Baptistic Theologies, 2009

Finney believed that the Almighty had so ordained that particular methods would infallibly bring one: ‘a revival’, he wrote, ‘is not a miracle; it consists entirely in the right exercise of the powers of nature’. The natural world was governed by laws, and the spiritual world was no different. Revival, on this understanding, could be organised into existence. This style was also pragmatic. Its special measures represented an adaptation to the human psyche. Those who sat on the anxious seat, for example, felt a sense of isolation that made the transition to salvation seem more imperative. Whatever worked, Finney held, should be employed. Theological reconstruction was another feature. 16 Truth and Progress (Adelaide), July 1875, pp. 74-5. 17 Charles Finney quoted by William G. McLoughlin, Revivals, Awakenings and Reform: An Essay on Religion and Social Change in America, 1607-1977 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 125. 8 Baptistic Theologies Finney was prepared to abandon confessional Calvinism altogether. His thought was shaped by the broad assumptions of the Enlightenment, whose beliefs about a mechanistic universe underlay his premise that laws functioning by cause and effect operated in the spiritual universe. Others later in the century were to be swayed by intellectual currents flowing from the Romantic movement. Thus many of the Holinesss revivalists, swayed by Phoebe Palmer, were to urge an immediate surrender to the Almighty on the pattern of the melodramatic moments of romantic literature. 19 Indeed, immediacy was a hallmark of the synthetic school. Presbyterians, Congregationalists and even traditional Methodists had all held that there was a need to wait until the time of conversion came. According to the newer approach, however, there was no need to wait. Salvation could be appropriated straight away, without delaying until any particular sensation arose. Traditional denominational teaching could therefore be a hindrance, and so, as Barton W. Stone came to think, could denominational structures. The new revivalists therefore tended to ignore old boundaries, sometimes creating, like Stone, a new denomination in the process. This synthetic style of revival triumphed during the nineteenth century. There emerged a largely homogeneous Evangelical approach to awakenings, adopted by many Baptists in America, Britain and elsewhere. Joseph Belcher, a prominent English Baptist who emigrated to the United States in 1844, for example, was an exponent of some of Finney’s ideas in his periodical The Revivalist during the 1830s. The new style, however, was most associated with the keenest of Evangelical bodies, the (so-called Plymouth) Brethren. This grouping became dedicated to revivalism. For them it was normally planned, pragmatic and neither Calvinist nor Arminian; they insisted on immediate conversion and denied that they were 21 a denomination, claiming that they w