Great Awakening

Testimonies during the Great Awakening make it appear that most of the sporadic revivals were based on a concern for salvation by works, which taught men to help themselves to the means of grace institutionalized in the church. There was little conviction of the sinfulness of all human character and conduct, and no consequent casting of oneself on the mercy of God in faith alone. A striking change occurred in Jonathan Parsons. After Calvinistic preaching had "awakened" all New England , he was converted to those doctrines and confessed that in 1731 he had been too optimistic in counting his converts and too hasty in admitting them to the Lord's Supper. Also, he confessed that he himself had been trusting too much in his own self-righteousness and not enough in the sufficiency of Christ.

Although the Great Awakening proper broke forth under George Whitefield along the eastern seaboard before it moved overland, and although the promotion and progress of that revival was far different from the frontier awakening which was "very much at a Stop" by 1737, the surprising conversions in the churches of the Connecticut Valley brought several important influences to bear on the later phenomenon.

During these years ministers were beset on all sides by inquirers after the way of salvation, implored to increase the number of sermons and lectures, and impelled to carry the word of life to distant places. The increase in church membership has been variously estimated at twenty to fifty thousand, and more than a few pastors rejoiced over the noticeable elevation of public morals. Within the next twenty years, more than a hundred and fifty new regular Congregational churches were gathered. In spite of unfortunate excesses which marred the revival and eventually dissipated it in controversy and schism, it amply deserves the name by which it is generally known - the Great Awakening.

The Puritan founders of New England , with a doctrine of conscious conversion, insisted on a public profession of personal regeneration as prerequisite to church membership. But in the general decline of experimental piety and through the working of the Halfway Covenant, the doctrine of conversion became greatly attenuated. Before the Great Awakening, even those who maintained some sort of emphasis on conversion held that it was so subtle and inward as not to be cognizable by another person - if indeed by oneself! Anyone who subscribed to the creed of the churches and lived a respectably moral life was presumed to be converted. The Great Awakening marks a recovery of the doctrine of conscious conversion, even setting "experience" over "profession" in a way that the early Puritans had never known. Jonathan Edwards himself articulated this doctrine in such a way as to erect a normative pattern for religious experience among the revivalists.

There were, of course, individual differences in the conversion experience, and Edwards notes them carefully. But in spite of these differences the general pattern is the same. The three-stage process of conversion became normative in the Great Awakening and in subsequent revivalism, and those who could not or would not pass through it were in time denounced as unconverted.

If the fundamental principle of the Great Awakening was insistence on personal conversion, its most striking characteristic was religious excitement. The emotional outbursts which eventually discredited the revival have led some to regard it as "a tempest of ungoverned passions that swept over the colonies, leaving wreckage everywhere in the alienations and divisions in families, neighborhoods, and churches, the undermining of cherished institutions, and a relapse into indifference, debauchery, and irreligion."