The Second Great Awakening

What it was. Between 1788 and 1903 there is in this section no substantial change in the text of the Confession. Not because nothing happened, but because what happened was not done in the synods. Historians give the name of Second Great Awakening to the series of revivals which swept the United States between 1790 and 1840, approximately. It began on the frontier, in Kentucky and Tennessee, among Presbyterians, Methodists and Baptists. Its characteristic form, the camp meeting of several days, came from the communion seasons of the Scottish Presbyterians; the most celebrated, that of Cane Ridge, in August 1801, was called by a Presbyterian minister. In the 1820s and 1830s it passed to the west of the state of New York and to the cities of the east, at the hand of Charles Finney.
When it ended, the religious map of the country was another. The churches which predominated in the colonial period, the Anglican, the Congregational and the Presbyterian, had been left far behind by the Methodist and the Baptist, and wholly new movements had been born: the Restorationists, the Adventists, the Mormons.

What it did with the Presbyterians. Three episodes, all three documented.
1803-1804. Five ministers of the Synod of Kentucky, among them the one who had called Cane Ridge, separate and form their own presbytery. A year later they dissolve it with a paper which rejects the "divisive" use of the Westminster Confession, maintains that each congregation should govern itself, and wants no other name than that of "Christians". Thence comes Restorationism, whose watchword would come to be: no creed but Christ, no book but the Bible.
1805-1810. In the same synod, the Cumberland Presbytery, lacking ministers to attend to the revival, begins to ordain men without the required training, and allows them to subscribe the Confession only "so far as they deemed it agreeable to the Word of God". The synod suspends them and dissolves the presbytery. In 1810 those expelled found a church of their own, the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, which four years later revises the Confession to remove predestination from it.
1801-1837. By the Plan of Union of 1801, Presbyterians and Congregationalists of New England found churches in common in the new territories. By that door there enter into the Presbyterian church congregations without Presbyterian government, and the New Haven theology, which reinterpreted regeneration in a manner that suited the revivals. Out of that milieu comes Finney, a Presbyterian minister who had passed through neither college nor seminary and who had, by his own account, many objections to the fundamental doctrines of his church. In 1837, the majority of the General Assembly, the so-called Old School, abrogates the Plan of Union and excludes the four synods formed under it: twenty-eight presbyteries, five hundred and nine ministers and sixty thousand members, the fifth part of the church. Those excluded form the New School.

What changed. Not an article of the Confession, but the way of understanding three things which the Confession takes for granted.
Conversion. Finney wrote it in 1835 with all clearness: a revival "is not a miracle, or dependent on a miracle, in any sense. It is a purely philosophical result of the right use of the constituted means". If that is so, to be converted is something which man can do when he is moved in the proper way, and the task of the preacher is to find the measures which achieve it. Finney's "new measures", such as the anxious bench, come from there; and from there also comes his theology, which denied total depravity.
The ministry. The frontier called for preachers, and the Methodists and Baptists sent them without learning. The answer of the Cumberland Presbytery was to do the same. The Westminster Form of Church Government requires that the minister be examined in the original tongues and in divinity before being ordained.
Subscription. The Cumberland formula, to subscribe the Confession "so far as" it is agreeable to the Word, seems innocent: no one would wish to subscribe it otherwise. But it leaves each minister the judge of how much he subscribes. It is, seventy years in advance, the same clause as that of the Scottish declaratory acts, with which another article of this section deals.

The resistance. It must be said that American Presbyterianism resisted, and for a long time. The Synod of Kentucky preferred to lose a presbytery rather than ordain without examination or subscription. Men such as Asahel Nettleton, who was himself a preacher of revivals, wrote against the new measures in 1828. Charles Hodge called them in 1833 "dangerous innovations". And the Assembly of 1837 parted with the fifth part of the church in order to keep its doctrine and its government. Of that schism a historian has said that the surprising thing is not that it happened, but that the church had held together so long.
It must also be said that in those years there were true conversions, and a missionary impulse from which there came, from 1810 onward, the first American missions abroad. What is criticised here is not that men preached to multitudes, but what was done with doctrine, with the ministry and with the church in order to be able to do so.

How it ended. It ended in the church which made the revisions. In 1869 the Old School and the New School of the north were reunited. Hodge opposed it, warning that in the New School there were still those who held the New Haven theology and that its manner of subscribing the Confession was lax; he lost. Out of the reunited church there came, twenty years later, the movement to revise the Confession; out of that movement, the revision of 1903; and three years later, in 1906, that church received the greater part of the Cumberland Presbyterians.
The circle closes almost exactly. In 1806 the Synod of Kentucky had dissolved a presbytery because it did not accept the doctrine of the Confession on God's decree. In 1903 the Confession was accompanied by a Declaratory Statement which left that doctrine in terms which those men could sign. A century later, it was the Confession that had yielded.

