Volume 7 Number 049 the Great Awakening I Lead: out of The

Volume 7 Number 049

The Great Awakening I

Lead: Out of the intellectual ferment of the Eighteenth Century Enlightenment emerged a rush of devout pietism. The Great Awakening helped transform American religious life.

Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: The wars of religion that convulsed Europe following the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Revival in the 1500s and 1600s provoked a growing revulsion among Europe’s intellectual elite against intolerance and sectarian violence. This, combined with the spreading awareness of the previous century’s scientific discoveries and progress, shaped a new way of thinking about the world. Less religious in its orientation with more emphasis on the accomplishments of man, the Enlightenment, through its major spokesmen, Frenchmen Voltaire, Diderot, Montesquieu and their many followers in western Europe and North America, stressed the importance of individual achievement, rational thought, happiness in this world not salvation in the next, and liberty.

The religion of the Enlightenment prized reason, progress, and the perfection of humanity. The enlightened were deists, whose God was the celestial watchmaker. He created the universe, wound it up and then watched impersonally from afar as the world worked according to the natural laws he had set up. Not surprisingly, these rather irreligious tendencies in the Enlightenment, in turn, provoked a powerful religious reaction, indeed, a search for a warm, emotional encounter with a personal God. This movement away from the arid rationalism of the philosophes took a variety of forms, Pietism among continental Protestants, Quietism among Roman Catholics, Methodism under John Wesley in England, and in America, beginning in the Connecticut River Valley in the 1720s and 1730s, the Great Awakening. Next time: sinners in the hands of an angry God.

At the University of Richmond, this is Dan Roberts.

Resources

Davidson, Edward D. Jonathan Edwards, The Narrative of a Puritan Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968.

Edwards, Jonathan. The Works of Jonathan Edwards. Edited by Perly Miller. 5 vols. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959.

Gaustad, Edwin S. The Great Awakening in New England. Gloucester, MA: P. Smith 1965.

Mller, Perry. Jonathan Edwards. Toronto, ON, Can.: William Sloane Associates, Inc., 1949