Monthly Archives: July 2013

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George Whitefield: A Revival Phenomenon

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Local revivals were a part of American culture from the earliest colonial times. But they were always isolated affairs and rarely transcended local boundaries. But in 1739, a young preacher appeared in the colonies whose spiritual zeal was so intense and whose speaking abilities were so finely tuned that he altered the conventions of preaching and religious association. It was George Whitefield (1714-1770), a mere novice of 21 years old, who went on a preaching tour of America that created a mass sensation. 

Whitefield, an ordained minister of the Church of England, was a colleague of the Wesleys, who had showed the Wesley brothers in both preaching outdoors and traveling wherever he could to preach the message of salvation. He came to Georgia briefly in 1738 to establish an orphanage. He came back in 1739 and his dramatic and effective preaching soon made him a national celebration. His preaching tour of New England in the fall of 1740, where he addressed crowds of 8,000 nearly every day for over a month, was most likely the most sensational event in American religion. Wherever he went in the colonies-New England, New York, Ben Franklin’s Philadelphia, Charleston, Savannah-he left a lively interest in the Christian faith. There were hundreds for whom the big question had become “What must I do to be saved?” and others who wondered what awakened religion would do to the social fabric. Whitefield was in short a phenomenon. 

On November 23, 1740, Nathan Cole from Connecticut went to see Mr. Whitefield and he writes about the experience in his journal: “When we got to Middletown old meeting house it was said to be three or four thousand of people assembled together…I turned and looked towards the Great River and saw the ferry boats running swift backward and forward bringing over loads of people and the oars rowed nimble and quick; everything men, horses and boats seemed to be struggling for life; the land and banks over the river looked black with people and horses all along the twelve miles I saw no man at work in his field, but all seemed to be gone.”

Benjamin Franklin wrote, “He had a loud and clear voice, and articulated his words and sentences so perfectly that he might be heard and understood at a great distance, especially as his auditories, however numerous, observed the most exact silence….I perceived that he intended to finish with a collection, and I silently resolved he should get nothing from me. I had in my pocket a handful of copper money, three or four silver dollars, and five pistoles of gold. As he preceded, I began to soften and concluded to give the coppers. Another stroke of his oratory made me ashamed of that and determined me to give the silver and he finished so admirably that i emptied my pocket wholly into the collection dish gold and all.”

Whitefield indeed could preach to mass crowds and could easily be heard from the furthest reaches of a crowd numbering in excess of twenty thousand people. He had a raw power of delivery, dynamic appeal, a commanding pulpit presence and a tremendous speaking endurance. Itinerant preaching was usually a young man’s profession and most seldom lasted for more than one tour. But George Whitefield, from the time he started preaching at the age of 23 until his death 33 years later, he preached several times weekly to mass audiences. In all, he made seven preaching tours of the colonies, each of which lasted for more than a year. He preached more than 15,000 sermons. 

As a man who was unattached to any local church, Whitefield was free to cast his message in the language of the common man. He discovered what politicians would discover later on, that in a mass speaking engagement, you don’t speak down to the audience, but aim the message directly to their hearts and minds and that is exactly what Whitefield did. He won the hearts of the American populace but also had his critics, mainly in the Anglican church and the academics at Harvard and Yale. Nonetheless, unprecedented crowds numbering in the thousands and tens of thousands, appeared out of nowhere to hear the simple and dramatic message of spiritual rebirth and justification by faith alone.

In Newport, Rhode Island, October 5, 1770, Whitefield died suddenly as he hoped he always would, in the middle of a preaching tour. His influence would not cease with his death, but would continue to inspire generations of American revivalists attuned to the simple yet powerful message of the new birth. His simple dramatic presentations can still be read with profit. His sermons stand the test of time and read with remarkable clarity and contemporaneity. And no one in the colonies until George Washington would enjoy such widespread popularity and fame among the American populace. 

