Yale lecturer on The Great Calvinist Reawakening

Briallen Hopper is English Lecturer at Yale University, Faculty Fellow at the University Church in Yale, and frequent contributor on religious topics in many prestigious media venues. She has written about religion for The Huffington Post, Killing the Buddha, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. In her latest piece entitled "The Great Calvinist Reawakening" published in Religion & Politics, Hopper profiles the rise of Neo-Calvinism and the impact it's having in contemporary culture. Citing the proof of Reformed revitalization as entirely persuasive, she goes on to contrast Neo-Calvinism with New Haven Calvinism a few centuries ago:

Clearly a heightened emphasis on doctrine and God’s predestining power is appealing to many. But the new Calvinist revival—which amounts to a partial shift in theological emphasis and style—is a far cry from the Calvinist revival that burned through the Northeast a few centuries ago during the Great Awakening. In churches just a couple miles from where I’m writing this essay in New Haven, and in other towns for hundreds of miles around, men and women were once caught up in controversial and unmanageable ecstasies. They wept, they trembled, they flushed, they fell senseless to the ground. They sang at the top of their lungs and threw their worldliest possessions on bonfires. They writhed with the shame of sin, and shook with the power of salvation, and fainted with the sweetness of the grace and glory of God.

About the only time one now expects "mass bodily ecstasies" with which Jonathan Edwards dealt amongst Reformed believers during the awakening days is among Pentecostals or music festival attendees. Rather "American Calvinism has largely become a religion of books and beliefs. It is a movement of the mind."

One of the interesting elements of Hopper's essay is her interweaving a book review into the fabric of her observations on Neo-Calvinism. In potentially answering questions as to how Calvinists went from writhing in public anguish during the 18th century awakenings to "buttoned-up forms of religious expression" in the 21st century, Hopper turns to the fictional writing of Susan Stinson. In her novel, Spider in a Tree, Stinson writes historical fiction the context of which is Jonathan Edwards and the people of the Great Awakening. According to Hopper, Stinson's fictionalized version of Edwards’s life,

breaks through the boundaries of academic research, popular hagiography, and Edwards’s own writing in order to help us recover the strange sensory immediacy of a religious life that has been lost to time. She (almost literally) fleshes out the facts, restoring our sense of the bodily experiences and complicated feelings of Puritan faith. In the process, she also makes audible and tangible the experiences of those around Edwards who were not heard or who left little legible trace, including enslaved black people, white women and children, and spiders.

Hopper goes on to conclude that as "much as modern Calvinists want to claim Edwards, they would likely have a hard time having him as their minister. Historic revivalist American Calvinism doesn’t fit too well with the New Calvinist emphasis on rigor and dignity."

Hopper's essay is a great reflection on the rise of Neo-Calvinism.

With that, I am...

Peter

Read Briallen Hopper's full essay: "The Great Calvinist Awakening"

Comments

[John Hutchinson]

You quote

"much as modern Calvinists want to claim Edwards, they would likely have a hard time having him as their minister"

Jonathan Edwards had a hard time in his own era. He was kicked out from his own Northampton church by a vote of 90%.

It is not entirely a fair historical comparison between Edwards and our time. In those days, the Great Awakening was reacting to the intellectualist speculations of Calvinist scholasticism. In our day, the New Calvinism is a reaction to the incoherent theological flubber in NeoEvangelical circles. Reactions invariably tend toward extreme pendularity, if that is a word.

[peter lumpkins]

Thanks, John. Yes, Edwards was run out of town by the same community that shook in their shoes when he preached his "Angry God" sermon. Hopper cataloged this in her essay.

I'm not following your objection to Hopper, however--"It is not entirely a fair historical comparison between Edwards and our time." I don't think she'd disagree that Edwards addressed different voices than Neo-Calvinists today. Using categories to fit your objection, I think her counter-point could be, "Yes, Edwards answered scholasticism, but did so with emotion and heart while today's Neo-Calvinists answer emotion and heart with scholasticism. As Hopper concluded, Neo-Calvinism is a movement of the mind

[dr. james willingham]

We might be at the beginning of a Third Great Awakening, but we still have some distance to go. The full implications of the Sovereignty of God and how it relates to evangelism, worship, missions, prayer, etc., has yet to be realized. Prayer for this visitation has been going on for over 150 years. Spurgeon prayed for such a visitation. G. Campbell Morgan, D.M. Lloyd-Jones, and the Evangelist Rolfe Barnard prayed all their years for such a blessing. The latter figure declared that it would likely not come until every evidence of deadness had been manifested. I have been praying for this Awakening since the Fall of 1973, when I spoke to the Pastors Prayer Meeting of the Sandy Creek Baptist Association on the subject of A Great Awakening. I spoke again to that prayer group on its 5th and 10th anniversary on the subject, A Third Great Awakening. Sandy Creek grew out of the labors of Shubal Stearns and his brother-in-law Daniel Marshall who were converted during the First Great Awakening, the former being converted under Ev. George Whitefield. The Association also experienced the Second Great Awakening with as many as 500 being converted at one church on a Sunday morning. Unfortunately, the records have disappeared or been destroyed, the forces of evil being awakened by such assault. O yes, and Sandy Creek with the encouragement of Rev. Luther Rice helped to launch Southern Baptists into the Great Century of Missions or the modern missionary movement. The visitation is coming, overwhelming, irresistible, universal, unstoppable, bringing glory to God in Christ for the next thousand generations and on quadrillions of planets as man kind goes to the stars, all so the angels can gather the elect from one end of the heavens to the other.

[Andrew Barker]

"The visitation is coming, overwhelming, irresistible, universal, unstoppable, bringing glory to God in Christ for the next thousand generations and on quadrillions of planets as man kind goes to the stars, all so the angels can gather the elect from one end of the heavens to the other."

Dr. Willingham, I would suggest such hyperbole are more suited for episodes of Star Trek than the present topic?

[Scott Shaver]

Andrew Barker

The older I get the less I question the visions, dreams and insights of those who've tread the path before me ... no matter how grandiose or bizarre they might sound.

Maybe Dr. Willingham sees or senses something we can't. Perhaps not. He still deserves my respect.

[Lydia]

Dr J, Did you hear about the revival at Asbury College in 1970? It started with small prayer groups but the actual revival came out of confession of sin. It seems it was in and of itself "missions" and "evangelism". Most importantly, the focus ended up being on how they lived out the Kingdom of God now.

I could be wrong as I was not there or old enough to be there. I just know what I have read, heard testimony of what took place from others who were there.

[Andrew Barker]

Scott, point taken. I don't mind vision, or dreams in those of us who've reached the appropriate age, but I have to say mankind going to the stars? It's a step too far for me I'm afraid.

[Scott Shaver]

I cannot disagree Andrew.

Surface of a star doesn't sound like a place I want to be either pre or post resurrection body.