armstrong takes readers through past revivals and considers their power and rarity. Then he shows how each and every Christian is of vital importance in any movement of the Spirit. Pastors, lay leaders, and anyone interested in revival or refor mation will appreciate this thoughtful work on a vital issue.

B-ARM-7 Hardcover, $10.00

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business Neil Postman (New York: Penguin, 1986) Television has conditioned us to tolerate visually enter taining material measured out in spoonfuls of time, to the detriment of rational public discourse and reasoned public affairs. In this persuasive book, Neil Postman alerts us to the real and present dangers of this state of affairs, and offers compelling suggestions as to how to withstand the media onslaught.

B-POS-1 Paperback, $12.00

The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism Harry S. Stout (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991) Historians single out George Whitefield as the most powerful and arresting revivalist of an age including John Wesley and Jonathan Edwards. Yet Whitefield has remained an elusive figure.

Stout’s creative study brings Whitfield to life, capturing the essence of his meteoric rise and arresting power of his preaching.

B-STO-1 Paperback, $16.00

Revival and Revivalism: The Making and Marring of American Evangelicalism, 1750-1858 Iain Murray (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 1996) Iain Murray demonstrates that a common understanding of the New Testament idea of revival was prevalent in most denominations throughout the period 1750–1858. Revivalism, on the other hand, is different both in its origin and in its tendencies. Its ethos is man-centered and its methods too close to the manipulative to require a supernatural explanation.

B-MU-1 Paperback, $28.00

Charles G. Finney and the Spirit of American Evangelicalism Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996) In Hambrick-Stowe’s skillful hands, Finney becomes a man of numerous theological connections, debts, and borrowings. From this we discover not only a new Finney, but a far wider and more varied sense of the culture of the early American Republic.

B-HAM-1 Paperback, $16.00

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All books (unless otherwise noted) are available from MR by calling (800) 956-2644. Phones are answered from 8:30 am through 4:30 pm Eastern Time, Monday through Friday. For further book recommendations and an on-line resources catalogue, please visit our website at www.AllianceNet.org.

MODERN REFORMATION

BACK ISSUES January/February 1997: The Whirlpool: The Effects of Popular Culture on Religion.

A time when “whirl”— the fascination with the novel, eccentric, eclectic, and “exciting”— is king, our age is dominated by an obsession with mass popular culture.

But, how do we get the Christian message out without marketing it in some sense? Are we perhaps making more out of the dangers of “pop-culture” than we should? Contributors include: Ken Myers, Leonard R. Payton, Rick Ritchie, Gene Veith. Code # MR-01/97 March/April 1997: Finding the Keys: Liberating the Ministry from Trivial Pursuits.

What should we think about organizations, businesses, entertainment media, and other groups that call themselves “ministries”?

What is the relationship of today’s minister to the prophets and apostles? Contributors to this issue of modernREFORMATION explore the possibility that our whole contemporary notion of the ministry is out of step with Scripture. Contributors include: D.G. Hart, Lawrence R. Rast, Jr., Rick Ritchie.

Code # MR-03/97 May/June 1997: How Do We Receive Christ: God’s Sacraments or Ours?

Among other things, Baptism and the Lord’s Supper are supposed to unite us not only to Christ, but to his Body.

And yet, they have caused some of the widest divisions among professing Christians. In this issue, contributors from many denominational backgrounds discuss the meaning, method, and mode of the Sacraments.

Contributors include: Timothy George, W. Robert Godfrey, Arthur A. Just, Tom Nettles, Rick Ritchie.

Code # MR-05/97 September/October 1997: Has Evangelicalism Lost Its Voice? The Movement and Its Media.

Has the Church been replaced with the marketplace? Is genuine reformation possible if we do not take the institutional aspects of the challenge seriously? In this issue contributors consider both the theological and the institutional drift of Evangelicalism. Contributors include: James Montgomery Boice, Harold O. J. Brown, Eric Gregory, John Warwick Montgomery, David P.

Scaer, and David Wells as well as interviews with Carl Henry and Neil Postman. Code # MR-09/97 November/December 1997: Naked and Ashamed: Does Anyone Feel Guilty Any More?

In our therapeutic society, guilt is reduced to subjective feeling. It doesn’t seem to be related in any significant way to an actual state of affairs, but is on the order of an insuppressible hiccup. It just happens. Trying to live without guilt is like trying to live without physical pain: It can’t be done and it shouldn’t be done, but the good news is that the only people God wants to save are guilty people. Contributors include: Tremper Longman, Don Matzat, Rick Ritchie, Rachel Stahle, David Wells plus a review of the group V.O.L. by Shane Rosenthal. Code # MR-11/97 March/April 1998: Exploring Mars Hill: Common Ground in Apologetics.

This issue moves beyond the debates amongst ourselves to debates with unbelievers, looking at the context in which apologetics occurs. These debates are not about whether we speak to nonChristians, they are about our philosophical starting points when we speak to non-Christians.

Contributors include: William Edgar, Kim Riddlebarger, Philip G. Ryken, and a roundtable discussion with W. Robert Godfrey, R.C. Sproul, and Rod Rosenbladt. Code # MR-03/98 May/June 1998: Why Does Matter Matter?

From the Resurrection to the Word and the Sacraments, our God the Redeemer is pleased to use matter to accomplish his purposes. As humans, we seek to under tand matter (science) and to build with it (architecture). Matter matters. This issue explores some of the benefits and challenges of our material world, and considers the implications of the biblical orientation in our age. Contributors include: Ronald Feuerhan, Douglas Groothuis, Mark Noll, Benjamin Sasse, and Paul F.M. Zahl. Code #MR-05/98 Cost per issue: $4.00 (includes shipping & handling)

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“Reformed” or “Revived”?

Why Words Matter D. G. HART Was the Protestant Reformation a revival? If we define revivalism as a dramatic increase in new converts and an increased zeal on the par t of believers to live godly lives, then the Reformation was at least an urban revival in the sense that it took root and changed church life in a number of Nor ther n European cities. And if we add that genuine revivals usually include a recovery of the Gospel in the context of a church that has substituted human wisdom for God’s Word, then again the Protestant Reformation qualifies as a revival.

Looking at the Reformation as a revival may explain why most contemporary histories of Evangelicalism trace its historical roots first to Martin Luther and John Calvin, then to both seventeenth-century pietism and Puritanism, then to the revivals of the first and second Great Awakenings, and finally to the urban revivalism of Dwight L. Moody, Billy Sunday, and Billy Graham. To be sure, interpreters of Evangelicalism would want to differentiate among the efforts of Martin Bucer, George Whitefield, and Charles Grandison Finney. But on the whole, modern Evangelicalism has been shaped by the Reformation and revivalism. In other words, reformation and revival are at least compatible if not complementary.

Calvinistic evangelicals would, of course, want to qualify the evangelical narrative. Reformation and revival were mutually supportive, they might argue, up to the 38

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nineteenth century when revivalism’s theology soured. Up until Finney and the “new measures,” revivalists were predominantly Calvinistic, George Whitefield being the classic example. What is more, throughout the nineteenth century Calvinists, as David Calhoun’s two-volume history of Princeton Theological Seminary proves, continued to profit from, pray for, and promote revivals. One of the striking features of Calhoun’s valuable work is how many of Princeton’s Old School Presbyterian professors were converted in revivals, even after, in many cases, having been reared as covenant children. From a Calvinistic perspective, revivals are not inherently defective. They only turn bad when Arminian people run them. Revivals are like the White House—when Republicans live there, big government isn’t so bad, but when Democrats move in, there goes the neighborhood.

