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At a time when critics are attacking intellectual weakness, theological decline, and worldliness among evangelical Christians, there are also rumors of revival. Tens of thousands of men attend rallies and rededicate their lives to Christ and recommit to their marriages. Students in Christian colleges line up to testify and confess their sins. In Toronto, a congregation nestled among airport hotels becomes a jet-age version of the frontier camp meetings, drawing its attendance not just from the next county, but from other continents. Are events like these the overture to another great awakening—or even just a small one?

Jonathan Edwards, the Puritan theologian who has been called the greatest mind produced by America, was also the greatest theologian of revival. When we talk about renewal in the contemporary church, Edwards's writings provide us with the best standards available to help us judge what is genuine, what is spurious, and what is a mixture waiting to be purified.

THE INTROVERTED EVANGELIST

Early in his pastoral career, Edwards had to grapple with what it would mean for his congregation to be revived. His church was solidly orthodox and had experienced several harvests of conversions under Edwards's grandfather, Solomon Stoddard. In the 1730s, however, the church's orthodoxy was merely "notional," as Puritans would say. Parishioners knew their catechism and could rattle off the elements of Christian faith, but few of them cared deeply about Christ. They were absorbed and fascinated by business and everyday life, and they gave little attention to God.

In 1734, Edwards preached "A Divine and Supernatural Light," advancing a new theory of religious semantics. Professing Christians who have had truth drilled into them by others can talk a good game even when they are totally out of touch with supernatural reality. They can move pieces of theology around like markers on the map of a territory they have never visited.

Real Christianity requires encounter with truth, but that truth must be illuminated by the presence of the Holy Spirit. Only this can produce "a true sense of the divine excellency of the things revealed in the word of God." One of the effects of this encounter will be a delight in the glory of God. The convert "does not merely rationally believe that God is glorious, but he has a sense of the gloriousness of God in his heart … there is a sense of the loveliness of God's holiness." Biblical Christianity is therefore a Spirit-illumined orthodoxy that transforms the heart and reorients the whole life to focus on God and seek his will.

It is clear from Edwards's "Personal Narrative" that he is describing his own experience in these passages. When he first encountered the Scripture under the illumination of the Holy Spirit, his life began to change:

My mind was greatly engaged to spend my time in reading and meditating on Christ, on the beauty and excellency of his person, and the lovely way of salvation by free grace in him. … I walked abroad alone, in a solitary place in my father's pasture, for contemplation. … There came into my mind so sweet a sense of the glorious majesty and grace of God, as I know not how to express. … I seemed to see them both in a sweet conjunction; majesty and meekness joined together: it was a sweet, and gentle, and holy majesty; and also a majestic meekness; an awful sweetness; a high, and great, and holy gentleness.

A part of this new, Spirit-driven concern in the young Edwards was a fervent interest in revival and the extension of Christ's kingdom.

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September 1 1995, Vol. 39, No. 10