 

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Life & Doctrine: Council of Chalcedon (451)

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council-of-chalcedonOn May 23, 451, the Eastern emperor, Marcian, summoned an ecumenical council of bishops that he helped would “end disputations and settle the true faith more clearly and for all time.” They met at Chalcedon, just across the Bosporus from Marcian’s imperial capital of Constantinople. About 520 bishops attended, all but four from the eastern half of the Roman Empire. Nicaea had settled the momentous question of the eternal relationship between the Son and the Father, but it raised questions regarding the relationships between the human and divine natures of Jesus Christ. The bishops met for fifteen arduous sessions between October 8 and November 10 and they came up with an answer that answered the question for which it had been called. And that answer has stood the test of time: Jesus was one person consisting of two natures. But before they came up with this time-tested answer, there was plenty of passionate controversy. In general, those theologians who were linked with Alexandria emphasized the deity of Christ; those sided with Antioch emphasized his humanity at the expense of his deity.

One controversial view that did injustice to Christ’s true humanity was developed by Appolinarius (c.310-c.390), rhetoric teacher and bishop of Laodicea. He developed this view when he was around age 60. Before this point, he was a good friend of Athanasius and a notable champion of orthodoxy. In order to avoid the undue separation of the human and divine natures of Christ, Apollinarius taught that Christ had a true body and soul but that his spirit was replaced by the logos. This logos as the divine element actively dominated the passive element, the body and soul, in the person of Christ. He stressed the deity of Christ but minimized his humanity. This view was officially condemned at the Council of Constantinople in 381.

In contrast to this was the view developed by Nestorius (c.381-c.452), a scholarly monk who became patriarch of Constantinople in 428. He disliked the term theotokos (God-bearer) as a name for Mary, the mother of Jesus, because it seemed to exalt her unduly. He offered the term Christotokos, as an alternative, arguing that Mary was only the mother of his human side. By doing this, he made Christ out to be a man, in whom, in Siamese twin fashion, the divine and human natures were combined in a mechanical union rather than in an organic union of natures. Christ was in essence only a perfect man who was morally linked to deity. He was a God-bearer rather than the God-man. The leaders at the Council of Ephesus in 431 condemned this doctrine. Yet the followers of Nestorius continued their work in the eastern half of the empire and carried their version of the gospel to Persia, India and even China in 635.

Enter into the fray, Pope Leo I also known as “the Great” due to his talent, seriousness, and dedication and because of his lasting importance in the history of Christian thought. His driving goal in doctrine as well as church order was to secure stability in an age of fragmentation. Leo’s response to this controversy, known as his Tome, took a straightforward response: Jesus was a single person with two natures. Leo walked a tightrope that many had fallen off of. Each form of Christ as God and man “carries on its proper activities in communication with the other.” With these words, Leo kept together distinctiveness of natures along with unity of person. This later became a cornerstone of the definition at Chalcedon.

After intense debate, the emperor Marcian himself read aloud the definition formulated on October 25, 451:

Following the holy fathers, we confess with one voice that the one and only Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, is perfect in Godhead and perfect in manhood, truly God and truly man, and that he has a rational soul and a body. He is of one substance with the Father as God, he is also of one substance with us as man. He is like us in all things except sin. He has begotten of his Father before the ages as God, but in these last days and for our salvation he was born of Mary the virgin, the theotokos, as man. This one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only-Begotten is made known in two natures which exist without confusion, without change, without division, without separation. The distinction of the nature in no way taken away by their union, but rather the distinctive properties of each nature are preserved. Both natures unite into one person and one hypostasis, that is substance. They are not separated or divided into two persons, but they form one and the same Son, Only-begotten, God, Word, Lord Jesus Christ, just as the prophets of old have spoken concerning him and as the Lord Jesus Christ has taught us and as the creeds of the fathers has delivered to us.

Chalcedon had important theological consequences. Of first importance was the way the balanced statement of Chalcedon articulated fundamental Christian doctrine. It reflected the teachings of the New Testament with commendable caution. In a way, it constructed a fence within which further reflection upon the person could continue. Whatever else might be said, it was always necessary to affirm Christ as one person with two natures. Getting questions right about the personhood of Jesus Christ was important because Christ and what he did were of immeasurable significance. Chalcedon preserved room for further thought on the person of Christ while it gave reassurance for the great work of salvation this Son of God  performed.

