Second Great Awakening

in this lecture we're looking at the Second Great Awakening and the changes that it wrought in American evangelicalism and then the Second Great Awakening flows out of the time that we've been talking about in general up until this point the first Great Awakening of course is from 1740 just prior to the American Revolutionary era you then flow into this revolutionary desire of the colonies as well as those in the church to separate itself in to chart a new course when you get to the Second Great Awakening which is far more diverse and far more varied both in terms of its scope and in terms of its theology you see a real rise of the changes that have come about as a result of the American Revolution now I want to stress again the American Revolution is not about theology and it's not about the church it's about the political orders and it's about the formation of a new government but these things always have an effect on culture and the church being part of the culture engaging with the culture sometimes positively or negatively means that what ends up happening in the church always takes on some type of the tone of the world around it what begins to happen from roughly 1780 down until about 18 20 18 25 is you see a rise a number of different changes you see a rise different denominational groups and you see the formation of what will form the backdrop of the 19th and 20th century landscape of the American church inevitably what happens whenever you have a revolutionary spirit come upon a culture and in this case come upon church is you end up having more or less a constant need or a constant belief that things are slipping the things are falling away that the church needs to get off the couch and get about the serious work of the gospel what's always baked into this idea though is a certain amount of dystopian pessimism when it comes to the status of the church and the culture certain groups tend to believe that if the church is not strong if it's not going forth and conquering and evangelizing vast numbers of people that what we're dealing with is a slouching towards the worst side of sin and oppression and secularism the ironic thing about dystopian ideas of where culture is going though is that they always have sort of built in the back end this belief that if we just do things right that the world will somehow become more or less utopian what do I mean well in the case of certain denominations at times particularly when you get to the eighteen hundreds you see proclaim this idea that the church is falling apart but that this community this denomination or this region of the world maybe even a subset region within America becomes the bastion of all things that are right and good and true in the world at times it comes with the belief that if we discipline recover this doctrine or that doctrine that finally the church will have its place in culture and will be listened to in other words what you see in the Second Great Awakening and the evolution of evangelicalism in the 19th or 20th centuries it's not so much a rejection fully of the older models of the role of the church and culture but often at times it's a mutation of it and I don't mean mutation in the negative sense I mean it simply develops there is always the assumption here that if the church simply does what it's supposed to do it will again become a voice for the world around it and they might even begin to sway things in their favor this idea of a dystopian world around us and the recovery of something pure and undefiled a utopian ideal plays right into the new American ethos of this rugged individualism this belief that we're supposed to chart our own ways and that it is up to us always to affect our own prosperity and I've said it one or two points along the way that one of the more natural things that happens during this period of time is that theological systems or the nominations that capitalize on this American individualism tend to have a pretty strong role to play in the life of the church those denominations it's still tout or still affirm a more or less top-down structure or that don't tow the line of rugged individualism that discuss things like sin and gravity and the need to let Christ's work be sufficient only for ourselves these church traditions tend not to fall apart they certainly don't go away but over time they cease to have the sway of the wider Church in America and you really begin to see this shift in the Second Great Awakening now defining the Second Great Awakening and looking for an exact start point and end date is usually a failing quest there are things on the horizon as early as the 1780s it certainly gets underway in full force in the 1800s and it seems to stop sometime around 1825 and what you begin to see happening here is just what I said those denominations in those traditions that tend to be more rooted tend to be more traditional might be the word groups like the Presbyterians or the Congregationalists those who are more in favor of an established ordinary slow orthodoxy you might say leadership from the top without a lot of the bells and whistles of revivalism these groups tend to not embrace the Second Great Awakening and they tend to not plant or to travel to areas where the Second Great Awakening is having its most significant impact what's going on here culturally is after the end of the Revolutionary War there is this push to go over the Appalachian Mountains metaphorically speaking and to settle and to populate regions that before were not the focus of the colonies and so you see a dispersion of a number of different folks farmers and workers and these kinds of things that head off towards the west some of them head more to the deep south some of them head up in the Midwest but there is a population explosion or dispersion from the colonies over the mountains into these areas one of the great challenges though that happens there is a lot of the folks that go or relatively undereducated instance what is in play here is an expansion of the culture from the east coast to the Midwest and down into the deep south there is suddenly a need for pastors preachers and evangelists to go out there to plant in established churches and the two most important and pivotal groups that take this task on or the Methodists and the Baptist's in fact from the Revolutionary War in 1770 down until the Civil War in the late 1800s the Methodists go from being a ragtag group of circuit writer preachers to the largest denomination in the country Baptists or right there behind them the expansion of America in other words brings with it an expansion of certain