This selective approach to revivalism—welcome when Calvinists preach but nefarious when Arminians manipulate—reveals an inherent weakness in Reformed selfawareness. The standard Reformed assessments of revivalism these days often only consider issues such as sound doctrine or the preaching’s content. Yet, good reasons exist for questioning the compatibility of revivalism and the Reformation, reasons that involve the very definitions of the words “reform” and “revive.” Recently, historians of the first Great Awakening have raised important questions about MODERN REFORMATION

the way the methods of revivals, even when conducted by Calvinists, undercut the work and ministry of the visible Church. But even more harmful is the way the term, “revival,” inherently skews our understanding of the Christian life and how we discern it. But before contrasting the significance of the words, “reformed,” and “revived,” a brief foray into revivalist history is in order.

Effective Preaching Gilbert Tennent would no doubt be a worthy candidate for ministry in most Presbyterian churches today. A strong adherent of the Westminster Standards, long-time successful pastor of a prominent Philadelphia congregation, and fierce opponent of both liberalism and hypocrisy in the ministry, Tennent is usually considered one of the “good guys” of colonial American Presbyterianism. But even good guys can go bad under the influence of revivalism. In 1741, during a heated controversy among Presbyterians over Whitefield’s itinerant preaching, Tennent added fuel to the fire with his sermon, “The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry.” He insinuated that opponents of Whitefield’s preaching were unregenerate, or just like the Pharisees, that is, church leaders who had not been born again. What is more, Tennent argued that God would only bless the ministry of converted pastors. “These foolish builders,” he exclaimed, “do but strengthen Men’s carnal Security, by their soft, selfish, cowardly Discourses.” These false ministers kept pointing the unregenerate to their duty to obey God’s law, as if such obedience would “recommend natural Men to the Favour of GOD, or entitle them to the Promises of Grace and Salvation.” Not only was Tennent suggesting that he could tell a converted minister, but according to his logic, only regenerate ministers could produce sound and true preaching. An unregenerate pastor automatically preached false doctrine.

To be sure, the ideal pastor is one who has truly trusted in Christ for salvation. But Tennent’s conception of the ministry appears to have little room for the views expressed in the Second Helvetic Confession (1561). In the first chapter on Scripture, Heinrich Bullinger, Ulrich Zwingli’s successor in Zurich, wrote that when the Word of God was preached by pastors “lawfully called, we believe that the very Word of God is proclaimed, and received by the faithful.” Such a high view of preaching applied to unfaithful pastors as well, “for even if he be evil and a sinner, nevertheless the Word of God remains still true and good.” And just in case Reformed believers missed the point, Bullinger added in chapter 18 on the ministry that “we know that the voice of Christ is to be heard, though it be out of the mouths of evil ministers”

KEY FIGURES OF AMERICAN REVIVALISM JIM BAKKER 1940—

Born in Michigan, Bakker reports that he was converted after running over a child with his father’s car. At North Central Bible College (Assemblies of God), he met and married Tammy Faye La Valley, which led to their expulsion from the school in 1961. The two became itinerant preachers, known primarily for their children’s “puppet ministry.” In 1965, Pat Robertson hired them to do children’s television and to host the new “700 Club.” They would later become cofounders of the Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN), and the hosts of the “PTL Club” television program, which grew into another Christian network, PTL Television. The business continued to develop, adding a hotel, Christian condominiums, and an amusement park/ entertainment complex in North Carolina which reportedly trailed only Disneyland and Disney World in attendance in the mid 1980s. In 1987–88, the organization disintegrated amidst revelations of drug addiction, marital infidelity, blackmail payments to a former mistress, and other financial improprieties. The mainstream media began to refer to the scandal as “Pearlygate,” and evangelists Jimmy Swaggart and Jerry Falwell began to contend for PTL, which ultimately declared bankruptcy.

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in the same way that Sacraments were sanctified “by the institution and the word of Christ,” and were effectual to the godly, even if “administered by unworthy ministers.”

In contrast to Tennent’s argument that only the preaching of converted ministers would be effectual, Bullinger taught, in the Second Helvetic Confession, that God would bless even the preaching of wicked ministers.

Tennent’s sermon and the Second Helvetic Confession represent different ideas about effective preaching. Tennent indicates a view widely prevalent in evangelical circles that locates effectiveness in the soul or salvation of the minister. If the minister doesn’t believe what he preaches then his sermons will lack power and conviction.

This understandable desire for a believing pastor can lead to moder n Evangelicalism’s excesses, where the minister’s charisma, personality, and charm determine his ministry’s success. (This is not to say that pastors should be poor speakers, unlearned and dull.)

The Second Helvetic Confession, in contrast, makes the effectiveness of the sermon depend on God only, not the spiritual (or natural) abilities of the minister. Even in the extreme case, when the sermon comes out of the mouth of an unregenerate minister, those in the congregation still hear the very “Word of God.” (And this is not to say that we should ignore the profession of faith of a candidate for Gospel ministry.)

The contrast here can be drawn too starkly. As a good Calvinist, Tennent would not deny the necessity of God’s power for preaching to lead to repentance and conversion, or mercy and comfort. Nor would Bullinger deny the importance of godly, and therefore, believing ministers. Still, the difference between the Reformed and revivalistic conceptions of the ministry is evident in Tennent’s writings and the Second Helvetic Confession. The Reformers knew that only God could turn the word preached into a means of salvation and sanctification, while revivalists acted as if the actions and affects of men were necessary for a work of God to occur.

The modern upshot of revivalism’s influence is the triumph of the subjective over the objective elements of the Christian religion. Because of revivalism’s concern

for the internal state of the preacher or the convert, it has fostered an attitude that places a premium on the sincerity and assurance of Christian experience. At the same time, it has nurtured disregard for the necessity and importance of external forms, whether in liturgy, creeds, or church polity. As long as the heart is in the right place, as long as methods lead to conversion and repentance, then the forms of religiosity don’t matter (do the worship wars come to mind?).

In contrast, the Refor med tradition has refused to separate the internal from the external aspects of Christian faith and practice. It has taught that as important as the subjective state of the soul is, the objective expressions of Christianity are no less important. Worship, confession, and government— the external forms by which we judge the faithfulness of churches—matter not only because God desires tr ue worship, faithful teaching, and right order in his Church, but also because these objective forms are the means he has ordained to minister to human souls. Consequently, while effective preaching for revivalists is that for m of communication that shows the presence and power of God in the preacher’s life, for the reformers it is a sermon that conforms to the truth of God’s Word no matter whether the pastor believes or conversions follow from it. Unfortunately, because of revivalism’s triumph since the eighteenth century, the older Reformational synthesis of the external and internal has been neglected.

While effective preaching

for revivalists is that form of communication that shows the presence and power of God in the preacher’s life, for the reformers it is a sermon that conforms to the truth of God’s Word no matter whether the pastor believes or conversions follow from it.

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O Be Careful Little Mouth Perhaps a better way of showing these distinctions is to contrast the words “revive” and “reform.” These words connote the same difference already noted between Tennent and the Second Helvetic Confession. The word “revive” suggests an effort to recover genuine spiritual existence and vitality in the lives of believers, and to introduce nonbelievers to the eternal life that comes through Christ. A revival penetrates the forms and “vain repetitions” of established and hypocritical religion and goes to the heart to cause and nurture genuine conversion and real repentance. Not only does MODERN REFORMATION

revivalism thrive on the desire for authentic religion but its aim is individualistic. To be sure, the more people revived, the better the church may be. But revival stresses individual conversion and personal morality.

The word “refor m” however, suggests a restructuring of a specific order. A reform’s purpose is to take an existing organization or body and make it conform to a correct or true standard and norm. So while revivals aim at generating or deepening spiritual life in individuals, reformations strive to impart a more faithful shape to the visible Church in its corporate life, in doctrine, worship, and government. For example, individuals sitting through the Mass may be Reformed in their understanding of the Lord’s Supper, but the liturgy presently violating their conscience hardly is.

