Dynamics of Spiritual Life: An Evangelical Theology of Renewal

by Richard F. Lovelace

Because of the default mode of the human heart, revival is a pattern repeatedly used by the Holy Spirit to reconnect Christian communities with the power of the gospel.

America and the rest of Western culture now seem to be more on the edge of dissolution than on the point of renewal.

Revivalism, redefined now as a movement centered on mass evangelism rather than as a comprehensive renewal movement affecting the whole church and the surrounding culture, became Fundamentalism, a desperate attempt to hold on to the consensus of Reformation orthodoxy and to enforce it politically within the major denominations. This effort failed.

But by the end of the sixteenth century, Protestants in both the Lutheran and Reformed spheres were referring to the “half-reformation” which had reformed their doctrines but not their lives, and were seeking for a new revitalization of the church.

In America Christians had been praying since the late seventeenth century for an effusion of the Holy Spirit on the rising generations of their listless and unconverted children.

For three years after its founding in 1724 the different factions among the settlers quarreled as constantly as their parent denominations in the church at large, putting the community periodically on the brink of disruption. Zinzendorf’s response was to set up the famous round-the-clock prayer watch in which Moravians prayed for the revival of the church for one hundred years. In August 1727, the community experienced a “baptism of the Holy Spirit” climaxing in a communion service. From this point on unity prevailed. Within the larger community Zinzendorf organized smaller cells, the prayer bands, in which lay people were encouraged to confess their faults to one another, counsel together and support each other in prayer.

When Edwards inherited his grandfather Stoddard’s congregation in 1727, he tells us, they were “dry bones,” possessing the form of godliness but denying its power. As Edwards saw them, they were respectable, and they had a kind of rote orthodoxy which shuffled doctrines aimlessly like faded packs of cards. But their ultimate concerns were not God and his kingdom, but land and the pursuit of affluence.

But the generation gap between a powerless orthodoxy and its apostate children was reversed in 1734, as the outpouring of the Holy Spirit began to “turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers” (Mal. 4:6).

They suddenly became aware that their problem was not isolated acts of conscious disobedience to God, but a deep aversion to God at the root of their personalities, an aversion which left them in unconscious bondage to unbelief, selfishness, jealousy and other underlying complexes of sin. Some were in agony —even convicted because they were not more sensibly convicted—until they broke through to the realization that the only righteousness that could reconcile such depravity to a holy God was that of Jesus Christ, who offered himself for them on the cross. The new lives which they began to live issued out of hearts thoroughly broken because of sin.

Revival, in his understanding, is not a special season of extraordinary religious excitement, as in many forms of later American revivalism. Rather it is an outpouring of the Holy Spirit which restores the people of God to normal spiritual life after a period of corporate declension. Periods of spiritual decline occur in history because the gravity of indwelling sin keeps pulling believers first into formal religion and then into open apostasy.

The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God (1741) defended the revival because it possessed five marks of genuineness: it exalted Jesus Christ, attacked the kingdom of darkness, honored the Scriptures, promoted sound doctrine and involved an outpouring of love toward God and man.

Edwards establishes the principle that a full-fledged revival will involve a balance between personal concern for individuals and social concern. A revival is therefore not something exclusively “spiritual” and “religious.” Edwards insists that the proliferation of religiosity in the form of meetings, prayer, singing and religious talk will not promote or sustain revival without works of love and mercy, which will “bring the God of love down from heaven to earth… to set up his tabernacle with men on the earth, and dwell with them.”

Lyman Beecher and other evangelists began attacking social and cultural evils in a two-pronged strategy which included crusades against dueling, slavery, alcoholism, war and prostitution, as well as more conventional forms of mission such as evangelism and the distribution of tracts and Bibles.

And this was not merely a revival of home mission. By mid-century the trade routes of the British Empire had been turned into a railway system for the delivery of the gospel to other nations.

the early Christians experienced a substantial repetition of the pattern of crisis/prayer/empowering, documented in Acts 4:23-37.

But perhaps the root cause of the decay of evangelicalism in America was the replacement of the old comprehensive concept of revival with the post-Finneyan machinery of revivalism. “Holding a revival” became synonymous with “using new methods to do mass evangelism.”

