Church History — Unit 8: Post-Reformation, Puritanism, Pietism, and the First Great Awakening

Unit 7 closed in the year 1600 with the religious map of Europe permanently redrawn. The Reformation had recovered the gospel and put the Bible into the people's languages. But the doctrines of grace, however precious, can grow cold even on Reformed lips. The century and a half between 1600 and 1750 is the story of three movements that worked the recovered gospel into the heart, and a fourth that ignited an awakening across two continents.

The Puritans in England and America took the Reformed doctrines into the soul and produced the most pastoral theology the English-speaking church had ever seen. The Pietists in Germany answered cold Lutheran orthodoxy with small-group Bible study, conversion preaching, and a missionary fire that would carry the gospel around the world. The Moravians, refugees from Bohemia who found shelter on Count Zinzendorf's estate, became one of the earliest and most influential Protestant missionary movements and were the immediate catalyst, at a fuller moment, for John Wesley's conversion. The First Great Awakening in the American colonies and the closely related British Evangelical Revival swept both sides of the Atlantic in the 1730s and 1740s under Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, and the Wesleys — two movements bound together especially through Whitefield's tireless transatlantic ministry, though not strictly identical. By 1750 the gospel that the Reformers had recovered was burning hot again, in revivals, in mission fields, and in millions of warmed hearts.

Unit 8 will give us six landmarks. The Westminster Assembly and the great Puritan confessional summary of the Reformation. The English Puritans — Bunyan, Owen, Baxter. German Pietism — Spener, Francke, Halle. The Moravians and Zinzendorf. The First Great Awakening — Edwards, Whitefield, the Wesleys. And the suffering remnant of the era — the Scottish Covenanters in the Killing Times, the French Huguenots dragooned out of France in 1685.

The English Reformation that Elizabeth I had stabilized in 1559 was a moderate, broadly Reformed settlement that left certain practices — bishops, set liturgy, vestments — that some thought too close to Rome. The men who wanted further purification of the Church of England came to be called Puritans. They were not a sect; they were a movement within the established church. They wanted Reformed doctrine fully applied, expository preaching at the center of worship, the Lord's Day kept rigorously, and the Christian life ordered toward holiness.

Under Charles I (1625–1649) the conflict between Puritans and the high-church party led by Archbishop Laud broke into civil war. The Long Parliament summoned the Westminster Assembly in 1643 to advise on the reform of religion. About 121 ministers and 30 lay members met at Westminster Abbey from 1643 to 1653. They produced four documents that would shape Reformed theology in the English-speaking world for the next four centuries: the Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), the Larger Catechism, the Shorter Catechism, and the Directory for the Public Worship of God.

The Shorter Catechism's first question and answer are the high water mark of catechetical writing in English: "Q. What is the chief end of man? A. Man's chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him for ever." The Confession is the most precise systematic statement of Reformed theology produced in English — covenant theology, divine sovereignty, the means of grace, the sabbath, civil government, and Christian liberty all set out in thirty-three carefully worded chapters. The Westminster standards became the doctrinal foundation of English-speaking Presbyterianism, the Congregational churches of New England (with the parallel Savoy Declaration), and the Particular Baptists (with the parallel Second London Confession of 1689).

The English Puritan giants

John Bunyan (1628–1688), a tinker by trade and Baptist by conviction, was imprisoned for twelve years in Bedford jail for preaching without a license. He used the time to write. His Pilgrim's Progress (1678), an allegory of the Christian life from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City, became one of the most widely read books in the English language and one of the most translated books in the world after the Bible. Christian, Faithful, Hopeful, the Slough of Despond, Vanity Fair, Doubting Castle — Bunyan gave the Christian imagination a permanent vocabulary.

John Owen (1616–1683), the most rigorous theological mind among the Puritans, served as vice-chancellor of Oxford under Cromwell and produced massive treatises on the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, the atonement, communion with God, and the mortification of sin. His The Death of Death in the Death of Christ remains the classic Reformed exposition of definite atonement. Owen wrote one sentence about indwelling sin that has become a Puritan motto: "Be killing sin, or it will be killing you."

Richard Baxter (1615–1691), pastor at Kidderminster, wrote the most influential pastoral manual of the seventeenth century: The Reformed Pastor (1656). He insisted that every minister catechize every family in his parish personally and labored to do it. Of the saints in heaven he wrote The Saints' Everlasting Rest. Baxter's words to himself remain a model of pastoral self-examination: "I preached as never sure to preach again, and as a dying man to dying men."

Lutheran Germany after the devastating Thirty Years' War (1618–1648) was a spiritual wasteland. The war had killed perhaps eight million people, depopulated whole regions, and left the Lutheran state churches drained and formalistic. Doctrinal correctness was preached. Living faith was rare.

