Chapter 69. Fire in the Heart: Pietists, Methodists, the Great Awakenings, Pentecostalism and the Prosperity Gospel

The magisterial Reformation put Scripture and doctrine in place of priest and sacrament. A second Protestant current then put experience in the place of doctrine. It runs from Puritanism and continental Pietism through Wesley’s and Whitefield’s revivals and the American Awakenings to the Holiness movement and Azusa Street. That “religion of the heart” became the fastest-growing form of Christianity in the twentieth century, a major force in American electoral politics, and, in its prosperity-gospel form, a television industry with scandals of its own. This chapter keeps three kinds of source apart: the movement’s own voices (Whitefield, Wesley as quoted by the Adventist Ellen G. White), scholarly and journalistic analysts (Armstrong, Willis, Heisman), and modern evangelical critics of their own tradition (Viola and Barna).

Puritan and Pietist Roots

The reference shelf summarises the line of descent. The First Great Awakening, “sometimes called the Great Awakening or the Evangelical Revival”, swept Britain and its thirteen colonies “in the 1730s and 1740s”. It built “on the foundations of older traditions — Puritanism, Pietism, and Presbyterianism”. Its leaders, Whitefield, Wesley and Jonathan Edwards, taught that conversion “had to be a ‘new birth’ experienced in the heart”. The article also records division: opponents “accused the revivals of fostering disorder and fanaticism”, Congregational and Presbyterian churches split in America, and Methodist and Baptist churches grew stronger [Wikipedia: First Great Awakening].

Frank Viola and George Barna trace how this movement reshaped Protestant worship. In their account the Sunday order of service evolved from Gregory’s Mass through “Luther, Calvin, the Puritans, the Free Church tradition, the Methodists, the Frontier-Revivalists, and the Pentecostals”. The Methodists “spiced up the pastor’s Sunday morning pre-sermon prayer”, gave birth with the frontier revivalists to “the ‘altar call'”, and “were the forerunners of the Pentecostals”. Citing Horton Davies, they note that evening prayer was old in Catholicism, but “the Methodists are noted for bringing into the Protestant faith the Sunday” evening service. Whitefield and Wesley are “credited with being the first to employ music to induce conviction” [Viola & Barna, Pagan Christianity?, #66661, ch. 3, nn. 337, 344]. Their thesis, that most church practice has no New Testament basis, is itself a house-church argument from inside evangelicalism.

Mitchell Heisman reads Puritanism politically. For him “a long-term consequence of the Norman Conquest of England in 1066 was a nepotistic ‘class’ system imposed over the defeated Anglo-Saxons”. The Puritan Revolution was therefore “the Anglo-Saxon self-conquest”, and “the revolutionary abolition of the House of Lords” “could be considered the central question, and not a peripheral question, of the English Civil War” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, “The Puritans: The Anglo-Saxon Self-Conquest”]. On this reading the Puritan religion of conscience was also a revolt against an aristocracy, and he treats its egalitarian abstractions, “justice, democracy, and equality”, as the core of an Anglo-Jewish “convergence of abstract principle” [#38252].

Wesley and Whitefield

Ellen G. White, co-founder of Seventh-day Adventism, tells Wesley’s conversion as the climax of a struggle. Through “years of exhausting and comfortless struggle, years of harsh self-denial, reproof and humiliation”, Wesley sought God. When he found him, he discovered that the grace “he had laboured to earn through prayers and fasts, through works of charity and self-denial, was a gift, ‘without money and without price'” [White, Tragedia Veacurilor vol. 1, #13034]. She quotes his defence against critics who called the revivalists’ teachings “false, mistaken and fanatical; that they are new and unheard of; that they are Quakerism, fanaticism, papism”. Wesley replied that every branch of the teaching was “the plain doctrine of Scripture interpreted by” the Church of England [#13034]. White writes as an Adventist and places Wesley in her providential history of the Reformation.

The evangelical reference work Encyclopedic Dictionary of Cults, Sects, and World Religions gives the doctrinal link to later movements: “John Wesley (1701–93), the father of Methodism, had laid the foundation for Holiness theology in the eighteenth century when he taught that sanctification (holiness) is a necessary” stage after conversion. “For Wesley, the evidence of such holiness is the perfected or holy life that he believed could be attained by a Christian before death” [Mather, Nichols & Schmidt, Encyclopedic Dictionary, #65667]. Its authors also describe the split, from the Enlightenment onward, “between church dogma and an academic theology” that adjusted itself to “the philosophies and ‘pop’ cultures of the day”. That split drew the lines “between mainline liberalism and conservative” Protestantism [#65667].

The Romanian edition of Whitefield’s sermons, introduced by J. C. Ryle, records that “John Wesley did not agree with Whitefield on several theological questions”. This was the Calvinist–Arminian divide. Ryle says Whitefield “distanced himself from these two extremist conceptions”. His “great principles of faith” were the new birth, “justification by faith in Christ” and “the final perseverance of the saints, not on the basis of the power of one’s own will” [Whitefield, Predici alese, #45610, Ryle’s introduction]. Whitefield himself defended predestination: “If God may justly impute Adam’s sin to all and afterwards leave all to perish, then He may legitimately leave some to perish”. He attacked universal salvation as a doctrine that “keeps the soul in its state of laziness and drowsiness” [#45610].

