Puritans and Revival III: Captivated Leaders | Behold Your God Podcast

Welcome to the Behold Your God podcast. I'm Teddy James, content producer for Media Grazie. Joined as always by Dr. John Snyder, pastor of Christ Church, New Albany, and author of The Behold Your God Studies.

John, for the last couple of weeks, we've focused on what is basically your doctorate, your dissertation. Last time we were together, we talked about the period between the Puritans and the beginning of the 18th century evangelical revival.

So 1662 to around 1735. One of the things we really focused on last time was the fact that it was a dark period, a period of spiritual decline, something where we could say, you know, maybe God wasn't at work, but in fact, he very much was.

Today, we're going to be looking at a group that was in the heart of the evangelical revival. And now you're going to hear the phrase evangelical revival quite a bit in this episode, just so that we have the historical context.

People in America typically are familiar with what we call the Great Awakening. This was the same work, but it was in the UK, right? All right. So where are we going now? We're going to talk about a group at the heart.

What the Calvinistic Methodists Were

Of that, that has been called the Calvinistic Methodists. And that is a strange label for most of us. So we want to kind of define that label. And later in our podcast, we're going to connect them with the wider work of evangelicalism, because really it is just one strand, one, you know, expression of a transnational, transcontinental restoring kind of work that the Lord was doing in that century.

So first of all, let's take the word Methodist. Methodist at this point in time, until the late 18th century, it is not a denomination. It's more of a fluid movement. And it's a label like Puritan that was placed on a group of people by their opponents.

It's not what they chose. So John Wesley, we think of as a Methodist, but there were many others. George Whitefield, the leader of the other half, other theological half of Methodism. But Methodism really was a label applied to people who were methodical about their life.

They wanted to be very careful about holiness in the earliest days. And then as the century progressed and as the evangelical revival spread throughout Wales and England in particular, but also up into Scotland.

In Wales and England, the term Methodist could be applied to anybody that was pro-revival, pro-evangelicalism, or a participant in it. So you could have John Wesley and George Whitefield and Charles Wesley called Methodist, obviously, but also men like John Newton, who was an Anglican minister, whose ministry began at the end of the century, was also labeled Methodist.

So Methodist is kind of a fluid rejuvenation movement, not a denomination at this time. It isn't until the end of the century when John Wesley decides to ordain. And so he's acting as a bishop, really.

He decides to ordain men to carry the gospel to the colonies. And so in ordaining someone like that, really you have made an official break with the mother church. You've become your own entity. Until that point, until the late 1700s, all Methodists of every variety were Anglican or under the Church of England.

The other half of that description, Calvinistic Methodism, that's really the tricky part for us because we think of Methodists as particularly following John Wesley, and a Wesleyan Methodist is an Arminian Methodist.

So where do we get Calvinistic? In the earliest days of the evangelical revival, the majority, really, of the revival men and converts were more on the Calvinistic side or on the reformed side of doctrine.

John and Charles and then those that follow the influence of John and Charles were kind of the minority and they were Arminian. As the century progressed, John's fabulous ability to organize really showed itself.

So much so that at the end of the century, Wesleyan Methodism, as opposed to the other half, Calvinistic Methodism, Wesleyan Methodism was a well-organized, well-oiled machine. Calvinistic Methodism tended to break up and dissipate and go into, it never formed its own denomination in England.

The Welsh formed their own denomination later, the Calvinistic Methodism in Wales, but basically they just joined other churches like Presbyterians or Congregationalists.

Or Baptists. So Calvinistic Methodist, what does it mean? Real quick, so we've got, you mentioned the Arminian Methodists, they have their leaders in John and Charles Wesley. Was there a leader in the Calvinistic Methodist that we can kind of look to and say, this is that guy?

Yeah, so George Whitfield would really be the leader. Okay, we'll talk about him later, but just so we know. George.

Whitfield. So what a Calvinistic Methodist is, is a person who is pro-revival, pro-evangelical gospel and the emphasis on a very experiential Christianity and also of the Calvinistic and under Calvinistic influence rather than the Wesleyan influence.

