“Bringing many souls home to Jesus Christ”

2020 ◽  
pp. 80-104
Author(s):  
Eric C. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
Baptist Church ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Reformed Tradition ◽  
Wide Acceptance ◽  
Ministry Of The Word ◽  
George Whitefield ◽  
Erratic Behavior

As the pastor of the Charleston Baptist Church, Oliver Hart established a pattern of moderate revivalist ministry. His weekly routine of public and private ministry of the Word mirrored that of most ministers in the broadly Reformed tradition. Hart invested a significant portion of each week to preparing and delivering sermons, which he developed according to the classic Puritan method. Outside his own congregation, he partnered with evangelical leaders from a variety of other denominations, including the Anglican evangelist George Whitefield, to spread the revivalism of the Great Awakening. Hart gained a wide acceptance among the residents of Charleston in part because of the respectable social persona he developed, in contrast to the erratic behavior of the Separate Baptists and other radical revivalists. Most significant, Hart adopted the classic moderate evangelical approach to slavery while in Charleston, ministering earnestly to enslaved Africans even as he owned slaves himself. Hart’s respectable, moderate revivalism set the tone for the next century and a half for white Baptists in Charleston and the broader South.

Oliver Hart and the Rise of Baptist America

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric C. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Development ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
Baptist Church ◽  
Southern Culture ◽  
Single Person ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Lower South

Oliver Hart was arguably the most important evangelical leader of the pre-Revolutionary South. For thirty years the pastor of the Charleston Baptist Church, Hart’s energetic ministry breathed new life into that congregation and the struggling Baptist cause in the region. As the founder of the Charleston Baptist Association, Hart did more than any single person to lay the foundations for the institutional life of the Baptist South, while also working extensively with evangelicals of all denominations to spread the revivalism of the Great Awakening across the lower South. One reason for Hart’s extensive influence is the uneasy compromise he made with white Southern culture, most apparent in his willingness to sanctify rather than challenge the institution of slavery, as his more radical evangelical predecessors had done. While this capitulation gained Hart and his fellow Baptists access to Southern culture, it would also sow the seeds of disunion in the larger American denomination Hart worked so hard to construct. Oliver Hart and the Rise of Baptist America is the first modern biography of Oliver Hart, at the same time interweaving the story of the remarkable transformation of America’s Baptists across the long eighteenth century. It provides perhaps the most complete narrative of the early development of one of America’s largest, most influential, and most understudied religious groups.

scholarly journals Die ontmoeting van wêrelde en die beginsel van sola Scriptura

2015 ◽  
Vol 71 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yolanda Dreyer
Keyword(s):  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Reformed Tradition ◽  
Normative Power ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The World ◽  
Fusion Of Horizons ◽  
Point Of Departure

The meeting of worlds and the principle of sola Scriptura. Rather than function as a catalyst for unity, the Bible can be the cause of conflict among Christian believers. The Bible is also often the reason for strife, specifically in the Reformed tradition, even though Protestants uphold the creedal truism of sola Scriptura and though the authority of the Bible is seen as selfmandatory, transcending the normative power of ecclesiastical or confessional traditions. This article focuses on biblical interpretation as both a cause of disunity and a possible means to achieve greater unity. The point of departure is that biblical interpretation consists of a fusion of horizons; it is primarily about the fusion of two horizons, namely that of the Bible and that of the reader. However, both these horizons represent a great diversity of perspectives. A variety of readers interpret the Bible from diverse contexts. The Bible itself also communicates a diversity of ideas. Even the notion ‘Jesus Christ’ does not function as a unified or unifying concept. The article proposes that the idea of ‘Jesus’ cause’ (Sache Jesu) could provide continuity between the world of the reader and the world of a biblical passage.

scholarly journals The Theological Polemics of Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield: Differences in Their Understanding of the "Great Awakening" of the 1740s in New England

2020 ◽  
pp. 162-171
Author(s):  
Irina Yur'evna Khruleva
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Religious Movement ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
First Great Awakening ◽  
British America ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Ideological Space ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
George Whitefield ◽  
First Time

The first "Great Awakening" took hold of all British colonies in North America in the 1730s-1750s and developed contemporaneously with the Enlightenment movement, which had a significant impact on all aspects of life in the colonies, influencing religion, politics and ideology. The inhabitants of the colonies, professing different religious views, for the first time experienced a general spiritual upsurge. The colonies had never seen anything like the Great Awakening in scale and degree of influence on society. This was the first movement in American history that was truly intercolonial in nature, contributing to the formation of a single religious and partially ideological space in British America. The beginning of the Great Awakening in British America was instigated by both the colonial traditions of religious renewal (the so-called "revivals") and new ideas coming from Europe, hence this religious movement cannot be understood without considering its European roots nor not taking into account its transatlantic nature. The development of pietism in Holland and Germany and the unfolding of Methodism on the British Isles greatly influenced Protestant theology on both sides of the Atlantic. This article explores the differences in understanding the nature of the Great Awakening by its two leaders - J. Edwards and J. Whitefield.