Though these definitions of “revive” and “reform” don’t come from Webster’s dictionary, they are implicit in the arguments used to defend both revivalism and reformation. If a revival occurs, its defenders argue that spiritual life has been imparted, in other words, that the Spirit of God is at work. This was not only true in the eighteenth century but is still true today. Tennent, for instance, not only thought that ministers who supported Whitefield’s revivals were regenerate, but also presumed that the revivals of his day were a work of God. More recently, British theologian Iain Murray has followed a similar logic. Though he has not gone so far as Tennent in questioning the regeneration of the individual ministers who opposed Whitefield, Murray is convinced that the First Great Awakening was a work of God. While believing that revivals are occasions where God blesses the ordinary means of grace in an extraordinary way, Murray is not reluctant in concluding that the Great Awakening of the eighteenth century was the result of the work of the Spirit. Murray’s conclusion should not be surprising. Since Calvinists believe that only God can give spiritual life to the unregenerate, a revival ipso facto has to be a work of God. But that begs the epistemological question of whether we can know for sure where and when God’s Spirit is active.

The interpretive stakes are not quite so high, however, when it comes to evaluating whether reformation has taken place. The marks of the Church, according to the Reformers, are one very important way to discern where the Gospel is. Unlike revivalism, which encourages the evaluation of things that are invisible, namely, the human soul, the Reformation promoted the search for phenomena that can be observed by the human senses. In the words of the Belgic Confession, Article 29, “The marks by which the true church is known are these: if the pure doctrine of the gospel is preached therein; if she maintains the pure administration of the sacraments as instituted by Christ; if church discipline is exercised in punishing of sin; in

short, if all things are managed according to the pure Word of God.” In other words, to look for Reformation is to consider visible or external forms.

But to look for revival is to make judgments about things invisible and internal.

So the “reformed” and the “revived” make two different kinds of determination when they look for Reformation and revival. Proponents of revival make claims that should be reserved for God, that is, whether a soul has truly come to new life in Christ. To be sure, the “revived” look for evidence in visible and external things such as profession and deed. But to say that a revival occurred is to determine that God did actually regenerate a remarkable number of souls. The parable of the sower suggests the need for less certainty in making such a determination. The “reformed,” however, do not pretend to look into the state of souls or make judgments about God’s intervention into human history. Yes, they do use the language of “true” and “false” churches, which are forms of evaluation that connote eternal significance.

Still, they make no claims about the spiritual state of individuals. And in the context of sixteenth-century Europe, one did not need to be a believer to recognize a Reformed church. A professing Roman Catholic would see an extraordinarily different liturgy in a Protestant church and know that this congregation had been “reformed.” The difference, of course, would be that the Protestant would call such visible changes “true,” while the Catholic believer would regard them as “false.”

The lesson taught by the differences implicit in the words “reformed” and “revived” is not simply that we should be careful about claiming to know things we can’t know. It is also that our assessment of Christian expressions and practice will always be limited to forms.

We cannot see into the human heart and therefore must judge whether the words and deeds of an individual believer’s life are credible, and whether a congregation’s liturg y, teaching, and gover nment are refor med according to the Word. In other words, we are limited to the world of appearances and our conclusions should always reflect a caution befitting the limits of our knowledge. For this reason, professing believers who cherish the Reformed Faith might consider deleting the words “revival,” “revived,” and “revive” from their vocabulary. If you are Reformed you should know that detecting either the pulse of spiritual life in a convert or the hand of God in human history is work that only God, who surpasses human understanding, can do. MR D. G. Hart is the librarian at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia and co-edits the Nicotine Theological Journal.

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Faith Healing and the Sovereignty of God C. EVERETT KOOP I don’t know how many operations I performed in my surgical career. I know that I performed 17,000 of one particular type, and 7,000 of another. I practiced surgery for thirtynine years, so perhaps I performed 50,000 operations. I was successful, and patients were coming to me from all over the world. And one of the things that endeared me to the parents of my patients was the way my incisions healed.

No one likes big scars, but they are especially upsetting to mothers when they appear on their children. So I set out early on to make my scars small, as short and as thin as possible. These “invisible” scars became my trademark. But was I a healer?

The secret of thin scars is to make the incision precise—no feathered edges—and in the closing, to get the edges of the skin in exact apposition. I would do this by sewing the stitches inside the skin, but not through it, and the knots were tied on the bottom.

All you have to figure out is how I crawled out after doing that.

I was the one who put the edges together, but it was God who coagulated the serum. It was God who sent the fiberblasts out across the skin edges.

It was God who had the fiberblasts make collagen, and there were probably about fifty other complicated processes involved about which you and I will never know. But did God come down and instruct the fiberblasts to behave that way? In a sense, he did. But he did it through his natural laws, just the way he makes the grass grow, the rain fall, the earth quake. The question, then, is not, Does God heal? Of course he heals! We are concer ned with this question: Granted that 42

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God heals, is it normally according to natural laws or an interruption of those laws (i.e., a miracle)?

Ordinary Providence It is God’s providence that keeps the sea at the edge of the shore, or an airplane in the sky, or that makes cats out of kittens. When the twenty-three chromosomes of the sperm and the twenty-three chromosomes of the egg are put together, it is God’s ordinary activity that forms a baby. It is his ordinary activity that grows a baby into a child, a child into an adolescent, an adolescent into an adult, and an adult into an elderly person. It is also his ordinary providence that brings about the death of a person, set off by one phenomenon or another.

Never theless, the phenomenon is part of God’s natural law. Can you interrupt or alter God’s law of nature? It may indeed appear that you can. You might accelerate the process or slow it, but you cannot avoid it. Whatever happens, it is according to God’s providence.

Suppose you get tonsillitis. Your doctor recommends penicillin, and your condition improves.

You say to your doctor, “You’re a magician!” Not so.

He was an instrument, just as I was an instrument in stitching the skin together. I used instruments to do it, but I was an instrument in so doing. You might say at this point, “What makes you so special?” And the reply is, “I’m not.” Nothing makes me special.

God uses instruments who will spend eternity with him. I’m one of those instruments. But he also uses instruments who curse him and people who never even acknowledge him.

I remember well an incident that occurred during my days in training. A woman was recovering from gall bladder surgery. She said to her surgeon as he made his rounds, “I thank God for making me well.” The surgeon angrily grabbed the foot of the bed with both hands and shouted, “God didn’t do that; I did!” But MODERN REFORMATION

whether this doctor acknowledged it or not, he was an instrument of God’s providence.

Now, back to the tonsillitis. God created a fungus that a man named “Penicillin notatum.” It has been around, I presume, since the beginning of time. But I was well into my residency before Alexander Fleming noted its properties. Penicillin killed bacteria, and it did so through a very complicated process: all part of God’s natural laws. Penicillin killed the streptococcus in your tonsils, and you were healed in accordance with the process and timing of God’s law.

Maybe you have had a severe illness. Let us say you have “hovered at death’s door,” as they say. Then you slowly improved, and here you are today, fit and healthy.

I can just imagine that when you recovered someone told you, “It’s a miracle!” Not necessarily. God’s providence was again at work.

Let me offer an illustration that should be familiar to most city dwellers. I missed the entrance to the expressway and wandered all around parts of San Francisco I had never seen before. Finally, I got back to where I wanted to be, got on the expressway, and arrived at the airport with no time to spare. It was a miracle that I caught my plane! Miracle? Not so. Just a loose use of a word that is rarely employed in its authentic meaning.