Reformation grows out of awakened spiritual interest, and spiritual renewal seldom persists long without continuing reformation. This suggests that God has chosen to bless his church with the fullness of the Holy Spirit on the condition of its moving toward certain vital norms of health and witness.

In the 1960s, as in the period just before the Second Awakening, Americans felt themselves threatened by foreign currents of revolution lapping at their doors and also by the barbarous frontier of a wildly mutating youth culture. Christian families everywhere agonized as they saw their children ripped away by the gravitational field of a subversive Sodom developing within American culture. When voices within the church announced in the late 1960s that God was dead, many Christians must have duplicated the reaction of Hezekiah to the Assyrian challenge in 2 Kings 18, laying the matter before the Lord and doing the modern equivalent of rending their garments.

The German Pietists Spener and Zinzendorf felt that unity among the denominations would come only when all the segments of the church were revived.28 They understood, however, that this involved a revival of theology as well as a transitory wave of conversions and enthusiasm, and that sound theology would be a decidedly major instrument in reviving the church. This speaks directly to our situation.

Whatever degree of awakening we are experiencing now is not united around any single theology or leader, and perhaps this is a sign that the awakening is genuinely from God and not a human contrivance. But if the separated segments which are being revived are not united by some theological bridge, we will ultimately be left with estrangements between the component organs in the body of Christ—and broken bodies are never very healthy. We need a theological “unified field theory” which conserves and consolidates all the values in the different groups and parties while avoiding their errors and imbalances, which enables the pentecostal and nonpentecostal to affirm one another as Spirit-filled Christians with valid but differing spiritual gifts, and which unites socially concerned Christians with those burdened for the destinies of individuals on a common basis in the redemptive work of Christ.

Can we expect a similar impact to be made on the institutional church by the young leaders emerging everywhere? Much depends on the armor-piercing strength of their theological equipment, which must penetrate the masks of respectability to get at the underlying apathy toward God and lay bare its rootage in sin.

The condition of Middle-American churchgoers is remarkably similar to that of the Israelites in Haggai’s prophecy:

The prophecy of Haggai brings a penetrating challenge to our society. But it offers also a remarkable hope for the church’s future.

Because the hearts and memories of the succeeding generation were emptied of the experience of the Lord and his mighty acts, they became filled with the idolatry of the surrounding culture like an empty sponge which has been dropped in filthy water (Judg. 2:11-12).

The concept of the believing remnant has a disturbingly constant application to the era of the church. Thus far in time vital Christianity has been a thin stream that sometimes goes underground, only to emerge again to spread abroad like a river that has been dammed, expanding during awakenings to form a reservoir that refreshes and transforms a culture for a generation.

Figure 1. Dynamics of Spiritual Life

In order to experience normal spirituality Christians must go with Jesus Christ into mission, must depend on him to direct and empower in this, and must give and take sustenance in community with the members of his body.

Men and women cannot know themselves until they know the reality of the God who made them, and once they know the holy God, their own sin appears so grievous that they cannot rest until they have fully appropriated Christ.

In the late nineteenth century, D. L. Moody determined to center his message around the truth that “God is Love” and to tone down the mention of hell and the wrath of God to the point of inaudibility.4 But this was only one example of the sentimentalizing of God in every sector of the church, among evangelicals and the rising Liberal movement alike.

The tension between God’s holy righteousness and his compassionate mercy cannot be legitimately resolved by remolding his character into an image of pure benevolence as the church did in the nineteenth century. There is only one way that this contradiction can be removed: through the cross of Christ which reveals the severity of God’s anger against sin and the depth of his compassion in paying its penalty through the vicarious sacrifice of his Son. In systems which resolve this tension by softening the character of God, Christ and his work become an addendum, and spiritual darkness becomes complete because the true God has been abandoned for the worship of a magnified image of human tolerance.

During the late nineteenth century, while the church’s understanding of the unconscious motivation behind surface actions was vanishing, Sigmund Freud rediscovered this factor and recast it in an elaborate and profound secular mythology. One of the consequences of this remarkable shift is that in the twentieth century pastors have often been reduced to the status of legalistic moralists, while the deeper aspects of the cure of souls are generally relegated to psychotherapy, even among Evangelical Christians.

