American revivalism was birthed in controversy. The issue was not only individual, but encompassed the whole idea of revival: are the revivals under God’s operation or man’s manipulation?[1] The Old Light position that the revivals were not inspired of God became the minority view as revivals and revival meetings continued with fervor. The Second Great Awakening began in New England with Edwards’s balance of experience moored to God.[2] Gonzales traces how revivals moved even outside of New England and writes, “But, since conditions on the frontier were different, the awakening become more emotional and less intellectual, to the point that it eventually became anti-intellectual.”[3] Gonzales goes on to cite the Cane Ridge Revival as an example of this. The response to this camp meeting’s preaching was across the board from weeping to barking. This became the prototype of revival on the frontier.[4] Therefore, after the Second Great Awakening, the Old and New Light argument was practically over. Furthermore, the popular movement was to even do away with Edwards’s guardrails of emotional experience. The major American religious life was firmly established in these emotional revival experiences.

Around 20 years after the Cane Ridge Revival, a trained lawyer named Charles Finney had a conversion experience that became the catalyst for him to become a preacher.[5] Finney argues extensively for what he calls “new measures” in revivals in his Lectures on Revivals in Religion. He argues that new measures have always been instated within the church, from the way people dress to the way people worship in song.[6] He goes on to argue for three specific new measures in revival meetings: anxious meetings, protracted meetings, and the anxious seat.[7] Finney argued that, “Without new measures it is impossible that the church should succeed in gaining the attention of the world to religion.”[8] Here his concern is getting attention to the gospel. He argues that preachers need to be exciting to get attention as well. He warns preachers that have not changed saying, “The character of the age is changed, and these men have not conformed to it, but retain the same stiff, dry, prosing style of preaching that answered half a century ago.”[9] It is startling to note that Finney’s telos was conformity to the zeitgeist.

All of Finney’s new measures were calculated to spark a revival and to convince a man to make a decision for Christ. Finney encourages people to take up the new measures which he insists, “are calculated to get the attention of men to the Gospel of Christ.”[10] These new measures placed the individual rather than God in the driver seat of salvation. B.B. Warfield of Princeton quotes Finney saying, “Grace has made the salvation of every human being secure, who can be persuaded, by all the influence God can wisely bring to bear upon him, to accept the offers of salvation.”[11] In this article, Warfield critiques Finney especially in regard to the doctrine of election. Finney’s new measures are not only aimed at conforming to the spirit of the age, but also to persuade acceptance.

Finney’s new measures are in stark contrast to Jesus’s measures in Mark 10:17ff. In this passage a rich young man concerned about his eternal state asks Jesus what he must do to be saved. He proclaims his obedience to the law. Jesus demands that he sell all he has and follow him. The rich young man went away sorrowful. Perhaps one may describe the man departing as anxious. But notice what Jesus does. He does not call him down the aisle to sit at the anxious bench and consider his decision for a while. He lets him leave. Then, he makes shocking statements about how difficult it is for the rich to be saved. So shocking that the disciples ask, “Then who can be saved?” (Mark 10:26). This prompts Jesus to make that famous statement, “With man it is impossible, but not with God. For all things are possible with God” (Mark 10:27). Finney’s new measures which conform to the age and attempt to manipulate acceptance are in direct contradiction to Christ’s measures. Furthermore, since they focus on man’s will rather than God, they elevate the individual human will.

First, the conversion experience shift from Old Light to New—a shift from ecclesiastical authority and confessionalism to religious experience. Then, the religious experience became the catalyst for the human will to make itself into something that it is ontologically not. Rejection of confessionalism is a rejection of external authority shaped by Scripture. This can only be replaced by an internal authority—hopefully shaped by Scripture. Autonomy plus anti-intellectualism usually does not have a great probability to be shaped by Scripture.

E.Y. Mullins’s soul competency was an embrace of an internal authority. However, Mullins was careful to state that this must be tied to the external authority “under God.”[12] However, Mullins began to shift from grounding the soul’s competency in God to one’s experience. Mullins writes in a later work Christian Religion, “Religious experience is the starting point of religious knowledge. Of course the facts concerning which we obtain knowledge exist independently of us. But we acquire truth about these facts through experience.”[13] Just like later revivalism and empiricism, Mullins embraced a seautopoiesis rooted in experience. This deeply affected the Southern Baptist Convention for the next serval decades. If who we are before Christ is merely rooted in our religious experience, confessions become nothing more than propaganda—it is personal experience which does the real propagation.