The recovery began with a Lutheran pastor in Frankfurt named Philipp Jakob Spener (1635–1705). In 1675 Spener wrote a short preface to a new edition of Johann Arndt's devotional classic True Christianity and called it Pia Desideria — "Pious Desires." It became a best-seller and the founding manifesto of Pietism. Spener proposed six reforms: more Bible reading by laity, the practice of the priesthood of all believers, Christianity as practice and not just doctrine, charitable handling of theological controversy, more spiritually formative theological education, and preaching aimed at the heart and conscience. Spener gathered believers in his Frankfurt home into small groups he called collegia pietatis — "schools of piety" — for Bible reading, prayer, and mutual encouragement. The movement spread.

The center of Pietism became the city of Halle, where Spener's protégé August Hermann Francke (1663–1727) built one of the most extraordinary institutional networks in Christian history. Francke founded an orphanage in 1695 with seven thalers and the conviction that God would provide. Within a generation the Halle Foundations included an orphanage, a Latin school, a girls' school, a printing press that produced Bibles by the hundreds of thousands, a free pharmacy, a Bible institute that trained missionaries, and a faculty of theology that for two generations was the most influential in Lutheran Germany. The Halle motto was Soli Deo Gloria carved over the gate. Francke's prayer life was relentless. His record-keeping was meticulous. His God provided.

From Halle the Pietist impulse went out across Europe and into the mission field. The first organized Protestant foreign mission of the modern era left Halle in 1706 when Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg and Heinrich Plütschau sailed to the Danish trading colony of Tranquebar in southern India and planted a Lutheran mission that translated the New Testament into Tamil and produced converts and indigenous leadership for the next century. Pietist Bible study, conversion preaching, and missions would shape continental Protestantism, English-speaking evangelicalism, and the modern missionary movement of Unit 9.

The Hussite tradition of Bohemia, three hundred years old by the early 1700s, had been driven underground after the Catholic victory in the Thirty Years' War. A small remnant of Bohemian and Moravian Brethren still kept the faith of Hus and Comenius in secret. In 1722 a few of these refugees, fleeing renewed persecution, crossed the border into Saxony and asked permission to settle on the estate of a young Lutheran nobleman named Nicholas Ludwig von Zinzendorf (1700–1760). He was twenty-two years old, godson of Spener, educated at Francke's Halle, and aflame with Pietist devotion to Christ. He gave them land and the right to worship as they pleased. They named their settlement Herrnhut — "the Lord's watch."

The little Moravian community at Herrnhut nearly split in its first five years over personality and theological differences among the refugees. On August 13, 1727, in a communion service at the village church, a tide of repentance and unity broke out that the Moravians called the day of "the great outpouring of the Holy Ghost upon Herrnhut and its inhabitants." Out of that day grew a community marked by an extraordinary missionary impulse. By 1732, only five years after the outpouring, the first Moravian missionaries were sailing to the Caribbean to preach to enslaved Africans on the Danish island of St. Thomas. By 1740 the Moravians had missions in Greenland, Suriname, North America among the Native peoples, and South Africa. By 1760, when Zinzendorf died, the Moravians had sent more missionaries from a community of a few hundred than the entire Lutheran and Reformed churches of Europe combined had sent in two hundred years. The Protestant mission movement of the modern era was largely born at Herrnhut.

The Moravian missionary spirit reached London in 1738. A young Anglican priest named John Wesley, recently returned discouraged from a failed mission to Georgia, met a group of Moravians who were on their way to Pennsylvania. Their leader, Peter Böhler, urged Wesley to trust Christ for salvation rather than to strive for it by good works. Wesley resisted, then yielded. On the evening of May 24, 1738, Wesley reluctantly attended a Moravian meeting on Aldersgate Street in London where someone was reading aloud from Luther's preface to Romans. Wesley wrote in his journal: "About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death." The Moravian fire that had warmed Herrnhut now warmed Aldersgate. The man who would lead the Methodist revival traced the decisive moment of his own assurance to a Moravian Bible study reading Luther on Romans — the spark that lit a fire built from years of striving, failure, and Böhler's patient counsel.

The American colonies in the 1730s were religiously cold. New England Congregationalism had drifted into a half-converted moralism. Anglican parishes in the South were stretched thin and often nominal. Presbyterian and Reformed churches in the middle colonies were strong on doctrine but slow on conversion preaching. Then revival came.

The center of the awakening's first stirrings was Northampton, Massachusetts, where Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) pastored. Edwards was the most powerful theological mind America has produced — a Yale graduate at sixteen, a precise reader of Locke and Newton, and a Reformed pastor of intense devotional life. In 1734–1735 Northampton experienced an unexpected revival as Edwards preached through the doctrine of justification by faith. Conversions came in waves. Edwards described what he saw in A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God (1737), and the report itself helped spread the awakening. Edwards's most famous sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," preached at Enfield, Connecticut, on July 8, 1741, brought a congregation to such terror at the prospect of judgment that listeners were said to clutch the pillars of the meetinghouse to keep from being swept away. Edwards read the sermon from a manuscript in a quiet voice. The Holy Spirit did the rest.