denominations that have an opportunistic spirit to go into these areas in the plant and to cultivate religious life Presbyterians and Congregationalists tend to stay more in the East Coast more in the areas where they had always been now of course some do go it's not ironclad that only the Methodists in the Baptist's go but in terms of their central mission the Methodists and the Baptist take on this charge to move to the western parts or the deep south parts of the world and they do it with pretty serious vigor while the beginning of the Second Great Awakening properly speaking actually gets going in Kentucky and other areas around it it's in Kentucky in the area of Logan County where you begin to see a real counter cultural anti institutional camp-meeting style of revival and evangelistic preaching the camp revivals in Kentucky there in the late seventeen hundreds in fact but bring together a time somewhere between ten and twenty two thousand people it's just simply a staggering number what's important about this though is this is not clergy or establishment lead and here you see the connection between the first Great Awakening in the second in the first Great Awakening with Whitfield and Jonathan Edwards you had two men that really felt establishment men who could be trusted at times by certain people within the established structures of the institutional Church no one's going to really fault them for the theology or for the quality of their education but still they were relatively anti institutional in the sense that they went outside the bounds of the church to affect their evangelistic preaching and this is particularly the case with George Whitfield here in the Second Great Awakening though again a lot of that revolutionary rugged individualism really begins to peak its head out here and just simply the sheer numbers involved with the Kentucky explosion of these big camp meetings you begin to see that this is having an effect the other reality though is at this time of course the Methodists are overtly Arminian in addition the Baptist have a very strong Arminian streak within them there's always a bit of back and forth between reformed theology and Arminian ecology and the life of the Baptist Church in this case those who are going out to the western parts to the Midwest and down into the deep south tend to be more of those who are theologically very similar to the Methodists at least on the subject of salvation and sanctification they want holy living though it's obviously run to a different institutional or denominational focus and we mentioned in our lecture on the Revolution and the American Church that men like francis asbury and Thomas Koch go up and down over thousands of miles on horseback preaching what we call today the circuits these men were known as the circuit writers they simply went everywhere preaching the gospel they were also very revolutionary in the way that they applied their theology both of them were Armenian and they appealed to this idea in the American ethos that the most important decision one can make with the new freedom that they felt that they had after the Revolution is to choose God to choose the Christian life over against the alternatives now obviously that's not the entirety of their message they are preaching Christ and renewal and revival they're preaching evangelism but the pastor implications of what's going on here is very much appealing to the idea that what needs to happen here is a life of holiness and sanctification it needs to be a restoration of society there needs to be those who are downtrodden brought up and those who are haughty brought low there's a real Galit Arian spirit here within the Methodist circuit writers and we mentioned of course that francis asbury even goes so far as to bring into his preaching circuit a man by the name of black harry hozier who was the first african-american preacher to address a predominantly white audience really radical things and i think we need a stress right here that there are a lot of good things that come out of the Second Great Awakening the appeal to holy living to the improvement of the lives of the people around us brings into the American evangelical culture all kinds of things that had not been there before things like Sunday school a movement that actually got underway to actually educate in the traditional sense people that had no skills those who were illiterate those who needed to have their lives improved it also brings about the tract in Bible societies things like the American Bible Society it's also these folks that tends to stress abolition as a requirement for those who are Christians in fact one of the under explored and underappreciated realities of American evangelicalism particularly during this time is the fact that a great number of evangelion during this time actually take up the cause of abolition now it is certainly not everybody there are those who in a traditional mind frame continue on with the arguments that there are differences of levels of society and the people who are slaves are not really being treated poorly the kind of head-in-the-sand argument but the abolitionist movement it's driven in part by the Methodist movement the Methodist movement from the very beginning all the way back to John Wesley himself is opposed to slavery John Wesley actually wrote a tract against it very very violently almost fact as violent as you're gonna get Wesley being just slamming the practice of slavery in America and so it should be again acknowledged that as the Methodist movement from the revolutionary time to the civil war as it becomes the lead voice in this most significant denomination in America its abolitionist stance becomes vital in the run-up to the Civil War and there are other strengths and weaknesses that come out of this world which we'll look at in later lectures still though the Second Great Awakening is often noted for some of its excesses and its abuses when it comes to the revivalist Experian and this is noted by both religious historians and to simply historians of American culture there are so many excesses and an ongoing reliance on revival and big tent meetings and this kind of individualistic approach to the Christian life that obviously they're going to be opportunities for abuse and for problems now some of these abuses are unintended consequences of the Second Great Awakening others are more or less people that should have known better or should have been stopped but because of the ongoing anti institutional model because those who were in power before are no longer the lead voices and they can no longer censure or stop rogue