“Every day brings fresh wonders!”

2020 ◽  
pp. 125-148
Author(s):  
Eric C. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Black Woman ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
First Baptist Church ◽  
The South ◽  
Baptist Church ◽  
White Girls ◽  
Private Homes

In 1754 Oliver Hart led a revival among the youth of the Charleston Baptist Church which mirrored the awakenings that had been taking place throughout the colonies since the 1730s. Hart kept a careful record of the revival in his personal diary after the pattern of George Whitefield’s Journals, documenting his own revivalist practices, such as preaching in private homes and counseling those who had fallen into sin. The 1754 Charleston revival involved a number of dramatic conversion experiences and exhibited some of the egalitarian tendencies of the Great Awakening, including Hart’s encouragement of public testimony and exhortation of a enslaved black woman to a group of white girls. This revival is also noteworthy for the conversion of Samuel Stillman, who would go on to become the influential pastor of the First Baptist Church of Boston at the time of the American Revolution. The 1754 Charleston revival shows Hart attempting to walk the line of discerning, moderate revivalism in the context of a dynamic awakening. It also demonstrates that a robust revivalism existed among the Regular Baptists of the South before the more famous Separate Baptists arrived in 1755.

Narratives of Conversion in English Calvinistic Methodism

2008 ◽  
Vol 44 ◽  
pp. 128-141
Author(s):  
David Ceri Jones
Keyword(s):  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Holy Spirit ◽  
George Whitefield ◽  
Body Talk ◽  
At Home

In May 1741, an anonymous Yorkshire Methodist sent George Whitefield a long letter in which he recorded the details of his nine-year-old daughter’s evangelical conversion. Within a fortnight the letter was printed in The Weekly History, the magazine which had become the official mouthpiece of the Calvinistic wing of the Evangelical Revival by this point. Here is how Whitefield began his account: We have a little daughter about nine years old; one Lord's Day in the last winter, when she staid at home, she read one of your journals, and afterwards some sermons of yours we had got from London. It pleased God by his Holy Spirit so to impress her mind as is very remarkable. She desires me to tell Mr Whitefield (that sweet minister of Jesus Christ) what she has met with in reading his book, she says, such a change of Heart, that she can now pray to God, and converse with his people in such a manner as she could never do before that day. She is of a sprightly brisk temper, yet if she be never so much engaged in work or play, if she hears any body talk of you, or things relating to religion, she will come and hear, and put in her word about it.

Book Review: George Whitefield and the Great Awakening

1973 ◽  
Vol 70 (3) ◽  
pp. 405-406
Author(s):  
James H. Edmonson
Keyword(s):  
Great Awakening ◽  
George Whitefield

scholarly journals Gereja Di Rumah: Kontekstualisasi Fungsi-Fungsi Rumah Dalam Masa Perjanjian Baru Untuk Pekabaran Injil

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 107-117
Author(s):  
Djeffry Hidajat
Keyword(s):  
New Testament ◽  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Christian Community ◽  
House Church ◽  
Wide Acceptance ◽  
The Social ◽  
Religious Teaching ◽  
Community Evangelism

Gereja dalam Perjanjian Baru adalah gereja di rumah. Mengapa murid-murid Yesus dan Paulus menggunakan rumah untuk kegiatan gereja? Mereka menggunakan rumah karena rumah adalah unit sosial, ekonomi dan religius. Ibadah dan pengajaran rohani biasa diadakan dalam rumah-rumah pada waktu itu. Karena fungsi sosial dan ekonominya, rumah juga membuka kontak dan komunikasi bagi para penginjil untuk memberitakan tentang Injil Yesus Kristus kepada jaringan sosial rumah di mana mereka melayani. Dengan demikian murid-murid Yesus dan Paulus telah melakukan upaya kontekstual yang cerdas dengan menggunakan rumah untuk membangun komunitas Kristen sekaligus pekabaran Injil. Terbukti kekristenan diterima secara luas dengan pendekatan gereja di rumah ini di tiga abad pertama sejarah kekristenan. Kata-kata kunci: Kontekstualisasi, Gereja Rumah, Oikos, Komunitas Kristen, Pekabaran Injil   The churches in New Testament times met together within houses. Why did Jesus’ disciples and Paul utilize the house for the church’s activities? They did so because the house was the foundational unit pertaining to the social, economic and religious structures of society. The house was a common place that could be used for worship and religious teaching. Moreover, because of the social and economic functions of the household, the house provided a sphere of easy interaction and communication with others in order to evangelize them with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Thus, the disciples and Paul are facilitating contextualized structures in their use of the house unit for the building of Christian community and evangelization. This effectiveness can be evidenced by the wide acceptance of Christianity throughout the first three centuries of Christianity. Keywords: Contextualization, House Church, Oikos, Christian Community, Evangelism

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