That was no more a miracle than the recovery from tonsillitis. Now, I can hear somebody say, “He doesn’t even believe in miracles!” But I do believe in miracles, and that is why it is worthwhile to define the term.

If the surgeon who reacted so arrogantly to the praise attributed to God were writing this article, you would be wasting your time to continue reading. But I have credentials in this matter. I am a Bible-believing, evangelical Christian steeped in the doctrines of the Reformed faith. I am absolutely committed to a belief in the sovereignty of God in all things, and because of my understanding of the art and science of medicine, I have a perspective on the process of healing as it ordinarily takes place.

Supernatural Intervention Having defended my supernaturalism, let us turn our attention to a case study that does circumvent or interrupt God’s natural laws. It is the account of a man who never attended medical school. On one occasion, he encountered a homeless person who had been unable to walk since birth. The man’s heart went out to that disabled individual and, looking the man straight in the eyes, the non-credentialed physician said, “Silver and gold I do not have, but what I do have I give to you. In the name of Jesus of Nazareth, stand up and walk.”

Of course, this is an excerpt from Acts 3:6, and the unlettered healer was the apostle Peter. The next verses tell us, “And he took him by the right hand, lifted him

KEY FIGURES OF AMERICAN REVIVALISM BENNY HINN 1953—

First shaped by the writings of D. L. Moody and R. A. Torrey, and later by the teachings of Kenneth Hagin and Kenneth Copeland, Hinn in 1983 founded the Orlando Christian Center, which rapidly grew to over 7,000 weekly attendees.

His Good Morning, Holy Spirit (1990) and The Anointing (1992) have become two of the better selling volumes in the history of Christian publishing. But these books, combined with Hinn's TBN preaching, have also drawn the fire of critics. Appealing to private revelation, Hinn has taught on a nine-personed Trinity, the corporeality of the Spirit, and God's original intention that babies be delivered through women's sides. When challenged, especially by the CRI's Hank Hanegraaff, Hinn responded to his critics on TBN, "Sometimes I wish God would give me a Holy Ghost machine gun. [I'd] blow your head off." In a subsequent Christianity Today interview, he repented of his teachings and his response to his critics, and pledged to be limited to the revelation of the Bible in the future. These changes were soon questioned, though, as he announced another round of "Holy Spirit-anointed" threats to his opponents.

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up, and immediately his feet and ankle bones received strength. And he, leaping, stood up, walked and entered with them into the temple, walking, and leaping, and praising God.” That was a miracle! An apostle uttered those words of healing. It was performed before there was a written New Testament, and the healing was immediate, radical, and demonstrable to those who knew the man when he was disabled. The healing of this lame man was instantaneous, and that is what made it a miracle. However, a miracle is more than a matter of time. It is an act of God produced in unusual circumstances in which he uses means unfamiliar to us but which are perfectly normal expressions of his character. Miracles may be a departure from God’s usual way of acting (as we understand it), but we can never say they contradict God’s nature.

Over the years I have had innumerable people say that I am wrong, that they have witnessed numerous miracles. For example, after I had spoken one night, a woman came to me and said, “God can do anything! … I once knew a woman who went into the hospital to be fitted for a glass eye. The surgeon turned his back to get an instrument, and when he looked back, he found a new eye in the empty pocket where there had been nothing before, and the woman could see!”

I said, “Did you say you knew this woman?”

“No. I knew someone who knows her,” she conceded.

“Well,” I said, “could you tell me who he or she is? I would like to have a conversation with even that person.”

“Well, I don’t really know that person either, but I know someone who knows her.”

“Even so,” I persisted “I would like to meet that person.”

“I don’t really know that person, but she knows someone who knows someone….” And so it goes.

not by the guarantee that you will never be sick, or, if you are, that you will be miraculously healed. God is the Lord of healing, of growing, of weather, of transportation, and of every other process. Yet people don’t expect vegetables without plowing. They don’t expect levitation instead of getting in a car and turning a key—even for extraordinarily good and exceptional reasons.

Although God could do all of this, Christian airline pilots do not fly straight into a thunderstorm after asking God for a safe corridor, although he could give them such safety. We do not have public services and ask God to remove all criminals, prostitutes, and pornographers from our midst, although he could do that too. God could eliminate AIDS from our planet. While we pray for a speedy discovery of successful treatment, I must do all I can to employ medical science in its task, as all health care professionals must do.

We live in a fallen world and the afflictions of our bodies and souls are the result of that fall (not the immediate work of Satan). Disease and death are “givens” in this fallen world. They are the expectation; all will be straightened out only after the return of Jesus Christ—and not before. God is sovereign. By “sovereignty” I mean that God is in total control of this universe, at all times. If you and I could determine human circumstances by our “faith” (as it is called), God would not be sovereign, and I do not think, indeed, that he would be God. He did not create us and drop us down here, withdrawing control to see how we would make out. He does not act capriciously nor arbitrarily. It is all in line with the grand plan that you and I can only see in pieces now but will see in its completeness in the future.

Presumptuous Christian writers claim to know God’s intent, such as the author of the book that insists, “God wants you well.” Who says so? Why should he want you well when he did not want the apostle Paul well? Paul apparently had a serious eye disease to which he refers in his letters to the young churches. And indeed, Paul asked God to remove his thorn in the flesh several times.

But God chose not to do so. Timothy, Paul’s protégé, had something in the way of a gastrointestinal

Many will say to me on

that day, “Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?” Then I will tell them plainly, “I never knew you.

Away from me, you evildoers!”

— Matthew 7:22-23

Is It Faith or Faithlessness?

A surprising number of Christians are convinced God will not be believed unless he makes tumors disappear, causes asthma to go away, and pops eyes into empty sockets. But the Gospel is accepted by God-given faith, 44

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MODERN REFORMATION

complaint. Paul didn’t respond with the command, “Be healed!” Instead, he told Timothy to stop drinking only water and to drink a little wine!

Affliction is part of the Christian’s life just as much as the nonbeliever’s (sometimes more so). The proper response of Christians to affliction is not to demand healing but rather to witness to the world that through the grace of God a Christian is able to accept affliction, trusting in the sovereignty, grace, and mercy of God in time, knowing that all of these things will be removed in eternity.

Soon after the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus himself began to perform miracles. And those miracles, no doubt, authenticated Christ’s claims and his mission. Thereafter, he invested his twelve apostles with these same healing capabilities in order to authenticate this “new” religion, which we call Christianity. But after serving their purpose, these gifts ceased. With the completion of the canon of Scripture, the total revelation of God has been given (that is, not all that can be known about God, but all that God has decided to let us in on).

If miracles were commonplace, they would cease to be miracles. And I repeat what I said earlier: It is always God who does the healing, but he does not regularly do so in a miraculous way. He heals providentially. God can be, and should be, glorified when healing of illness takes place. But he should also be glorified when healing does not take place—and even when death ensues, in spite of the pain and grief it may cause. I don’t say this flippantly. I lost my own son to a rock-climbing accident, and I have learned how essential the doctrine of God’s sovereignty is in such circumstances. God was greatly glorified by that tragedy in ways I could have never predicted.

Miracles, then, were the credentials of Christ and the apostles, to whom he gave the gift of healing. And one can assume, I think, that the cessation of these gifts came at the end of the apostolic age. A few biblical statements would seem to promise, at first glance, that God will do whatever we ask of him. Obviously, though, these cannot be taken as absolute promises in an unconditional sense, because, if this were true, God could not possibly be sovereign. Such passages must be analyzed in light of other passages. For instance, we read in John 15:7, “If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it shall be done for you” (NASB). Nevertheless, there is a condition to this promise, given in 1 John: “If we ask anything according to His will, He hears us” (5:14, NASB).

