Misplaced passion and the QIRE

It's long been an article of faith among Reformed folk that the First Great Awakening was the good one, but the Second Great Awakening was bad. That's because the earlier one is seen as Calvinistic due to the major roles of Whitefield and Edwards, while the later one is largely associated with Finney and his New Measures. The first was genuine revival while the second was a particularly egregious example of revivalism, or so the story goes. This can be seen by the fact that John Piper will be giving a biographical portrait of George Whitefield at this year's Desiring God Pastors Conference, but don't expect to ever hear a commendation of Charles Finney at any DG or Ligonier or T4G conference!

In Recovering the Reformed Confession R. Scott Clark challenges that bit of conventional wisdom. Clark doesn't deny the very real differences between the two, but he argues that there's a good bit of continuity as well, both being animated by what he calls the QIRE (Quest for Illegitimate Religious Experience). The QIRE is "one of the most ancient impulses in Christian theology...the quest for the vision of God (visio Dei), which Luther and Calvin derided as the desire to see God "naked" (Deus nudus)." (p. 71) It's a quest to "experience God apart from the mediation of Word and sacrament." (p. 72) Instead of a piety organized around the ordinary means of grace administered by the visible church, the Great Awakening events stressed the extraordinary, and in the process actually undermined the church to lasting effect.

Clark makes the case that along with the QIRC, or Quest for Illegitimate Religious Certainty, the QIRE has contributed to a state of affairs where the Reformed churches have lost their grip on any distinctive theology, piety and practice as defined by the 16th and 17th century Reformed confessions and churches. Where "distinct colors fade to grey," as Michael Horton writes in a blurb on the jacket, and where being Reformed is defined subjectively and often idiosyncratically i.e. "I am Reformed, I think p, and therefore p must be Reformed." (p. 18) Clark gives three prominent examples of this in the chapter on QIRC: a belief in 6/24 creation as a boundary marker of Reformed orthodoxy, theonomy/reconstructionism and covenantal moralism. In response to the relativism that characterizes our age some have sought to compensate by seeking certainty in areas "where such certainty is neither possible nor desirable." (p. 39) Elevating tangential issues is often indicative of "the spirit of fundamentalism" and Clark shows how the Reformed churches haven't been immune to this spirit. Clark believes, as did Machen, that the best response to modernism and theological liberalism is Calvinism, not Fundamentalism.

But back to the QIRE. Clark argues not against genuine piety, nor against a passionate experience of God. Indeed, he advances a compelling and appealing case for a Reformed piety -- "Word and Spirit piety" as against "event and excitement pietism" (p. 99) -- based on the ordinary means of grace and the objective marks of "a true and lively faith" [WCF 16.2] which the Belgic Confession defines as "faith, fruit, and fighting against sin." More on that later. Here Clark sums up his case that both Great Awakenings -- while used by "God, in his wonderful freedom...to accomplish great things" (p. 83) -- were driven by impulses that undermined and supplanted "the theology, piety, and practice of confessional Reformed Christianity." (p. 99)

There were genuine differences between the First and Second Great Awakenings. For example, the leading Reformed ministers of the First Great Awakening were strongly committed to the doctrines of absolute divine sovereignty and predestination. On the other hand, the leading voices of the Second Great Awakening (see below) ardently rejected not only predestination, but also the Reformation doctrine of justification. Nevertheless, there were genuine continuities between the two movements. Both were marked by innovative methods, neither was particularly churchly in orientation, and both were ultimately measured by their advocates by the degree of religious experience they fostered. None of these things could be said fairly of the classic Reformed theologians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

My criticism of Reformed subjectivism in the colonial revivals should not be confused with Charles Chauncy's criticisms of Edwards. In 1743, Chauncy, a Congregationalist minister in Boston and a leader of the Congregationalist "Old Lights," published the most important criticism of the Great Awakening, Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New England. He was an enigmatic figure, applauded by the Arminians of his day, taken by many in the eighteenth century as a rationalist and a universalist. He opposed the awakening, because it offended cool reason by its passionate experience of God's presence. My criticism of revivalism is not that it is too passionate (Calvinism has always been one of the hotter religions); rather my criticism is that it is passionate about the wrong things. (pp. 96-97)

Perhaps some readers think the scenario Clark outlines was/is a good thing, or at least accept the common criticism of Reformed theology and practice as heartless and sterile, dead religion even. If so, then Clark would say you're falling into the trap of judging confessional Reformed Christianity by an "alien standard" and "have already accepted the revivalist or subjectivist paradigm." (p. 98) He audaciously argues that "even in its best and most admirable form, the revivalist program is still misguided." (p. 99) What then of the legitimate place for religious experience? Is there a QLRE? Yes there is, and Clark writes at length on the confessional Reformed approach to personal piety, including a wonderful outline of this approach as seen in the content and structure of the Heidelberg Catechism.

All of this flows from the logic of new covenant passages such as Jeremiah 31:33-34 where the subjective blessings of the Christian life "are bound up with God's decisive covenantal saving work in history. This language does not suggest so much a heightened state of religious experience or awareness of the divine presence as it does the objective establishment of a new state of divine-human relations. In other words, this language is more sacramental, Protestant, and official than it is personal, private, or revivalist." (p. 101) Clark cites William Perkins, the father of English Puritanism, to make the case that recovering the Reformed confession means being more concerned with the "ordinary" than the "extraordinary."

In his catechism Perkins made it clear that conversion is not ordinarily a momentary or epochal experience and certainly not chiefly a private religious experience, but rather and ordinarily the result of the prevenient grace of justifying faith which comes through the hearing of the preached gospel and the consequent grace of sanctification received in the means of grace administered in the church. It is not as if the Reformed confession is unconcerned with religious experience, but in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries we were more concerned about the objective manifestations of regeneration and conversion, which the apostle Paul called "the fruit of the Spirit." (p. 99)

I realize some of this must sound very strange to modern ears, even to those who didn't grow up in an environment strongly influenced by fundamentalism (QIRC) and revivalism (QIRE) as I did. It's meant to. That's because the QIRC and QIRE have profoundly shaped the American religious landscape. Contemporary evangelicalism is heir to both, though often in a watered-down form. It might also sound as if Recovering the Reformed Confession is simply a backward-looking exercise in nostalgia for the good ol' days. Well, recovery and reformation necessarily involves looking back, but this book is much more than that, and in a future post I'll focus on the positive forward-looking case that Clark makes in my favorite chapter so far -- Chapter 6 "The Joy of Being Confessional" -- and explain why I think this book should be read by those outside its target audience.

As for the QIRC and the QIRE, I'm with Clark 100% on the first, but though I agree with most of his diagnosis regarding the second I'm not ready to toss out Edwards and Whitefield with the Second Awakening bathwater. Nor am I as ready as Clark to rule someone else's religious experience out of bounds, even if judged on the basis of the Reformed consensus on what Scripture teaches as summed up in those great confessions that I've come to believe and love.