Christian History Home > Issue 77 > Testing the Spirits
Testing the Spirits
The heart stirring revivalism of the Great Awakening led Edwars to develop a new religious psychology.
David W. Kling | posted 1/01/2003 12:00AM
Puritanism had lost its vitality, and for years, the "friends of vital piety" had prayed for revival. Finally, in the late 1730s and early 1740s, a great spiritual dam seemed to break in New England. Streams of Christian conviction and conversion rushed through the land.
One historian has compared the emotional force of the Great Awakening to the radical furor of the 1960s, with its civil rights demonstrations, campus disturbances, and urban riots.
The new excitement and new ideals of the awakened brought with them controversy and divisiveness—much of it over the nature of religious experience.
The controversy is easy to understand. Some converts claimed new religious insight. Others erupted in emotional outbursts. Still others censured their pastors for lack of spiritual fervor. Even friends of the revival could see that not all the fruit of this new season came from the Spirit.
But how to distinguish genuine religious experience from counterfeit? The question haunted Jonathan Edwards as ...
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