When a faith healer commands God to perform a miracle, in the absence of a prayer that says, “thy will be done,” it is, as far as I am concerned, the most rank form of arrogance. No doubt some have said that it is the will of God for every affliction of man to be healed, but you know that this could not possibly be tr ue.

KEY FIGURES OF AMERICAN REVIVALISM PENSACOLA OUTPOURING 1995—

The “Pensacola Outpouring” (1995— ) is the name given to recent activities at the Brownsville (Florida) Assembly of God. Superseding the “laughing revival” or the “Toronto Blessing,” this Pensacola suburb is the newest site of frenzy.

While more subdued than the Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship (formerly Vineyard), the Brownsville revival meetings have still had their share of sprawling and screaming. Well over a million people have visited thus far, with some ar riving in the early mor ning in hopes of obtaining a ticket for the nightly event. Some even move to Brownsville because of their need “for more of God.” One historian of Pentecostalism, aiming to place the occurrence within the mainstream of American religious history, notes: “Brownsville, with its emphasis on conversion and people weeping over conviction of sin, seems to be a revival in the long tradition of American native revivals dating back to the preaching of Jonathan Edwards.” 5 Two CCM labels have begun to market CDs of “praise and worship” from the event, and local restaurants and hotels offer discounts to revival attendees. Many hope to replicate the happenings, as thousands have attended pastors' conferences at the site, and over a hundred have enrolled full-time in the newly founded Brownsville Revival School of Ministry.

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Otherwise, we would have to conclude that God falls far short of his plans.

But if faith healing is really accomplished by faith, why is a mediator (the faith healer acting in a priestly role) necessary? Why are the healings often either invisible or said to have occurred over a long period of time? I want to see a person with one leg suddenly (“immediately”) have two. In fact, I want to see a person cold, flat-out dead, get up and walk. Now it is not that I want to see these miracles take place just to satisfy my own curiosity. I want to see them happen in such a way that there is no praise attributed to the faith healer. And I want to see it done in a situation that is not a carnival. Now if all of those conditions were in place, I suspect that a healing service would occur very much in private.

Did I Have Enough Faith?

I was once the president of an evangelical organization which hired an investigative writer to look into some cults and into some specific faith healers. Our investigator traveled to a southwestern city where a healing campaign had been advertised some weeks in advance. Adjacent to the huge tent into which thousands would pour for services was a smaller tent. For the whole week prior to the services, those who had physical infirmities came to this smaller tent in order to be screened by associates of the healer. The associates’ job was to pick the proper specimens for their “chief ” to heal on television. They chose people with such conditions as asthma, which has a very strong emotional overlay. They dealt with hysterical people, and with those who were very open to the power of suggestion. With others, they tried to see if they could find samples of psychosomatic illness that could be altered by suggestion.

Among those who applied for healing was an elderly Christian gentleman who lived out on the prairie. His vision was becoming dim, and he most likely was developing cataracts. The only lighting in the little cabin where he lived was a kerosene lamp. He was a devout Christian, read his Bible daily—or tried to.

Unfortunately, his sight had deteriorated to the point where he could no longer read. On the night of his appearance before the healer, the old man was led into the meeting which had the atmosphere of a sideshow.

The faith healer said, “Well, Pop, you can’t see anymore.

You’ve gotten old; you can’t even see with your glasses.

Your vision is failing.” Then he reached over and took off the old man’s spectacles, threw them on the platform, stamped on them, and broke them. He then handed the elderly gentleman a large-print Bible, which under the lights necessary for television in those days, enabled the gentleman to read John 3:16 out loud, to the astonishment and applause of the audience.

46

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The elderly gentleman praised God, the healer praised God, the audience praised God, and the old man went back to his dimly lit cabin and could not find his Bible, because his glasses were destroyed. The man went back to the healer, but was told the most discouraging thing a godly man could possibly hear: “You didn’t have enough faith, or the healing would have stuck.”

Now, obviously, this makes two classes of Christians: those who have enough faith to be healed— the first-class Christians—and those who don’t have enough faith to be healed—they, of course, are secondclass. There is great poverty in that kind of religion.

One’s willpower, not divine grace, becomes the basis for faith and life.

Biblical Christianity is different: It does not allow us to peek into the hidden workings of God to determine his purposes in all suffering. “Who sinned,” the disciples asked Jesus, “this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus answered, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned … but this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life” (John 9:23). Then Jesus, the Great Healer, did the work of opening the man’s eyes—not because the man had fulfilled some “work of faith,” but because Jesus is the Messiah who gives sight to the blind. MR Dr. Koop is a former Surgeon General of the United States. An earlier version of this article appeared in The Agony of Deceit: What Some TV Preachers Are Really Teaching, ed. by Michael S. Horton (Chicago: Moody, 1990).

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⡎ MODERN REFORMATION

INTERVIEW WITH IAIN MURRAY MR: Rev. Murray, your book Revival and Revivalism: The Making and Marring of American Evangelicalism 1750-1858 is a marvelous account of the differences between the First Great Awakening and the Second Great Awakening. How does “revival” differ from “revivalism”?

IM: I use “revivalism” as something that can be manufactured, organized, worked up. I think it was the Unitarians who first used and coined the word, and it was very foolish for evangelicals to take it up.

MR: What was the role of Charles Finney in the development of revivalism?

IM: It was quite considerable. The Second Great Awakening began in 1798 or thereabouts, in many locations at once. Finney was ordained in 1824, pretty near the end of the Second Great Awakening. It is significant that the men who had been so prominent in the Awakening, with very few exceptions, were alarmed at Finney’s developments. At first, of course, it was thought that he was just advocating different methods.

And, people asked, why shouldn’t Christians have different methods? But then, within the course of a few years, it became quite apparent that the different methods were founded on a different theology. That’s where the division really became more serious.

MR: One thing that we hear a lot in discussions today about revival, and in claims of revivals breaking out all over the place, is that the First and Second Great Awakenings were movements of the Spirit of God. And in these discussions, the names Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, and Charles Finney are often spoken of in one sweeping sentence. Do you think that this is an accurate representation of what actually took place?

IM: No, I don’t think it is. I think there was a very big change with Finney, that there is a milestone there.

Finney’s lectures on revival of the 1830s represent a viewpoint that is really quite distant from Edwards or Whitefield or these other men. There’s been a lack of

literature on the Second Great Awakening, which has led to this problem in some ways.

MR: What do you make of the argument advanced by certain people that Jonathan Edwards himself sowed the seeds for much of this, particularly in his view of the religious affections? It is argued that what we see with his students—their so-called “consistent Calvinism”—is really little more than Pelagianism, with their rejection of original sin and so forth. How do you read Jonathan Edwards’ connection to the later developments?

IM: That was a point of issue between Princeton and Finney, with Princeton saying that their Westminster Confession theology was essentially the theology of Edwards. Finney, when he began to preach (and certainly by the time of his preaching in Boston in 1832) claimed Edwards and Griffin as advocates of his position. But Finney did have the honesty to abandon that claim. Personally, I don’t think there is any doubt that Princeton represented the theology of Edwards.

Now Jonathan Edwards’ son, Edwards Jr., was a new departure, of course. He was only an infant when his father died. But I don’t believe for a moment that the later developments in New England can be fairly traced to the heart of Edwards’ theology.

MR: Did Finney’s theolog y really have a close connection to his methods? The reason we ask is because people today will say that we can have revivalistic practices without the theology. Even Reformed people will say that it is acceptable to be involved in certain revivalistic crusade evangelism events, Promise Keepers, and other movements. Is it possible to divorce our theology from our view of evangelism and discipleship in that way?

IM: I don’t believe it is. I believe there have been some eminent evangelists—like D. L. Moody—who didn’t

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have a great deal of theology and who did much good.

