Implosion (27 page)

Sadly, in the twentieth century many Methodist congregations embraced liberal theology and distanced themselves from the orthodox teachings of their predecessors, but that cannot be held against the movement's founders or early leaders. Indeed, we should pray for the Methodist church to experience another awakening today that would take it back to its solid biblical roots, that it might again have such a powerful effect on the American nation.

The Rise of Timothy Dwight (1752–1817)

In the last chapter, we noted the remarkable legacy of Jonathan Edwards's descendants and the key roles many of them have played in American religious, social, and political life, as well as in overseas missions. Consider briefly the story of one of those descendants, an important but generally overlooked figure in the Second Great Awakening.

Timothy Dwight, a grandson of Jonathan and Sarah Edwards on his mother's side, was born on May 14, 1752, in Northampton, Massachusetts. Raised in a deeply devoted Christian home, he gave his life to Jesus Christ at a young age. He was a brilliant boy who was homeschooled by his mother (since there were no public schools at the time) and loved to study the Scriptures. “It didn't take long for Mary Dwight to discover her eldest had an unusually quick mind,” one chronicler noted. “By age four, Dwight was reading the Bible, songbooks, books on prayer, and whatever else his mother gave him. At the age of six, the precocious Dwight would overhear Latin lessons given to older boys at a local grammar school, and then steal away on his own to go over Lily's Latin Grammar. He had a remarkably absorbent mind and not infrequently surprised adults by recounting stories he had read, with all the minutiae included.”
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Dwight attended and graduated from Yale College in New Haven, Connecticut (later expanded into Yale University). Among other subjects, he studied theology and became an ordained minister, serving as a military chaplain during the Revolutionary War. After the war, he became the pastor of a congregation in Greenfield, Connecticut, started an elementary school, was twice elected to the Massachusetts legislature, and became an outspoken opponent of slavery. Committed as he was to impacting both the church and the newly free American nation for the cause of Christ, he was also determined to impact the world for Christ. Working toward this goal, he helped start three foreign missions societies to recruit, train, send, and support evangelists, pastors, and church planters to win souls in other countries.

Despite poor health and weak eyesight, Dwight read constantly, and he loved to write. He was a poet and penned a multi-book epic titled
The Conquest of Canaan
about the Jews conquering and settling the land of Israel.

For most men, such accomplishments would have been enough, but not for a descendant of Jonathan Edwards. For Dwight, this was merely preparation for how God was going to use him next. In 1795, Dwight was elected president of Yale College, his alma mater. He wasn't entirely sure, however, that he wanted the assignment. Yale was not the school it had once been. Founded in 1701 by clergymen who wanted to train young men to make a difference for Christ, Yale had built an impressive legacy early on. Twenty-five of its graduates had served in the Continental Congress. Four had signed the Declaration of Independence. But since the end of the war, the prestigious school had drifted from its biblical moorings, and Dwight wasn't convinced it could be turned around.

“Before [President Dwight] came college was in a most ungodly state,” a Yale student during this time later wrote. “The college church was almost extinct. Most of the students were skeptical, and . . . intemperance, profanity, gambling, and licentiousness were common.”
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“Students found pleasure in nightly revelings that frequently included breaking tutors' windows and smashing bottles,” another chronicler wrote. “Yale men regularly clashed with drunken townsmen in violent engagements where rocks flew and clubs flailed. Christian faith was unfashionable and reviled on campus.”
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From 1701 to 1744, records show that on average, half of Yale's graduates went into full-time Christian ministry. By the late 1790s, however, most of the students attending Yale weren't even professing Christians.
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The year Timothy Dwight took office, barely one in ten of the 125 students enrolled at Yale would admit to being a Christian.
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“To build up a ruined college is a difficult task,” Dwight remarked upon being named Yale's president.
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Nevertheless, that's what he set out to do.