The Age of Enlightenment made the American experiment the great catalyst of change for Christian subjective identity. The fervor for a greater harvest exalted the human will and experience in the individual’s religious identity. Instead of endysis through truth, reality, and confessionalism, the populist revivals, though often marked by anti-intellectualism, did not stop their catechumen process. Instead of drilling a catechism, non-confessional revivalism worked up an emotional frenzy. The catechumen going through this emotionalism was told this experience validates their status before God. This individual then suffers a cognitive dissonance having a subjective personal identity factor which is not objective at all. And thereby, this fellow practices seautopoiesis rather than endysis.

Modern churches continue to thrive off of the revivalist spirit. Though the spirit of the age has changed sense Finney defended his new methods, people who want to conform to the spirit of the age still continue to bring about even more new methods. Nearly all megachurches are attractional churches. The megachurches in America contain about half of all churchgoers.[14] Jared Wilson of Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary defines an attractional church as a church which, “conducts worship and ministry according to the desires and values of potential consumers.”[15] Attractional churches and revivalism alike attempt to create an experience of God. Wilson observes, “In many evangelical communities today, we see a downplaying of theology and doctrinal truth in order to make way for personal feelings and individual preferences.”[16] Wilson goes on to offer correction that if people have an emotional response to the experience in a church without knowing God, and continue to yearn for that experience, then they are not worshipping God, only their feelings.[17]

A famous cultural maxim today is, “Be who you want to be.” And, “You are what you make yourself out to be.” How does one in the modern maxim determine who he is? Through rejecting any external authority in favor of internal authorities of affections and experience. Who someone is is no longer based in reality, but in one’s own imagination. So attractional churches seek to target that yearn center through emotional experience just like revivalism and new methods. “I am what I want” and “I am what I experience” only get people so far. Does truth ever impact an individual’s wants? Do experiences come and go? The person who by seautopoiesis makes himself a Christian on the basis of affection and experience is the very person who is ready to become an exvangelical. Truth, reality, making the objective subjective is the only way that one can practice endysis

[1] Marsden, A Short Life of Jonathan Edwards, 75.

[2] Justo L González, The Story of Christianity: The Reformation to the Present Day, vol. II (New York, Ny: Harperone/Harpercollins Pub, 2010), 326.

[3] Gonzales, The Story of Christianity, vol. II, 327.

[4] Gonzales, The Story of Christianity, vol. II, 327.

[5] Noll, The Old Religion in a New World, 96.

[6] Charles Finney, Lectures on Revivals of Religion (Grand Rapids, MI: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, 1835), https://www.ccel.org/ccel/f/finney/revivals/cache/revivals.pdf, 195-197.

[7] Finney, Lectures on Revivals of Religion, 197-202.

[8] Finney, Lectures on Revivals of Religion, 205.

[9] Finney, Lectures on Revivals of Religion, 205.

[10] Finney, Lectures on Revivals of Religion, 205.

[11] B.B. Warfield, “The Theology of Charles G. Finney ,” Monergism, 1921, https://www.monergism.com/theology-charles-g-finney.

[12] E.Y. Mullins, The Axioms of Religion (Philadelphia, PA: The Griffeth and Rowland Press, 1908), 54.

[13] Gregory A Wills, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary 1859-2009 (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2010), 242.

[14] Mark Wingfield, “Another Major Study Confirms: Most American Congregations Are Small, but Most Churchgoers Attend Large Congregations,” Baptist News Global, March 17, 2022, https://baptistnews.com/article/another-major-study-confirms-most-american-congregations-are-small-but-most-churchgoers-attend-large-congregations/.

[15] Jared C Wilson, The Gospel-Driven Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2021), 25.

[16] Wilson, The Gospel-Driven Church, 112.

[17] Wilson, The Gospel-Driven Church, 112.