Second, Chalcedon marked the successful translation of the Christian faith out of its Jewish context (where words and concepts were shaped mainly by the Old Testament) into the Hellenistic (Greek) context (where words and concepts were shaped mainly by Greek thought and Roman might). For the Greek world, what occurred at the Council of Chalcedon could not be more important. Chalcedon showed that the heart of the gospel message could be preserved even in new conceptual language. The terms ousia, hypostatis, substantia, and persona are not found in scripture and the biblical world has very little connection to the conceptual worlds in which these terms arose. “Yet Chalcedon showed that the message of God becoming incarnate to effect the salvation of his people was a message that could be heard distinctly, adequately, and powerfully in precisely these extrascriptural terms and within that non-Judaic intellectual milieu.” (Noll)

Lastly, Chalcedon was not Pentecost. But because it faithfully synthesized scriptural history, the people of the Greek world could now hear the “wonders of God” in their own tongue. Because Chalcedon’s work faithfully translated scriptural teaching, Greeks would now express those wonders of the Lord God in its own conceptual terms. This synthesis and translation would need to happen again and again.

The Definition of Chalcedon retains its momentous importance not just because it is such a skillful and well-balanced statement. It also faithfully represents the reality about which it speaks. We Christians can live in the world and for the glory of God we serve and worship, because the fact of one “person” can coexist with the fact of two “natures” because it really happened, as the apostle John attests, that “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” (John 1:14)

 

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The Course of Empires: Whig View of History

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John-Locke-Second-Treatise-of-Government-Cover-Page    The dissenters had a sharp and heightened view of political tyranny. We are talking about people who were sensitive to the abuse of power. By the 1720s, the Whigs were amassing a body of political thought that linked together political and ecclesiastical tyranny with the accumulation of executive power surrounding the monarch. Looking at the precedents of ancient Athens and Rome, they saw that republican governments tended to be subverted if that republic acquired an empire. The massive colonial administration would bring accumulation of power around an executive, and corruption would quickly set in. There would be buying and selling of offices and privileges. This is what happened to their native England. Its combination of monarchy and parliament was losing its balance of power towards growing executive power and arbitrary privilege. The wealthy Church of England was on the side of this executive power. When it comes to theology, they were not as strict as their Puritan predecessors, but they did share with the Puritans the belief that high-handed monarchial power is always supported by ecclesiastical privilege. Therefore these men of the commonwealth were the champions of the inalienable rights of humanity to life, liberty and property, in the footsteps of John Locke, and the inalienable rights of conscience in the traditions of English religious dissent.

George Marsden writes that “one could hardly overstate the importance of this Commonwealth heritage in shaping American revolutionary political thought.” Most Americans were dissenters. Even those who were Anglicans, like the Virginia gentry, were outsiders to royal privilege. Those who held political or social power in America stood to lose if the full-fledged English system was exported to the colonies. So when the English authorities, after 1763, began to take more interest in reorganizing her new expanded North American colonies, many colonists were understandably alarmed. And they stated their alarm in the terms and language of their Commonwealth or Real Whig heritage. This dissenting tradition would become the basis for the republican outlook that long dominated American political thought.

These fears were compounded by the militant anti-Catholic sentiments of many colonial revolutionaries. In a real sense of sad irony, those who were the champions of freedom and liberty did not extend these natural rights to those who they considered to be their mortal enemies. The Catholic population, who lived mostly in the middle colonies, was often discriminated against and generally tolerated. They were not the problem. Some Catholics, such as the influential Carroll family in Maryland, supported the Revolution and had hopes of making the American Catholic Church more republican. The real problem was that the thirteen English colonies were still Protestant enclaves in a mostly Catholic hemisphere. One could say a cold war mentality lingered. This was especially true in New England, home of the Congregationalists, the Puritans. On multiple occasions in the course of the eighteenth century, amidst much religious fanfare, the men of New England mobilized the militia for military action against French Catholics in Canada. In 1763, at the end of the French and Indian War, they rejoiced that French Canada (Quebec) was finally in British i.e. Protestant hands. But the rejoicing soon ended and they were quite chagrined that the Quebec Act of 1774 the British government of Canada allowed for continued tax support of the Catholic Church and allowed for the continued spread of Catholicism in the trans-Appalachian west (upper Midwest).

