"Without new methods it is impossible that the church should succeed in gaining the attention of the world to the subject of religion." While that quote could have come from any number of revivalists and church growth gurus of our day, it was a quote from Charles Finney, the renowned 19th century evangelist who, more than anybody, represents the shift from genuine evangelical faith to Arminian and even Pelagian religion.

Last time, our focus was on the Great Awakening, that great movement of God's Spirit during the 18th century, when men and women were captivated by a sense of their great sinfulness and God's great mercy. But in the 19th century, revival — viewed as God's sovereign and super­natural work in saving sin­ners — became revivalism ­viewed now as man's work in implementing the correct techniques, methods and, as Finney called them, "excite­ments sufficient to induce men to conversion." Whereas the great sermons of the Great Awakening focused on God and his saving work in Christ, the content of the new revivalistic sermons were more favorable to the demo­cratic frontier experience. How could you tell people who had just overthrown a king and carved, their own existence out of the wilder­ness that they were helpless before God, that there was nothing that they could do, that they were sinners entirely at God's mercy? Arminianism — the 17th cen­tury heresy that insisted that salvation is a cooperative venture between God and the sinner — meshed perfectly with the democratic experi­ment.

So now that conversion depended on human beings and an act of their will, the evangelist rather than Christ became central and instead of the saving work of the Redeemer on the cross, the supposedly saving work of the evangelist on the stage, preparing everyone for the "altar call" took preemi­nence. "New measures," as they were called, were intro­duced to excite the will to change its direction and "do the right thing." And not sur­prisingly, even Finney him­self complained toward the end of his life that the very people who had streamed forward to make a decision during his revival campaigns were now unchurched and deeply cynical about religion in general. The region in upstate New York, in fact, where Finney's revivals were most common, is known to history as "the Burned-Over District." It quickly became the incubator for cults and a greenhouse for secularism.

But what about today's revivals? Are they different? Has there been a return to the great evangelical truths proclaimed during the Reformation and the Great Awakening? Or are all of these revivals that seem to arrive about as often as a Greyhound merely Arminian tumble-weeds blowing through the arid desert of the late 20th century, a period that, in America at least, is best described by Amos — a famine of the Word in the land?

First, a word about a topic that is of utmost relevance to our subject: It is the word, "modernity." Increasingly subjected to a barrage of artillery from the academic community, the chunk of his­tory between the rise of the Enlightenment and the fall of the Berlin wall is marked by a number of important fea­tures: First, the rise of demo­cratic individualism. Around the world, the individual has been given a place in society that is almost unique in west­ern history. This has led to a concern for human rights, individual responsibility, and a variety of other important virtues. In fact, the Reformation itself is said to have produced many of these effects. However, it has its down-side, too, and the Reformation saw it in the form of Anabaptism: a sec­tarian individualism that led to the conviction that the church and the world were corrupt, but the individual Christian was pure. Creeds, confessions and theological traditions were now immedi­ately suspect and many saw them as Old World baggage that stood in the way of building the New World.

This leads to another fea­ture of modernity: the obses­sion with progress. While Christianity has usually taught that history is a story of "ups" and "downs," punc­tuated by saving events, but all of history governed by divine providence, moderns have been convinced that they are building the Tower of Babel, and that their own contributions will lead inevitably to the perfection of history. This means that the past is inherently inferior to the present and the future. In America, modernity went into high gear and pragma­tism became the nation's unique contribution to the world of philosophy. It was great for business, but it shaped the way we viewed everything else, too. Take religion, for instance. Instead of sinners in need of grace and forgiveness from a holy God, people became con­sumers in need of self‑improvement.   William James, the father of pragma­tism, said "the test of a truth-claim is its cash-value in experiential terms." "In other words," he said, "it is true if it works better than something else." Thus, pragmatism not only became a way of looking at building corporate empires; it became the lens through which moderns ­especially Americans ­viewed their entire universe.

The point of this little dis­course is to suggest that while evangelicals and fundamen­talists get their dander up over "worldliness" in the form of immorality in TV or movies, in books, or in night clubs and bars, they are among the most worldly people in American society at the end of the 20th century. Addicted to the tenets of modernity more than the tenets of Scripture, evangeli­calism — as a movement — is addicted to the modern idols of progress, success, pragma­tism, and democratic individ­ualism. If it works, how could it be wrong? If it makes peo­ple happy, so what? Isn't this what we tell the world? Give Jesus A Chance? Try God ­and if you're not completely satisfied, simply return the unused portion for a full refund?

In recent months, evangeli­cals have been proclaiming a period of revival. Bill Bright (founder of C. C. C.), organ­ized a revival committee in Orlando and initiated the revival with a 40-day fast, invoking, among others, the memory of Charles Finney. In recent days, our computers were buzzing with Internet messages on revival sweeping Christian campuses across the country. Beginning at Wheaton College and Dallas Theological Seminary, the movement seemed to spread over-night to Gordon College, Northwestern College, Criswell College, Houston Baptist University, Olivet Nazarene and the Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. According to the reports, the movement spread quickly as students from Wheaton gave "testi­monies" at these other cam­puses. The Wheaton "revival" began on Sunday evening, March 19, when students gathered for a weekly meeting and began to confess their sins, and didn't end until the next morning. Monday evening, they began again and it adjourned at 2 am, so the following evening it was moved to College Church's large sanctuary, where the crowd swelled to 1,350, with long lines of stu­dents and faculty waiting to confess their specific sins at the microphone. On Wednesday evening, 1,500 assembled for the same pur­pose and concluded at 2 am. Here are a few eye-witness reports from students: "People are publicly confess­ing sins, bringing things that went between themselves and God, such as cigarettes, drugs, books, and things like that. One guy confessed high-style clothes were the issue. The list is extraordinary. Others confessed horrible sexual perversions and pride. This wasn't about theology; this was and is about God, about being reunited with Him as one ... They came to get right before God." Many students thought that this revival was akin to the so-called "Toronto blessing," and nearly all of them con­nected it to Finney and the Pentecostal revival at Azusa Street in the early 1900s.