But Finney certainly had a theology, and it was hostile to historic Christianity in its whole assessment of human nature. Finney’s position was that the will decides everything. There isn’t a fallen nature in man; there is no need for a man’s nature to be changed. All that is needed for a person to become a Christian is for his will to take action. He has got to make a decision, and if he makes that decision, he becomes a Christian.

To which the older preachers responded, it’s true that to become a Christian, we all have to commit ourselves and receive Christ, but there’s a much more serious problem.

By nature we are at enmity to God, and we need to be regenerated, and that regeneration isn’t in our own hands or power. We can’t accomplish it ourselves. Whereas Finney said that this view was heresy; any man who makes the right decision becomes a new creature.

MR: Do you see a marked shift of emphasis in preaching as well—a shift from God to man, and from justification by faith alone (which was so prominent in the First Great Awakening) to man’s justification by his own willpower and moral exertion?

IM: Well, over the long term, that is what happened. From the God-centeredness of the earlier Awakening, by 1900 everything had become so man-centered. But I wouldn’t say that that was entirely Finney’s position. I don’t doubt that he believed in the power of the Holy Spirit… . I’m sure Finney didn’t intend to move man into the center, but I fear that, over the long term, that is what his theology produced.

MR: How about the article of justification by faith alone, which Finney explicitly denies? He said that it is another Gospel, that you can’t have one man’s righteousness imputed to another.

IM: One of the difficulties with Finney is putting his thinking in the correct eras of his long life. You are referring to his Systematic Theology of 1851. By that time, when he had been a minister for over twenty-five years, he was really developing his own unique position, and opposing the older orthodoxy at several points. And as you say, at that point too. In his earlier preaching, I wouldn’t think that there is anything of that at all. He is simply calling for repentance and speaking of forgiveness of sins in Christ in a general way. He was a multifaceted man. When he came to real theology, he certainly ceased to be an evangelist and said some things that were very detrimental to the faith.

MR: How would you characterize the development of revivalism from Finney to the present? Has Arminianism dominated the American scene ever since Finney?

IM: In my book, I just go up to 1858-60, so I can’t speak with any authority on the later time. But the great 48

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change that Finney introduced became axiomatic for evangelism. He said that we must get people to a decision—to do something, to stand up, to walk down an aisle. That became accepted, and accepted so widely, that it’s continued ever since. Although it has been recognized very often that many of the people who make this kind of decision don’t, in fact, become Christians at all. But the argument is that some do become Christians, so shouldn’t we rejoice in that and be thankful for that?

To which we should reply: it wasn’t walking down an aisle that made them Christians. It was the truth and the grace of God that came to them as they heard the Gospel preached, and they would have been saved under Gospel preaching without any addition.

MR: That brings up the question of the “new measures” and the means of grace. B. B. Warfield pointed out that, in Finney’s scheme, the evangelist becomes the sacrament. Is there a sense in which—once the supernaturalism has been removed and it is simply the philosophical result of the right use of means—the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit working through the means of Word and Sacrament were then set aside?

Were the “old” Sacraments replaced with new “sacraments,” if you will, that revolved around the “excitements” or the “new measures”?

IM: Yes, I think there is a lot of truth in that. Yet, I think on the other side as well, it needs to be said that (while not at the time of Finney but a good deal later) Reformed or Calvinistic churches and preachers have tended to be viewed as overly intellectual, with very little passion. Regrettably, it is true that the kind of evangelists who have been so used in church history, like Edwards and Spurgeon, are rare now. It’s a great pity in my mind that Calvinism should be identified more with the intellectual—because it is both. The truth comes to our minds, but it has to reach our hearts.

MR: Do you think that that is one of the reasons why people run off to every announcement of revival and awakening, because there isn’t an alternative from a Reformation base?

IM: I think that is true. It is noticeable that many of the people that have turned to these things have come out of churches that have been cold and dry and so on.

MR: You title one of your chapters “When Theology Took Fire.” Does that summarize how you think our Christianity should look before a watching world?

IM: Yes, it does. If we just hold the truth in a cold way, we are almost telling people that we don’t ardently believe it.

MR: Is it overstating it to say that many of the churchgrowth paradigms that are used, especially in American MODERN REFORMATION

evangelicalism, are living off of the inheritance of Finney’s “new measures” and the pragmatic approach to evangelism?

IM: I do believe there is a line that continues. Because the main theme after Finney was that we have to “influence” people, and it is justifiable for us to do that in any way we can to bring them to salvation. And bringing people to salvation became identified with getting people to do things publicly that presumably committed them. Whereas the older preaching was that man is in a desperate, lost condition. We are utterly dependent upon God; we must go to our knees and pray.

We must preach and pray, because God has given us no other means… . The church in a former day would have been looking to God much more than we are today. We are so taken up with the problems of communication and being relevant, and making sure we are understood.

We are so absorbed with all of that, that we seem to have lost the emphasis that went before. For we need more of God’s presence, grace, and power.

MR: So we are so concerned with being understood, that we have forgotten what it is that we understand.

IM: Yes, and we’ve underestimated the problem. The problem isn’t just that man isn’t sufficiently interested. Man is in a worse condition than that: he really is undone.

MR: So it’s not just the production of sufficient excitements. It is really is a proclamation of something that is beyond our wildest hopes.

IM: Yes, and which proves its reality by the fact that it lasts. Excitement is a very short-lived thing. Our Lord talks about stony ground hearers, who receive the Word with joy, but it simply doesn’t last. When the altar calls came in, simultaneously came in that method of announcing that we had 500 conversions last night. And that is so remote from biblical Christianity. That brought great disrepute upon the church, because everybody knew that many of these supposed converts didn’t stand.

MR: What role do you think revivalism had in shaping popular culture, and in being shaped by popular culture?

In other days, we saw Puritanism shaping the culture at a much higher level, with Jonathan Edwards as an evangelist but also as the president of Princeton. Today, do you see revivalism, as it becomes increasingly Arminian, especially in America, becoming increasingly anti-intellectual as well? Is it becoming a form of popular American mass culture?

IM: The church in former times was, to a much greater degree, light and salt. And it was that because great care was taken in admitting members into the church, so that the church was different than the world. Part of our problem today is that the church in its way of living is

so like the world that it is no longer convicting. Think of Paul saying to the Corinthians that if a stranger comes in, he is convicted by God’s presence and he falls down. We don’t see that now. The church is so close to the world. And that’s come about, the older divines would have said, because we’ve taken such a superficial view of what it means to be a Christian. Conversion has become demeaned in its significance.

MR: If someone came into many of our churches today and fell down because he was struck by something completely alien to him, we would probably ask what we have to change for next week so that he won’t be uncomfortable.

IM: That’s right, we’d be concerned that he would be upset or offended!

MR: How do you respond to those who say that the problem is the very notion of revival? I’m speaking not only of modern critics, like Harry Stout at Yale, but also of critics at that time such as Nevin and some others at Princeton. How do you answer those who, even at that time, said that revivalism in any sense is part of the problem?

IM: I think that is a fair question, and we need to address it. Because a number of people now simply believe that all forms of religious excitement come under the heading of revival or revivalism, and that it is an artificial distinction which I draw between the two. It seems to me that if you hold that view, then you wouldn’t want revival.

You’d actually think that revival could do more harm than good. Now it is true of course that certain types of revival can do more harm than good, but that is what I mean by “revivalism.” I think, though, that we need to go back to our biblical theology. Sometimes I think that our defense of revival has rested on the wrong bases. I do believe that we need to present a New Testament theology of revival, which isn’t charismatic and isn’t Pentecostal, but is straight in the line of Protestant and Reformed theology.

Interestingly enough, when Princeton Seminary was founded in 1812, it was actually written into the constitution that it was meant to be a friend of revival.

