Some have sought to make revivalism just an American experience and only on the frontier in the early years of the American continental expansion. But revivalism can be seen to be a much broader Christian phenomena. The modern revival movement has its historical roots in the Puritan-pietistic reaction to the rationalism of the Enlightenment and to the Lutheran and Calvinistic theological creedal formulations of Reformation faith that characterized much of the seventeenth century. This reaction resisted the depersonalization of their religion. These revivalists emphasized a more experiential element of their Reformation faith which emphasized personal commitment and obedience to Christ and a life regenerated by the indwelling Holy Spirit. They also emphasized personal witness and missions as a primary responsibility of the individual Christian and of the church. Subjective religious experience and the importance of the individual became a new force in the renewing and expansion of the church. These concerns gradually permeated much of Protestantism, especially in the developing churches in America.
It was the work of Philipp Jakob Spener (1635-1705), often known as the father of pietism, that began the movement known as pietism. He was born in Rappoltsweiler, Upper Alsace, and died in Berlin. He received a strict, pious upbringing and took his university training in Strasborg (1651-1659), where he concentrated on Biblical languages and historical studies. The professors at Strasborg stressed spiritual rebirth and ethical concerns, which became important factors later in Spener's preaching. After graduation he served in pastoral positions in Strasborg (1663), Frankfort-on-Main (1666), Dresden (1686), and Berlin (1697). When he was called to be senior minister in Frankfort-on-Main, he called for reform in the city. He had initiated a far-flung correspondence which eventually won him the title of "spiritual counselor of all Germany". He thus promoted a major reform in the practical life of the churches. In a sermon preached in 1669, Spener mentioned the possibility of laymen meeting together, setting aside "glasses, cards, or dice", and encouraging each other in the Christian faith. The next year Spener himself instituted such meetings which he called a collegia prietatis ["pious assembly"] to meet on Wednesday and Sunday evenings to pray and discuss the previous Sunday's sermon, and to apply passages of Scripture and devotional writings to their individual lives. From his name of these meetings the name of the movement, pietism, was derived. In 1675 Spener took a major step toward reviving the church when he was asked to prepare a new preface for the collection of sermons of Johann Arndt. The result was the famous tract Pia Desideria ["Pious Wishes"], in which Spener examines the sources of spiritual decline in Protestant Germany and offered proposals for reform. This tract was an immediate sensation. In it Spener criticized the nobles and princes for exercising unauthorized control of the church, ministers for substituting cold doctrine for warm faith, and lay people for disregarding proper Christian behavior. Positively, he called for a revival of the concerns of Luther and the early Reformation, even altering slightly Reformation teachings. For example, Spener regarded salvation more as regeneration (new birth) than justification by the imputed righteousness of Christ, even though the Reformers laid greater emphasis on the latter.
Spener offered in Pia Desideria six proposals for reform, which became a short summary of pietism.
Franke had experienced a dramatic conversion in 1687, which was source of his lifelong concern in evangelism and missions. Under his leadership, Halle became the center of Protestantism's most ambitious missionary endeavors up to that time. The university established a center for Oriental languages and also encouraged the translation of the Bible into new languages. Franke's missionary influence was felt directly through the missionaries who went from Halle to the foreign fields and indirectly through groups like the Moravians and an active Danish mission which drew inspiration from the leaders of pietism.
Spener and Franke inspired other varieties of German pietism. The head of the renewed Moravian Church, Count Nikolas von Zinzendorf, was Spener's godson and Franke's pupil. Zinzendorf organized refugees from Moravia into a kind of collegia pietatis, within German Lutheranism, and later shepherded this group in reviving the Bohemian Unity of the Brethren. These Moravians, as they later called, carried the pietistic concern for personal spirituality almost literally around the world. It was a group of Moravian missionaries that John Wesley met during his voyage to Georgia in 1735. Wesley was so impressed by their behavior then and what he heard of their faith that after returning to England he was led to his own evangelical awakening.
