Twenty-two years ago I came to the conclusion that the perennial Evangelical (and Pentecostal) hunger for revival is, in effect, an attempt to put God in a box shaped like the First Great Awakening under Wesley, Whitefield and Edwards two centuries ago. In fact, in my view, this was a unique work of God for a particular time and circumstance, and not a biblical template for the renewal of Christianity. Indeed, like every work of God in history, it was in large part a psycho-social, as well as a spiritual, phenomenon, which was both a good thing and a bad thing in God’s providence.
I’ve mentioned in a recent post how, just a decade after the Awakening in Northampton, Jonathan Edwards was ousted from his pastorate not only for very worldly reasons, but by a church majority of just 120 – a mere fraction of the hundreds said to have been converted in the town’s revival. Where did all those dramatically converted people go? Many must have fallen away.
At his death, I understand that John Wesley’s Methodists numbered some 80,000. That is a significant number, and had lasting spiritual effects. My own maternal ancestors were Primitive Methodists (a group thrown out of the main movement!) in the mid nineteenth century, and my grandmother and her local family were still active in a Methodist church in Exeter when I was a kid. Furthermore, historians have said that the Methodist Revival was a major factor in preventing the kind of catastrophic revolution that occurred in France.
If we compare that with the ministry of Billy Graham, who lived just two years longer than Wesley and probably ministered for a shorter time, the latter is not seen as an instance of revival, but merely of evangelism. Converts did not start a mass movement, but were instead encouraged to join local churches of all – arguably too many – denominations. Yet formal responses to his “altar calls” numbered 3.2 million, and follow-up suggests a good proportion of those remained in the faith. It knocks the Awakening into a cocked hat.
Despite that unprecedented harvest, Evangelicals have continued to bemoan the lack of revival in this country! Declining church numbers and heterodox bishops may contribute to that sense of spiritual famine, but surely as significant is the feeling of being in a nation whose institutions have turned against Christ (and towards Allah, it seems).
Billy Graham has been criticised most for being too ecumenical and so under-emphasising doctrine. But Wesley had some pretty questionable teachings too, and regular readers will be aware of how his “sinless perfection” teaching has given rise to the whole phenomenon of Charismatic experientialism (which is effectively gnosticism and mysticism) closely linked to revivalism. But once we recognise the “Great Awakening” as a particular work of God, mixed in with some bad effects and with socio-political benefits that can themselves be seen as God’s providence, then we get a better handle on how God has grown his Kingdom messily through history.
The mediaeval Lollards won many for Christ among the poor, and opened the path to the recovery of the Bible as the word of God for all. Yet they had, by today’s standards, some pretty Roman Catholic teachings, and probably strongly influenced the Peasants Revolt, which you may see as a good or bad thing depending on your social class.
In Italy Savonarola won many converts to Jesus devotion within a Catholic theology, and with a strong political dimension. Was that good or bad? It was bad for him, as he was burned at the stake as a heretic, like so many Protestants a century later. But I’ll wager many who had come to love Christ remained fruitful for him.
Whether you view the Emperor Constantine’s toleration of Christianity, and his later disputed conversion, as a tragedy or a triumph, there’s no doubt that all those consequently converted came into a sacerdotal Christianity that was almost taken over by Arianism, but for the grace of God and the persecutions of Athanasius. Yet it was because of Constantine that your nation has a Church today, and that Europe and America retain a heritage worth trying to save.
The point is that God has worked in many novel ways through history, not to “do a new thing,” as the Charismatics constantly misapply Isaiah 43, but to do the old thing of getting the gospel of repentance and the Lordship of the crucified and risen Christ out there to the people. And now, apparently to the annoyance of the revivalists, there is a groundswell of support for Christianity that seems to come largely, though not entirely, from the unchurched working class, and from the undesirable working class at that.
Jordan Peterson is not working class, but was early to proclaim unfashionably that the Bible holds answers to today’s societal rot. As a Jungian, his approach began by treating the Bible as potent myth more than as holy writ, and to this day he comes across as agnostic about the claims of Christ. A more orthodox convert from the intellectual class is Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali Muslim who became an atheist on fleeing to the west, but who has now embraced Christ. Yet she too has been treated with suspicion by Christians, as well as by Richard Dawkins, for promoting “cultural Christianity.” But this is because she has seen, contra the pietists, that Christ should be Lord of society as well as of our individual hearts, or else society will be malevolent towards all.
Such figures shade over into the less educated who are beginning to stand up for Jesus, and show every sign of being the exemplars of 1 Corinthians 1:27:
But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things, of the world to shame the strong.
In America, of course, the MAGA movement and TPUSA are the prime examples, and are held at arm’s length by many Conservative Christians, whilst the progressives just shoot their leaders in solidarity. In this country, Russell Brand is suspected of being baptized just to evade sex abuse charges, whilst Tommy Robinson, converted in prison through an Asian chaplain, remains unmentionable in most churches because they believe the mainstream media that hate Christ, and that have kept largely silent about the Pakistani rape victims that Robinson has been defending for two decades. Come to think of it, the churches have been silent too.
It seems that the Evangelical Alliance has been warning us that Robinson’s Unite the Kingdom movement is only promoting Christianity in order to oppress Muslims, and I’m told that even past EA boss Clive Calver has said much the same. It seems that the default position is that the closest parallel is with Adolph Hitler (he always is the closest parallel to anything!), who sold Naziism to Germans under the cloak of restoring their Christian heritage.
This, of course, is always possible in a world of deceivers, and in these troublous times the risk of the reaction to the current cultural mess becoming totalitarian is one to guard against. But “by their fruits you shall know them.” Journalist Andre Walker is a practising Catholic, and has put out a good report on how, whilst cultural Christianity is not the “real thing,” it can save the infrastructure of church and faith-initiated institutions that make sharing our faith possible at all. That’s quite apart from the more spiritual point that if Jesus is now declared Lord of all by the Father, he is Lord of society too.
But I want to close this discussion with a video from Tommy Robinson’s own organisation, Unite the Kingdom, which is promoting a gathering in London on December 13, anticipated to be as large as the record-breaking rally in the summer, purely to honour the name of the Lord Jesus in song and worship. It is intended to be free of politics and social comment (thus sidelining cultural Christianity for the event), and I think you’ll agree with me that it is not even promoting Christianity as a religion, but rather the Lord Jesus himself. If a million people should turn up in the capital to sing the praises of Jesus, I would call it revival.
But maybe it’s the wrong kind of revival.
