Revivals
1. Definition
2. History
2.1. North America
2.2. Great Britain
2.3. Switzerland and France
2.4. Netherlands
2.5. Germany
2.6. The Nordic Lands
1. Definition
The term “revivals” is a general one used to describe the movements of awakening that covered all the Protestant territories of Europe and North America in the 18th and 19th centuries. The term remains popular, especially in those parts of the Protestant world under American influence. Revivals are seen as counteracting Christian decline, both spiritual and social, and, by special evangelistic and organizational means (→ Evangelism), as renewing → church and → society on a biblical and reformative basis.
To portray revivals as a whole is very difficult. Quite apart from the lack of preparatory critical work, the movements cannot easily be distinguished from preceding, contemporary, and subsequent developments. Especially fluid are the boundaries with → Pietism, → Methodism, → Romanticism, → idealism, → restoration, and confessionalism, as well as with the → fellowship, → holiness, Pentecostal (→ Pentecostalism), and → charismatic movements. There are also regional distinctions, a special point being that the developments in the English-speaking lands differ both chronologically and materially from those on the European mainland. In these circumstances the use of the term “revivals” must be regarded as no more than a necessary historiographical device.
2. History
2.1. North America
When the highly educated Jonathan Edwards (1703–58) preached against a weakening of the traditional Calvinist doctrine of → justification in his church at Northampton, Massachusetts, it triggered an awakening. Beginning in 1734 and later receiving the help of the itinerant English preacher George Whitefield (1714–70), it spread across all the colonies that were under Reformed influence. In his assessment of the revivals Edwards took a very cautious view both of the human ability to turn to God and of his own part in these events. He found in revivals, rather, the work of the → Holy Spirit. Despite this skepticism, however, Edwards became a chief witness for the theory and practice of revival. This stirring, or First Great Awakening, may be seen as the correction of a development within → Calvinism; the Second Great Awakening (roughly 1790–1835) was directed to those who were outside the church in both urban and rural areas.
In contrast to Edwards, Charles Grandison Finney (1792–1875) abandoned traditional → Reformation positions and totally subordinated the content of his → preaching to the goal of → conversion. He accompanied his preaching with measures that would promote conversions: evangelistic weeks, public gatherings to discuss the problems of individual faith, the altar call, the mourners’ bench (“anxious seat”), music, lay participation, and pastoral follow-up. With the introduction of these so-called new measures, Finney initiated the popular evangelism of modern times.
In the 1830s social problems also began to be tackled. There was an attack on → slavery and also on drunkenness (→ Substance Abuse), paralleling movements for abolition and temperance. The piety of American revivalism had a democratic and anti-intellectual trait that went hand-in-hand with a rationalizing of conversion and awakening, so that the legacy of the → Enlightenment was preserved rather than contested. The second half of the 19th century brought a new wave of awakenings that came to be associated with the name of Dwight L. Moody (1837–99), who worked especially among the → masses in the growing cities. Revivalism in North America continued into the 20th and 21st centuries through persons such as Billy Sunday (1863–1935) and Billy Graham (b. 1918).
The outbreak of Pentecostalism associated with the 1906 Azusa Street mission in Los Angeles represented a strong revival with mostly Methodist and Holiness origins. That revival shared many features with a mass popular movement in the Welsh churches during 1904–5 and with significant movements of renewal and church expansion that took place during the same years around Pyongyang, Korea, and the Mukti Mission of Pandita Ramabai (1858–1922) in India. In turn, the newer Pentecostal movements, which have spread throughout the world, have been active promoters of revival, not least in the United States. Throughout the 20th century and into the 21st, many evangelical and fundamentalist churches in America continue to feature revival emphases, especially in Baptist and independent Bible churches, where regular revival meetings are sometimes scheduled on an annual basis. During the last century revivals also occurred regularly at conservative Protestant colleges and, from the 1960s, in some Catholic institutions associated with the charismatic movement.