These reports seem to glory in the fact that there was no preaching involved. One par­ticipant exults, "The service was turned over to God, with a major percentage of the people at the altar in repen­tance — based only upon what the Spirit was doing in their hearts, not based on anything a man had said, as the pastor was not able to speak." Another writes in the same vein, as if the preaching of a man was somehow inferior to the work of the Spirit. "It was as though every ounce of my body was being drained, and every horrible thought, sin, and wrong I had ever done was being atoned ... But more confession will be needed for me."

Where is all of this heading? Can we expect America to be converted through these activities? Or is it all going to simply make the entire nation one vast "Burned-Over District"?

Bill Bright's 40-Day Fast⤒🔗

Recently, Mr. Bright and more than 30 well-known Christian leaders gathered in Orlando for a Prayer Summit and Mr. Bright recently released his book, The Coming Revival. The group included such theologically diverse individuals as Charles Colson, Paul Crouch and Robert Schuller. Leaders expressed such comments as the following: "There is enough power in this room to move the hand of God," as if the Almighty's arm had suf­fered a paralysis. Almost every comment had the word "experience" in it, but not one comment listed in Mr. Bright's book attributes the experience to Word or sacra­ment. A mainline Episcopal bishop hailed the event as "the beginning of our libera­tion," while the president of the SBC said he was sure the meeting got God's attention. Charles Colson went so far as to say, "This is the greatest experience of my life; I will never be the same." Mr. Bright claims that he received a vision from God in which he was told to fast for 40 days because of America's sins, and many of these leaders joined him in the fast. But was this intercession — that is, prayer on behalf of God, appealing to the sacrifice of Christ as the only power to bring forgiveness? I'm sure Mr. Bright and the others believe that, but it wasn't apparent in Mr. Bright's book. In fact, he wrote, "Fasting burns out our self­ishness and is the foundry in which we are purified." "It is," he says, "the primary means of restoration," "changing our relationship with God forever," enabling believers to live free of sin.

Fasting, it seems, is a sacra­ment — a means of grace, actually freeing up the Holy Spirit to work in our lives. He even calls it "a grace that God has provided" for the individual. Mr. Bright adds to fasting the practice he calls "Spiritual Breathing." By exhaling sin in confession and inhaling the Holy Spirit, and by making restitution (Is this penance?), the believer, Bright insists, can live above sin. In fact, Mr. Bright claims this very success for himself. "Since I learned how to breathe spiritually many years ago," Bright states, "I frankly do not have that much to confess."

Furthermore, the sacraments of fasting and spiritual breathing seem to work, as Rome has said of sacraments, ex opere operato — in other words, simply by doing it, it works!. He writes, "Spiritual breathing ... is an exercise (that) enables you to experi­ence God's love and forgive­ness." Even non-Christians can secure their blessings by fasting, as the Israelis did during the Six-Day War of 1967, according to Mr. Bright. "Synagogues and churches" that open their doors to revival and fasting, he says, will move the hand of God. Mr. Bright opens his book with gratitude expressed to Charles Finney for defining revival and goes down-hill from there. So here we have revival without Word, without sacraments, and even, as he implies, with­out Christ.

William Nevin once complained, "They tell us we must not speak against the New Measures, because this term is made to include revivals of all kinds, and this is, of course, to be an enemy of God himself. The system of New Measures, however, has no affinity whatever with the life of the Reformation, as embodied in the Augsburg Confession and the Heidelberg Catechism. It could not have found any favor in the eyes of Zwingli or Calvin. Luther would have denounced it in the most unmerciful terms. His soul was too large, too deep, too free, to hold communion with a style of religion so mechani­cal and shallow. Those who are actively laboring to bring the churches of the Reformation into subjection to this system cannot be said to be honorable. The system in question is in its principle and soul neither Calvinism nor Lutheranism, but Wesleyan Methodism. Those who are urging it upon the churches of the Reformation are turning these churches over into the arms of Methodism. This may be done without a change of denominational name.

Already the life of Methodism, in this country, is actively at work among other sects, which owe no fellow­ship with it in form. But if we must have Methodism, let us have it under its own proper title, and in its own proper shape. Why keep up the walls of denominational partition in such a case, when no gen­uine difference exists? Is this not bigotry to remain sepa­rate denominations when we are all now, in fact, Methodists?"

Today, we might add Pentecostalism, because a Wesleyan-Pentecostal theolo­gy now dominates the evan­gelical movement. Even those, like Bill Bright, who would not consider them­selves Pentecostals or even Charismatics, embrace many of the central tenets of Holiness Pentecostalism. Mr. Bright even claims to receive direct revelations from God.

Here are some ques­tions we should ask when a new revival pops up:

1. What is the source? God or the evangelists and com­mittees?

2. What are the means? Word and sacrament or methods and events?

3. What is the message? Christ crucified for sins and raised for justification or making a decision and having an experience?

4. What are the effects? Are people actually linked to Christ and incorporated into the church or are they into some other "trip" down the road? Are they changed peo­ple? Are their beliefs and their basic interests, convic­tions, hopes, dreams, charac­ter and lifestyles determined by Scripture or by the world?