The Realities of Revival I: A Theological Understanding

The Need for a Biblical Theology of Revival

Welcome to the Whole Council podcast. I'm John Snyder and with me today is the man that does not like to be on this side of the camera, but he's been very gracious in accepting my authoritative request.

And it's Teddy James. And Teddy is the man that does all of our filming and our audio and the editing of all of that. So it's good to have you, Teddy.

I appreciate the invitation. And I do want to say before we get started, if it looks or sounds weird, it's because I'm not where I'm used to being. Monitoring everything.

Yeah, we don't have anybody to blame, but we could pick AC. I like that idea. Okay, AC. AC's the one. We want to take a few weeks to consider a very significant work of the Lord throughout history. And one that often comes up, particularly in American evangelicalism, but not just us, but it is the kind of thing that sometimes comes up.

And it's been a thing that people have talked about recently. It is the issue of revival or the extraordinary seasons of grace that God has seemed to bring to the church in the past.

Why Revival Is So Widely Discussed Right Now

Yeah, and there's so many people right now that it seems there's a lot of interest. There's a lot of people who are looking for resources and books and sermons on revival. I had a recent conversation even with Jeremy Walker, you know, and with the revival documentary from RHB and different things that are happening.

So revival seems to be on the minds of a lot of people. And so we really thought that this would be a very timely episode to discuss this. And John, you're really the man we want to speak with about it.

Your doctorate is on the Puritan influence on the Great Awakening, correct? Yeah, yeah. And so you've spent so much time carefully thinking through revival, the Great Awakening, Puritans, and things like that.

So that's why we really wanted to do this episode. And so I think one of the first things we have to discuss is where can we begin, and how do we get a clear grasp of what revival really is?

I think that there are quite a few things that we're dealing with. When we look at the experiential side of Christianity, so that could be applied to the common stuff of Christianity, like sanctification.

That's a very experiential thing. You know, I'm struggling here, or I feel the Lord is really granting me, you know, grace for obedience here. Or, you know, I'm learning these things. I'm applying them for the first time in my marriage or with my kids or with my friends at school.

And, you know, when we talk about that, when we talk about true regeneration, the new birth, true conversion, all of these things involve not only the very real work of God as it's described in Scripture, but it also describes our experience of that work.

And it often involves us participating in that. You think about, you know, trying to help someone grow or pointing someone to Christ for the first time. And any time that we have that mixture of the work of God and the experiential, subjective aspect of human existence, then we're going to find ourselves, in a sense, walking through a field that is true.

It's a field that God has planted for us, but because of our imperfections, because of sin, because there is an enemy that would always take true things and abuse them, like the doctrine of grace, you know, salvation through the finished work of Christ received by faith.

That's a thing that Paul had to remind people over and over, that these are wonderful truths, but do not let the enemy bring you to a point where you abuse them. So, any genuine truth, any genuine treasure that Christ has purchased for the believer, I think we see a counterfeit that is always laid alongside of it.

So, as we walk through this field, I would think, in my mind, I think of it like a field that has some old landmines in it. And they were planted long ago, not by Americans. They were planted by an enemy thousands of years ago, and they're still there.

And if we're not careful, we won't notice the signs that would warn us. But there are signs, and there are so many helpful friends for the earnest Christian wanting to consider the biblical doctrine of revival, of God's extraordinary work among His people.

Scripture, Coram Deo, and the Characters of God and His People

So, where do we start? Well, I think we start with the Scripture. While there are many good books on revival, and my library has a lot of them, those books are secondary to the Scripture. There is no book on revival like the Scripture.

When we look at the Scripture, there are a couple of things, I think, that we can focus on. So, you know, it's not as if you're going to come to the Bible and you take your concordance and you look up the word revive or revival, and you will find that that is very rarely in the Bible.

So, we have other descriptions of what I believe could be termed revival, but where do you start? Well, I would say that the very best place to start is with the passages that describe the character of God.

If revival is desiring God to draw near in an unusual way and to work in an unusual degree, then what really God is the thing we desire, God is the person we are longing for. We're not wanting God to show up in some extraordinary way and fix our country.