With Graham, the descriptive word “revival” gave way to “crusade.” With Graham, moreover, a highly sophisticated use of modern → mass media communication technology has become instrumental in evangelistic work. Furthermore, it is to be acknowledged that American “revival movements” have in a clear sense merged with other predominantly conservative theological, ecclesiastical, sociological, and political movements to give shape to many expressions of an increasingly strong and diverse American → evangelical movement. The theological and, especially, sociopolitical significance of this movement is increasingly important in American public and private life. It must also be noted that, in the North American context, revival movements have played a significant and abiding role in the development of both Afro-American and Pentecostal churches. The judgment of W. W. Sweet, who had a section “Revivalism on the Wane” in his Revivalism in America (1944), was clearly in error.
2.2. Great Britain
Howel Harris (1714–73) and Daniel Rowland (1713–90) started evangelistic work in Wales in the 1730s. The Anglican theologian John Wesley (1703–91) had his “Aldersgate experience” in May 1738, which gave him his preaching commission. Wesley knew both the life and teaching of the → Moravians of Herrnhut and the writings of Jonathan Edwards. In a setting of rational Christianity and social inaction, he linked his message of justification by faith to a summons to → love of → neighbor. With his brother Charles (1707–88) and George Whitefield, John Wesley preached tirelessly throughout Great Britain. His aim was to renew the Church of England from within (→ Anglican Communion), but a break became inevitable in 1795.
In various parts of England Anglican ministers like William Grimshaw (1708–63), John William Fletcher (1729–85), John Newton (1725–1807), and William Romaine (1714–95), in spite of initial opposition, experienced revivals in their parishes that gave rise to a powerful Evangelical movement within the church. Various groups came together to form the London Missionary Society in 1795, the first interdenominational missionary society, and then to set up the Religious Tract Society (1799) and the British and Foreign Bible Society (1804), each of which had an impact on the European mainland.
Revivals affected the highest ranks of society (e.g., the so-called Clapham Sect; → Lay Movements 1.4), which made possible the attempt to remedy social ills by legislative action. William Wilberforce (1759–1833) set an example with his campaign to abolish the slave trade (1807) and then → slavery itself (1833), and others tackled a whole series of other problems, especially Lord Ashley (1801–85, the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury), with his labor for factory workers, the mentally ill, those in the garment industry, and boy chimney sweeps. From the middle of the 19th century, American visitors brought a new impulse—Finney with his new measures of revivalism (1849–51, 1859–60), and Moody with campaigns in industrial cities (1873–75, 1881–84). In both England and Wales, however, revivals still drew their main strength from the churches and parachurch movements.
In Scotland → Methodism made little headway, in view of the area’s strong Calvinist orientation. The opposition of the laymen Robert (1764–1842) and James Alexander (1768–1851) Haldane to the established church led in 1799 to the founding of a Congregationalist church in Edinburgh (→ Congregationalism). The roots of this movement lay in commonsense philosophy, as well as in the Calvinist traditions. Rationalist tendencies (e.g., in extended proofs of the truth of the Christian revelation) thus combined with revivalist piety.
The same trends appeared also in North America, which in turn influenced Finney. Since Robert Haldane traveled extensively in Europe, it is not surprising that we find a similar combination in other Calvinist churches, for example, Geneva and France, as well as North America (→ Restoration Movements 1.2).
The Haldanes prepared the ground for the work of Thomas Chalmers (1780–1847) in Glasgow, who was converted in 1811 under the influence of Wilberforce and who was well known not only as a university professor but also for his parish organization. He tried to meet the needs of the city’s poor by a strict system of self-help and parish support based on a rural model (→ Poverty). All social, pastoral, and educational tasks were to be discharged under the church’s leadership. Though this program of re-Christianizing the masses was not a total success, it influenced similar efforts elsewhere, for example, in Germany.