Most of the American revolutionaries took for granted a republican (Whig) view of history that had grown out of the British religious and political experience. They associated tyranny with the Middle Ages and the marriage of ecclesiastical and royal power. “Thus,” as John Adams wrote, “was human nature chained fast for ages in a cruel, shameful, and deplorable servitude to the pope and his subordinate tyrants.” Revolutionary thinkers like Adams saw Protestantism as crucial to the rise of freedom. According to this view, Protestantism opened the door for reason and common sense to challenge superstition and privilege. Here and elsewhere dissenting Protestant and Enlightenment views would blend more than they would disagree. Both parties saw superstition as the problem and common-sense reason as the answer. Both saw Catholicism (and to some degree Anglicanism) as defending monarchy and the authoritarianism of the Middle Ages and dissenting Protestantism was on the side of liberty and freedom.

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America: The Land of Dissenters

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The American Revolution followed closely on the heels of the Great Awakening. This momentous religious event contained seeds for potential social change. Now the Awakening did not cause the Revolution, but it did anticipate it in many ways including the assertion of the rights of individual in whatever social level to challenge the established authority. This country is a land of dissenters and it has been since its inception. 

The most important link with the Revolution and a much older tradition of Protestant dissent that the Awakening reinforced. This went back to Oliver Cromwell’s Puritan Commonwealth in the 1650s. The American colonies were populated mostly with people, especially New England Congregationalists and Scotch Irish Presbyterians, who thought of themselves as heirs to that valuable heritage. In their eyes, they were Dissenters rather than part of the powerful Anglican establishment. The Awakening intensified the dissenting tradition in America and increased their numbers. When the Revolution started, Congregationalists, Presbyterians and Baptists were almost invariably on its side.

George Marsden points out that one of the overlooked aspects of early America is its almost tribal ethnoreligious diversities. Politically, the most significant was the Scotch-Irish. During the reign of Elizabeth I, these Scots migrated to Ulster or Northern Ireland. As Scots, they disliked the English and as Presbyterians they disliked the Anglican church. During the course of the eighteenth century, they sailed in large numbers to the colonies, making up about one fourth of the population in Pennsylvania. They developed a strong animosity to the ruling Quakers, who were English and whose pacifist beliefs the gun toting Scotch-Irish saw as cowardly. They eventually brought Quaker rule to an end. Their even stronger hostility toward the English Anglicans, who were in control of the imperial government, was a major ingredient in the Revolution. Interestingly, the British sometimes referred to the American army as Presbyterian. But it was not just the Presbyterians. The Congregationalists in New England had a long and bitter history of antagonism with the Church of England. 

There was also a tradition of political dissent during the eighteenth century. The thought of English Dissenters was almost universally appropriated by the American revolutionaries. This thought first developed in the 1720s and it has been referred to as the Real Whig, or Commonwealth tradition. The commonwealth referred to the time of Puritan rule in England in the 1660s. These eighteenth century commonwealth men were heirs to this heritage because they belonged to nonconformist or dissenting denominations. 

Yet we most also recognize the importance and political implications in England of having an established church. Mirroring the practices of old Christendom, the Church of England was practically a department of the state and political power was tied to church membership. Other denominations were tolerated, but the memories of the Puritan takeover was recent enough that Anglicans were not ready to give up their political and social control. During the 1700s in England, if one were to hold public office or attend Oxford or Cambridge, one had to belong to the Church of England. 

This ties in to the most striking factor of religious dissent in the colonies was what one historian called the “Great Fear” or the fear of the American bishop. Anglicans in America operated at a considerable inconvenience by having no resident bishop by having no resident bishop since the church holds that the direct laying on of hands by a bishop was essential to ordination of clergy. Yet the same republican Americans, including many Anglicans, who opposed the new taxes for the empire were dead set against such an otherwise sensible proposal for an American bishop. They saw it as a major step toward imposing on the colonies the whole of the English hierarchical model for governing society.

Religion was a significant factor but it was not an isolated variable in the political events. Instead, the resurgence of dissenting religious heritages during the Great Awakening reinforced other ethnic and regional loyalties that contributed to the Revolution. Dissent was and is an important American tradition, whether it be religious or political. I spoke of the Whigs, they are one of the topics coming up, in particular, their view of history. 

 

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The Birth of the Great American Republic: The Founding Fathers

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As I write on the eve of the 237th anniversary of American independence, I thought I would take part of July to write on the Christianity and the birth of our republic. Let us start with the religion of the founding fathers. Too much has been written on the “Christian” origins of this great nation of ours and while there are some definite truths to this, we need to be careful we don’t take it too far; unfortunately it has been at times. It is important and practical to make sure the true story is told. I hope in the following posts to do just that.