The pietists rejected the pessimism which the Lutherans and Calvinists viewed the quest for perfection. Pietism was marked by the quest for personal holiness and by an emphasis on spiritual devotion rather than doctrine by such leaders as Spener and Franke, who stressed personal holiness marked by love and obedience. But some of the fears of its earliest opponents that pietism could lead to subjectivism and emotionalism; that it would discourage scholarship and intellectual pursuits, that it could fragment the church through its separatism; that it could establish new codes of legalistic morality; and that it could underrate the value of Christian tradition, have taken place.
"The priest scoffed at us and called us Quakers. but the Lord's power was so over them, and the word of life was declared with such authority and dread to them, that the priest began trembling himself; and one of people said, 'Look how the priest trembles and shakes, he is turned a Quaker also'."Fox was born at Leicestershire and apprenticed to a shoemaker. He apparently had no formal schooling. In 1643 he left his family and friends in search of enlightenment. After a painful search he came to rely on what he called the "Inner light of the living Christ".
Fox taught both personal responsibility for faith and freedom from sin in his doctrine of the inner light. He declared a doctrine of real holiness rather than imputed righteousness. Fox believed that as a result of the new birth into Christ by the Spirit, the believer was freed from actual sinning, which he defined as transgression of the law of God, and is thus perfect obedience to God. This perfection is relative in that it dealt with victory over sin rather than absolute moral development. But this perfection did not remove the possibility of sinning, for the Christian must needs constantly to rely on the inner light and must focus on Christ as center of faith. Fox contended that the Christian is restored to the innocency of Adam before the fall. Not all later Quakers agreed with him on this point. Fox emphasized that center of perfection was in the cross of Christ. The cross was no dead relic but was an inner experience that changed the believer into perfect love. Fox refused to be preoccupied with sin as the Puritans were with their pessimism over the profound sinfulness of man. Fox also distrusted all external means of grace such as the sacraments. The meeting of the believers had no ritual and was a waiting in silence upon God, for the Spirit to speak in and through them. The "Inner Light" was as important as the Scriptures; sacraments, ceremonies, and clergy was abandoned.
John was educated at Charterhouse, a school for boys in London, and then at Christ Church, Oxford University, where he received the B.A. degreein 1724 and the M.A. degree in 1727. He was a serious student of logic and religion, but he did not experience his "religious" conversion until 1725, when he was confronted with the decision of what he was to do for life. Through the influence of his mother and a friend, and the reading of Jeremy Taylor and Thomas a Kempis, he decided to make religion "the business of his life". In 1725 he was ordained a deacon, elected to a fellowship at Lincoln College at the same university (1726), and served as his father's curate at Wroot (1727-1729). He preached his first sermon in South Leigh. And in 1728 he was ordained a priest by John Potter. He returned to Oxford and became the leader of a small band of undergraduate students, including George Whitefield (1714-1770), that was organized earlier by his younger brother, Charles, for spiritual improvement. This band, called the "Holy Club", were later called "Methodist" because of their strict method of studying the Bible and their rigid rules of self-denial and works of charity. During this period (1729-1735) both he and his brother came under the influence of the nonjuror and mystic, William Law. It was during this period that he formed his views on Christian perfection, that was to become the hallmark of Methodism, even though he did not understand justification by faith yet, and, as he confessed later, he was seeking to be justified by his own works-righteousness.