So that's the group. What we're going to call them, hopefully for the rest of our podcast, is just evangelicals, because this is really when the term starts to take shape in a movement, the evangelical movement.

The Holy Club and Whitefield's Conversion

Now, let's talk a little bit about the origin of this group. It doesn't originate in the Holy Club, but the Holy Club was pretty significant. The Holy Club was a group of young men at Oxford University in the 1720s under the influence of John Wesley and then a little bit later, Charles.

These were young men studying for the ministry and they were very earnest about spiritual things. And so they decided to kind of band together to encourage each other to really press on and not to sink to the common level of religion in their day.

They met to study the Greek New Testament. They did good works like visiting prisons, giving to the poor, helping the sick. They attended church and took the sacrament as often as possible in a day when going maybe twice a year would have been acceptable.

These guys went weekly or more than one a week. So they really stuck out like a sore thumb as guys who were particularly religious, hence Methodist, methodical about their religion. But the problem was this.

The books they read were just moralistic books, how to be a really good person, assuming you've already been born again.

We talked about that in the last episode.

Right, right. And so these men, to a man, were lost, unsatisfied spiritually, and trying to work their way into the favor of God. Now, the first to be converted was George Whitfield. He came under terrible conviction as he attempted in the Holy Club to do better and better and to satisfy his conscience.

And really, Whitfield went the extra mile. He was not a very wealthy young man. He was at Oxford really through a scholarship and also through working as a servitor, as a servant of more wealthy students there.

So he's not a wealthy student. He barely gets in. And he sees poor people in the community and he decides that his clothes are too nice. So he gives away his nice winter coat and gloves and things to poor people.

And he goes without. If you read his journals, you see times where he's out praying in the winter by himself, isolated. One reason why he was so isolated during this time of conviction was that he was under the influence of a group of people, not the Holy Club, but other people who taught that, you know, really, all you need to do is just be still and be before the Lord and you don't need to have friends.

And so he felt that friends were a luxury. And so he should give his friends up as an example to God of how serious he was about being a Christian. So, you know, he gives up his nice clothing and he is cold.

He gives up his friends and he's isolated. And eventually he kind of just hits rock bottom and his health is damaged by this kind of behavior. And he is, he has to leave the university. During this time, he begins to read a number of books.

Three books in particular were very influential on him. One was a book by Henry Scougal named The Life of God and the Soul of Man. One was a book by Joseph Alain called A Sure Guide to Heaven. And one was by Richard Baxter, A Call to the Unconverted.

Now these may not sound like normal books to us, but in Whitefield's day, these were the normal evangelistic books from the Puritan period. So these writers had been dead 50 years plus and Whitefield gets their books and they lead him away from self-righteousness to Christ.

Welsh Revival Leaders: Harris, Rowland, and Williams

Now, while that's happening in England, in Wales, within weeks of Whitefield's conversion, two Welshmen are converted who don't know each other and don't meet each other until about four years later, but have the same type of conversion experience, have the same doctrine that they grab hold of and begin to really begin to preach the same way out in the fields and anywhere that anyone would listen to them.

And actually, I'm going to mention three of these guys. First, Hal Harris and second, Daniel Rowland, and those are really the initial leaders. Harris was an Anglican, going to church, reading good Anglican books.

He came to the communion service and he wasn't sure that he was really ready to take communion and so he didn't want to take it. And the preacher in the church that morning says to the crowd, where many of the people wouldn't take it, if you're not fit to take communion today, you're not fit to die.

Because if you can't take communion, how are you going to stand before the judge? And that really bothered Hal Harris. So, Harris went home and read a Puritan book by the author Louis Bailey and that book really bothered him and it led eventually to his conversion.

Also, at the same time, a man named Daniel Rowland, who was already a preacher, Harris never was ordained in the Anglican ministry. Rowland went to Oxford, got ordained, came back. He was a curate or an assistant pastor in the little town called Tlangetho.