So at that time at least, the word “revival” was perfectly clearly understood, but forty years later, it had become blurred because of what had happened. We need to go back and reconsider what the word originally meant.

Iain Murray is the co-founder of the Banner of Truth Trust. Portions of this interview were broadcast on the White Horse Inn.

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ENDNOTES DO YOU HEAR THE SPIRIT?—Michael S. Horton 1 Grant Wacker, “The Holy Spirit and the Spirit of the Age in American Protestantism, 1880-1910,” in D. G. Hart, Reckoning with the Past (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1995), 268.

2 Bright’s exact words are, according to his promotional literature, that “[f]asting unleashes God’s supernatural power through our prayers, and I believe it is the key to meeting the requirements of 2 Chronicles 7:14.”

(See the ”Quotes” page in this issue of MR for a more extensive excerpt.)

Is he not claiming to be an apostle? If he sends people letters telling them that God commanded him to perform these great works, with not a little pressure placed on the reader to respond obediently, what is the difference?

3 Martin Luther, sermon on 1 Corinthians 15 (1533).

4 Calvin, Commentary on Isaiah (30:1; 59:21).

5 See Calvin’s tract, “Against the Fanatics.” Calvin also briefly treats the subject in various places in the Institutes, such as in 4.8.13.

6 Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1941), 605.

7James Bratt, “Dutch Calvinism,” in Reformed Theology in America, ed. David Wells (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1997), 117.

8 Berkhof, op. cit., 612.

9 J. L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words, second edition, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisa (Boston: Harvard, 1975), 109.

10 See T. F. Torrrance, Theology in Reconstruction (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1996), 76-98, reprinted from the author’s lecture read to a colloquy held in Strasbourg, May 1964 titled, “The Knowledge of God According to Calvin.”

11 Bill Bright, The Coming Revival (Summerlin, NV: New Life Publications, 1995).

12 Pat Robertson, Beyond Reason (1985).

13 Madonna, “Bedtime Story,” Bedtime Stories (Sire Records, 1994).

14 John Calvin, Institutes, 4.1.9.

BATTLING “A WHOLE BABEL OF EXTRAVAGANCE”— Lawrence R. Rast, Jr. 1 John Williamson Nevin, The Anxious Bench, second edition (Chambersburg, PA: Printed at the Office of the German Reformed Church, 1844; repr.

Catholic and Reformed, ed. Charles Yrigoyen, Jr. and George H. Bricker [Pittsburgh: Pickwick, 1978]), 12.

2 John Williamson Nevin, The Anxious Bench (Chambersburg, PA: Printed at the Office of the “Weekly Messenger,” 1843), 4.

3 See Sam Hamstra’s article in this issue of MR (p. 19) for an explanation of the relationship between the “anxious bench” and the “altar call.“ 4 Nevin, Anxious Bench, second edition, 55.

5 Nevin, Anxious Bench, second edition, 12.

6 John W. Nevin, Antichrist, or, The Spirit of Sect and Schism (New York: John S. Taylor, 1848), 54, italics added.

7 See John W. Nevin, “Catholic Unity,” Printed as an Appendix to Philip Schaff, The Principle of Protestantism; The Church (Chambersburg, PA: Publication Office of the German Reformed Church, 1847); “True and False Protestantism,” Mercersburg Review 1 (1849), 83-104; “Thoughts on the Church,” Mercersburg Review 10 (1858), 169-98, 383-426.

8 “Mercersburg theology” generally refers to the movement to recover a Reformed catholicity, against the “sect-consciousness” of much of American Protestantism.

9 Vergilius Ferm, The Crisis in American Lutheran Theology (New York: The Century Company, 1927).

10 Samuel S. Schmucker, Fraternal Appeal to the American Churches, with a Plan for Catholic Union, on Apostolic Principles, second edition (New York: Taylor and Dodd, 1839), 128-39.

11 Charles Porterfield Krauth, “The Relation of Our Confessions to the Reformation, and the Importance of Their Study, With an Outline of the Early History of the Augsburg Confession,” Evangelical Review 1 (October 1849), 235.

12 Krauth, “Relations,” 235.

13 John Williamson Nevin, “The Lutheran Confession,” Mercersburg Review 1 (September 1849), 476.

14 Charles Porterfield Krauth, “Religion and Religionisms,” Lutheran Church Review 26 (January 1907), 230.

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15

John W. Nevin, The Anxious Bench, second edition, 31. One may also see Richard A. Muller, “The Holy Spirit in the Augsburg Confession: A Reformed Perspective,” Concordia Theological Quarterly 61 (January/April 1997), 77-78.

ALTAR CALLS AND EFFECTUAL CALLS—Sam Hamstra, Jr. 1 Iain H. Murray, Revival and Revivalism: The Marking and Marring of American Evangelicalism 1750-1858 (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth Trust, 1994), 185-190.

2 For an example, see John Williamson Nevin, The Anxious Bench, in American Religious Thought on the 18th and 19th Centuries, edited by Bruce Kuklick (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1987). For an overview of Nevin’s thought see Reformed Confessionalism in Nineteenth-Century America: Essays on the Thought of John Williamson Nevin, edited by Sam Hamstra, Jr. and Arie J. Griffioen (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1995).

3 John Stott, Between Two Worlds: The Art of Preaching in the Twentieth Century (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982), 335.

4 I Corinthians 2:1-5.

A SIXTH SOLA?—John R. Muether John Calvin, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, 4.1.4.

2 See Luckmann’s, The Invisible Religion: The Problem of Religion in Modern Society (New York: Macmillian, 1967).

3 George Gallup, Jr. and Jim Castelli, The People’s Religion: American Faith in the 90s (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 138.

1

REVIVALISM AND THE ME GENERATION—John Armstrong 1 Larry B. Stammer, “God is Up to Something, and It’s Big,” Los Angeles Times, December 31, 1995, A1, A20. All of the quotations used in this section are taken from this article.

2 David F. Wells, The Bleeding of the Evangelical Church (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1995), 3.

3 Tom Wolfe, “The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening, “ Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine (New York: Bantam, 1977), 166.

4 Sidney E. Mead, The Lively Experiment: The Shaping of Christianity in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 141.

5 Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches (London: Allen & Unwin, 1931), 796.

6 Philip J. Lee, Against the Protestant Gnostics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 194.

7 Wolfe, 139.

8 Ibid., 143.

9 Ibid., 146-48.

KEY FIGURES OF AMERICAN REVIVALISM 1 Perry Miller, Jonathan Edwards (New York, 1949), 177.

2 Harry Stout, The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), x.

3 Charles G. Finney, Systematic Theology (Minneapolis: Bethany, 1976), 320–22.

4 This entry—like many entries in this photo essay—draws heavily from the Twentiety-Century Dictionary of Christian Biography, edited by J. D. Douglas (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1995), 249.

5 Parker, Barry, and Smythe, The Television—Radio Audience and Religion (New York: Harper and Row, 1955), cited in George Marsden, Reforming Fundamentalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987), 16.