In 1735, when Wesley began his Journal and he continued it until his death, Wesley went to Georgia in the New World as a missionary, accepting the invitation from the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel to undertake a mission to the Indians and colonists there. Although the Indians alluded him, he served as a priest to settlers there under General James Oglethorpe. During a storm on the crossing over to Georgia, Wesley was deeply impressed by a group of twenty-six German Moravian missionaries on board the ship. Their simple faith in the face of death (the fear of dying had been constantly with Wesley since his youth) opened him to the Moravian evangelical faith. The cheerful courage of this company in a storm convinced Wesley that the Moravian had a trust in God that was not yet his. Soon after reaching Savannah he met Spangenberg, who asked him the question: "Do you know Jesus Christ?" Welsey answered, "I know He is the Saviour of the world." Spangenberg replied, "True, but do you know He has saved you?" When Wesley returned to England in 1738, after his disastrous experience in Georgia, he met the Moravian, Peter Boehler, who exhorted him to trust Christ alone for salvation. As the result of his conversations with Boehler, Wesley was "clearly convinced of unbelief, of the want of that faith whereby alone we are saved." At a Moravian band meeting, an Anglian "society", in Aldersgate Street, London, (Wednesday, May 24, 1738), as he listened to the reading of Luther's preface to the Commentary on Romans, Wesley felt his "heart strangely warmed". As he recorded later,
"About a quarter before nine, while he [Luther] was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and a assurance was given me, that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death."This experience determined Welsey's understanding of the normal mode of entrance into the Chirstian life. And it also made him an evangelist. He declared later, "Then it pleased God to kindle a fire which I trust will never be extinguished."
Shortly after this conversion experience, Wesley went to Germany and visited the Moravaian settlement at Herrnhut and met Count Zinzendorf. When he returned England, with a former member of the Holy Club, George Whitefield, he began to preach salvation by faith. This "new doctrine" was considered redundant by the sacramentalists in the Established Church, who believed that people were saved by virtue of their infant baptism. The established churches began to close their doors to their preaching. This did not deter the Methodist (the name carried over from their Oxford days). Wesley believed that he was called "to reform the nation, particularly the Church, and spread Scriptural holiness over the land." So he and Whitefield began preaching in the open air. In April, 1739, Wesley followed Whitefield to Bristol, where a revival broke out among the miners of Kingswood. In order to conserve the gains of their evangelism, Wesley organized the new converts into Methodist "societies" and "bands", which sustained both them and the revival. The revival continued under his direct leadership for fifty years. He traveled some 250,000 miles throughout England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, preaching some 40,000 sermons. Although Wesley never visited North America again, he sent preachers there and 1784 he ordained Thomas Coke to superintend the work there. Wesley literally considered the "world as his parish" to which he spread "scriptural holiness throughout the land". He remained loyal to the Established Church all his life. Methodism did not become a separate denomination until after his death.
Prevenient grace for Wesley is the universal work of the Holy Spirit in the hearts and lives of people between their conception and their conversion that prepares them for conversion. Original sin, according to Wesley, makes it necessary for the Holy Spirit to initiate salvation, because people are bound by sin and death. People experience the gentle wooing of the Holy Spirit, which prevents them from moving so far from "the way" that when they finally understand the claims of the gospel upon their lives, they have the freedom to say yes. The justifying grace is the work of the Holy Spirit at the moment of conversion when they say yes to the call of prevenient grace by placing their faith and trust in Jesus Christ. Wesley understood conversion to have two phases in a person's experience. The first phase is justification which includes the Spirit imputing to the believer the righteousness of Christ. The second phase is regeneration or the new birth. This lays the ground work for sanctification or the imparting of righteousness. These two phases mark the distinctiveness of Wesley's theology. Here he combines the "faith alone" emphasis of the Protestant Reformation with the passion for holiness so prevalent in the Catholic Counter-Reformation. Sanctifying grace describes the work of the Holy Spirit in the lives of the believers between their conversion and their death. Faith in Christ saves them from hell and sin for heaven and good works. Imputed righteousness, according to Wesley, entitles one to heaven, and imparted righteousness qualifies one for heaven. Here Wesley goes to great lengths to describe his view of Christian perfection. The process of sanctification or perfection culminates in the experience of "pure love" where one's love becomes devoid of self-interest. This second work of grace is the main work of the Holy Spirit in lives of believers. The first work of grace, justification, imputing of Christ's righteousness, must be followed by the second work of grace, sanctification, the imparting of Christ's righteousness. According to Wesley this second work of grace was not just a single experience but was also an on-going, continuous and dynamic process moving toward perfection, perfect love. This concept of continuous process was later clarified by the mystics such as Francois Fenelon, whose phrase "moi progressus ad infinitum" ["my progress is without end"] impressed Wesley and became the major teaching for the perpetuation of the Evangelical Revival. The watchword of the Revival was "Go on to perfection; otherwise you cannot keep what you have." According to Wesley prevenient grace is a process and justifying grace is instantaneous, but sanctifying grace is both a process and instantaneous. Although Wesley spoke of the instantaneous experience that he called "entire sanctification" subsequent to justification, his major emphasis was upon the continuous process of going on to perfection.
