The Consequences of Liberty: Barton W. Stone's Democratized Rhetoric and Hermeneutics

2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 279-308
Author(s):  
Daniel P. Overton
Keyword(s):  
Rhetorical Theory ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
Second Great Awakening ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Confessional Unity

The Cane Ridge Revival drew nearly twenty thousand participants, sparking the transformative Second Great Awakening. Barton Stone was the minister who organized and shared preaching responsibilities for the revival, and eventually, his disciples formed one of the largest American religious traditions, the Stone-Campbell Movement. In this paper, I examine portions of nine fictional dialogues published by Stone during the final year of his life, wherein he explicitly outlined the parameters of effective rhetoric or “useful preaching.” I argue that Stone developed a rhetorical theory that rebelled against authority by granting agency to the audience even in the processes of invention and interpretation, a theory that produced idiosyncratic theological convictions and a movement practically incapable of confessional unity.

Primitivism in America

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Bowman
Keyword(s):  
American Revolution ◽  
Religious Experience ◽  
American History ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Original Version ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
Second Great Awakening ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Individual Capacity ◽  
Historical Authority

Historians most often use the term primitivism to refer to the attempt to reconstruct a religious tradition’s original theology, structure, or beliefs. Primitivists believe that the earliest expressions of the faith are the most efficacious, powerful, and valid, and hence they attempt to recapture them in as complete a form as it is possible for them to imagine. Thus, they frequently dissent from established religious traditions, believing that those constructed under the primitive impulse achieve superior purity. Of course, these attempts are normally incomplete or inaccurate, reflecting the desires or needs of the group doing the restoring more than the original version of whatever faith is involved. Primitivism has taken on a number of forms throughout American history. This essay follows a chronological approach, but uses Richard Hughes’s designations of “ethical,” “ecclesiastical,” and “experiential” primitivism to distinguish among various movements and provide some order to the narrative. These are common impulses in American religion, particularly in the years immediately following the American Revolution commonly called the Second Great Awakening. The language of primitivism has provided Americans with the weight of historical authority, often invoked to overturn established hierarchies and replace them with forms of religious practice deemed, alternately, more democratic, more biblical, more conducive to religious experience, or more ethically demanding. Whatever the case, primitivism has spoken to the American impulse toward reform, resistance to institution, and individual capacity.

Presbyterians and Ethics

2019 ◽  
pp. 525-537
Author(s):  
Mark Douglas
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
Reformed Theology ◽  
Second Great Awakening ◽  
World War ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
History Of Ethics ◽  
Presbyterian Church ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of

The history of ethics in the Presbyterian Church has been shaped by the theological commitments of Reformed theology, the church’s ecumenical and interreligious encounters, its interactions with the wider cultures in which it functions, and its global scope. Consequently, Presbyterian ethics have become increasingly diverse, culturally diffused, ecumenically directed, and frequently divisive. That said, its history can helpfully be divided into three lengthy periods. In the first (roughly from the church’s origins in 1559 to the Second Great Awakening in the early nineteenth century), theology, ethics, and politics are so interwound that distinguishing one from the others is difficult. In the second (roughly from the Second Great Awakening to the end of World War II), moral concerns emerge as forces that drive the church’s theology and polity. And in the third (for which proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 might be a heuristically helpful starting point), ethics increasingly functions in ways that are only loosely tethered to either Reformed theology or polity. The strength of the church’s social witness, the consistency of its global engagements, and the failings of its internecine strife are all evident during its five-hundred-year history.

The Welsh Evangelical Community and ‘Finney's Revival’

1978 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 463-480 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Carwardine
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
High Pressure ◽  
Holy Spirit ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
Second Great Awakening ◽  
New Divinity ◽  
Public Commitment ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
Agent Of Change ◽  
Spiritual State

The early decades of the nineteenth century saw the emergence in American Calvinist churches of a new brand of religious revivalism. Energetic evangelicals successfully challenged the authority of a Calvinist theology which had seemed to emphasise the exclusiveness of the elect, and man's helplessness and inability to act in securing his own conversion. These evangelicals adopted a revivalism which, in contrast, reminded man of his responsibility and power, and which experimented with means to win converts that conservative evangelicals thought an affront to the operations of the Holy Spirit. The ‘new measures’, as they were called, included more direct preaching, often by revivalists who itinerated solely to stir churches and win converts, the ‘protracting’ of services over several days or weeks, and the ‘anxious seat’—the use of a special pew at the front of the congregation where those concerned for their spiritual state could go to be exhorted and prayed for, and where a public commitment might be expected. These measures—and the ‘New Divinity’ which gave them theological justification—became increasingly widespread during the 1820s and 1830s, the climax of the ‘Second Great Awakening’. In large part the impetus for change had come from the rapidly-growing Methodists, Arminian in theology and determined exponents of a high-pressure revivalism; but within the Calvinist churches the single most influential agent of change was the ‘high priest’ of revivalism, Charles Grandison Finney.

Vox Populi, Vox Dei

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle Sizemore
Keyword(s):  
Political Theology ◽  
Democratic Society ◽  
Religious Culture ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Subjectivity ◽  
Second Great Awakening ◽  
The People ◽  
Early Exploration ◽  
The Voice

This chapter presents enchanted subjectivity as a model of political subjectivity in which individuals claim to speak for God, not for themselves, as commonly assumed for a democratic society. This phenomenon occurred in both the political and religious realms, as demonstrated in the popular republican expression “Vox populi, vox dei” (The voice of the people is the voice of God) and in the prophecies of the Second Great Awakening. Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798) brings together the political and religious culture of prophecy in his novel about ventriloquism, an early exploration of political theology, that is, a study of the ways in which theological principles infuse republican political arrangements.

The Second Great Awakening and the New England Social Order

1970 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 345-364 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard D. Birdsall
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Social Order ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
Second Great Awakening ◽  
Henry Adams ◽  
The Real ◽  
The Social

“Only the shell of orthodoxy was left.” Such was the considered judgment of Henry Adams on the condition of the inherited socioreligious order of New England by the year 1800.1 The image of the shell of a gourd with loose seeds rattling within is a good one to convey the dissociation between the purposes of the society and the real beliefs of individuals that had come to pass by the end of the eighteenth century. And it presents a notable contrast to the close congruence of individual belief and the social aims of the first generation of New England Puritans.

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