The Great Awakening from the Perspective of Its Critics
One aspect of conversion and a new measure connected with it to which Thomson objected was the revivalists’ doctrine of preparatory, ungracious convictions and the preaching of the terrors of the law intended to produce such convictions. Ungracious, preparatory convictions consist of deep conviction of sin and misery in the soul that is prior to and not a part of the gracious work of the Holy Spirit through regeneration. According to Thomson, the revivalist Presbyterians believed that such ungracious convictions were “previously necessary to prepare the heart for saving grace.” He wrote that, for the revivalists, “these convictions must be so great, and fill the heart with such a degree of fear and terror as to bring the person unto the brink and border of despair before he be fit to have the consolations of the gospel offers and promises applied unto him.” In the revivalist system, once the gospel offers and promises are applied to the deeply convicted sinner, the reception of the gospel, if received, produces a conversion that makes as great an impression upon the person as did the ungracious, preparatory convictions.[1]
Such a theology of conversion helps to explain both the new preaching methods of the revivalists and the emotive responses that such preaching provoked among parishioners. One preaching strategy employed by the revivalists was to stress the terrors of the Law to the exclusion of the gospel in order to provoke the measure of fear thought necessary before the gospel could be received. Thomson wrote: “They strive to fright their hearers into confounding terrors by pronouncing them damned and decline giving them comfort until they have been so long under these terrors as the preacher thinks meet, unwarrantably separating the Law and Gospel, which should be joined together, and refusing to set life as well as death before their hearers, contrary to both scripture-precept and precedent.”[2] An example of the enthusiasm provoked by such law preaching can be observed in the ministry of Samuel Blair. In his outstanding work on the Great Awakening, Thomas S. Kidd writes that under Blair’s preaching congregants sobbed loudly, fainted, experienced strange bodily convulsions, laid on the ground, and looked up to the sky, crying out for mercy.[3] While Blair argued that such outward manifestations evidenced the intensity of the revival and were rational demonstrations that sinners understood God’s impending judgment, Thomson believed that such enthusiasm was unnecessary and that the preaching that provoked it was dangerous. . . .
In response to New Side theatrics, Thomson first set forth his own doctrine of convictions to demonstrate that the New Side teaching was erroneous and their preaching practices excessive. Thomson agreed that convictions were necessarily tied to regeneration so that a truly converted person possesses a real conviction and sorrow for sin. However, Thomson asserted that the convictions essential for conversion exist in a person’s heart as the fruit of regeneration rather than any preparatory wounding necessary for regeneration to take place. Related to this, Thomson taught that all particular graces—sorrow and hatred for sin, faith, repentance, love, and humility—are one radical grace that the Holy Spirit grants to sinners at the very moment He regenerates them. In other words, regeneration is an instantaneous work of the Holy Spirit that does not require any steps prior to its coming to pass, since the only convictions required for it are a part of the work itself. Thomson also argued that “when any one grace is evident, visible and conspicuous in its exercises and fruits, that certainly all other graces of the Spirit are to be found in the same person, although they be not so conspicuous or apparent.” For example, when a text of Scripture strikes a regenerate man’s conscience with the knowledge of a particular sin, he may very well feel a sense of great sorrow while his faith may be more hidden. However, if his convictions arise from a regenerate heart, faith also resides in him as a necessary component of the regenerating grace that brought about the conviction of sin.[4]
Second, Thomson described a sinner converted through the means of a “comfortable” sermon on God’s love. In such a case, Thomson wrote that it is only “natural and rational to expect that divine grace, then infused into such a soul, would immediately put forth itself in some spiritual exercises suitable to the entertainment [with] which he is entertained.” In other words, this newly regenerated person truly receives all graces as one radical grace in the supernatural work of regeneration, but his first affections as a new believer would be gratefulness and love towards Christ rather than a profound affecting conviction of sin. However, this does not mean that the newly regenerated person is unaware of his sin. Instead, the love and gratitude of the converted sinner would “undoubtedly be accompanied with conviction, humility, and a sense of his own unworthiness. But, in this case, conviction would only be a concomitant grace to the others.”[6]
Thomson taught that the Holy Spirit normally brought new life to sinners quietly through the preaching of the law and the gospel together in the various manners described above. For Thomson, the normal manner of law and gospel preaching that takes place at regular, Sunday morning worship was sufficient for unbelievers to experience conversion, because the Holy Spirit does not always awaken sinners using the same type of sermon nor does the Holy Spirit’s regenerating work always cause the same type of affections in newly converted sinners. He concluded from this that, “if it be so, that persons may be converted and turned unto God, in whom the first saving convictions may not be so sensible, or in so high a degree as some other graces, then certainly this work may be accomplished without the…soul-shocking [and] terrifying [preparatory] convictions” of the New Side preachers.[7] In short, Thomson considered the new measure of preaching the terrors of the law as a way to provoke preparatory, ungracious convictions as superfluous at best and destructive at worst. Moreover, as Thomson critiqued the New Side revivalists’ preaching that their doctrine of convictions led them to utilize, he clearly saw the latter as the case at hand rather than the former.