Revivalism as movement in America developed in reaction to the unemotional intellectualism of the Puritan Calvinism of the sixteenth century. It emphasized the appeal to the emotions as well as to the intellect. It believed that one's Christian life begins with one's response to gospel's call for repentance and spiritual rebirth by faith in Jesus Christ. It was characterized by a personal, public response to the preaching of the gospel in revival meetings. It emphasized personal commitment and obedience to Christ and a life regenerated by the indwelling Holy Spirit. The movement placed an emphasize on witnessing and missions as the primary responsibility of the individual Christian and the church.
In 1734, the revival broke out in New England under the preaching of Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) in his Congregational Church in Northhampton, Massachusetts. He wrote about it in his first widely distributed work in 1737. It described a time of renewal that descended upon Northhampton after Edwards preached a lengthy series of sermons on justification by faith. Edwards became the theologian of the colonial awakening. Accepting the validity of much of the emotions accompanying the conversions among his parishers, he wrote in defense of the proper role of emotion in true religion. The Revival moved south until it reached all of the colonies.
In England, the recognized leader of the "Evangelical Revival" was John Wesley, the founder of Methodism. When his Anglican friend George Whitefield came to America in 1738 with the message of Wesleyan Revival, the Awakening was already widespread in America. Whitefield visited Georgia briefly in 1738 to aid in the founding of an orphanage. But when he returned in 1739 to the American colonies, his reputation as a dramatic preacher proceeded him. His visit was a sensation. When he preached in New England during the fall of 1740, Whitefield addressed crowds up to 8,000 people nearly every day for over a month. This tour was the key event in New England's Great Awakening. Whitefield returned often to the American colonies. Many were swept into the churches, but controversy raged over the revival and churches were split. But historian acknowledge that the revival was a unifying influence in uniting the disparate American colonies.
Edwards provided a systematic exposition of Augustinian and Calvinistic views in his many works. His Freedom of Will (1754) argued that the "will" was expression of the whole person which always followed the heart's strongest motive. His Original Sin (1758) showed how the heart's ultimate motives were selfish and turned from God because of humanity's participation in Adam's fall, until God's sovereign grace brought about a change in the heart. His Religious Affections (1746) suggested that true spirituality was an overflow of the redeemed heart and not a product of emotional and willful exertion. Edwards's rejuvenation of a basically Calvinistic soteriology was the longest-lived theological results of the First Awakening. This soteriology of the First Awakening was exemplified in the practice of George Whitefield. Whitefield regularly preached that salvation belonged completely to God, and humans did not possess the natural capacity to turn to Christ apart from God's saving call. A Connecticut farmer, Nathan Cole, described what such preaching was like when he went to hear Whitefield at Middletown on October 23, 1740:
"My hearing him preach, gave me a heart wound; by God's blessing, my old Foundation was broken up, and I saw that my righteousness would not save me; then I was convinced of the doctrine of Election: and went right to quarrelling with God about it; because that all I could do would not save me; and he had decreed from Eternity who should be saved and who not."It was several months before Nathan Cole found the doctrine of God's electing power a consolation instead of a conundrum. But as he did, he was ushered into a new mode of existence. As his diary goes on to explain, Cole experienced a new level of love and concern for others who had been touched by a similar message. What Cole found in rushing off to hear Whitefield was what countless others in his generation and succeeding generations discovered. It was the reality of such religious experience that Whitefield's preaching sought. The realities of heartfelt conversion that Whitefield facilitated, even more than the extensive changes he brought to the practices of religion, are why he was such an important figure in his age and why his legacy has remained at the heart of the history of Christianity in America.