And while he was there, he was a charming young pastor. He was athletic, very capable, but lost, self-righteous, did not understand the gospel. Well, there was a famous preacher in the area that we talked about last week, Griffith Jones, a Welshman who did know the gospel and really was like the morning star of the revival for Wales.

Griffith Jones was preaching in a small town church nearby and the town's called Llanddewi Brefi. So...

Wait, you need to say that one more time.

Yeah, well, I'm English, so the Welsh will have to forgive me. Llanddewi Brefi. All right. Now, while he's preaching there, Daniel Rowland and a number of the people from his church want to go hear the famous preacher, so they go to hear him.

The church in Llanddewi Brefi can't hold all the people, so he has to preach in the cemetery. We talk about this in the First Behold Your God study. And so Daniel Rowland is with all the other people standing in the cemetery, listening to this man preach outdoors where the hundreds of people can fit.

And while he's preaching, Griffith Jones looks and he sees Daniel Rowland and he sees that arrogant look on his face because Rowland doesn't like Griffith Jones' way of preaching, the gospel way, the Puritan way.

And so Griffith Jones stops the sermon, points out this preacher, Daniel Rowland, and says, oh, for a word to reach your soul, and then continues preaching. Well, Rowland is really bothered that he just got called out in front of everybody.

On the way home, his church members notice that he's kind of down in the dumps. So they say to him, some of them are talking about how great the sermon was, but others are saying, well, actually, you know, Pastor Rowland, you're our favorite.

But it didn't, it wasn't, it was just a band-aid. It didn't really heal the wound. Those words by Griffith Jones, that sermon bothered Rowland until he was brought to Christ, and he became the greatest Welsh preacher probably ever.

A third guy, William Williams, who wrote the hymn, Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah. But he also wrote hundreds of hymns. He was the Charles Wesley for the Welsh movement. But most of them, only about a hundred, have been translated into English, so we don't know most of them here.

Pantykellen is what we call him, and that's just because there were a lot of guys named William Williams in his time. So William, son of William. But the farmhouse that he lived at was called Pantykellen.

So William Williams of Pantykellen, or William Williams Pantykellen. So we've just shortened it to Pantykellen. Well, he was riding home from university on holiday, and as he was riding through a tiny town not far from Trevecca, how Harris was preaching a sermon outdoors.

Now, Harris wasn't allowed to preach in the churches because he wasn't ordained, and you weren't supposed to preach on unsanctified ground, unhallowed ground. I mean, that sounds strange to us, but for the Anglican church, that was the pattern.

So the only place that Harris could preach and not get into too much trouble was he could preach on hallowed ground that wasn't inside a church, and that's in the cemetery. And his father's grave was in this cemetery, and it's just a big flat stone, you know, kind of raised up a little bit, but it's a giant flat stone.

I've been there. Now there's a little fence around it with the sign saying, please do not stand on this because people that read about the revival know that how Harris stood on this stone and preached the gospel, and as he was preaching to this group of people outside church, they just left a church service where Harris and the other revival men were being ridiculed by the preacher, and their idea of the new birth was being mocked.

So he leaves the church, and he decides, well, I'll preach the true gospel. So he gets up on his father's grave and just starts preaching, and all the people stay and listen. As he's doing this, William Williams is heading home from university, and on his horse riding through town, he hears a voice, and so he stops, and there's this guy preaching in the cemetery.

So he just listens for a while, and the words of that sermon, really, God uses those to capture William Williams' heart, and he goes home, and he's converted, and these become the three great leaders, really.

There are some others, David Jones and some others, but these are the three, probably, main leaders of the 18th century movement there in Wales. William Williams really becomes the poet, as I mentioned, of the movement.

He also became the theologian of the movement, translating Jonathan Edwards' works into Welsh and writing his own stuff, and he became, eventually, the leader of the, really, of soul culture or of sanctification.

He helped fashion the way they dealt with souls in their small groups, their society meetings, once how Harris stepped down from the movement, which happened in around 1750. But I mentioned Harris' father's grave.

I went to see this place when I was in Wales.

I mean... For the Beholder gods.