voices from leading a charge for revival often in American evangelicalism beginning here from the Second Great Awakening we see some the checks and balances that had been there from the beginning no longer having its punch and you see this in places like what's called the burned over district the burned over district is an area in New Jersey New York that became more or less a crisscross a kind of crossroads of so many of these revival istic circuits there ended up being a staggeringly high number of revivals preached in this one area alone in fact compared to other areas of America the burned over district becomes the most revival you might say to Quinn a word area after the Revolutionary War and people have done studies of this to this day in fact but certainly shortly after the Great Awakening the name burned over district is used because so many of the populous there just got simply numb in tone-deaf to the constant revival istic preaching that came into their community that there is a residual effect perhaps of so much excess when it comes to revival preaching and no opportunity or no strategy to put down deeper roots of a more ordinary regular church life of course the man who often gets the lion's share of the blame for the excesses of the Second Great Awakening is Charles Finney Charles Finney was born in 1792 many lived a good long while he died in 1875 Finney is a pivotal figure because what he does is he doesn't simply preach revival they actually kind of cans it and packages it and makes it a method is how other people could reproduce revivals in their own communities Fenny had been a presbyterian he eventually rejects Presbyterianism and he embraces something that comes to be known as the new divinity and this is essentially Arminian in perspective fitty never quite gives up all of his Presbyterian roots or his Presbyterian theology but he is overtly Arminian in his understanding that it is the free tours of the individual to accept God and not a matter of God's election or choice of the individual and the theology in the application of finis to the revivalist experience of the Second Great Awakening is often misunderstood it sometimes alleged that because he's our minion he is therefore manipulative actually there are a lot of people who are many and during the Second Great Awakening who are not manipulative Penny's choice though was to argue that the results of revival could be manipulated in fact he printed up a number of how-to manuals in which he talked about ways for people to stoke up revival because you could manipulate the free will of the people involved and this is certainly far beyond anything that the Methodists would be doing one of the more famous ones that Finney invents is something called the anxious bench which would be a bench up towards the front of the service and if someone feels that they're on the verge of a real embracing of the gospel or if they feel that they are on the verge of God coming upon them to really give him one of these ecstatic experiences they would go up and sit on the anxious bench and then all the prayers and the focus of those in the audience or the preacher himself would then churn and be directed towards this person sort of a pressure cooker of emotional and spiritual output when it comes to the anxious bench and for whatever reason whether it's spiritual or simply psychological the anxious bench and the methods of Finney were successful to a certain extent though they were always considered to be problematic by the majority of Christians that have Angelica 'ls in America one of the other excesses that you begin to see is you begin to see a lot of break off groups that take on sometimes heretical ideas sometimes apocalyptic ideas that are not heretical per se but which become the focus of certain denominational trends which gives a new emphasis within certain groups that are evangelical and we can't go through all the apocalyptic expressions that are going on here but we can go through one that is the teachings of William Miller then what became known as the millerite movement William Miller was a Baptist who lived up in New York State he is actually from around the area of the burned-over district which speaks to at least something of the interaction here he has heard maybe nothing but revivalist of preaching for a while and he has been stoked up to look for things that are extraordinary when it comes to the Scriptures well in the early 1800s flowing out of the Second Great Awakening Miller comes to the conclusion that he believes that Christ is going to return in 1843 now he says this personally in 1833 he begins to preach this out he actually gets a bit of a slow start he starts to tell others of his ideas and some begin to buy in though of course a lot do not and the way he came to this idea is he got to the prophecy and Daniel about the 2300 days until the end and then he applied the idea that a year is a day in any prophecy which is a somewhat unique interpretation of course not everyone agrees with his but he took this idea that McDaniel says there are 2300 days until the fulfillment of this prophecy by turning that into 2,300 years William Miller believed that he was on to something and he begins to work it out he actually lands on the year 457 BC which is the year that artaxerxes the first orders the rebuilding of the temple and beginning from the Year 457 BC he calculates at the end is going to be in 1843 well after the relatively lukewarm reception to his public defense of this view Miller and some others began to actually engage in a publishing campaign really a bit of a PR campaign to express and spread the views at the end times were going to be ending in 1843 now what's important here is in the publications themselves that go out they're actually been so often the answer as to the specific year Miller himself believed that is going to be 1843 in the publication's though he simply says that the time is ripe that it is soon that it's going to happen really at any moment and so he populates and spreads this idea - as far and wide a region as you can across a lot of different denominations again he's making a wide appeal to every Christian in America that they ought to wake up embrace the gospel and prepare for the second coming and it's worth making at least one note here what is it happening from really this point on in American heavens localism is whenever you see a significant amount of focus on prophecy in the end times in particular on the dating at the end times those who are attempting to come up with the exact day and year it often comes about as a result of this revival istic tendency