We're wanting God Himself. We're wanting to know what it is to walk with Him as close, like McShane said, as close as a saved sinner can walk to God. So, if that really is the heart of our desire, and any other heart of our desire is inappropriate, and revival is the kind of thing that will offer us so many nice benefits that we can easily become enamored with those and forget that really it is God that we're longing for.

So, if we're going to long for God and the nearness of God, then we should start with a refresher course from Scripture. Who is God? What is He like? What does He delight in? What is offensive to Him?

You know, if I want you and your family to come to my house, and I say to Misty, my wife, you know, we haven't had the Jameses over in a while, we've been busy, let's have them over, but let's make it a really special time.

And so, we would start to ask questions like this, well, what do the Jameses like? I mean, obviously, we wouldn't say, what does Chuck Baggett's family like? You know, we would say, well, what does Maddox like?

And, you know, what about Karis and Luke? And, you know, what about Allison? And we would ask and think, you know, maybe not in an overt way, but we would just begin to think, what do they like? And you would structure the evening in a way that would be pleasing to the people you're inviting over.

And when we think of God, the Scripture is full of descriptions of His character, and that's where we start. But it's also full of other passages. I call them Coram Deo passages, the Latin for, you know, before the face of God.

There are so many wonderful passages where God describes what kind of person He delights to draw near to in that experiential way, or what kind of person He will allow to draw near to Him in that experiential way.

So, for example, when we read the book of James in the fourth chapter, James has to rebuke the church for their idolatrous or what he calls an adulterous heart. We want to be friends with Christ. We want to be friends of the world.

We want the best of both worlds. And James has to rebuke the people, and he gives as one of the motivations for repentance the reality that God resists the proud, the self-sufficient. He stiff arms them, but God draws near to the humble, gives grace to them, and as they turn away from the sins of heart or action, the double-mindedness, draw near to the Lord and He will draw near to you, James promises.

And so there's that motivation. So, starting with verses that describe God, then working to the verses that describe the kind of people God delights to draw near to. There is a final category of passages in the Bible that I think are particularly suited to understanding the nature of true revival, and that is the passages that give us examples of individuals or corporate entities, nations, you know, a group of people seeking the Lord, and we find that their pursuit of God is effective.

And really for that, 2 Chronicles just stands out in the Old Testament. And also, the prayers of some of the individuals, like the prayer of Nehemiah crying out to the Lord, like the prayer of Daniel.

And both of those prayers were lifted to God in times of real judgment on the people of God. And so we certainly have no reason to despair and say, well, I don't live in Bible days when everyone loved the Lord.

Well, Nehemiah and Daniel lived in some pretty dark times, and the things they said to the Lord are appropriate for us as well.

Learning from Manifest Presence and Manifest Presence Withdrawn

Yeah. Last week, so, I mean, right now we're going through, or we just did three weeks of, you know, the full interviews from the First Behold Your God study, and last week we did one section from Mr. Roberts.

And in that episode, he talks about a practice that he has of going through Scripture. And he said that, he said, I would read Scripture very quickly, and I would write in the margins of my Bible, MP, Manifold Presence, or Manifest Presence.

And then in later places, he would write MPW, Manifest Presence Withdrawn. And he was looking for, you know, what caused these two things, or what God was pleased to make his Manifest Presence, you know, experienced, and what caused God to draw back.

And he said it was incredibly helpful, and it sounds like that is something, as we're reading through, particularly seasons of 2 Chronicles, or books of 2 Chronicles, and those things. Keep that in mind.

That may be a very helpful practice.

Positive and Negative Biblical Examples of Revival

Teddy, I think that along with the positive examples of a people seeking the Lord, you know, you think of what we call the revivals under Josiah, or Hezekiah, or Asa. There are also many negative examples, and those are equally important, because we don't want to think that God is so small, that He is flattered, that we decide to have a special service where we're going to seek the Lord.

We're going to have revival services this week, or we'll have a special day of prayer. And if we just tick that box, God is probably just so thrilled that someone paid attention to Him. Yeah, exactly.