Unlike the later revivalists, Whitefield was a Calvinist. He broke with
Wesley over theological matters in 1741, Wesley holding to a moderate
Arminianism. Later Wesley and Whitefield were reconciled as friends,
though not in theological opinions, and Wesley preached a sermon of
warm commendation after the death of Whitefield who died in the American
colonies, as he hoped he might, in the midst of a preaching tour.
Whitefield was much more interested in preaching than in theology.
Although he affirmed the doctrines of predistination, election, and
limited atonement - all points of traditional Calvinistic theology - he
confessed in a letter to Wesley early in his career that
"I never read anything that Calvin wrote;
my doctrine I had from Christ and His apostles:
I was taught them of God."
It was this sense of Divine direction that was what made Whitefield
an effective preacher and a model to other aspiring revivalists in America.
The First Awakening also influenced theologies of church and society. Under Edward's leadership many New England Congregationalist and middle colony Presbyterians moved toward an ideal of a "pure church," the conviction that only professed believers should participate in the Lord Supper or take their places as full members of the local congregation. This conviction which grew out of the revival's heightened sense for purity and holiness of God, overturned the Halfway Covenant and the yet more liberal ecclesiology of Edward's grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, who invited virtually the whole community to the Lord's Supper. The First Awakening had other ecclesiological effects, for it stimulated the efforts of Separate Congregationalists and Baptists to organize churches that were entirely distinct from New England governments. Edwards and the New Light party that shared his ideas did not believe that such a step was necessary, but the Baptists and Separate Congregationalists believed that Edward's own preaching on the church led inevitably in that direction.
The First Awakening also brought to an end the Puritan conception of society as a beneficial union of ecclesiastical and public life. The leaders of the Awakening called for a purity in the churches, even if it meant destroying Puritanism's historically close association between church and state. On the other hand, opponents of the Great Awakening valued the connection so highly that they were willing to dilute the church's spiritual requirements to preserve the bond. The result was a series of competing theologies of public life, no one of which enjoyed the general acceptance of the older Puritan synthesis.
Frontier evangelism was extraordinary for the visible outbursts with which many of the converts got religion. Contemorary specialists classified these, distinguishing the "falling exercise" - which was most common - from the jerking, rolling, running, dancing, and barking "exercise." Although the revivalists defended this emotionalism as a mighty work of God, more conservative clergymen condemned it as unhealthy hysteria and advocated quieter methods for the salvation of souls. They were likewise distressed by the tendency of the camp meetings to attract dissolute characters. Ironically, on the very occasions when many souls were being noisly saved, other were being lost through intoxication and seduction.
Some of the results of this Second Great Awakening was the following: significant church growth, check to the spread of Deism, schism and the emergence of new religious groups such as the Cumberland Presbyterians and Disciples, home and foreign missionary outreach, abolition and social reform movements, and introduction of the camp meeting. And it influenced such great men like Archibald Alexander, Adoniran Judson, and Samuel J. Mills.
Timothy Dwight (1752-1817), grandson of Jonathan Edwards and president of Yale College from 1795 to 1817, developed the theology of revival of his grandfather. He placed more emphasis on the natural powers of individuals to respond to gospel than did Edwards. A religious revival broke out under his preaching, which by 1802 converted a third of the students. His sermons, based on the moderately Calvinistic or Edwardian theology, was published after his death as Theology, Explained and Defended (five volumes, 1818-1819).