it's not to say that all revivalists or apocalyptic but it has almost always been the case from the Second Great Awakening until now that those who end up being very apocalyptic who begin to engage in the dating in the end times those people who want to find the Book of Daniel in their local newspaper with current events or with whatever political nation is suddenly going to be the Antichrist those groups who end up in that camp very often get there through this revival istic tendency prophesy in other words the end times the nearness of the immediate dating of when Christ is going to return tends to be a leverage point to stoke up the desire to come back to Christ and you can see this all throughout history folks will lay out a grid or a pattern or some kind of dating plan as to when the end is going to happen and then at the very end there's always the times are short come and submit hear the gospel now in other words the in dating is both for the people who believe it a real actual date they do believe it's going to happen according to their system but in terms of the communication with the wider world and you see this here with Miller there's always this sense that what needs to happen is you need to come and submit that if you just simply give people an awareness that the time is short but there's only a brief amount of time before the coming of Christ the idea here is that you can really get some increase of conversions maybe well the millerite movement as it became to be known came to a head on October 22nd 1844 and what has become known as the great disappointment now again this is just shortly after 1843 which is the original date that William Miller gave as the coming of Christ and the scene is on October 22nd there they were standing all these groups expecting the end and then it doesn't come it's a real heart-wrenching moment for a lot of these particularly lay people who had bought into what William Miller had said the great disappointment hit them so heavily because this is one of those moments where there was a wide I believe that William Miller had to have been correct and his dating of the second coming of Christ and there they were standing waiting for the end to come and then it didn't the spill out of the great disappointment had residual effects positively and negatively for the ongoing development with an epidemic ilysm immediately there was lots of frankly goofy ideas that came about one of my favorites is the idea that one of the local pastors who believed full-bore what william miller had said read in the scriptures that when christ comes he's going to come on the clouds and he extrapolated from that that Christ was somehow stuck in the clouds that he had not come down fully but he was right there just right there in the clouds and so he called on everyone to pray Jesus out of the clouds that was up to their effort that Jesus was waiting on us to pray hard for him to come my other favorite is the idea that there was a great Sabbath and this is very typical whenever there's a very serious call for the end times whenever it doesn't actually happen the next thing that happens very often is those in power say oh well Jesus did come but he only came spiritually well this happens here and a number of folks say that crisis comes - they're now in the Sabbath age the seventh age and they cease working they believe that they need to stop working entirely and just simply rest as if it's a permanent Sabbath Krynn of course you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out how this didn't work you don't work you don't eat the majority of folks those split into a number of different camps some joined the Quakers which of course is one of the Anabaptist groups that had come over to the new world others joined a more recent break off of the Quakers known as the shakers and the shakers are a group that again became very apocalyptic and they believed that Christ came back that he did come back in the form of a woman this is woman that they called mother and she was the leader of the shakers for a period of time and still others formed the kernel or the core group of what would eventually become known as the Adventists there is a conglomeration of folks that come out of the Miller right movement out of the great disappointment who come to the conclusion that while Miller was frankly a bit crazy that his ideas were but out there in extreme and that they ended up being false predictions the avid espuma comes together and they say that the abacus desire the constant waiting moment by moment for the coming of Christ was a movement that needs to continue what they realize is that Christians should not allow apocalyptic ideas the more extreme ones that try to date the coming of Christ to shape the desire and the belief and the expectation of the coming of Christ and so the Adventist group comes together as a movement eagerly seeking a posture of expectant waiting on the coming of Christ now they've learned their lesson they're not going to be dating it at least not with any regularity that will certainly be individuals who come along with different theories but there becomes this Adventist movement very very important movement that you might say realizes the importance of an expectant posture of waiting for Christ to come in the way that it gives Christians a sense of immediacy in the Christian life and so the Adventist denomination is born out of the Miller right problems in the end the Second Great Awakening was a coming together of the American revolutionary spirit with the revival preaching that was there before the Revolution and it mixed together in a way then it went out into new areas with new populations and new groups in ways that shaped American evangelicalism ever since a lot of the trends we see here in the late 1700s and the early 1800s are still with us today and as we go forward through some more lectures here as we begin to look at things like holiness movements and parachurch movements abolition and these kinds of things you're going to see that the Second Great Awakening shape the context of the future of the American church

Channel: Ryan Reeves

Views: 112,108

Keywords: First Great Awakening, Second Great Awakening, Religion (TV Genre), Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary (College/University), Ryan M. Reeves, Francis Asbury (Author), William Miller (Founding Figure), Millerite, Adventist (Religion), Charles Grandison Finney (Author), Christian Revival (TV Subject), Protestantism (Religion), 18th Century (Event)

Id: t2LTugtRQEQ

Length: 26min 53sec (1613 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 09 2015