George Whitefield (1714–1770) was the awakening's voice. A young Anglican priest converted under Wesley's Holy Club at Oxford and influenced by the Moravians as Wesley had been, Whitefield discovered he could preach to fifteen and twenty thousand people at a time in open fields without amplification and be heard at the back of the crowd. Benjamin Franklin, a skeptic, paced off the distance once and calculated Whitefield could be heard by thirty thousand. Whitefield made seven journeys from Britain to America between 1738 and his death in 1770, criss-crossing the colonies and Britain in unceasing preaching tours. He preached perhaps eighteen thousand sermons in his thirty-three-year ministry. The American colonies were welded together as a single religious public for the first time by Whitefield's voice. He died at Newburyport, Massachusetts, in 1770 and is buried under the pulpit of the Old South Presbyterian Church there.

John Wesley (1703–1791) and his brother Charles Wesley (1707–1788) led the parallel revival in Britain. Whitefield convinced the reluctant John to begin field preaching in 1739; thereafter Wesley preached on average sixteen sermons a week for the next fifty-two years and traveled by horseback an estimated quarter of a million miles. He organized his converts into societies divided into classes of twelve people that met weekly for accountability, mutual confession, and growth in holiness. The Methodist movement was born. Charles Wesley wrote some six thousand hymns — "And Can It Be," "Hark! the Herald Angels Sing," "O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing" — that put Methodist theology on the lips of plain people for ever after. By the time John Wesley died in 1791, there were Methodist societies across Britain, Ireland, and America, and the Methodist Church was the largest Protestant denomination in the United States.

The First Great Awakening produced a particular tension that has marked evangelicalism ever since: a Calvinist revivalist paradox. Edwards, Whitefield, William Tennent, Theodorus Frelinghuysen, and most of the Awakening's leaders were Reformed in their theology of grace and yet preached for immediate conversion. They held that God sovereignly chooses whom He will save, and they preached as if every hearer could and must come to Christ tonight. Both halves were biblical. Both halves were preached together. The fruit was tens of thousands of conversions.

First, doctrine without heart goes cold; heart without doctrine goes wild. The Lutheran orthodoxy that produced the Thirty Years' War without producing a missionary impulse was right in its doctrine but dry in its life. The radical revivalism that produced Münster (Unit 7) had heart but no anchor. The Puritans, the Pietists, the Moravians, and the Awakening preachers all worked the recovered Reformation gospel into hearts ordered by sound doctrine. Pastor, preach the doctrine. Pray for the heart.

Second, small groups are biblical and effective. Spener's collegia pietatis, Wesley's classes of twelve, the Moravian bands at Herrnhut — the recovered church of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries discovered (or rediscovered, from Acts 2:46) that the gathered congregation needs the close fellowship of small accountable groups to grow in holiness. The modern small-group movement has roots that go all the way back to Spener's living room.

Third, missions flow from awakened hearts. The Pietists at Halle sent the first organized Protestant mission. The Moravians at Herrnhut sent more missionaries from a community of a few hundred than all of European Protestantism in two centuries. The Wesleyan and Whitefieldian Awakening produced the missionary century of Unit 9. Pastor, preach for awakened hearts at home. The mission field will follow.

Fourth, the suffering remnant is permanent. The Wigtown Martyrs in 1685. The Huguenots dragooned out of France that same year. Anabaptists still dying in Lutheran Saxony. The pattern of Unit 5, Unit 6, Unit 7 continues into Unit 8. Suffering is the historical norm; the Constantinian arrangement that protects Christians is local and temporary. Be ready for suffering. Train your people to be ready.

Fifth, the Calvinist revivalist paradox is biblical and works. Edwards and Whitefield held divine sovereignty in salvation and preached for immediate conversion. They were not contradicting themselves; they were preaching what Scripture preaches. Pastor, do not let theological labels keep you from preaching every text the way it preaches itself. The same Bible that says "no one can come to Me unless the Father… draws him" also says "come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden." Preach both.

The century and a half between 1600 and 1750 took the Reformation gospel and worked it into the heart of Protestant Christianity. The Westminster divines codified it. The English Puritans pastored it. The German Pietists prayed it. The Moravians sailed it across the oceans. The Awakening preachers thundered it across two continents until tens of thousands of hearts were warmed. By 1750 the gospel was no longer just a doctrine; it was a fire. And that fire was about to be carried, by William Carey and Hudson Taylor and David Livingstone and a thousand others, around the entire world.

Pass this examination, and we will meet the missionary century in Unit 9: the fourth great century of preaching, the greatest expansion of Christianity since Pentecost, and the pulpit princes — Spurgeon, Moody, Phillips Brooks, Maclaren, Booth — whose voices shaped the modern church.