Thomson believed that if persons truly considered the “nature and tendency” of preparatory, ungracious convictions, then these convictions, “so far from being necessary preparatives for conversion,” would emerge rather as “an impediment to it.” First, Thomson explained the nature of preparatory, ungracious convictions by comparing them to gracious convictions. As already noted above, Thomson envisioned gracious convictions as persuasions of one’s miserable estate that bring sorrow for sin, but do not lead to despair since they are wedded with all the other graces that accompany the new birth. In contrast, ungracious, preparatory convictions, “not being restrained by any measure of hope or expectation of deliverance,” inevitably lead to great terror and despair. Thus, readiness for conversion was not the real reason that a great and noticeable fear threatened those who listened to the revivalists. Rather, on account of the people remaining in an unconverted state, their terrors were “heightened through unbelief and Satan’s temptation to desperation.” For Thomson, this sinful unbelief and satanic temptation provided the root of the ungracious, preparatory convictions. Moreover, since unbelief and satanic oppression caused the convictions the New Side revivalists provoked, these convictions, and the preaching that produced them, tended to do much greater harm than good. Thomson wrote that, far from preparing or enabling sinners to flee to Christ, ungracious convictions tended to drive them towards destruction. Particularly, Thomson stated that “the too common and ordinary consequence” is that ungracious convictions either “drive the person to despair and a halter with Judas, or to drown and stifle his trouble and terror with a dissolute and licentious life, or thirdly to rest upon an external lifeless profession together with an outward reformation.” Wherever the ungracious convictions produced by law preaching led, Thomson believed that, in and of themselves, they certainly did not promote piety or produce authentic conversions.[8]
Thomson was not only grieved at what he believed New Side preaching produced in the unconverted. Rather, he also feared that the New Side doctrine greatly injured many converted persons whose conversions were not accompanied by a deep and memorable sorrow for sin. Thomson expressed concern for those who were converted through a “comfortable” sermon, those who “were brought home to Christ in their young and tender years” under the “faithful and painful endeavours of their godly parents,” and those “drawn to Christ in more advanced years, gradually and by the cords of love.” Thomson recognized that such persons “can remember nothing of the first beginnings of grace in their own hearts”; therefore, he asserted that, if the doctrine of the revivalists prevailed upon them, “it [could not] but fill the hearts of many true, though weak believers, with many groundless fears.”[9] Thus, for Thomson, the New Side’s preaching of the terrors of the Law to the exclusion of the gospel in order to bring about ungracious, preparatory convictions both hindered true conversions and crippled Christ’s weary saints.
Growing up in a Baptist tradition birthed in American revivalism, I observed the legacy of awakening theology every Sunday from as far back as I can remember. Every Sunday there would be an altar call at the end of the service, a new measure added to the revivalist repertoire during the Second Great Awakening. However, aside from the occasional, particularly devout saint coming forward to pray, conversions were reserved for the height of the revivalist’s church calendar, the fall revival meeting. At that point, thanks to the hellfire and brimstone preaching of a traveling evangelist, unbelievers as well as already baptized members of the church would flock forward at the end of the service where they would fully experience the drama of revivalist conversion. It was in this way that I learned the truth of one of Thomson’s criticisms of the revivalist theology in the Middle Colonies, the idea that conversions must be extraordinary leads to the use of extraordinary means to the depreciation of the ordinary means set forth in Scripture, and it calls into question the authenticity of conversions produced quietly and subtly, though no less miraculously, through a child’s catechism or the regular exposition of Scripture.
[1]John Thomson, The Doctrine of Convictions set in a clear Light, Or, An Examination and Confutation of several Errors relating to Conversion (Philadelphia: A Bradford, 1741), 12-13. Spelling, punctuation, and capitalization in Thomson’s text has been modernized for the sake of clarity.
[2]John Thomson, The Government of the Church of Christ (Philadelphia: A. Bradford, 1741), 44.
[3]Thomas S. Kidd, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 56-57, 64-65.
[4]Thomson, Doctrine of Convictions, 15-16, 39.
[5]Ibid., 22-23.
[6]Ibid., 24-25.
[7]Ibid., 38, 43.
[8]Ibid., 27, 32, 34-35.
[9]Ibid., 46-47.
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