Yeah, really, I am at heart. I must be a really good Roman Catholic. My Scottish friends are quite ashamed of me. So, I go to find... No, no, no, it wasn't. It was... Yeah, it was before the Beholder gods.

It was when I was a student in Wales. So, I read the account. So, I look up the church. I go find this church, and there's the grave, and there's the little fence saying, don't step on this. So, of course, being a good American, I ignore all the rules and get up on the grave and pray that the Lord would do it again.

There's another amazing story about how Harris, when he was praying, wrestling with the question, should I really preach? He went to college to study for the ministry, Oxford. But after a short period, he just got sick of the college environment and said, why am I here?

I should... I could be preaching the gospel. So, for good or bad, he went back home, dropped out of school, and just started preaching in the fields. And the Lord did use him in a mighty way. But before he preached, he went to a church.

I think it's in a little town called Llangasti. And he went to the church, and there's a bell tower. There's a big bell. So, he goes up in the tower, and there's a little tiny room there for where the bells hung.

And he just spent the night by himself. And he stayed awake all night, wrestling with the Lord in prayer. Do you want me to preach or not? And at the end of the evening, he really felt that God had answered him in an extraordinary way and had really gifted him, had given him what he needed, equipped him for that work, you know, really an outpouring of the Spirit.

And from that point forward, God did use him in a wonderful way. So, I actually, I went and looked up that church, too, and went up in the bell tower. But now you're not allowed to do it. I went there one year, and I took a friend back like a few years later, and they'd shut it off because so many people want to go up.

In the bell tower, and it's kind of dangerous. So, but I got to go up. Now, how were, okay, because we're talking about Wales, but the evangelical revival wasn't just in Wales. It was also in England.

And so, how did all of the work going on in Wales, how was that connected.

To what was happening in England? Well, Hal Harris and Daniel Rowland, the twin leaders, they had personality conflicts. Hal Harris was extremely intense and serious, and Rowland was really very jovial.

And Harris would often get angry at Rowland, and Rowland would get frustrated with Harris. So, eventually, and, you know, they had both met George Whitefield by this time. So, in the early 1740s, I believe, they basically invite Whitefield to become the moderator or the head, the organizer of the Welsh movement.

So, they work under Whitefield's authority for a while, and through his ministry, Hal Harris worked a lot in London for George Whitefield when Whitefield would travel to the colonies to, you know, the states here.

And so, you know, through his ministry, all that work was connected, and really also the work in the colonies because.

He visited so many times across the pond. Real quick, too. So, we mentioned George Whitefield. I meant to bring this up when you were talking about his conversion, but the book that the Lord used to bring Whitefield to himself, The Life of God and the Soul of Man by Henry Schugle, we have that.

You can buy that now. A friend of ours, Jeff Johnson with Free Grace Press, has recently published that. It was out of print for a long time. Now it's here, so we'll put a.

Little bit about that book in our bonus session. Yep. Well, let's talk about what is an evangelical. If it was a fluid movement and they're not a denomination and they weren't under one leader, even though Whitefield was, you know, really a guy that they looked to a lot, what were they?

And we could say this. It is a movement in which four core emphases were held in common by these people. So, they may be Baptists, Presbyterians or Congregationalists or Anglicans, but they have more in common with each other than they had with perhaps the people at their home church because of these four things.

And this list is by a church historian, David Bebbington, and he wrote a very significant book on the evangelical revival, I don't know, maybe 20 years ago. And I don't agree with everything Bebbington said.

There's a few definitions that people have, you know, taken objection to, and I would agree with their objections. But in these four points, I think it's very helpful. And the four emphases, the four core elements are these, conversionism, activism, biblicism, and crucicentrism or cross-centeredness.

Let me just quickly hit those. Conversionism. You have to understand that in the Anglican church, kind of the great starting point, the earthquake, the spiritual earthquake for these people, it was their baptism.

It was their christening, you know, very much to a Baptist that looks very much Roman Catholic. That's not exactly what they believed, but it was pretty close to it. And Whitefield and Wesley and those men who were converted much later in life, look back on that, and they didn't quit baptizing babies.