The Impact of Timothy Dwight

After much prayer and analysis of the situation on campus, Dwight concluded that the only way to change Yale was to change the minds of the students and faculty who lived and worked there. The only way to change their minds was to change their hearts. And the only way to change their hearts was for God to do it himself by bringing about a revival.

Dwight
knew
revival was possible. As a boy he had seen the effects of the Great Awakening with his own eyes. He had heard his mother's and grandfather's stories with his own ears. He had read his grandfather's books. He knew that in dark times Jonathan Edwards had trusted in the inerrancy of God's Word and the transforming power of the Holy Spirit. Dwight couldn't know for sure whether God would choose to send revival again or not. But he had faith in passages of Scripture like “You do not have because you do not ask God” (James 4:2, NIV) and “The effective prayer of a righteous man can accomplish much” (James 5:16). What's more, he believed that revivals would precede the second coming of Jesus Christ, and he wanted to be faithful in doing his part while praying for and expecting God to do his.

First, Dwight personally engaged the faculty and staff. He met with them and got to know them. He let them know who he was and where he was coming from, and he made it clear that under his leadership, Yale would now be returning to its biblical heritage. He suggested that those who supported this direction were welcome to stay, but for anyone who embraced theological heresy or European radicalism, it was time to leave. Some have suggested that Dwight unleashed a purge at Yale, firing numerous professors who refused to boldly profess their Christian faith.
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While I have not found sufficient evidence to back up such broad claims, there is no question that Dwight did let at least one faculty member go—Josiah Meigs, professor of mathematics, who was a supporter of the antireligious elements of the French Revolution and who clashed repeatedly with Dwight on a range of issues.
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Second, Dwight personally engaged the students. He didn't hide from their skepticism and cynicism but directly answered them. In a class he taught to seniors, he asked the students to give him a list of all the tough questions they wanted answered that semester. “When the senior class decided to test their new instructor by suggesting they debate the question, ‘Are the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament the Word of God?' Dwight, to their utter amazement, picked up the gauntlet,” one chronicler noted. “With academic rigor he refuted the popular arguments against the reliability of Scripture and submitted his reasons for believing it to be the revelation of God. With a rhetorical knife sharpened by faith and years of diligent study, he cut through the seductive abstractions of the French philosophies and demonstrated to their devotees the unreasonableness of what they had embraced.”
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Third, Dwight powerfully taught the Word of God day in and day out. In the classroom and in the college chapel, he did what few, if any, members of the faculty or administration at Yale had done in quite some time—he opened the Bible and made it the centerpiece of the students' instruction. He also began “preaching six solid months on the question of biblical authority and accuracy.”
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Students could not refute Dwight's deep understanding of Scripture or his deconstruction of all manner of philosophical and religious heresies. He spent time with the students one-on-one and in small groups. They were generating lots of questions, but Dwight patiently answered them all. A man once asked him whether he allowed his children to read “the books of infidels.” “Yes,” Dwight replied, “for they must become acquainted with them sooner or later, and while I am living I can confute the arguments they use. . . . I should be unwilling to have them find these arguments unawares, with nobody to meet them.”
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Indeed, Dwight treated his students with the same love and respect that he afforded his own children. The approach startled everyone at first, but eventually it began to work. In 1796, barely one in ten students at Yale claimed to be followers of Jesus Christ. But God was beginning to answer Dwight's prayers. “Signs of revival began to emerge as early as 1797, when a group of twenty-five students founded the Moral Society of Yale College. Members of this secret society pledged to hold one another accountable in small groups similar to the Wesleys' Holy Clubs at Oxford. . . . This stirring foreshadowed bigger outpourings to come.”
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Dwight kept faithfully praying and teaching the Word. One by one, students were giving their lives to Christ. Dwight thanked God for each soul, but he was praying for something more dramatic. And then, suddenly, the dam broke. During the 1801–1802 school year, a true revival broke out on campus. Fully one-third of students enrolled in Yale—about 80 out of 230—prayed to receive Christ. Thirty-five of them decided to enter full-time Christian ministry. Benjamin Silliman, a student at the time, wrote to his mother to say that Yale College had become “a little temple: prayer and praise seem to be the delight of the greater part of the students, while those who are still unfeeling are awed into respectful silence.”
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Heman Humphrey, then a freshman, wrote, “The whole college was shaken. It seemed for a time as if the whole mass of the students would press into the kingdom. It was the Lord's doing, and marvelous in all eyes. Oh, what a blessed change! . . . It was a glorious reformation. It put a new face upon the college.”
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Each year, of course, some of the spiritually strongest students would graduate, and new skeptics and cynics would arrive. But Dwight was undeterred. He kept praying and preaching and answering questions, and he saw another revival sweep the campus in 1808. Then another during the 1812–1813 academic year when nearly half the student body accepted Christ. A fourth revival came in the spring of 1815, “this one sparked by a group of students who gathered at 3:30 every morning to pray for the campus.”
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Dwight, however, was not content simply to lead students to the Lord. He discipled them and endeavored to equip them to preach the gospel and teach the Word to the rest of the country and the world. And the Lord rewarded those efforts. Newly converted students shared the gospel with fellow students, leading many to the Lord. They gathered for prayer and Bible study. And they encouraged one another to think beyond their time at Yale on how the Lord might use them to further advance the Kingdom of God. Over the course of his tenure at Yale, Dwight saw an average of one in five graduates enter full-time Christian ministry, often as pastors or missionaries.
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One of his earliest converts, from the class of 1797, became one of his most fruitful disciples. Lyman Beecher, who considered Dwight his mentor, not only trusted Christ under Dwight's preaching but stayed on at Yale for another year to study theology. Upon leaving Yale, Beecher went on to become an ordained pastor, a renowned Bible teacher, an evangelist, the president of a seminary, a trainer of missionaries to reach the American West, an outspoken abolitionist, and a key figure in the Second Great Awakening. A tireless organizer seemingly cut from the same cloth as John Wesley, Beecher launched one new ministry after another. He helped found and build the American Bible Society, the American Sunday School Union, the American Tract Society, and the American Society for the Promotion of Temperance.
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When Dwight died on January 11, 1817, he had not seen all the fruit his ministry would eventually bear, but he had surely proven faithful to his task. “It would be impossible to adequately describe the legacy he left behind at Yale and beyond,” two church historians noted. “Revival spread from Yale to Dartmouth and Princeton, though Harvard continued its slide toward Unitarianism. Yale continued to experience revival long after Dwight's death. The largest revival came in 1831, when 104 students became members of the college church, and 900 others in New Haven were converted.”
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The Rise of Charles Finney (1792–1875)