Attaining a leading position in the church, Chalmers opposed the growing interference of the state through the patronage system in Scotland, and this stance led to the Disruption of 1843, when Chalmers and over 470 (out of 1,203) ministers left the Established Church of Scotland and founded the Free Church of Scotland (→ Free Church). With its ecumenical orientation, this church had a hand in founding the Evangelical Alliance in 1846 (→ World Evangelical Alliance). As in England and Wales, and also Northern Ireland, so in Scotland revivals marked the middle of the 19th century, especially in the Highlands, and strong evangelistic work continued into the 20th century.
2.3. Switzerland and France
An awakening in Geneva was made possible by the survival of Moravian traditions. A group of younger theologians led by Ami Bost (1790–1874) criticized the rationalistically inclined Reformed church, accusing it of denying its heritage. A visit by Robert Haldane resulted in the founding of free congregations after 1817. The Evangelical Society of Geneva, founded in 1831, took up the work of evangelization and → education. To produce trained leaders, a theological school was set up within the Evangelical Society in 1832 (→ Theological Education), at which Jean-Henri Merle d’Aubigné (1794–1872) and Louis Gaussen (1790–1863) taught. The separated churches joined together in the Église Libre in 1849. This revival in Geneva affected the neighboring cantons of Vaud (where a free church was founded in 1845) and Bern (where an evangelical society was established in 1831). Through the evangelizing work of César Malan (1787–1864), the revival also spread to France, Belgium, Netherlands, and Great Britain.
Adolphe Monod (1802–56) inspired the French awakening. He had studied in Geneva and experienced conversion in 1827 under the influence of the Scot Thomas Erskine (1788–1870). Called the same year to Lyons as a pastor, Monod advocated a Christian lifestyle and a return to biblical and Christocentric preaching. With some hesitation he founded an evangelical congregation in 1832 but maintained links to the national church as a professor in Montauban (from 1836) and Paris (from 1847). While he focused on a preaching ministry, his brother Frédéric Monod (1794–1863) united the separated French congregations into a single body on an orthodox Reformation basis (1849). Revivals in northern France, especially in Paris, were under direct British influence, for immediately after the Napoleonic era stimulation came from Britain to set up tract, Bible, and missionary societies (1818–22). In the French-speaking areas there was less involvement in social issues, the main thrust being toward a restoration of traditional Calvinist positions.
2.4. Netherlands
Behind the Dutch awakening stands the work of the Dutch branches of the German Christian Association (Deutsche Christentumsgesellschaft), founded in Basel in 1780, and the Netherlands Missionary Society (Nederlandsch Zendelingsgenootschap), founded in 1797 on the English model. From around 1820 we may note three main centers of revival. Under the influence of the Romantic and patriotic poet and historian Willem Bilderdijk (1759–1831), the very gifted Isaäc da Costa (1798–1860) was converted from → Judaism to Christianity. He confronted the thinking of the Enlightenment in his Bezwaren tegen de geest der eeuw (Objections against the spirit of the century, 1823), a much-noted treatise that challenged the spirit of the times. Through → Bible study groups in Amsterdam and popular writings, he then proclaimed a personal Christianity, idealizing the country’s Calvinist past. An expectation of Christ’s return (→ Parousia) played an important role in his work.
Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer (1801–76), who, under the influence of Merle d’Aubigné, took an active role in politics, shared da Costa’s basic antirevolutionary outlook and took practical steps to establish Reformation and Calvinist principles in state, church, school, and society. He stood at the beginning of the movement toward a Christian party in the Netherlands.
Otto Gerhard Heldring (1804–76), a friend of da Costa and Groen, devoted himself to social work, such as the battle against intemperance and → prostitution. He took the lead in setting up the first Dutch deaconess house (1842) after the model of Kaiserswerth (→ Religious Orders and Congregations 4.1). This awakening set the climate for groups committed to the Calvinist confession to leave the established church in order to set up independent churches. First was the Afscheiding (lit. “separation”), in 1834; then, in 1886, came the Doleantie (“grieving”; → Netherlands 2.1). In 1892 some 700 of these separated congregations united as the Gereformeerde Kerken in Nederland.
