I’m working through Jonathan Edwards’ Treatise Concerning Religious Affections of 1746, which I downloaded in 1999 when thinking and writing about the then current Toronto Blessing and Pensacola Revival for Prophecy Today, but which i never actually finished.
“Religious affections” is a useful term that is unfortunately incomprehensible today, “affection” being a word that has weakened over time to mean the mildest possible degree of warmth towards another. But Edwards means by it the sometimes overwhelming emotions, and even physical effects, associated with Christian movements, whether they be of God, of natural human responses, or of the devil. The first significant thing about his work is that he dispassionately deals with all three, which would be unusual in these undiscerning times.
The book was written after the end of the first and paradigm-defining Evangelical revival, the Great Awakening. It’s important to realise that Edwards was not some academic dissecting the phenomenon from an ivory tower, but had been one of the Awakening’s central figures. It began in England under the Arminian Anglican clergyman John Wesley, and the Calvinist innkeeper’s son and ex-actor George Whitefield. It spread to America through Whitefield (largely to allow Wesley space to work without a theological clash on the doctrines of grace), and Jonathan Edwards, a New England pastor, also a Calvinist.
Edwards documented the remarkable response to his preaching at the time in several short works, such as A Narrative of Surprizing Conversions, books which were misused by the proponents of the Toronto Blessing to justify the extreme behaviours witnessed therein. But even during the revival, and far more afterwards when he was able to examine its fruits over time, Whitefield was fully aware, and quick to point out, that much of what had made the Awakening such a significant and dramatic social phenomenon, was not the work of the Holy Spirit. Although, of course, he had no notions of modern psychological and sociological categories like hysteria, suggestion, mass formation and so on, he recognised that a large proportion of the dramatic testimonies and bodily effects was the product of human nature or even, in some cases, demonic manifestation.
One small example may show his astute insight into human nature. In Edwards’ time there was a classic Puritan understanding of the process of conversion, which any reader of Bunyan will recognise. It involved being suddenly convicted, amid a careless and sinful life, of the law of God, his wrath against sin, and the terror of one’s destiny in hell. After some time “under convictions,” hearing the message of the cross and salvation by grace through faith, one repented in tears, believed and was assured of salvation with great rejoicing.
Edwards recognised that such a neat pattern was usually not the case in real life, genuine conversion being for many a jumble of different apprehensions, feelings, and responses of which pretty much the only common feature was the end point of discipleship. But his insight was even greater, in that he observed that, over time, such converts as they were asked to tell their story gradually shaped their jumble of experience to match the expectations of the “standard model.” He recognised, in other words, that experiences are not only contagious, but are shaped by social expectation both before and after the fact.
By the time the book had been written, the emotional excesses people had witnessed at the height of the revival had led perhaps a majority of the population, according to Edwards, to reject the whole idea of strong emotion in true religion. In the first part of his book, Edwards rejects this extreme scepticism by showing that strong emotions, even extending to physical effects like weeping or prostration, and strong mental impressions, are neither evidence for, nor against, true conversions. Humans are naturally emotional beings, and therefore everything that affects us strongly affects our emotions, which in turn habitually affect our bodies in some way. In fact, the lack of any emotional involvement in religion is just as suspect as mindless “enthusiasm”… but not diagnostic.
In this conclusion he was no doubt able to draw on his pastoral experience of those whose dramatic conversion experiences had led to holy lives a decade on, and those with equally strong testimonies who had quickly fallen away – not to mention true saints who had been converted without extremes of “religious affection.” The net conclusion is that, in the end, the presence or absence of strong feelings, physical phenomena, visionary experiences and so on are neither here nor there when it comes to the matter of true faith. They may accompany both conversion and self-deception, and so they are evidence for neither.
The book goes on to distinguish, with logic and scriptural demonstration, the true evidence of Holy Spirit conversion from the false. There’s no space to go into them here, but what is most troubling for us is that his signs of genuine conversion are scarcely looked for by anyone in Evangelicalism nowadays, whereas many of the evidences he discards as entirely unreliable are now accepted as proof not only of genuine faith, but of intimate communion with God. In other words, many people now believe they have a hotline to God’s throne and a secure place in heaven when they are not even saved. That, surely, matters if the gospel is about salvation from sin.
In fact, we are worse off than in Edwards’ time, for pastors like him, aware of the pitfalls of self-delusion or satanic suggestion, were in a position, and worthily motivated, to discern where an individual was, and counsel them accordingly. Now, though, with the Charismatic emphasis on the validity of experience over all, even honest pastors are less prepared to challenge individuals, whilst the Big Sharks in megachurches are happy to milk false experiences and expectations of God all the way to the private jet.
That’s not to say that God does not work even in the manufactured revivals of the NAR and so on. Many of those coming out of these cults manage to salvage a true biblical faith which, by some miracle, began within the cult. One celebrated example would be Costi Hinn, nephew of televangelist Benny Hinn, he of the spirit-slaying white jacket.
Looking into the past, one might also be somewhat sceptical about the Welsh Revival of 1904, which was much assisted by the attention of the press, which reported (how accurately, I wonder?) how pit ponies no longer responded to commands because their masters stopped swearing at them. Historians report that, twenty years later, very little fruit from the revival remained in Welsh churches, and some rather cultic offshoots also emerged from it. And yet in the 1980s, I knew a lovely Christian lady in church whose parents were converted during the revival eighty years before.
Yet to me, the biggest question raised by Jonathan Edwards’ book is whether the proportion of genuine conversions during even the Great Awakening was high enough to offset the downsides of false assurance, disillusion with religion when emotional experiences faded, and so on. In other words, to what extent was the form the revival took a spiritual movement, and to what extent was it purely sociological and psychological? I ask this partly because, just four years after Religious Affections was published, Jonathan Edwards, the preacher of the Great Awakening as well as a great theologian and philosopher, was voted out of the office of pastor by a large majority of his congregation. And a large part of the dissatisfaction with him was his unwillingness to let professed unbelievers become church members and take communion.
To me, that would be a sad end to any faithful twenty-three year incumbency, even had Edwards simply been quietly preaching the gospel to his Northampton congregation, and it would be a poor reflection on the commitment of his church. But in fact this was the church at the epicentre of America’s greatest ever revival, just a decade before, that had resulted (to quote the title page of Edwards’ 1737 book) “in the Conversion of Many Hundred Souls in Northampton.”
The vote of the church against Edwards was 200 to 23. What happened to their common loyalty, let alone their zeal? And what happened to the rest of the “many hundreds” so “surprizingly converted” in the Awakening?
We are in the days of LEDs, and no longer accept that bulbs must generate more heat than light. Since the Bible doesn’t actually speak about Christian revivals along the lines of the Great Awakening, still less the Second Great Awakening under the likes of Charles Finney, with its “new measures” and “burned over districts,” let alone the much prophesied “End times Revival with Signs and Wonders,” perhaps it was ahead of its time in the pattern of evangelism it does advocate.
We don’t need to close the door on religious affections for that.