Or, yeah, I did A and B, and God, you owe me C. And that is not how God works in any part of our lives. But, so, think about some of the negatives. There are passages where the people cry out to the Lord, and God completely ignores them.

Isaiah 1 talks about it. Isaiah 58 talks about God ignoring their day of fasting and prayer. And He says to them, basically, you look like a people that are really intent on seeking Me. You are not seeking Me at all.

But you're having a day of fasting and prayer, so the appearance is not the reality. There is Psalm 80, where the people are crying out to the Lord, but the psalmist lays his heart's complaint before God and says, Why is it that in response to our prayers, you give us tears in great measure?

Why would the prayers of God's people be responded to by their God, by disciplinary action that breaks our hearts, rather than God just being happy to give us whatever we want? So there are very many negative examples of people going through the motions of religion, and God exposing that for what it is, and warning them that it's not a waste of time only.

It's worse than a waste of time. It's offensive.

The Best Books on Revival and Where to Start

Yeah. And John, so, we've talked about what is in Scripture. Now, your library is full of books, you know, historical Puritans. But there's a lot of people who are going to, you know, and this is my first inclination too, when I want to learn something, I go to Google.

And I can tell you, if you Google Books on Revival, there's really not a lot of great books that are going to come up on that first, you know, first page. And so where would you suggest, outside of Scripture, that we start?

Well, the good news, as I mentioned at the opening, is that there is a rich history of careful, biblical, theologically-oriented writings about the topic of revival. From the early Puritans, throughout the 18th century, and then even into the first half of the 19th century.

After that, we're going to see a shift, and I'll talk about that in a minute. But I have a couple of those books. Let me grab them. One of the books that I brought for today is very old, and, you know, it's...

I would like this book, even if it were blank, because it's so old, and it's so neat. It's from the 1600s. It is my oldest book. And the title is, The Fulfilling of the Scripture. Now, that's the short title, but if you open up to the title page, it is, The Fulfilling of the Scripture, held forth in a discovery of the exact accomplishment of the Word of God in His works of providence, performed, and to be performed, yet to come.

And then this subtitle goes on, For the Confirming of Believers. So, to encourage believers. And Convincing Atheists of the Present Day. Containing, in the end, a few rare histories of the works and servants of God in the Church of Scotland, corrected and enlarged with several editions, both doctrinal and historical.

This is actually the third edition in 1681. What this is, is the first Protestant book, and I would say the first book since the Reformation that I know of, and I do not know of any Roman Catholic books on the topic, and there's a theological reason for that.

This is the first book I know of where, in the Western Hemisphere, someone deals with the doctrine of revival, connected with what we might yet expect God to do. And, as he mentions, he does give some historical illustrations.

He talks about things that God had done in Scotland in previous years, and so that's a really helpful book, but that's an old book.

Out of curiosity, do you know who wrote that? Yeah, a man named Fleming.

Okay. That is a very difficult book to find, so don't try to start there. Let me give you one that you can start with, and this is a modern author. Richard Owen Roberts, whom we have mentioned many times, and he's helped us with other projects, has written a small book on revival, and the topics in the book are what is revival, when is revival needed, when can revival be expected, what truth must revival emphasize, what are the dangers of revival, what hinders revival, will the fruits of revival last, and there are other chapters as well.

But this is a trustworthy, simple introduction to the theme of those extraordinary seasons of God at work among His people. Another book, and I was with Mr. Roberts last week, and he recommended this book.

It's a different approach. It's by a man named Brian Edwards. I remember hearing Brian Edwards preached. I don't know if Brian Edwards is still with us. That was about 25 years ago, and he was an older man at that time.

But it's called Revival, a People Saturated with God. And what he does is he uses the life and the rule of Hezekiah as kind of a framework to describe elements that are generally found in the history of revival.

For instance, a people of God being made concerned, crying out to the Lord, laying aside known sin, the restoration of worship, and the joy of God's people when He draws near. But he uses Hezekiah's life kind of as a grid to teach those things, and he draws a lot from history as well.