2.5. Germany
Toward the end of the 18th century various individuals opposed rationalistic trends in Germany and, partly under the influence of older Pietist traditions, sought to uphold the biblical and Reformation heritage. Johann Georg Hamann (1730–88), Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling (1740–1817), Johann Friedrich Oberlin (1740–1826), and Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741–1801) were all able to form loose groups of supporters.
The → diaspora work of the Moravians formed a supraregional network to gather believers together, as did the work of the German Christian Association, preparing the way for true revivals both spiritually and organizationally. A decisive push came from England not to retreat in face of the movement away from the church but to contest it. When Karl Friedrich Adolf Steinkopf (1773–1859), one-time secretary of the German Christian Association, visited the German Savoy congregation in London in 1801, he became an intermediary between British and German revival movements. Encouraged by the groups in England, he used his former contacts with members and friends of the German Christian Association to set up a tract society (1802), the Württemberg Bible Institute (1812), the Basel Mission (1815), and various → inner mission movements. We have here a spectrum of organized Christian involvement such as the older Pietism never knew. These activities mark the beginning of a blossoming of Christian → societies and organizations, though the regionally splintered nature of German Protestantism meant that they seldom covered any wide area. In Germany, then, the revivals were strongly marked by regional differences.
The Bavaria revival had an expressly ecumenical character, for Roman Catholic clergy like Johann Michael Sailer (1751–1832) and Martin Boos (1762–1825) kindled awakenings that, from 1806, spread into Upper Austria. The Erlangen theologian Christian Krafft (1784–1845) worked among students and stressed allegiance to Scripture and the Reformation → confessions. Although he was Reformed, Krafft helped in this way to create a strongly Lutheran tradition at Erlangen.
In Württemberg we see best the continuity between the older Pietism and revivalism. There the varied manifestations of revivals range from activities in the German Christian Association and the Basel Mission, by way of fruitful institutional work (e.g., by Christian Heinrich Zeller [1779–1860] in Beuggen) and the core Lutheran preaching of Ludwig Hofacker (1798–1828), to eschatologically oriented groups that decided to emigrate to Russia and America. Although Pietism took a new lease on life in Württemberg in the first half of the 19th century, revivals made hardly any impact at all on Baden or Hesse.
Stimulation from Netherlands and Britain, however, influenced a Reformed type of revival in the Lower Rhine and from there in Siegerland, Wuppertal, and Minden-Ravensberg. Lay preachers like Tillman Siebel (1804–75) played the main part in Siegerland. In Wuppertal, then in process of industrialization, two outstanding Reformed theologians were at work: Gottfried Daniel Krummacher (1774–1837) and Hermann Friedrich Kohlbrügge (1803–75). The revivalist spiritual leader in Minden-Ravensberg, Johann Heinrich Volkening (1796–1877), was deeply rooted in the piety of the Moravians. In the territorial church he implemented things learned from them.
Except for Hamburg, the German cities were behind those of Britain in responding to the pressures of urbanization (→ City). The revivalist Johann Wilhelm Rautenberg (1791–1865) set up a → Sunday school in Hamburg in 1825. Then, under his influence, Johann Hinrich Wichern (1808–81) opened the Rauhe Haus (1833), which channeled his boundless practical and theoretical energies in helping the → Inner Mission. Adalbert Graf von der Recke-Volmerstein (1791–1878) had already founded an orphanage in Düsseltal in 1822. Also in Hamburg Amalie Sieveking (1794–1859) founded the Weiblicher Verein für Armen- und Krankenpflege (Female association for the care of the poor and sick) in 1832. Across the border of Schleswig-Holstein, Claus Harms (1778–1855) preached strongly against → rationalism, opposed the Prussian → Union, and thus prepared the way for neo-Lutheranism (→ Lutheranism).