While Timothy Dwight's influence during the Second Great Awakening was primarily in New England, and Francis Asbury's influence was primarily in the Mid-Atlantic, the South, and over the Appalachian Mountains, God also raised up men in New York State—the most populous state in the union in the 1800s and thus one of the most influential—to preach the gospel to the lost and revive the existing churches. One of the most prominent—and at times controversial—of these men was Charles Grandison Finney.

Charles Finney was born in Litchfield County, Connecticut, on August 29, 1792, but his family soon moved to Oneida County in central New York and later to the southern shores of Lake Ontario, near a town called Sackett's Harbor. “Neither of my parents were professing Christians, and among our neighbors there were very few religious people,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I seldom heard a sermon, unless it was an occasional one from some traveling minister.”
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The first time Finney became interested in the Bible was while studying to become a lawyer in the town of Adams, New York, in Jefferson County, not far from the Adirondack Mountains. Noticing how often the law of Moses or other Scriptures were cited in his law books, he bought his first copy of the Bible and began to read it eagerly, though he understood little of it at first. What bothered Finney and kept him from the faith for some time was the dullness and lethargy and even hypocrisy that he saw in the churches he attended. He met numerous ministers, for example, who didn't seem to truly believe the very Scriptures they were teaching. This troubled him greatly, and rightly so.