They remained Anglicans, but they said that's not necessarily the beginning of anything. And the new epicenter, the heart of the Christian experience was shifted from the sacrament of baptism to true personal conversion, to regeneration, to faith and repentance.

Also, so that's conversionism. Activism. Though these men, especially the men we're talking about, were very Reformed in their views, believing that God had to work and that apart from the work of God, we couldn't really accomplish anything of any good value.

These men were not fatalists. They were aggressive with evangelism. They were aggressive with pastoring each other. And really, they put us to shame. Whitefield was a Calvinist, you know. I mean, he took a lot of heat for being a Calvinist, but he came to the colonies eight times.

Whitefield was often very ill after preaching, and the doctor said, if you'd preach less, you'll live a long life. And Whitefield said, I would rather burn out than, you know, kind of rust out. And so, Whitefield continued to preach and did die at a pretty early age.

These men were aggressive with their Reformed doctrines. Third, biblicism. Not in a bad way, but just the idea that like the Puritans, the scriptures were the ultimate authority. And fourth, crucicentrism or cross-centeredness.

One of the most amazing things about the sermons of these men in the 18th century is that if you look in the sermons of Whitefield or Rowland, you know, in particular, we don't have many of Hal Harris's sermons.

These men don't preach on the topic of revival. You can't find a bunch of sermons on revival, how to create a revival, what a revival is. What you find is a bunch of sermons on the doctrine of redemption.

I mean, so, you know, all the great truths of the work of Christ, the gospel, that's what they emphasized. And then also holiness is flowing out of that. And so, it was the cross and the preaching of the cross that was at the heart of all of that.

Now, when we talk about these guys, again, we have to understand that they're connected with all the other evangelical movements that are going on, on the continent, in Europe, and over here with, you know, guys like Jonathan Edwards.

Puritan and Evangelical Influences on Their Theology

Yeah. So, John, you've mentioned, you know, particularly with Whitefield and with, you know, Skougel was very helpful with him in his conversion, but how did these men get these ideas? I mean, did they just read the Bible and it was illumined to them, or what were their real.

Influences? Well, obviously, the scripture is what they would say, and that's true, but there were teachers that helped them. So, we can think of them as kind of theological friends or guides or mentors that really helped these young men because most of these leaders were in their early 20s when they became, you know, preachers of extraordinary ability and renown.

And so, in their 20s, they're faced with a lot of questions that their Anglican church doesn't answer very well for them. What is the nature of faith? Well, the Anglican church had one answer. These men, by their own experience, had a very different answer.

When they went and read the scripture, they thought, well, the scripture seems to side with what I say, but their Anglican friend would say, no, it doesn't. It sides with what we say. And so, what we find is that the Puritan literature that still remained, Puritans had been dead for at least 50 years, and these men's books were available.

And so, these young leaders of the revival grabbed hold of the Puritans and would read them as they tried to wrestle with the questions. What's the nature of justification? How is that different from sanctification?

What I, you know, what about assurance of salvation? My Anglican church doesn't give me that at all. What's the right way? What's the wrong way? And so, they would read their Bible, but they would also read different Puritan works on these key doctrines.

And we have, if we read their journals and their letters, you can see which books were particularly influential. We don't have much time, but we want to just give you kind of a flying run by. We already mentioned that Whitefield was converted through reading it, but others were too.

A guy named William Grimshaw in the north of England was a pastor, and he was a pastor who didn't know the Lord, you know, and he didn't know that he didn't know the Lord. One time a grieving couple came to him and said, we, you know, we've had to bury our child and we just can't get over the grief.

You know, it's been, it's been a long time and we're not recovering. Do you have any counsel for us, pastor? And he didn't know what to tell him. So, he told him, well, don't sit in the house so much.

Get out, go to parties, go to balls, you know, spend time with friends.

That's as deep as he could go. Well, and also he was the same guy that a man's wife had said, you know, he told me he was going to quit drinking and he was lost. And so Grimshaw painted himself red. And wasn't that Grimshaw?

Yeah. Yeah. The old man was headed, the old man, he was old man,.