Dwight's best student was Nathaniel William Taylor (1786-1858). He carried the revivalist theology to its maturity. He graduated from Yale in 1807 where he studied the theology of Timothy Dwight, and after ordination and successfully pastoring the Congregational First Church of New Haven (1812-1822), he was appointed as first professor of theology at the new Yale Divinity School. Taylor's main concern was the problem of human depravity. He departed from Edwards' views that man unable to make any move toward God, and argued that people always have a "power to contrary", when faced with the choice for God. He also contended, as suggested by Edwards' son, Jonathan Edwards, Jr., that human sinfulness arose from sinful acts, not from a sinful nature inherited from Adam. Taylor held that everyone did in fact sin, but this was not the result of God's act of predetermining man's nature. He contended that each person is responsible for his own moral choices -- a position consistent with revivalistic preaching. His views created a controversy among the Congregationalist so that the more orthodox and Calvinists formed their own seminary at Hartford in 1834. The Old School opponents, such as Charles Hodge at Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey, who defended traditional Calvinism, accused Taylor of Pelagianism and Arminianism.
Calvin had taught that while the goal toward which the believers are to strive was to appear before God without spot or blemish, the believer will never reach that goal until the sinful physical body is laid aside in death. Calvin's view of man as having a sinful nature meant that man cannot obtain perfection in this life. This original sin remains within man until death, even in those who are declared righteous by the imputation of Christ's merits through faith. These believers are regenerated, receiving a new nature, but the old nature is still there in the believer. The experience of chapter 7 of Romans is interpreted as the conflict between these two natures. The Christian life is characterized as struggle with the sinful nature to keep it under control, subject to God's law. Because of this sinful nature, spiritual perfection is impossible in this life.
This view conflicted sharply with Methodist Holiness doctrine going back to at least the eighteenth century and John Wesley's work on "Christian Perfection." Wesley, who was concerned with morality, noted that the Scriptures commanded one to "be perfect." He was convinced that this state must therefore be obtainable. He proposed a resolution to the obvious difficulties by limiting the definition of sin. "Nothing is sin, strictly speaking," he said, "but a voluntary transgression of a known law of God." This definition limited the concept of sin as a voluntary act of will. Moreover, according to Wesley believers could by God's grace be freed not only from particular sinful acts, but also from the disease of sinful motives and the "power" of sin, the sinful nature. This state he called "entire sanctification." It usually involved both a growth in grace and a dramatic experience, a "second work of grace." The condition of "perfection" or having "perfect love" had to be maintained at all times and was one from which the Christian might fall. This view conflicted sharply with the Reformed and Puritan concepts of the Christain life that had prevailed in colonial America. These two opposing view of the Christain life clashed at first and were then synthesized during the evangelical revivals of the first half of the nineteenth century in America.
Finney's theological position has been called the New School Calvinism, in contrast to the Old School Calvinism of the Princeton Seminary in New Jersey. He stressed that men are able to repent but could only turn to God by God's grace. He attempted to hold together God's Sovereignty and man's free will and responsibility. He particularly stressed the means that God had established to promote revival among both "backslidden Christians" and "unconverted sinners". In his Lectures on Revival in 1835, he expresses his expectation that soon a revival will sweep America, bringing progress and social reforms, such as democracy, abolition of slavery, temperance, education, eschewing of luxury and fashionable display. Later in his Letters on Revival (1845) he confessed that he had been too optimistic. Nevertheless, he wanted Oberlin to prepare "a race of revival ministers" who would awaken Christian to their duty. He developed a "Christian Perfectionism" in which Christians need to "grow in grace" and have "a burning love for souls" to ask sinners to "give their hearts to God". In his Lectures to Professing Christians (1837) and later writings, Finney attempted to awaken Christian people to their duty to practice Christian Perfection according to Matt. 5:48. The first president of Oberlin College, Asa Mahan (1799-1889), in his Scripture Doctrine of Perfection (1839) wrote that the Christian might eventually obtain a state of unbroken peace and not come under condemnation. Finney states in his Lectures on Systematic Theology (1846) that he had gone far beyond N. W. Taylor (1786-1858) and had brought liberal Calvinism close to the Methodist perfectionism. To him God was benevolent and man was capable of growing toward perfection, although not absolute perfection, and thus society is perfectible.