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The founding fathers were a mixed lot, religiously speaking. They were generally Protestant. Some of them were quite orthodox Christians in Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Congregationalist, Quaker, or Baptist persuasion. But others, like Thomas Jefferson, were the exact opposite, if they were to be judged by the standards of Christian orthodoxy. Jefferson did not believe in miracles or the deity of Jesus Christ. Roman Catholic, Jewish, or other religious convictions had little influence in early America. 

But whatever we can say about the religious convictions of the Founding Fathers, there was another spirit that brought them together in the founding of the republic. This spirit arose from the humanism of the Renaissance which gave birth to seventeenth-century rationalism and to the eighteenth century Enlightenment. Without doubt, this was a religious spirit but the religion it inspired was a human-centered moral philosophy rather than a God-centered life of dependence upon God through his revelation. Majority of the founders gave evidence of the inner struggle between these dual spirits in their lives. 

On the one hand, orthodox and even some unorthodox Christians expressed a traditional private piety that would include prayer, church attendance, Bible reading, and testimony of personal faith in God. On the other hand, though, the quest for a stable and enduring political order on the part of these same men was being directed by the conviction that a common moral philosophy rooted simply in human reason could give the foundation for public community. The religion of our Founding Fathers was a synthesis of these two faiths. 

Franklin, for example, valued the influence of Christian churches, but had no use for a Philadelphia minister whose goal was “to make good Presbyterians rather than good citizens.” And George Washington, for all of his moral conviction, referred to God with language that was drawn more from nature and reason than from the Bible. This country’s father referred to God as Supreme Being, Providence, Grand Architect, Higher Cause, Great Ruler of Events, Great Creator, Supreme Ruler and Director of Human Events. 

The author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, is perhaps the best example of this common duality. His public philosophy (his religion) became the majority conviction that shaped the basic structure of American public life. To Jefferson, God was the benevolent Creator who preserves people in this life and judges them according to their moral worth and good deeds; not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; not the Father of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ; not the Lord and Sustainer of the Universe…..indeed a far cry from the God we find and know from the sacred scriptures.  

Jefferson advised his nephew, Peter Carr, to read the Bible to see if it stood the rational and moral test for truth. In a letter dated August 10, 1787, he wrote, “Do not be frightened from this inquiry. If it ends in a belief that there is no God, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel” in the exercise of virtue and “in the love of others which it will procure you.” But, on the other hand, if this leads to the belief that there is a God, then that faith will give you additional comfort and motivation. 

So for Jefferson the existence and identity of God was of only secondary importance. The primary concern for anyone was to find motivations to live a virtuous and moral life, whether that included the God of the Bible or not. God was only important if he was useful towards human virtue. 

This great human-centered moral philosophy, which served as the commonly held religion of this nation’s Founding Fathers, was not primarily concerned with private morality, but more for a public moral philosophy oriented towards the good of the society. To them, life was duty and the moral duty was to serve the society in which one lived. This was rooted in the classical Roman philosophy of Stoicism, particularly expressed by Cicero.

 

In sum, Jefferson, Franklin, Washington, and the other leading revolutionaries were “Deists,” who believed in a rational form of Christianity. They abandoned those parts of the Christian faith that were seen as irrational, but retained faith in a creator God since they thought it would be unreasonable to think that such an incredible universe appeared without an intelligent designer. They believed in a created moral order, reflecting the wisdom of the Supreme Being and necessary for the practical ordering of society. They greatly admired the moral teachings of Jesus, but did not think him to be God Incarnate. 

Perhaps the most important result of the religion of public morality was its victorious influence over orthodox, evangelical Christianity in the public square. It helped establish a civil religion in the United States as the newly born republic and the public faith matured. Evangelical Christians held on dearly to their doctrines and churches as matters of private faith. But at the same time, however, they came to accept a great deal of Jeffersonian public philosophy, seeing it as a good secular basis for a common public life. What these orthodox believers failed to recognize was that this new public philosophy was an all embracing religion, one that continues to dominate the republic, even among Christians. As Sidney Meade puts it, the United States of America is a “nation with the soul of a church.” Or as George Marsden writes, “The United States is both remarkably religious and remarkably secular.”