The Awakenings

In America and Western Europe, there were two great revivals, two “Great Awakenings.”  The first began about 1720 and lasted for years.  It was led by preachers George Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards, and others.  The common tactic of this major revival was to simply teach God’s Word and let the Holy Spirit do the work of evangelism.  Tens of thousands came to know Christ.

The result of the revival wasn’t just large numbers of converts but an educated church.  Those who came to Christ came because they had learned the Truth, why it was true, and had decided to commit to it.

Then there was a “Second Great Awakening” in the early 1800s.  Charles Finney was the most prominent of the preachers.  Finney’s sermons were not like those of the First Great Awakening.  He used very little Scripture but told emotional stories to draw people to make commitments.  He found the immediate number of converts was greater if people could be persuaded rather than taught and allowed to decide for themselves on the basis of knowledge.

Finney’s crusades were effective.  Thousands of the lost came to know Christ through his revival meetings.  But, there were consequences.

The result of Finney’s tactics was an uneducated church, a church whose faith was not founded on fact but on Finney’s emotional pleas.  This practice of very little teaching but lots of stories was continued by most preachers for the following decades.  The church was happy in its ignorance.  The culture was such that nearly everyone went to church.  There were few to challenge the believers or to test their faith.

But, that didn’t last for long.  In 1835, Joseph Smith Jr. published the Book of Mormon and started the Mormon “church.”  Smith lived only 14 more years but led thousands astray.  Because the church was, for the most part, poorly taught and ill equipped to defend itself and tell those lost in Mormonism why it was unbiblical, the cult grew mostly unchallenged.  Few knew the Truth well enough to lead the Mormons away from error.  Today, it is estimated there are 4.5 million Mormons worldwide.

In 1879, Charles Taze Russell published the first copy of Zion’s Watchtower Herald of Christ’s Presence, and the Watchtower organization began.  Today, there are about 8.5 million Jehovah’s Witness worldwide because the church was still unable to defend the truth.

The church looked at these lost people and often didn’t even see them as lost.  They were considered as just holding differing views of the Truth even though the Mormons taught and still teach that Jesus is Lucifer’s brother and the Watchtower taught and still teaches Jesus is the Archangel Michael.

By 1925, the church still had not seen their need for in depth teaching.  That year, John T. Scopes, a substitute science teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, had been recruited by the ACLU to teach evolution in the local high school.  Teaching evolution was against the law in Tennessee at that time, and the ACLU wanted a test case.  Scopes was arrested and put on trial.

The Scopes trial of 1925 was as big a trial as the O. J. Simpson trial 70 years later.  The trial was broadcast gavel-to-gavel nationwide on radio.  The two major players were ACLU attorney, Clarence Darrow, and William Jennings Bryan, three times Democrat presidential candidate and very public Christian.

Because Bryant was as ignorant of the Bible and of the science of his day, Darrow wiped the floor with him.  The church had been publicly humiliated and was now seen as a bunch of ill educated ignorant bumpkins pushing an outdated superstition.  The church withdrew.  It became self-involved.

Today, nearly 100 years later, many Christians are still very much like the church of Scopes’ day or Finney’s for that matter, and are still looked upon at as a bunch of ignorant uneducated fools. True, the church is beginning to emerge again into the marketplace of ideas, but it is slow and we face much resistance.

Claiming to know something implies heavily that the “knower” can explain what they know and give convincing justification for it.  The church of Finney and Bryan couldn’t give a good account of what they believe.  We’re doing better, but it is still our responsibility to know what we believe and why we believe it.  In this way, we can change the church and the world.

Jude 1:3 (ESV)
³  Beloved, although I was very eager to write to you about our common salvation, I found it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints.