Great Awakening

Background

The Great Awakening was a Protestant revival movement in the British North American colonies. A revival is a phenomenon in which faith that has grown cold is powerfully renewed. The movement of the 1730s and 1740s is usually called the First Great Awakening, and that of the early nineteenth century the Second Great Awakening. Even before the first movement, Solomon Stoddard, the Dutch Reformed minister Theodorus Frelinghuysen, and the Presbyterian Tennent family led local revivals. Stoddard was the maternal grandfather of Jonathan Edwards and his predecessor as pastor of the church at Northampton. Some Korean church historians hold that a longing for revival had already taken hold by the 1720s, before the well-known figures came to prominence.

Course of the Movement

• 1734: Congregationalist minister Jonathan Edwards preached a series of sermons at Northampton on justification by faith alone, after which a local revival broke out.
• 1739–1740: George Whitefield, an Anglican priest and an associate of the Wesley brothers, traveled through the colonies, preaching mostly in the open air. In the autumn of 1740 in New England, he is reported to have preached almost daily for more than a month to crowds of up to about 8,000 people. Benjamin Franklin printed his sermons and circulated them widely. Edwards also invited Whitefield to preach in his own church.
• 1740–1742: The revival reached its peak in the colonies and in Britain. On July 8, 1741, Edwards preached "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" at Enfield.

Results and Influence

Supporters of the revival were called "New Lights," and its opponents "Old Lights." In 1741 colonial Presbyterianism split into the "New Side," which supported the revival, and the "Old Side," which opposed it. The points of contention included:

• The authority of the synod (a body above the presbytery)
• Whether to require a college education of ministerial candidates
• Itinerant preachers preaching from other ministers' pulpits
• Gilbert Tennent's criticism of unconverted ministers

The New Side established the separate Synod of New York in 1745. The two sides reunited in 1758, and Tennent was elected moderator of the united synod. Records indicate that the number of New Side ministers grew considerably during the period of division. Edwards later served as president of the College of New Jersey, the forerunner of Princeton University.

The Second Great Awakening is generally regarded as having lasted from around 1800 into the 1840s. After Timothy Dwight, a grandson of Edwards through his daughter, became president of Yale College in 1795, a revival broke out on campus. Charles Finney, a leading figure of this period, understood revival as something that human beings prepare for and bring about through the use of various means.

Assessment

• Supporters hold that the movement revived personal conversion and heartfelt faith. It has also been credited with giving people across the various colonies a shared religious experience.
• Opponents at the time worried about emotional enthusiasm and the disruption of social order that resulted from it. Some also charged that Whitefield placed too much weight on his hearers' tears and emotional displays as evidence of success. Old Side Presbyterians placed great importance on ministerial learning and church order.
• Theologically, Edwards and Whitefield stood within Calvinism, while Wesley stood within Arminianism. Wesley believed that Whitefield's Calvinism undermined the truth that the gospel is open to all people. Finney's view of revival is regarded as a revision of Edwards's understanding of revival as a sovereign work of God. Korean Methodist media have sometimes presented the movement, together with Wesley's revival in England, as a revival that took place on both sides of the Atlantic.
• This tradition is regarded as having been carried on by later evangelical preachers such as Charles Spurgeon and Billy Graham.