So a very readable book. Now, let me give you another book that is more theological, more difficult to read, very densely packed with truths, but in spite of that frightening introduction, I think this is one of the most significant books outside of Scripture that any modern person can read on the nature of revival and all things connected with that.

It's called The Revival of Religion. It was published by Banner of Truth. I think it's a little difficult to find right now, but you can probably find it on the used book market or maybe in Google Docs.

You can do the research for that, Teddy. The full title is The Revival of Religion, Addresses by Scottish Evangelical Leaders Delivered in Glasgow in 1840. Now, there's a unique aspect to this book, and this is a book that I want us to use for a couple of our podcasts.

What's unique is, 1840, these are men, friends of Robert Murray McShane, men like the Bannars, men like William Chalmers Burns, and others, men who knew what real revival was because they were living in the midst of an early wave of revival in that century.

Now, McShane has already passed away by the time this is written, so he's not a contributor, but there are a number of contributors, and I'll read you just some of the chapter titles. There are 14 chapters and 14 different men from that era and from Scotland who had experienced revival as pastors or preachers and who were writing in the midst of that because they wanted to make sure that the Church was careful with this precious gift, you know, and that they didn't become silly.

They didn't get their focus on something other than God. They didn't cause it to, you know, be...

So, in other words, this book was written to kind of help us navigate the minefield that you were talking about at the beginning of the episode.

Yes, but what is unusual about this book is it's a book written by men in the midst of a revival. Most of our books on revival that we have are written by men who, after study of the Bible and history, have written to stir us to cry out for revival or have looked back on revival as a book I'll show you in a minute, and they're telling you what they saw, and so they had the benefit of hindsight, but these are men right in the middle.

And so the table of contents, the chapters are pretty, like I said, they're pretty theological. Chapter 1 says this, The nature of a religious revival, the state of religion that requires it, effects which it is calculated to produce in the Church and on the world, vindication from misapprehensions and prejudice against revival.

Chapter 2, the work of Christ in connection with the revival of religion, His atonement, His righteousness, His intercession. Chapter 3, the work of the Holy Spirit in revival. Chapter 4, the sovereignty of God connected with revival.

Chapter 5, the Word of God, its preaching, the kind of preaching, the character of preaching that God uses to produce revival. The subordinate means of making known the gospel, visitation, Sunday schools, on and on, prayer, the life of believers.

So these ministers deal with so many themes that are important if we want to be careful with this whole concept and the reality of God drawing near.

Why This Book Is for the Whole Church

One question I want to ask about that book before you go on to the next one, because as a layperson, as someone who's sitting in the pew, and I hear, okay, well, this book is theological in nature, and this is difficult to get through.

I want to make clear, that book is for everyone in the pews, and not just for pastors and elders, right?

Yeah. You were in our small group where we read it. We have a group of men that pray every Saturday, and sometimes, when the Church schedule's a little less busy, we do a book reading, and we say, well, let's read this book and work through this topic.

And there was some aversion to it, because the theme of revival is not a theme right now that Reformed men generally are interested in. It's kind of out of its vogue. So we're more interested in other aspects of ecclesiology right now, church discipline, body life, community, confessions, catechisms.

But this aspect of church life, the extraordinary seasons of grace, it is also a valid part of church life, and it's being neglected right now maybe because of the silliness with which it's been dealt with in previous years.

But you came to that meeting, and it is a book that can be understood. I think if a person would just plan to work through slowly, be patient...

And that's the key. Go through slowly and let it soak.

Yeah. If you read it in an hour and a half, right before your meeting, then it just, you know, it's overwhelming. And I get frustrated with authors when I'm trying to kind of speed read it to get ready for my meeting, because I think, oh, you know, you've said so much, you could have said less, but that's my fault, you know, for procrastination.

So that's a good book. Let me just show one other good book. Lectures on Revivals. This is kind of the gold standard of books from the 19th century to today by William Sprague. And what he does is, the first half of this book, he gives good theological, biblical explanations of the nature of revival and of the things that these Scottish preachers preached about.