Thus Finney and his associates, notably Asa Mahan, developed the Oberlin Theology, a qualified version of perfectionism. Even more than Wesley they emphasized the role of the will, founding their case on the Yale theologian Nathanel Taylor's argument, based in turn on the Common Sense philosophy, nothing is either sinful or righteous unless it be a free act of the will. The regenerate person, Finney and Mahon said, is not commanded to perform acts beyond his capacity. But to choose correctly a special work of the Holy Spirit beyond mere regeneration must completely overwhelm his will. Given this special work, defined so as to affirm both human free agency and complete dependence on God's gracious power, "entire sanctification is attainable in this life."
Jonathan Blanchard's proposals to reform society were essentially optimistic. They were "postmillenial," which assumed that spiritual and cultural progress amounted to a millennium, after which Christ would return. Later Jonathan's son Charles would turn to premillenniumism, seeing little hope for society before Christ would return to set up His kingdom. The gradually transitions of their respective moral views reflects an important development of evangelical theology.
Jonathan Blanchard (1811-1892) was a product of the same tradition of the New England evangelicalism that fostered theological liberalism. Born in New England, he attended Andover Seminary. In the mid-1830's, inspired by Theodore Dwight Weld, he became an anti-slavery lecturer - then a dangerous business. Unpopularity and physical threats only increased his conviction that the cause was morally right. In 1837, Jonathan moved to Cincinnati to complete his theological training at Lane Seminary, where Lyman Beecher was president. In the next eight years in Cincinnati, Jonathan became pastor of a sizable New School Presbyterian church (then closely allied with his native Congregationalism), helped found the anti-slavery Liberty Party, and was appointed a representative to the World's Peace Convection, held in London in 1843. During these years, the Blanchards were close friends of the Beechers. Lyman Beecher preached at Jonathan Blanchard's ordination and a few days later both, with Calvin Stowe, presided at the ordination of Lyman's talented son, Henry Ward Beecher.
In 1845, Jonathan Blanchard became president of Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. He was a typical of the old-time college president. He built the fledgling school into a flourishing institution. But he was notorious for his refusal to compromise on any moral point. His intital move to Galesburg was delayed for three weeks when he had his family and all his possessions unloaded on the banks of the Mississippi River rather than to continue during a Sabbath's journey on a riverboat that was behind schedule because of bad weather. In Galesburg, the apocryphal story circulated that he stood in front of one of the first Sunday trains and told the engineer to go back to the roundhouse, upon which the engineer returned the sentiment, suggesting a warmer destination. Jonathan Blanchard engaged in serious controvery with local Masons and liquor interests, whom he considered to be allied. His career at Galesburg ended in a conflict with some of the Presbyterian founders of Knox College, in which another son of Lyman Beecher's sons, Edwards, was one of Blanchard's chief supporters. After refusing a number of similar positions, in 1860 Jonathan Blanchard became the president of The Illinois Institute in Wheaton, Illinois, a college of Wesleyan background that turned to Blanchard for more Congregational support. Under his leadership it was became Wheaton College.
Jonathan Blanchard's policies at both Knox and Wheaton were based on the prevailing conviction about the necessary interrelationship of reason and morality. Right thinking led to right living. The task of education was therefore a moral one. "In the moral conflict of the world," he declared in his inaugural address at Knox, "institutions of learning are forts." Blanchard's views, which were grounded in the Scottish Common Sense philosophy, were that God had built into the universe a system of laws, essentially moral law, and had created the minds of people so that reason and moral sense could apprehend that law. The millennium would occur when the inhabitants of a society recognized, and freely obeyed, this law. "The kingdom of God," he said at Knox, "is simply Christ ruling in and over rational creatures who obey him freely and from choice, under no constraint but that of life." Opposing the way of the kingdom were vices, superstitutions, and false religions. These morally, intellectually, and spiritually blinded one to true moral duty.