Awakenings and the Pentecostal Explosion

Karen Armstrong treats revival as a recurring form, a popular “Awakening” that rises from the margins when modernity leaves people behind. She describes the Azusa Street revival of 1906 this way:

“Crowds of African Americans and disadvantaged whites poured into his next service in such huge numbers that they had to move to an old warehouse in Azusa Street. Within four years, there were hundreds of Pentecostal groups all over the United States and the movement had spread to fifty countries. This first Pentecostal upsurge was yet another of the popular Awakenings…” [Armstrong, The Battle for God, #53064]

She interprets it as expressing “a strongly felt need for the spiritual, which is so often either excluded or marginalized in a secularist society”, among people “who have not been major beneficiaries of modernity”. She links this to Susan Sontag’s “perennial discontent with language”, which made glossolalia a protest against rationalised speech [#53064]. Jim Willis, writing on American cults, describes the same revival: led by William Seymour, it “took the country by storm, featuring worshippers speaking in tongues, people being ‘slain in the Spirit’ while fainting dead away into the arms of a waiting” helper [Willis, American Cults, #63203, “Offshoots: Breaking Away from Traditional Religions”]. The reference shelf adds the chronology. In 1900 “Charles Parham, an American evangelist and faith healer, began teaching that speaking in tongues was the Biblical evidence of Spirit baptism”. Seymour, “a Wesleyan-Holiness preacher”, taught it as “the third work of grace”. Today the movement comprises “over 700 Christian denominations” and “over 279 million classical Pentecostals worldwide”, with a charismatic extension into Protestant and Catholic churches since the 1960s [Wikipedia: Pentecostalism].

The library also holds the practice itself. Divine Healing Made Simple teaches that healing “relies on a personal relationship with the Holy Spirit rather than specific rituals like speaking in tongues or water baptism”. It advises would-be healers to find candidates “in everyday settings like restaurants or shopping areas” and argues “against begging God for healing”. The author recalls asking after a “no healing vacation”: “If I laid hands on someone, would they actually be healed?” [Unknown, Divine Healing Made Simple, #76760].

Fundamentalism, “Evangelical” and the Vote

Armstrong describes a retreat followed by a return. “After the Scopes trial”, in 1925, “Protestant fundamentalists retreated from the public arena and withdrew to their own churches” and built “their own defensive counterculture”. After the trial “their views became more extreme. They felt embittered and nursed a deep grievance”. They would “eventually launch a counteroffensive against the modernity that had defeated them” [Armstrong, #53064]. Willis tells how the label changed: “It was Harold Ockenga, pastor of Park Street Church in Boston, who coined the term ‘Evangelical'”. When Christianity Today and “the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association followed suit, the term ‘Evangelical’ stuck” [Willis, #63203].

The counter-offensive turned electoral. Willis quotes Jerry Falwell: “We need to get these people saved, baptized, and registered to vote!” He records that the movement’s impact “was almost immediate” and that it “deserted Democrat Jimmy Carter, an Evangelical Baptist Sunday school teacher, in favor of Republican Ronald Reagan in the presidential election in 1980” [Willis, #63203]. In Willis’s account religion here worked as a voting bloc, not through a fellow-believer in office: the evangelical president lost the evangelical vote.

The Prosperity Gospel and the Line Between Sect and Cult

Willis’s case study of televangelism begins in April 1977, when “Jim Bakker, a minister associated with the Assemblies of God”, went on live television to dedicate his ministry’s new headquarters. “Bakker preached what came to be known as the ‘prosperity gospel'”, and Willis cites the verses it relied on: Ecclesiastes 11, “Cast your bread upon the waters”, and Luke 6, “Give, and it shall be given unto you; good measure, pressed down” [Willis, #63203, “Jim Bakker, The PTL Club, and the Return of Jesus”]. “There was grit in the machine of the prosperity gospel.” When Falwell took over the PTL organisation he called it “one of the major miracle ministries of this century”. When he left, he called it “a scab and cancer on the face of Christianity”. Willis asks whether PTL was “a cult” or “simply the horrible result of too much power, wealth, and fame” [#63203].

He asks the same question more sharply about Jim Jones, who became “infamous throughout the world on November 18, 1978”. Jones was “a charismatic preacher, in both the theological and popular senses of the word”. His backers included Orval Lee Jaggers, an editor of William Branham’s publications, who wrote about the zodiac and UFOs, doctrines that “became part of the Peoples Temple dogmas” [#63203]. Willis’s verdict on the arc reads: “step by inevitable step, slowly but surely, a well-meaning minister from a respected Protestant denomination walked willingly and surely into pathological narcissism” [#63203]. Willis places Pentecostal healing revivalism, the prosperity gospel and Peoples Temple in one chapter of “offshoots”. His grouping implies that, in these cases, the line between charismatic sect and destructive cult is drawn by leadership and money more than by doctrine. The cults Part takes up this line again.

Key points

• The Evangelical Revival (1730s–40s) grew out of Puritanism, Pietism and Presbyterianism and made the “new birth” “experienced in the heart” central. It split American Congregationalists and Presbyterians.
• Viola and Barna credit the Methodists with the Protestant Sunday evening service (citing Horton Davies) and the altar call, and call them “forerunners of the Pentecostals”.
• Heisman reads the Puritan Revolution as an “Anglo-Saxon self-conquest” against a Norman class system, with the abolition of the House of Lords as its central question.
• Wesley (1701–93) found grace to be “without money and without price” (White) and founded Holiness theology through his doctrine of sanctification. Whitefield, per Ryle, stood on the Calvinist side: new birth, justification by faith, perseverance.
• Armstrong calls Azusa Street (1906) “another of the popular Awakenings”: within four years there were hundreds of US groups and the movement had reached fifty countries. Today there are about 279 million classical Pentecostals.
• After Scopes (1925), fundamentalists withdrew into a counterculture and then returned. Ockenga coined “Evangelical”, and Falwell’s slogan “saved, baptized, and registered to vote” helped move the vote from Carter to Reagan in 1980.
• Willis’s cases (Bakker’s PTL prosperity gospel, Jones’s slide into “pathological narcissism”) raise the question of where sect ends and cult begins.