Coming off a really bad Good Friday service. Your criticisms of the therapeutic nature of the modern gospel were wonderful – and dead on. I would love for you to expand on this in another post – revivalism is something that has poisoned so much of our mind space, so much of our church – in other words, I know it bothers me, I believe I know when I see it, but articulating it is quite another story.
A few good books to get on this subject is, “Revival & Revivalism’ by Iain Murray,’Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism’ and ‘Fundamentalism and American Culture’ by George Marsden, ‘The Democratization of American Christianity’ by Nathan Hatch and finally ‘The Methodist Revolution’ by Bernard Semmel.
First, we should note that Revivalism finds its origin just about the time that Romanticism / Transcendentalism as philosophical schools are starting to wash across American Universities and American Culture. Romanticism, as a belief system, emphasized the emotions, in correction to what it believed to be the arid rationalism to which it was responding. In my estimation Methodist Holiness Revivalism (and later its cousin Pentecostalism) in its American expression partakes of this emotional based Romanticist school of thought. So one sign of Revivalism is that it is emotionally based. Now, of course, this is not to say that emotions have no place in the Christian life (I heartily recommend J. Edwards ‘Religious Affections’),but classic mainstream revivalism cannot survive without large dollops of emotionally driven energy — emotionally driven energy that most often gets associated with ‘The work of The Holy Ghost,’ and sometimes gets labeled as ‘Feeling the Holy Ghost.’
This emotionalism, in its more deleterious forms, I can’t imagine looking a great deal different then what Elijah saw on Mt. Carmel when the Priests of Baal were whooping and hollering trying to get Baal’s attention.
This characteristic trademark of Revivalism then has a few implications. First, it tends to practice sentimentalism to an absurd degree. It is said that one of the ‘come down to the altar’ songs for one of the 20th century revivalist (I think Moody but I can’t remember for sure) was ‘Mother I’m Coming Home.’ The context would be that the Revivalist would hit heavy on how sinners had left their parents teaching and how Mother was in heaven, and wouldn’t it be nice for Mom if you accepted Jesus. After that type of message then the Revivalist song master would take up ‘Mother I’m Coming Home.’ I was exposed to an instance of sentimentalism recently when attending a funeral everyone was asked to hold hands and while singing the closing song in the memory of the deceased. Upon reading that sentence it doesn’t sound like much, but if you had been there with me you would have likewise seen the sentimentalism. We still see that type of sentimentalism today from your garden variety Evangelical. As before, there is nothing wrong with proper sentiment but it is this syrupy sentimentalism that is characteristic of revivalism. Second, emotionalism also drives anti-intellectualism which is a hallmark character of Revivalism. If you attend a Revivalistic Church don’t count on Sermons or Sunday School classes teaching on things like ‘the nature of the Atonement,’ or, the history of the Creeds, or, a Christian theory of knowledge or anything like that.
This brings us to the therapy angle. When a Church is driven by emotionalism and is anti-intellectual then the means of solving problems in the congregation is therapy — the goal of which is to make people feel (there is that emotional angle again) good. Further if you know anything about modern Christian versions of Christian counseling (therapy) you know that one could fill dump-trucks with the sentimental bilge that comes out of that context. Seeking to avoid the danger of being extremist, I will mention again, that I suppose there are times when therapy is a good thing (though I am far less sure about that than I am about the proper place of emotion and sentiment in the Christian life) but the problem is when therapy is used as an avoidance technique to do the heavy lifting of thinking God’s thoughts after Him, or when it is used as a means to lock people out of leadership positions because they don’t have enough emotion or sentiment.
A great contemporary example of what I’ve mentioned here was Promise Keepers. Since, when the circus comes to down, one always needs to go once to see the Elephant, I attended a PK conference. Emotionalism, Sentimentalism, and Anti-intellectualism were on parade. The Gospel proclamation was just plain stupid, as was most of the other presentations.I had people whooping and hollering all around me while I was calmly sitting in my chair reading a book. They looked sympathetically at me like I was someone who was missing out on the Holy Ghost.
So the first character of Revivalism is emotionalism which then brings to fore both sentimentalism and anti-intellecutalism, and the three of them together go a long way towards explaining our Therapeutic culture.
The Next entry we will look at Revivalism and the Cross.