What came afterwards. What triumphed then did not stay among the Presbyterians, nor in America, nor in that century.
The method became the norm. The altar call, which begins in the 1830s with the anxious bench, is the same that Moody, Billy Sunday and Billy Graham will use. With it travels everything else: conversion understood as a decision taken at an appointed moment, the itinerant evangelist who answers to no church, the congregation without a confession, and numbers as the proof.
That is today the appearance of a good part of the evangelical world. In part, because it was the Protestantism which many North American missions carried. But a historian such as Mark Noll has maintained that the likeness is due less to direct influence than to the repetition of the same conditions: where there is no established church and everything depends on voluntary adherence, Christianity takes the form which it took in America. If that is so, the observation confirms what was said above: it was not so much a method that was exported as the principle which makes it necessary. In our judgment, for many evangelicals this is no longer one form of Protestantism: it is Protestantism.
And out of those years there comes, by two roads, one of the most numerous movements of present-day Christianity. The first is that of holiness. During the revival there was revived among the Methodists the doctrine of a second experience subsequent to conversion, entire sanctification; and at Oberlin, Finney's college, men began to speak in 1836 of a "baptism with the Holy Spirit" which would free the believer from the inclination to sin. Out of that Holiness movement came, about 1900, the men who taught that the sign of that baptism is speaking in tongues, and out of Azusa Street in Los Angeles, in 1906, Pentecostalism.
The second road is that of Restorationism, and it is the one which best explains it. It is not a matter of the churches which Stone and Campbell founded, but of their principle: that between the apostles and ourselves there is nothing to preserve, and that the church must be restored as it appears in the Acts, over the head of eighteen centuries of history and of all the confessions. The first Restorationists applied that principle to the name and to the government of the church. Pentecostalism carries it to the end: if the church of the Acts is to be restored, its tongues, its prophecies and its miracles must be restored also. That is why the first Pentecostals called their cause the "Apostolic Faith". Their own historians say as much: early Pentecostalism is best understood as an expression of restorationist yearning, born in the same milieu as the Disciples of Christ, the Adventists and the Mormons.
Here the clash with the Confession is no longer one of nuance. Its first chapter says that "those former ways of God's revealing his will unto his people" are "now ceased", and that unto Scripture "nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelations of the Spirit, or traditions of men". Pentecostals and charismatics, counting the latter in all the churches, are today, according to the current estimates, more than six hundred million.

What this shows. That the deviation of a great part of American Presbyterianism did not begin in an assembly nor in a seminary, but in a revival, and that it coincides with its triumph. The Second Great Awakening was for American Protestantism a second reformation, but in the bad sense of the word: it changed almost everything, and did so without new Scripture, without council and without confession, by the sheer force of the result. What filled the pews was true; what left them empty, suspect.
None of this can be understood without what was seen in the article on the civil magistrate. In 1788 the Presbyterians had confessed a church of "voluntary members" among equal "denominations". In such a country, each church has to win its members, and the one that wins most seems to be the one most in the right. The revival is the religious form which corresponds to that principle, and its fruits are those which were to be expected: a conversion which depends on the method, a minister who depends on his success, a confession which is subscribed so far as each sees fit, and, where there is not even a synod to restrain it, a new church for every disagreement.
Presbyterianism resisted so long as it was willing to pay the price: a presbytery in 1806, four synods in 1837. It yielded when it preferred union: in 1869 and in 1906. The revisions of 1903 are not the cause of that history; they are its minutes.
And the rest of the evangelical world, which had neither synods with which to resist nor a confession to revise, inherited the result without having known the dispute.

Sources. Charles G. Finney, Lectures on Revivals of Religion (1835), for the quotation. For the Springfield Presbytery, the Cumberland Presbytery, the Plan of Union and the schism of 1837, the histories of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America; the figures for 1837 are those given in those histories. The judgment on the schism is that of Nathan O. Hatch. For the Holiness movement and the origins of Pentecostalism, Edith Blumhofer and Grant Wacker; for the likeness between world evangelicalism and American evangelicalism, Mark A. Noll, The New Shape of World Christianity (2009). The final figure is an estimate in common use. The assessments are our own.