He actually wrote before them, they mentioned this book as a significant help for anybody that wants to know. So what he also does that's helpful is that the second half of the book, from page 220 to the end, so almost exactly the last half, he gives letters from men who were alive in his day who were reporting the effects of God's extraordinary work in the land, what we call the Second Great Awakening here.

And so men like Archibald Alexander and others that are not as well known as the First Great Awakening men. Edward Payson, perhaps you might be familiar with that name. And so we have, I believe, 20 letters from these men giving eyewitness accounts.

And these are eyewitness accounts from Reformed men who are very careful and very concerned to avoid what later became the influence of Charles Finney, which really became kind of the flavor of the day.

Well, revivalism.

Finney, Revivalism, and the Shift Away from Serious Theology

Yeah, revivalism. Now, is there any particular order or even a particular instance that you think some of these might be more beneficial than others or anything like that, or just kind of. Here's the list and pick one?

Yeah, I think that if you're new to this kind of reading, you could start with the book by Richard Owen Roberts because it will be in the same vein that the other books are, but simple. But then I think perhaps either Lectures on Revivals by Sprague or The Revival of Religion by the Scottish Ministers.

And as I mentioned, that's a bit more theological, but it's really worth the time it takes to chew on it.

And links to all of the books will be in the show description and then also on our blog at mediagrotte .org.

Now, all the men I mentioned, except for Roberts and Brian Edwards, and even they wrote their books 30, 40 years ago, they're not modern men. They're not contemporary men. They're not men that just put out the book this month.

And there are some modern writers that are more helpful on the topic, but I think we would have to say that for the most careful and accurate and full understanding of Extraordinary Seasons of Grace, even from men who were eyewitnesses of it, we need to go back to books that were written, and I'm just giving kind of a generalization, prior to 1850.

Even early 1900s, even like books or sermons by D .L. Moody and other men that were genuinely used of God, the theology has already begun to shift a little, and I would say kind of like there's some holes, there's some cracks that are starting to show up, particularly because of the influence of Charles Finney.

And what was wrong with Finney's influence fundamentally is the teaching that you can guarantee a revival if you do the things you're supposed to do. So you do A, B, and C, and God always brings revival.

Always. So if you don't get a revival, then it's because you just didn't do your part correctly. That also fit with what he thought about salvation, that a soul was brought from death to life. We are turned from living for self to living for Christ, and we can do that without the help of God.

That's what we call Pelagianism, the idea that our nature is not fallen, not impacted by sin. Other men before Finney, like John Wesley, who was certainly not a Calvinistic man or a Reformed guy, Wesley and other Arminians did not believe that.

They believed you did need God to work in you first before you could respond. So they, the West, the Arminian and the Calvinist, hold that in common, really. But Finney shifted, and the shift was much more radical to say that you can do it on your time.

You can ask Jesus to save you when you're ready, and you can make yourself a new heart, to quote this scripture, out of place. And, you know, so after that came, what we see is that Reformed men from the middle of the 19th century, Reformed theologians quit dealing with revival as a serious and legitimate biblical concept, as a serious study for any theologian.

You know, it's fine if average people in the pew want to read, you know, the history of Jonathan Edwards or they want to read, you know, George Whitefield's sermons. That's nice, but if you're going to study theology, that's not a serious topic.

Prior to Finney's negative impact on the whole topic of revival, even men like Archibald Alexander, who was the theology professor at Princeton prior to men like Hodge and then much later Warfield and other godly, earnest men, Alexander was a great theologian, a careful theologian, but he also was a man who pastored during the second great awakening.

When he deals with theology, especially the experiential side, the work of the spirit, pneumatology, he treats revival as a legitimate category that needs to be considered and understood biblically, like we would talk about conversion or sanctification or glorification or the perseverance of the saint.

He saw this as a one aspect of the spreading of God's kingdom and he had witnessed it as a pastor and he translated that into his theology. After Archibald Alexander, particularly in our country, Princeton and the other schools, which at that time were very conservative and trustworthy...