Modern man is not immune to the impact of traditional Christian terminology; he is simply inert in the presence of answers to questions he has not yet been induced to ask.

Most congregations of professing Christians today are saturated with a kind of dead goodness, an ethical respectability which has its motivational roots in the flesh rather than in the illuminating and enlivening control of the Holy Spirit. In 2 Timothy 3 Paul describes this surface righteousness which does not spring from faith and the Spirit’s renewing action, but from religious pride and conditioned conformity to tradition, as a form of godliness which denies its power. It goes without saying that many congregations which are built upon such counterfeit piety are Evangelical in name, descendants of the great awakening movements—and yet they themselves are today in desperate need of new awakening! Observers in the Charismatic movement would say that such churches are in need of “the baptism of the Spirit,” and they would not be far from truth in this analysis; but what may be instrumental in obtaining such a baptism is an exposure of the subtlety of the flesh.

It is providentially fitting that Luther’s name resembles the Greek word for freedom, for the power of his central insight blows through all his writings like a great wind of joyful liberation.

These three aberrations from the biblical teaching on justification—cheap grace, legalism, and moralism—still dominate the church today.

Faith and repentance are not separable quantities. To have faith is to receive God’s Word as truth and rest upon it in dependent trust; to repent is to have a new mind toward God, oneself, Christ and the world, commiting one’s heart to new obedience to God. Obviously these two factors are so interwoven that they are experienced as one, so that the condition of justification is not faith plus repentance, but repentant faith.

It is true that justification can only be appropriated on the ground of our union with Christ. But we cannot be in the light about our union with the perfect righteousness which covers our sin without simultaneously being in the light about the power available to transform our lives and displace our sin. We cannot be in union with half a Christ, as the Puritans would say. We must appropriate a whole Christ if we are to remain in light and thus in spiritual life.

the Bible teaches that salvation is completely a matter of God’s grace and power, so that none of us can take credit for our own wisdom or initiative in receiving it, but also that we are fully responsible if we refuse it. It is not prudent to take either side of this paradox in isolation and build a rational system around it, since we are dealing with matters vastly beyond the comprehension of human reason.

Our task as evangelists is therefore that of midwives, and not that of parents.

Because of our muted emphasis on sin, many persons experience a two-stage conversion, but we should recognize that no conversion is complete that does not deal with the problem of sin. If all of our preaching were properly centered around this problem and its answer in the cross, the number of two-stage conversions would probably decrease sharply.

The law is like a “tracer chemical” which makes the invisible course of a disease evident or a medicine which aggravates a hidden illness until it breaks out in surface symptoms.

it must be detached from any assumption that the sin which is to be overcome by faith is limited to conscious voluntary acts of disobedience. Without a depth understanding of sin, “the victorious life” becomes an exercise in futility. The world does not need more “victorious Christians” who drive their neighbors to distraction by their cheerful indulgence in undiscerned carnality.

To borrow a metaphor from Mahayana Buddhism, we are not like the infant monkey which must cling to its mother with all its strength if it is to avoid falling; we are like the kitten which is carried from place to place in its mother’s mouth.

any model of the fullness of the Spirit which attempts to make empowering for service relatively separate from growth in holiness inevitably collides with the truth represented in the very title Holy Spirit.

being filled with the Spirit simply means having all our faculties under his control rather than under the control of sin.

sanctification and empowering for ministry are as inseparable as justification and sanctification.

There is a vigorous faith in the supernatural operation of God in many Charismatic circles which the rest of the church should emulate.

Eager and uncritical seeking after wonders to believe is a work of the flesh, not a grace of the spirit.

Even where Christians know about the Holy Spirit doctrinally, they have not necessarily made a deliberate point of getting to know him personally.

The typical relationship between believers and the Holy Spirit in today’s church is too often like that between the husband and wife in a bad marriage. They live under the same roof, and the husband makes constant use of his wife’s services, but he fails to communicate with her, recognize her presence and celebrate their relationship with her.