Pine Knoll Sabbath School Study Notes Third Quarter 2013: Revival and Reformation Bonus Session Study Material

Thoughts and Questions for Consideration Moderator: Daniel Duda 1. We think in models, patterns of thinking. However, ideas and doctrines have a tendency throughout the years to develop a life of their own. People often lose track of the origin of these ideas and doctrines, but perceive everything through their prism and are genuinely convinced that what they believe is what the Bible teaches. This process works on everybody, we are no exception.

2. The Talmud says we do not see the world the way it is, we see the world the way we are. Our optic, our filters determine what we see. That’s why it is important to constantly clean our spectacles. Otherwise we will keep believing what we have always believed and find a pious way of justifying it.

3. There is a reason the topic for this Quarter is called “Revival and Reformation”. The idea has its own history and development. The better we understand how the history of these ideas developed, the better equipped we will be not to impose our subconscious ideas on the Bible text. But rather try to draw out of the text what we are supposed to learn and what corrects our crooked thinking.

4. There have been noted revivals throughout the centuries. Historians have different numbering and dates for them. The most significant were “Awakenings” that spread through the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, and influenced early Adventism.

5. The First Great Awakening was a Christian revival (revitalization) movement that swept Protestant Europe and British America in the 1730s and 1740s. It was geared towards church members and tried to pull them away from ritual and ceremony. It incited rancor and division between the old traditionalists who insisted on ritual and doctrine and the new revivalists. It had a major impact in reshaping the Congregational, Presbyterian, Dutch Reformed, and German Reformed denominations, and strengthened the small Baptist and Methodist denominations, but had little impact on Anglicans and Quakers.

6. The First Great Awakening focused on people who were already church members. It changed their rituals, their piety, and their self-awareness. It brought Christianity to the slaves and challenged established authority. Pulling away from ritual and ceremony, the Great Awakening made religion intensely personal to the average

Study Collection Prepared October 2012 ©Pine Knoll Publications Page 1 person by creating a deep sense of spiritual guilt and redemption in Christ. The new style of sermons and the way people practiced their faith breathed new life into religion in America. People became passionately and emotionally involved in their religion, rather than passively listening to intellectual discourse in a detached manner. Ministers who used this new style of preaching were generally called “new lights”, while the preachers of old were called “old lights”. People began to study the Bible at home, which effectively decentralized the means of informing the public on religious matters and was akin to the individualistic trends present in Europe during the Protestant Reformation. To the evangelical imperatives of Reformation Protestantism, 18th century American Christians added emphases on divine outpourings of the Holy Spirit and conversions that implanted within new believers an intense love for God. It had an impact on the American Revolution. The great names that embodied this era are Jonathan Edwards & George Whitefield.

7. The Second Great Awakening began about 1800 and reached its peak in the 1840s. This Protestant revival movement primarily reached out to the unchurched. It rose rapidly among the Baptist and Methodist congregations. The famous names are Charles Finney, Lyman Beecher, Barton Stone, and Alexander Campbell. Finney’s revival meetings created anxiety in a penitent person’s mind that one could only save his or her soul by submission to the will of God. The Second Great Awakening brought renewed interest in religion and inspired a wave of social activism, including abolitionism. It also encouraged the emergence of new Restorationism and other Christian denominations and movements such as the Holiness Movement. The Churches of Christ and Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) arose from the Stone- Campbell Restoration Movement. Renewed interest in religion even led to new sects and beliefs such as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It also introduced into America a new form of religious expression—the camp meeting (originally from Scottish Presbyterianism).

8. William Miller was part of Second Great Awakening, but his main message was revival by preparing for a pre-millennial second coming of Jesus. His followers became known as Millerites. Their emphasis was on the belief in the soon Second Advent of Jesus (popularly known as the Second Coming) and resulted in several major religious denominations, including Seventh-day Adventists and Advent Christians.

9. The Third Great Awakening began from 1857 onwards in Canada and spread throughout the world including America and Australia. It lasted until the early 1900s. It affected pietistic Protestant denominations and had a strong element of social activism. It was affiliated with the Social Gospel Movement, which applied Christianity to social issues and the worldwide missionary movement. New groups emerged, such as the Holiness movement and Nazarene movements, and Christian Science and the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Significant names include Dwight L. Moody, Ira D. Sankey, William Booth and Catherine Booth (founders of the Salvation Army),

Study Collection Prepared October 2012 ©Pine Knoll Publications Page 2 Charles Spurgeon and James Caughey. Hudson Taylor began the China Inland Mission and Thomas John Barnardo founded his famous orphanages.

10. The goal of the Holiness movement in the Methodist Church was to move beyond the one-time conversion experience that the revivals produce, and reach entire sanctification. At the turn of the 20th century, the Pentecostals went one step further, seeking what they called a “baptism in the Spirit” or “baptism of the Holy Ghost” that enabled those with this special gift to heal the sick, perform miracles, prophesy, and speak in tongues.

11. The origin of the Pentecostal movement goes back to the Azusa Street Revival which was a historic Pentecostal revival that took place in Los Angeles, California. It was led by William J. Seymour, a follower of Charles Parham. It began with meetings between 1906, and continued until roughly 1915.

12. The theological thinking went along these lines: Before the imminent Second coming of Christ, an end-time revival will bring many people to Christ. This experience that will empower believers to evangelize the whole world is the baptism of the Holy Spirit, which is the Latter Rain experience. The entire sanctification is a definite event. If God can give you the total sanctification experience, “Why not sooner rather than later?” Why not now?– became the rallying cry of Pentecostalism in which mission, speaking in tongues, healing and miracles started playing a crucial role.

13. Until 1964, Adventists could always say that just as Noah preached for 120 years and then the flood came, we are going to preach the soon coming of Jesus and then it will suddenly happen. However, after 1964 Adventism entered into a crisis of identity. Adventism worked well with short time mentality – If not us, who else will do it for the Lord? How do we deal with the delay? What is the reason for our existence? Are we one of the churches, or do we have a specific mission that nobody else has? Different solutions have been proposed for the current crisis of identity – the result is that Adventism is now more fragmented and polarized than at any time of its history!

14. At the General Conference session in 1966 in Detroit, Michigan, Robert H. Pierson was elected as General Conference president. Soon his motto became “Revival and Reformation”. At the Autumn Council of 1972 he said: “We are putting the agenda aside and we are going to pray, until the revival comes.”

15. The Jews in the First Century believed that if Israel kept Sabbath properly, the Messiah would come. Heresy is seldom an outright error, often it is truth that it is not balanced. Shortly before his death in 1989, R.H. Pierson was asked, “So what happened to the Revival & Reformation?” His answer was: “The People were not ready.”

16. When the Red Army entered the streets of Berlin, somebody asked Hitler, “What happened with the dream of the Third Reich?” His answer was, “The German nation proved unworthy of a genius leader like me.” We need to be aware of historical patterns of thinking, because faulty models will have far reaching consequences and we are only capable of thinking in models.

17. New events and new patterns of thinking always cause a crisis of faith, an identity crisis. The only viable solution is re-thinking our faith and identity. Adventism has already faced serious crises and the need to do “re-thinking” a few times in its history and so far has managed to do it well. The future of Adventism depends on our ability to re-think our identity. If we want to move forward, we need to re- think our faith in every generation.