He was drunk. And to get back home, this is, there's no streetlights and stuff at this time. He had to travel through a bunch of woods, a forest to get to his farmhouse. And on the way, Grimshaw meets him on the path in the middle of the night, painted red and says that I'm Satan and I've come to get your soul.

I mean, he didn't know how to help anybody, you know,.

So he just scared. He didn't have the gospel. So, right. So, he scared the drunkenness out.

Of the old man. All right. When Grimshaw's wife died early on in their marriage, he's broken and he tries to comfort himself with the same kind of empty comforts he gave others, and it didn't work. And one day he went to a friend's house and he saw a book by John Owen on justification by faith.

So, he borrowed it. And also a book by Thomas Brooks on precious, God's precious remedies for Satan's devices. And he took those two Puritan books and he read them and it led to his conversion. But it wasn't just conversion.

It goes on and on. Whitefield, on his second trip to America, read Bishop Hall and Ralph Erskine and Robert Bolton and a guy named Jinks and a man named Hammond on the new birth. And I mean, the list just goes on and on.

We just have a very... The thing is, unfortunately, we don't have time to get into every book. However, most of these books are still in publication. Banner of Truth publishes a lot of them. So, what we'll do is we'll have a list for all of these books linked at mediagratia .org.

Good, good. So, they read these books. They republished these books like Bunyan's Works, republished by Whitefield with his recommendation. English Puritans published in Welsh. But they also, you know, through contact with living descendants of the Puritans, so to speak, the Erskines in Scotland, Edwards in America, really fashioned these young men in a mode of a very warm, aggressive, experiential reform doctrine.

And really, in my opinion, just some of the best balance that we can find of Christians and the Christian doctrine, even though they were young. So, with that in mind, in the coming podcast, we're going to be looking at some of these key doctrines and exactly what the Puritans taught on the doctrine and how we see that reflected again, you know, nearly a century later among.

The evangelical revival guys. Who were the Puritans? Is the reputation deserved? And is there anything they had that you and I might need? Are you interested in knowing the.

Bible? Are you interested in knowing Christ? Do you want someone to attend to the care of your soul? Then you're going to want to get to know the Puritans.

To learn more about Puritan All of Life to the Glory of God, visit Mediagracie .org or click the link in the description below. So, John, we've just spent the last half hour really talking and introducing maybe some of these men that our listeners haven't heard of before, maybe Daniel Rowland and Howell Harris.

Why the Puritans Were Not Dry or Stodgy

And I think most of our people probably know George Whitefield. But what do we do with this? Well, I think one lesson we can learn right away.

Is that the Puritans were not a group of really old guys that were stodgy and were, you know, so precise about theology that they were like dry as dust. I mean, the pictures we have,.

You know, Nathaniel Hawthorne's Scarlet Letters. Yeah, the pictures we have of the Puritans are.

When they were old. Nobody painted their picture when they were 22 year olds in Cambridge listening to William Perkins. The Puritan movement really started with young men in particular in college under the influence of some godly professors and their hearts being captured by the true gospel and then having to rethink everything from the gospel to holiness to church, family, government, everything.

So the Puritan writings are not stodgy old writings. They are lively. They are radical, not just extreme. You know, extreme measures like the degree of behavior, you know, that's extreme behavior. I really am not impressed by extreme behavior in the church, but radical change is wonderful because it deal radical meaning dealing with the root of it.

So these men got to the roots and the changes that at times were wonderful. These changes flowed from a completely different root system. So my advice to any young believer is to look at what, you know, Banner Truth and RHB and Soledad Gloria and whatever groups are making these available.

Look at these Puritan paperbacks and these short Puritan biographies and don't think of them as a bunch of old people with long beards and, you know, weird pictures. Think of them as men that when they were in college, they were conquered by Christ and they lived radically from that point forward.

Yeah, and such a helpful thing to remember too is that the same Holy Spirit that was in them illuminating truth, applying truth, applying the Scriptures is the same Holy Spirit that lives within every believer today.

We serve the same God. So why not today? Yeah, certainly.