In 1860, Jonathan Blanchard was still very much in the mainstream of American evangelicalism. But with the end of the Civil War the mainstream divided into two distinct branches. Henry Ward Beecher represented the branch of those who continued to adjust religion to the tenor of the new age. On the other hand, Blanchard in the last thirty years of his life represented those who attempted to hold firm to the standards drawn from the evangelicalism of the ante-bellum era.
The victory of the Civil War virtually put out of business the old national coalition for reform which had united against slavery. Although the old reformers were feted, there was a sense of weariness with strenuous reform efforts. But Jonathan Blanchard was undaunted by the mood of the Gilded Age. With the slavery question settled, he simply turned to old business. The anti-Masonic movement had been a major reform and political movement before anti-slavery overshadowed it in the 1830's. Now it resumed top place in Blanchard's list of crusades. Enlisting his son Charles Blanchard in the cause, Jonathan followed the pattern that haad led to the anti-slavery's success. He founded the National Christian Association in 1868, sent out teams of lecturers, held regular conventions, and wrote constantly again secret societies in the Christian Cynosure. In 1880, Blanchard even ran for President for "The American Party," following the model of the old Liberty Party. Fighting Freemasonry was an unpopular business in the era after the Civil War. It meant attacking a powerful institution of strong loyalities, made up of many of the influential business, political, and professional leaders in American society. For Wheaton College it meant much opposition. During the last third of the nineteenth century, most American colleges shed their controversial prophetic and reforming stances. Knox College, for example, had a Mason as president, had Greek-letter fraternities, and gradually droppedd its tight religious restrictions. Wheaton, on the other hand, increasingly found its identity by fighting against the mainstream.
The closest affinities of the Blanchards had always been with the revivalists who preached a fundamental gospel message of conversion and holy life. With these tendencies, it was almost inevitable that the Blanchards would come into the orbit of Dwight L. Moody, who was then forging a new revivalism. Moody's immense success sparked new hopes of revitalizing the heritage. When the evangelist's first national tour brought him to Chicago in 1876, Jonathan Blanchard took part in the dedicatory servies and continued thereafter to give him enthusiastic support in the Christian Cynosure.
The son of Jonathan Blanchard Charles Albert Blanchard (1848-1925), who was deeply dedicated to preserving his father's views, assumed the presidency of Wheaton College in 1877, which position he held until 1925, 43 years later. He was born in Galesburg, Illinois, and graduated from the Knox College while his father was president there. When he was called to succeed his father Jonathan at Wheaton, Charles had already been associated with the school for ten years. In a real sense, Wheaton College was his life; he maintained its conservative evangelical character and gave to it stature as an educational institution. During 1883 and 1884, Charles Blanchard regularly preached in the Chicago Avenue Church in Chicago (now Moody Memmoral Church) where he was also its pastor from 1891 to 1893. There he met Miss Emma Dryer who enlisted the educator's support in founding the Bible Training Institute in Chicago that Moody himself soon made one of his enterprises and was later named Moody Bible Institute. More importantly, Miss Dryer helped to convince Charles Blanchard of the truth of dispensational premillennialism.
The Holiness teaching quickly spread beyond Methodism. A Mennonite group, the United Missionary Church (formerly the Mennonite Brethren in Christ and since a merger in 1969 is known as Missionary Church), adopted a doctrine of entire sanctification and Holiness standard of personal conduct. Another group, the Brethren in Christ, founded in 1863, of mixed Pennsylvania pietists and Mennonites, also adopted Wesleyan perfectionism. Four Quaker yearly meetings that had been influenced by the Holiness teachings came together in 1947 to form the Evangelical Friends Alliance. The Salvation Army also adopted the Holiness teachings. The Christian and Missionary Alliance with its teaching on Christ as Savior, sanctifier, healer, and coming King, had affinities with the Holiness movement, but never accepted the doctrine of the second work of grace and the eradication of the sinful nature. Two of its teachers and ministers, A. B. Simpson and A. W. Tozer, were widely read in Holiness circles.