What occurred among the New England Puritans between 1620 and 1660 is a remarkable story that began with a rag-tag band of beleaguered separatist Puritans (Pilgrims) that landed on the shores of a vast wilderness in 1620. By the end of that decade many of the prosperous, well-educated members of the Church of England also began immigrating to New England. Unlike the Pilgrims, they still considered themselves to be members of the Church of England, although separated from their corrupt brethren that remained in their homeland. Known as Puritans, they formed the great migration to the Massachusetts Bay Colony which by 1640 had grown to a population of twenty-six thousand. For these Protestant Puritans who strongly followed the teachings of John Calvin, religion was the beginning, center, and end of all social and political life. The Puritan adventure in their New England colony began as a theocracy, but the Massachusetts Puritans were not alone in their religious affections. Religion and religious liberty were the fundamental reasons for the founding of most of the original thirteen colonies, and nearly all were founded upon various social and religious experiments.[1]

However, none were so well organized or advanced in their religious […] Continue Reading…

Conditions in England 1688-1739

As discussed in Chapter 3, the Catholic Church and the various branches of the Protestant Church were in great turmoil from the beginning of the Reformation in 1517 until 1648 when the peace agreement at Westphalia substantially ended the Catholic-Protestant wars on the continent of Europe. However, the conflict would not end in Great Britain until the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the triumph of Protestantism under William III.

All wars invariably lead to post-war periods in which the Christian faith is neglected which leads to a general decay of national morality. This was the condition in which the British people found themselves at the end of the seventeenth century. Not only had the opposing camps of Christianity fought among themselves, but England had been involved in almost constant civil and international warfare for almost two centuries by the end of the 1600s. As a consequence there existed a significant decline of morality and the general religious impulse within the nation. This decline was deepened by the ascendance of competing Enlightenment philosophies and deism in the late 1600s and all of the 1700s throughout Europe and Great Britain. By the time the British Great Awaking began […] Continue Reading…

To understand the origins and nature of the great awakenings and revivals beginning in the eighteenth century, we must first look at the history of God’s people in England and the American colonies following the Reformation. Much of their history presented in this chapter is drawn from Chapters 6 through 9 in Evangelical Winter-Restoring New Testament Christianity.[1]

Although the reformers readily affirmed their allegiance to “the scriptures alone” as the authority of the church and living the Christian life, it was a far more difficult matter to shed centuries of the teachings and practices of the Catholic Church that conflicted with or undermined faithful adherence to the Scriptures. Therefore, implementation of reforms in the new Protestant churches often carried with it many of the old Roman Catholic ways of doing the business of church.

By 1550, the church in the West had settled into three branches of state religion: papal Catholicism, Lutheranism (Christianity allied with the state), and Calvinism (theocracy).[2] The Protestant branches were similar in that each was a compulsory religion, had strong ties with the state in one way or another, retained certain unbiblical elements of Catholic orthodoxy, and attempted to use the state to impose a […] Continue Reading…

What is true revival?

Ask twenty Christian lay men and women under the age of fifty and you will likely get twenty different answers, and most of them will be incorrect. The same may said of many in the clergy. Very simply put, revival means to bring the church back to life. Noah Webster’s dictionary of 1828 lists four definitions that are helpful when applied to revival in the biblical sense.

1. Return, recall or recovery to life from death or apparent death; as the revival of a drowned person.
2. Return or recall to activity from a state of languor; as the revival of spirits.
3. Return, recall or recovery from a state of neglect, oblivion, obscurity or depression; as the revival of the letters or learning.
4. Renewed and more active attention to religion; an awakening of men to their spiritual concerns.[1]

Here we see that revival is actually being defined as the opposites of death or apparent spiritual death, languor, neglect, oblivion, obscurity, and depression. Put another way in a spiritual or religious context, revival is spiritual life instead of death, vigor instead of languor, attention instead of neglect, awareness instead of oblivion, prominence instead of obscurity, and joy instead of depression. But, […] Continue Reading…