In Berlin Johann Evangelista Gossner (1773–1858) engaged in all the activities typical of revival. Along with preaching and writing, he organized diaconal work (→ Diakonia) and overseas → mission (→ German Missions). The socially involved Baron Hans Ernst von Kottwitz (1757–1843), with his revivalist lay theology, attracted supporters in the palace and also among church people and theological students. Pomerania was greatly influenced from Berlin. Adolf von Thadden (1796–1882) helped to gather a group of pastors open to revival that met regularly after 1829. Revival took a Lutheran turn also in Saxony, where the Dresden (later Leipzig) Mission was founded in 1836, and in Silesia, where the Old Lutheran Free Church was founded under the leadership of Gottfried Scheibel (1783–1843), Henrik Steffens (1773–1845), and Eduard Huschke (1801–86). This church maintained contact with revival circles in Berlin.
The changes of the post-Napoleonic period formed the setting for revival in Germany. Though there were various influences, it moved ecclesiastically and theologically in the direction of confessionalism, and politically and socially in that of → conservatism. Unlike its broad effect in Britain and the United States, this orientation limited its impact in Germany, steering it mainly into the territorial churches. Yet it expressed elements and motifs that later found more general recognition, especially the concern for mission, the higher regard for the laity and lower classes, and an awareness that the work of the → church of Jesus Christ cannot be restricted to what the → congregation does when it gathers for → worship.
2.6. The Nordic Lands
In Sweden influences from British and Moravian traditions led to the founding of a → Bible society (1815) and a missionary society (1835). The Stockholm city missioner Carl Olof Rosenius (1816–68) directed revivals into confessional Lutheran channels, though holding somewhat aloof from the established church. In Norway the influential lay preacher Hans Nielsen Hauge (1771–1824) tried deliberately to work within the established church, though he encountered a good deal of official opposition. In Denmark the movement of reform and renewal launched by Nikolas Frederik Severin Grundtvig (1783–1872) aimed at the population as a whole in an indissoluble interrelating of church and people (→ Denmark 1.2.3). In Finland revivals developed in two ways as a movement of repentance within the church (→ Penitence). The itinerant preacher Paavo Ruotsalainen (1777–1852) put judgment in the forefront, but Henrik Renquist (1789–1866) stressed prayer, from which alone salvation can come.
→ Devotional Literature; Theology of Revivals
Bibliography: E. Beyreuther, Die Erweckungsbewegung (2d ed.; Göttingen, 1977) • E. L. Blumhofer and R. Balmer, eds., Modern Christian Revivals (Urbana, Ill., 1993) • R. Carwardine, Transatlantic Revivalism: Popular Evangelicalism in Britain and America, 1790–1865 (Westport, Conn., 1978) • M. Crawford, Seasons of Grace: New England’s Revival Tradition in Its British Context (New York, 1991) • U. Gäbler, “Auferstehungszeit.” Erweckungsprediger des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1991) • R. T. Jones, Faith and the Crisis of a Nation: Wales, 1890–1914 (ed. R. Pope; Cardiff, 2004) • M. J. McClymond, ed., Embodying the Spirit: New Perspectives on North American Revivalism (Baltimore, 2004); idem, ed., Encyclopedia of Religious Revivals in America (Westport, Conn., 2005) • W. G. McLoughlin, Modern Revivalism: Charles Grandison Finney to Billy Graham (New York, 1959); idem, Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform (Chicago, 1978) • M. A. Noll, The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield, and the Wesleys (Downers Grove, Ill., 2003) • T. L. Smith, Revivalism and Social Reform in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America (Nashville, 1957) • W. W. Sweet, Revivalism in America: Its Origin, Growth, and Decline (New York, 1944).
Ulrich Gäbler
