Considering Revival

I just finished the first chapter of Richard Lovelace’s Dynamics of Spiritual Life.  Lovelace has been influential on guys like Tim Keller and Jack Miller.  The rather lengthy and dense first chapter traces the history of revivals and renewal.  He is looking to see the common threads in history before moving into the biblical patterns.  He leans heavily on Jonathan Edwards’ works in this area during the First Great Awakening.  Here are some nuggets, and thoughts of mine in response.

From the preface:  (A.W. Boehm) “dismissed much activity in the church as a lifeless product of human conditioning.”  I never cease to be surprised at how complicated, and time-consuming, we have made church.  God intended it to be one of the threads in our lives.  It is the God-ordained community for evangelism, missions, spiritual development and worship.  But we have created churches that keep us (or distract us) from our mission in the world (vocation, family, and more) to maintain complex systems.  I think we are missing something here.

“it is impossible to grow to full stature as an individual while separated from smaller and larger groups in the church, nor can the body grow without the renewing of its members.”  We see the symbiotic nature of growth.  I need the Body to grow; and the Body needs me to grow.  Our future growth is intertwined.  Christians who reject the “organized” church will be stunted, and keep the church from growing as it should.

“Luther himself felt that the perceptions of the radical depth of sin and the sovereignty of grace which were inherent in the doctrine were the essential key to reforming the problems which earlier critics had only been able to uncover.”  No easy solutions, but we tend to underestimate the problems.

“Here a one-sided emphasis on justification, along with the resulting neglect of sanctification and the uses of the law, often produced what Bonhoeffer has bitingly called ‘cheap grace.’  Luther had warned against this abuse of his doctrine, and Calvin had included in his Institutes a carefully balance treatment of sanctification.”  This seems to be much of the problem today, as it became prior to the days of Whitefield and Edwards.  We have much need to preach the gospel for sanctification as well as justification.

During the Great Awakening, “they suddenly became aware that their problem was not isolated acts of conscious disobedience to God, but a deep aversion to God at the root of their personalities, an aversion which left them in unconscious bondage to unbelief, selfishness, jealousy and other underlying complexes of sin.”  Well said!

“Edwards was especially concerned to make clear that fallen human nature is fertile ground for a fleshly religiousity which is impressively ‘spiritual’ but ultimately rooted in self-love.”  This would describe large chunks of American Christianity.

“Reformational theologies balancing justification and sanctification and applying these vigorously to the lives of believers were still at the center of the work, and there was still a profound sense of prayerful dependence on the Holy Spirit.”  In short, the answer.

In discussing the problem of Fundamentalism:  “While guarding themselves against ‘worldliness’ in the form of external taboos, they had gradually moved into the kind of worldliness which Edwards had attacked: a covetous immersion in affluence.”  Note to middle class American Christians like me, you don’t need to have a prosperity gospel perversion to be covetously immersed in affluence (the tactic of the Whore of Babylon [counterfeit church] in Revelation).

“The mission to the counterculture has reminded the church that its home mission needs to sit loose toward cultural agenda which interfere with the cross-cultural transmission of the gospel.”  He got a bit missional in his assesment of the 1970’s.  If we hammer the cultural issues (like the Evangelical movement tends to do), we interfere in the communication of the gospel from our sub-culture to the larger culture.  In other words- Mark Driscoll is on the right track.