6 Vinson Synan, dean at Regent University School of Divinity (Virginia), cited in Christianity Today, March 3, 1997, 54

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WHITE HORSE INN RADIO BROADCAST FEATURING HOSTS MICHAEL HORTON, KEN JONES, KIM RIDDLEBARGER, & ROD ROSENBLADT Arizona Phoenix KPXQ 960 AM, Sun. 9 pm California Lake Tahoe KNIS 91.9 FM, Sat. 8 pm & Sun. 12 Noon Los Angeles KKLA 99.5 FM, Sun. 9 pm Mammoth KNIS 89.9 FM, Sat. 8 pm & Sun. 12 Noon Modesto KCIV 99.9 FM, Sun. 9 pm Palmdale KAVC 105.5 FM, Sun. 9 pm Riverside KKLA 1240 AM, Sun. 9 pm Salinas KKMC 800 AM, Sun. 3 pm San Diego KPRZ 1210 AM, Sun. 9 pm San Francisco KFAX 1100 AM, Sun. 3 pm Ventura KDAR 98.3 FM, Sun. 9 pm Colorado Colorado Springs KGFT 100.7 FM, Sun. 10 pm Denver KRKS 94.7 FM, Sun. 10 pm District of Columbia Washington, DC WAVA 105.1 FM, Sun. 9 pm & 12 Mid. Georgia Augusta WFAM 1050 AM, Sun. 8 pm Idaho Boise KBXL 94.1 FM, Sun. 10 pm Illinois Chicago WYLL 106.7 FM, Sun. 11 pm Kansas Wichita KSGL 900 AM, Sun. 8 pm Maryland Baltimore WAVA 1230 AM, Sun. at 9 pm & 12 Mid. Massachusetts Boston WEZE 590 AM, Sun. 2 pm & 12 Mid. Michigan Detroit WMUZ 103.5 AM, Sun. 8:30 pm Grand Rapids WFUR 102.9 FM/1570 AM, Sun. 9 pm Missouri St. Louis KFUO 850 AM, Sat. 11:05 am & Sun. 7 pm Montana Billings KCSP 100.9 FM, Sat. 8 pm & Sun. 12 Noon Nebraska McCook KNGN 1360 AM, Sat. 1 & 6 pm Nevada Reno/Carson City KNIS 91.3 FM, Sat. 8 pm & Sun. 12 Noon New York New York WMCA 570 AM, Sun. 12 Mid. & Mon. 11 pm North Carolina Asheville WSKY 1230 AM, Sun. 8 pm Pennsylvania Philadelphia WFIL 560 AM, Sun. 6 pm & 12 Mid. Pittsburgh WORD 101.5 FM, Sun. 6 & 12 Mid. Tennessee Chattanooga WLMR 1450 AM, Sun. 9 pm Texas Austin KIXL 970 AM, Sun. 11 pm Dallas KWRD 94.9 AM, Sun. 11 pm Houston KKHT 106.9 FM, Sun. 11 pm Jacksonville KBJS 90.3 FM, Sun. 11 pm San Antonio KDRY 1100 AM, Sun. 9:30 pm Virginia Norfolk WPMH 1010 AM, Sun. 9 pm Washington Collville KCVL 1240 AM, Sun. 9 pm

The White Horse Inn is a weekly radio program produced by the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. Each week the hosts talk about important theological topics from both the Lutheran and Reformed perspectives.

Dr. Michael S. Horton is the author/editor of ten books, including Beyond Culture Wars and Putting Amazing Back Into Grace.

The Reverend Ken Jones is the pastor of Greater Union Baptist Church in Compton, California. Dr. Kim Riddlebarger is copastor of Christ Reformed Church in Placentia, California. Dr. Rod Rosenbladt is a Professor of Theology and Christian Apologetics at Concordia University in Irvine, California.

If the program is not listed in your area, tune in on the internet at www.ICRN.com.

UPCOMING TOPICS July 5—August 9: Revivalism August 16—September 6: Unity September 13—November 1: They Took Their Stand: Great Debates in Christian History November 8—December 28 : The Book of Hebrews

RECENT RADIO SERIES NOW AVAILABLE ON TAPE Does Matter Matter (2 tapes) In this two part White Horse Inn tape series, hosts Michael Horton, Kim Riddlebarger, Ken Jones and Rod Rosenbladt take a look at the influence of gnosticism in contemporary and ancient Christianity, a view that down-plays material existence in favor of the spiritual. But as the hosts point out, this view is closer to Greek philosophy than the Judeo-Christian view of creation in which matter highly esteemed.

C-DMS-S 2 tapes, $13.00 Eschatology (4 tapes) As we approach the end of a millennium, speculation about the end times seems to abound. In this four part White Horse Inn tape series, hosts Michael Horton, Kim Riddlebarger, Ken Jones and Rod Rosenbladt provide for us a classical approach to the study of eschatology and why it is important to understand it not merely as various views of the end of the world, but rather, as a way of reading the Bible from Genesis to Revelation.

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JULY/AUGUST 1998

51

ON MY MIND

By Howard F. Ahmanson

Great Commission Deism e all know that the great doctrine of justification marks the historical division between Protestants and Roman Catholics.

But the theology of the Reformation often cuts not only along these traditional lines, but distinguishes an outlook on life as well as redemption that is often unknown even to many of the reformers’ supposed heirs. Sometimes one even sees Roman Catholics taking cer tain Reformation views more seriously than Protestants. One example of this is the matter of the “Cultural Mandate.”

At least for Reformed Christians, a distinction is made between the Cultural Mandate (“Be fruitful and multiply; rule and subdue”) and the Great Commission.

After the fall, the one is governed by common grace; the other by saving grace.

Here is the hear t of the issue as far as our contemporary concern: Is God’s primary concern that the organized Church and other Christian institutions should prosper and be well-funded and staffed? Or is God’s primary concern his world? Did God create the universe and then retire, like a businessman in mid-life crisis, to go into evangelism and redemption as a kind of second career? Or did he decree his plan of redemption in Christ as the solution to the major problem in the management of his universe, the rebellion of humankind?

And does he still manage the universe and want us to manage our position in it well? Is the Second Mandate (the Great Commission) linked with the First Mandate (the Cultural Mandate/Adamic-Noahic Covenant)? I would submit that Reformation theology, inasmuch as it is biblical theology, demands that we recognize God’s lordship over and interest in the entire universe.

It seems that Protestants are faced with two temptations: the one is to expect the visible Church to become a cultural institution with its respective brands of secular politics; the other is to give the false impression that because the Church is entrusted with the means of saving grace, it does not encourage individual Christians to take creation seriously. For instance, in the late Middle Ages, the Church became so self-absorbed that it could think only of preserving its own power, money, and influence. It had developed a “spirituality”

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of cash indulgences, gifts to monks, bought masses for the dead, jubilees, relics, and pilgrimages—all of which had little connection to the created sphere.

But the reformers did away with monkery and gave the word “vocation” the meaning it now has (or at least until recently), for in Roman Catholic circles it tended to mean “full-time Christian service.” According to the reformers, though, all productive callings are godly, and do not exist merely as fields for evangelism and earning money to support it. The very fact that we have this phrase, “full-time Christian service,” in common evangelical parlance—even though we do not worship Mary and the saints, are not subject to the Pope, and (in the more confessional denominations) are fairly firm in our understanding of justification by faith—reveals that we have no ground to be complacent about this important aspect of the Reformation’s vision. While Roman Catholics have attempted serious thought about the implications of God’s Word for various professions and activities in the world, Protestants have often yielded to the temptations of late medieval Rome.

Is it possible that this tendency reflects an implicit Deism—what I call “Great Commission Deism”? In other words, the universe is now supposedly running itself and God’s energies are focused entirely on saving individuals from a material creation that will supposedly be destroyed anyway. Saying grace before meals is important, if only it gets us out of this anti-creation mentality for a moment!

The reformers anticipated that the Protestant churches would have these problems. They, after all, rediscovered total depravity! They also made the slogan, Ecclesia reformata semper reformanda. If you think semper reformanda means “always reforming,” you’ve been studying too much Spanish. In Latin, it means “always in need of reform.” That is why we who care about God’s Church and God’s world must always be watchful and discerning.

Howard F. Ahmanson, was educated at Occidental College and the University of Southern California, and is the chairman of Fieldstead & Company, Irvine, California.

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