They were very strong. Yes. They began to abandon the topic of revival while remaining very conservative and very biblical, they began to de-emphasize that to the point of not treating it seriously because of its attachment with Charles Finney.

We could think of in our day the attachment of some of the older phraseology of the writers, where Whitefield would talk about an effusion of the spirit or Edwards might talk about the baptism of the spirit, but because of our context with charismatic or Pentecostal language, we have tended to move away from those phrases.

And de-emphasize that. Do you think that the kind of withdrawal of careful theologians discussing revival and the realities of revival have allowed and even almost encouraged some of these incorrect and unbiblical views of revival to prosper?

How Neglect of Revival Theology Opens the Door to Error

Yes, certainly. If, you know, what we say, you know, nature abhors a vacuum. If there is a vacuum, if there is a part of the garden that the church is not carefully plowing and planting, then just like with any garden, weeds go crazy, you know.

So when you look at a topic that once was in the hand of careful, reformed, earnest, experiential, warm-hearted men, and suddenly a century later, it's almost not discussed by that kind of man. For a while, things go along well in the sense that, you know, if you lived in the 1850s, you could just read what Edward Payson talked about, and it happened only 30 years prior.

And so those books are everywhere, you know, and Sprague's book, and, you know, you could read Whitefield's sermons. I mean, that material is everywhere. It's taken for granted.

Well, everybody knows those are the good books. The echoes are still reverberating.

Yeah, you're still living on the fumes of those guys. There are still people that were alive who heard, you know, Payson pray and saw the impact of God's extraordinary nearness in Portland, Maine. But you fast forward to where we're at and reformed men not treating that like they used to, then other people begin to write.

And I'm not saying that these other people don't love the Lord. I'm not saying that they didn't know, they didn't experience revival. It's not just reformed guys that experience revival. But I am saying that while their experiences and their intentions may have been pure and real, their ability to explain that theologically was inferior to this century that preceded them.

Jonathan Edwards in America, William Williams in Wales, the Erskine brothers and others in Scotland, so carefully explaining these things so that people don't think this is some new phenomenon. That, well, you know, you've got some new thing that you drummed up and that's why people are making decisions by the thousands.

Those men wrote, men like John Newton, who was not a historian, wrote a small history of Christianity. And when you read that, it is a very inferior history of Christianity. He is not a great historian.

He is a pastor who's trying to explain to his people that the extraordinary season of grace that they saw, even under his ministry at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century, that these waves of what we call revival, that these were, in fact, things that God had done previously.

Jonathan Edwards, a much better theologian and writer, perhaps he writes a book where he describes that God deals with humanity. There's that wonderful ordinary work of the Spirit, bringing conviction and granting faith and repentance, and what we think of as the wonderful ordinary of the Christian life.

But Edwards shows that it is also demonstrable from history that seasons of unusual awakening that bring great reformation and reviving in God's people, that these are also ways that God spreads his kingdom.

And so he gives a theological and historical argument there. So yeah, I think that the lack of reformed writing on the topic has led people who are serious about biblical doctrine, oftentimes, to neglect the topic.

And that has kind of opened us up to maybe less serious treatments of the experience, which, especially with extraordinary work, it's left us open to a lot that's damaging.

Next Week: Assessing Biblical Revival

John, I'm very grateful that you have compiled this list for us, and there's some... You know, I have read Revival of Religion, and there's some that I haven't read that I really want to get into. So again, if you're interested in these books, we're going to put them in...

We'll link them, the ones that we can find. Fleming, you said, we'll look for a Google Doc on that one. But what are we going to talk about next week?

So next week, I want us to go back to Scripture and this book, The Revival of Religion, discussed by the Scottish ministers. And I want us to begin to look at what is the nature of biblical revival, of true revival, and how does that change the way we think about promoting it, judging it, assessing people's claims that we're having revival this week.

Well, does the Bible give any method of assessing that? And that's really probably, I would say, of all the key principles in approaching the issue of revival, understanding the nature of it and how that relates to the other work that God does is paramount.