Revival and the System of the Catechism

An interesting passage from high-church Calvinist John Williamson Nevin:

"It is a most unfair view of the system of the Catechism to think of it or speak of it as unfriendly to all special and extraordinary forms of action in the work of the gospel. The system, it is true, makes more account of the regular, the ordinary, and the general than it does of the occasional and the special....

"The extraordinary in this case, however, is found to stand in the ordinary, and grows forth from it without violence, so as to bear the same character of natural and free power. It is not the water-spout, but the fruitful, plentiful shower, causing the fields to sing, and the trees of the wood to clap their hands for joy. Such is the concept of a Revival.

"For such special showers of grace, it is the privilege of the Church to hope, and her duty to pray, at all times. To call into question the reality or the desirableness of them, is a monstrous skepticism, that may be said to border on the sin of infidelity itself.

"[Revivals] are the natural product of the proper life of the Church. Wherever the system of the Catechism is rightly understood, and faithfully applied, it may be expected to generate revivals in this form" (The Anxious Bench, 72-73, emphasis original).

Talk Amongst Yourselves, I'll Give You a Topic: The "Great Awakening" - It Was Neither Great, Nor an Awakening. Discuss....

In his book Revival and Revivalism, Iain Murray contends that due to the Calvinistic flavor of the First Great Awakening and the Pelagian flavor of the Second Great Awakening, the former is to be considered a legitimate work of the Spirit while the latter was largely spurious and manmade. Scott Clark, on the other hand, argues in Recovering the Reformed Confession that “both awakenings were species of the same genus, the QIRE [or, the quest for illegitimate religious experience].” He continues:

… it is sometimes said and even more frequently assumed that confessional Reformed theology, piety, and practice need to be augmented with the piety and evangelical fervor of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century revivals. In such a marriage, however, classical Reformed theology and piety are unequally yoked.

In fact, Clark’s contention is that it was not soteriological issues at all that caused Murray to bind together the good revivalist to the exclusion of the bad ones, but “a common heightened personal experience of the divine presence.”

Judged, however, by confessional Reformed theology, piety, and practice, it is more difficult to see [revivals] as models for our theology, piety, and practice. Rather, taken individually or as a whole, the revivals represent a subjectivism that is alien to the Reformed confession.

Let me be clear about the fact that I agree with Clark wholeheartedly (due in no small part to all the yelling at me he did while I was his student). Still, I can remember back to the days when I was an ardent Banner of Truth guy, and the objection I would have raised would go something like this: According to whose standard of “legitimacy” should one’s quest for religious experience be judged? In other words, Clark’s QIRE label can easily sound as if any quest for a level of religious experience that exceeds Clark’s is excessive and illegitimate.

Of course, Clark’s response will be that it is not his standard that he is commending, but that of our Reformed confessions and catechisms. But pro-revival Reformed theologians like Murray or the Old Princetonians subscribed to the same standards that we do, and their definition of revival as an extraordinary degree of blessing upon the ordinary means of grace would seem to comport just fine with the experimental language of the Westminster Standards (not to mention that of Paul).

So the question is, how do we avoid combating the subjectivity of revivalism with an equally subjective standard of our own?

Preaching to the QIRE

I have been away from home of late and don't have my copy of Clark's Recovering the Reformed Confession handy to cite directly, but there is a topic he addresses that I'd like to put forth for discussion. In one of his chapters he addresses the issue he calls the QIRE, or, the quest for illegitimate religious experience. One of this problem's main culprits, Clark argues, is the phenomenon of revival.

While an in-depth post on revival will probably have to wait until Monday, I am curious to hear your thoughts on the matter. Are revivals legitimate? If so, which ones, and by what criteria should we determine a revival's legitimacy? How much tension, if any, is there between confessional Reformed piety and practice on the one hand, and what many Banner of Truth authors call "experimental Calvinism" on the other?

On Whipping-Boys and Collective Growth

"Revivals," insists John Williamson Nevin,

"... are as old as the gospel itself. Special effusions of the Spirit the Church has a right to expect in every age, in proportion as she is found faithful to God's covenant; and where such effusions take place, an extraordinary use of the ordinary means of grace will appear, as a matter of course" (The Anxious Bench, 15-16).

I have observed on several occasions the propensity of Reformed believers to define ourselves negatively, over against what we reject rather than according to what we actually affirm. The subtle perception is that we need a foil or whipping boy in order to figure out who we are.

"You instruct the members of your congregation to kneel during the confession of sin and raise their hands while singing the Gloria Patri? But Catholics and charismatics do those things!"

I can't help but wonder whether we do the same thing with revival.

Yeah, I get it: Finney was a bad guy and contemporary evangelicalism is obsessed with the Gnostic and novel over the tried and true. But if the highest of high churchmen, a man who lived to see the effects of revivalism first hand, was still willing to boldly lay claim to the phenomenon of revival despite its being highjacked by fanatics, then maybe we don't need to be so afraid of it.

Think about it this way: What is growth in the Christian life but increasing in faith, love, and various other graces through the proper use of the means Jesus has appointed for these ends? Well, is it not possible for growth to happen in a church in the same way it does for an individual believer?

And what do you call that?

Antirevivalist Revival?

High churchman and general enemy of all things revivalistic John Williamson Nevin writes:

"It is a most unfair view of the system of the Catechism to think of it or speak of it as unfriendly to all special and extraordinary forms of action in the work of the gospel. The system, it is true, makes more account of the regular, the ordinary, and the general than it does of the occasional and the special....

"The extraordinary in this case, however, is found to stand in the ordinary, and grows forth from it without violence, so as to bear the same character of natural and free power. It is not the water-spout, but the fruitful, plentiful shower, causing the fields to sing, and the trees of the wood to clap their hands for joy. Such is the concept of a Revival.

"For such special showers of grace, it is the privilege of the Church to hope, and her duty to pray, at all times. To call into question the reality or the desirableness of them, is a monstrous skepticism, that may be said to border on the sin of infidelity itself.

"[Revivals] are the natural product of the proper life of the Church. Wherever the system of the Catechism is rightly understood, and faithfully applied, it may be expected to generate revivals in this form" (The Anxious Bench, 72-73, emphasis original).

I agree with the comments under the previous post to the effect that the term "revival" conjures up all sort of nasty images from unfettered emotionalism in general to barking in the Spirit in particular.

But such images would have been suggested even more strongly to people's minds in Nevin's day, and yet he refused to surrender the term, or to allow the phenomenon to be highjacked by well-meaning but fanatical revivalists.

Revive Us Again, O Lord

Iain Murray has described the phenomenon of revial as

"... an outpouring of the Holy Spirit... resulting in a new degree of life in the churches and a widespread movement of grace among the unconverted. It is an extraordinary communication of the Spirit of God, a superabundance of the Spirit’s operations, an enlargement of his manifest power."

A simpler way of puting it would be that a revival is an extraordinary degree of blessing upon the ordinary means of grace.

In his book Revival and Revivalism, Murray argues that a categorical distinction must be made between the revivals of the Great Awakening (c. 1735-1742) and the revivalism of the Second Great Awakening (c. 1820-1830s). The leaders of the former - men like Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield - were staunch Calvinists, while the latter was led by none other than the outspoken Pelagian Charles Grandison Finney.

Critics of Murray argue that, while the theology of the first Great Awakening was undoubtedly preferable to that of the second, the seeds of excess and anti-ecclesiastical fanaticism were sown long before Finney rode into town.

So what do you think? Is Murray's thesis legitimate? Does revival, despite its abuses, have a genuine place in Reformed ecclesiology?