Christ for Us, Over and Over Again
Of Asbury and revivals, Lenten repentance, and the comfort of Word and Sacrament
We’ve entered Lent, that long, long tradition in the Christian church of commemorating Christ’s suffering as He approached His death on Good Friday and resurrection culminating on Easter Sunday. Last week, our usual Lent beginning in Casper was thrown awry from yet another big snow, this one a blizzard, that hit as we enjoyed pancakes at a Fat Tuesday youth event. It snowed through Wednesday night, and temperatures plunged yet again into the negative double-digits. Instead of attending an Ash Wednesday service during the whiteout freeze, our congregation met on the warmer, clearer Friday night instead. We still had to navigate huge snow piles and icy roads and parking lots, but at least we could see where we were going. And despite the delay and the day change, not much else in the service differed from prior years. It was Ash Friday, a different yet familiar gathering.
Another service at a different worship space early in February also didn’t go as planned. You’ve likely heard something about the phenomenon at Asbury University in Kentucky. A regular chapel service on February 8 basically didn’t end. As more and more students from campus attended, #Asburyrevival went viral on social media, and thousands upon thousands of people joined in, many of them from Generation Z (those born roughly between 1997 and 2012, mostly older teens and those in their early 20s). The university finally and formally ended the service on February 23 (you can see a video of that portion here).
Revivals have an interesting history in America, beginning with Jonathan Edwards, a fiery 18th century preacher in New England. I remember reading his famous 1741 sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” in one of my English classes in high school. I marveled over that text for two reasons. First, I was a little bit incredulous that we were reading an actual Christian sermon as a literature assignment. This was in the late 1990s, and the gradual removal of Christian writing had already been happening in public schools for nearly forty years. Outside of class, many of my classmates enjoyed Buffy the Vampire Slayer and other decidedly secular offerings from pop culture. But there we were, poring over the words of a long-dead Congregationalist minister. In a small way, reading Edwards felt countercultural. Even more—and this was the second reason I was delighted—we students were reading about human sin and its eternal consequences, theological concepts crucial to Christian teaching. These were meaty, adult topics.
We couldn’t miss the implications for ourselves. The sermon was introduced with this description: “At a Time of Great Awakenings, and Attended with Remarkable Impressions on many of the Hearers,” which included a lot of capital letters and some historical context. The first American Great Awakening occurred in the 1730s and 1740s and involved spiritual revival, events characterized by passionate preaching of God’s wrath toward sinners, emotional repentance of hearers, and their conversion to Christianity. This conversion happened internally through the work of the Holy Spirit but would be made manifest through the hearers’ public confession and gradual but unmistakable signs of holiness in them. Considered one of the primary preachers of the Awakening, Edwards preached vehemently about God’s wrath and the need for sinners to convert. The time was at hand, exhorted Edwards.
You had need to consider yourselves, and awake thoroughly out of sleep. You cannot bear the fierceness and wrath of the infinite God.—And you, young men, and young women, will you neglect this precious season which you now enjoy, when so many others of your age are renouncing all youthful vanities, and flocking to Christ? You especially have now an extraordinary opportunity; but if you neglect it, it will soon be with you as with those persons who spent all the precious days of youth in sin, and are now come to such a dreadful pass in blindness and hardness.— And you, children, who are unconverted, do not you know that you are going down to hell, to bear the dreadful wrath of that God, who is now angry with you every day and every night? Will you be content to be the children of the devil, when so many other children in the land are converted, and are become the holy and happy children of the King of kings? …
Therefore, let every one that is out of Christ, now awake and fly from the wrath to come. The wrath of Almighty God is now undoubtedly hanging over a great part of this congregation. Let every one fly out of Sodom: “Haste and escape for your lives, look not behind you, escape to the mountain, lest you be consumed.”
How could a bunch of teenagers not be at least a little rattled by such direct words?
Edwards’ 1741 message centered upon Deuteronomy 32:35: “Their foot shall slide in due time.” Essentially, his hearers would learn that they were always capable of falling away, but—and I missed this deep import of this at the time—they never had a specific event or moment that they could identify as making them God’s own. Edwards was a Calvinist, which developed after Lutheranism and differs in a few key ways. But we share some commonalities. As Lutherans, we certainly agree with Edwards’ conclusion that sinners are deserving of God’s eternal punishment (that’s the “T” in the Calvinist TULIP acronym which stands for “total depravity”). We also agree with the positive part of unconditional election (that’s the “U”), which is the belief that we could do nothing to deserve Christ’s mercy, but He chose to give it anyway. This is good. But there Edwards and confessional Lutherans differ widely. While Edwards claimed Christ’s justification without works, his theology left holes for pietism—an emphasis on the personal faith and holiness of a believer—to make precisely that claim. In other words, once Christians turn away from looking solely to Christ and His work, they are often left looking at themselves and their own work, which can produce some odd and even problematic results.
Take conversion. Confessional Lutherans are assured of God’s grace because of His work, not because of ours. Our conversion occurs through His word and the means of grace in baptism. If I’m asked when I was “saved,” I’ll say “October 13, 1981”—my baptism birthday. Edwards understood conversion very differently. In this section on the Northampton revival, which was part of the Great Awakening, we learn that
[Edwards] understood conversion to be the experience of moving from spiritual deadness to joy in the knowledge of one's election (that one had been chosen by God for salvation). While a Christian might have several conversion moments as part of this process, Edwards believed there was a single point in time when God regenerated an individual, even if the exact moment could not be pinpointed. [emphasis mine]
No wonder the Awakening and other revivals that followed were characterized by ever more dramatic and often charismatic behaviors. If sinners couldn’t point to baptism, for instance, as the moment God gave them eternal benefits, as the Small Catechism explains, then they would have to point to something else. And that something else usually involved their own emotional experiences as they repented and heard the Gospel. But even a single, public, passionate confession of Christ wasn’t a sure thing. What if the sinner immediately sinned after the revival ended? Did that mean she wasn’t sincere in her prior confession? Or maybe the Holy Spirit hadn’t quite started her spiritual regeneration yet? Or what if her memory of the experience faded and she wasn’t sure she actually felt as strongly about Jesus as she was supposed to to be a “real” Christian? You can see how this goes. To be confident that their conversions were real, people would have to experience the powerful fervor of revival over and over again.
To be confident that their conversions were real,
people would have to experience the powerful fervor of revival over and over again.
At the risk of losing some readers here, this point brings me to another memory that relates to the sometimes flamboyant, or even weird and often humorous, displays that ongoing group revivals can produce. My grandpa loved the singer-songwriter Ray Stevens. Grandpa would play Stevens’ humorous albums on a gigantic tape player sound system that blared the songs through the screen doors of his and Grandma’s southern Missouri home. I remember listening to Stevens and cackling, sometimes crying with laughter, with my siblings while we lounged on the deck overlooking Deer Run Lake. One of our favorites was “Mississippi Squirrel Revival,” a slapstick roundelay that’s like a Vegas marriage between the Prairie Home Companion and the Babylon Bee. It is what it sounds like—the story of how a boy catches a squirrel, brings it to church, and well, things happen.
Well what happened next is hard to tell
Some thought it was Heaven, others thought it was Hell
But the fact that something was among us
Was plain to see
As the choir sang "I Surrender All"
The squirrel ran up Harv Newlan's coveralls
Harv leaped to his feet and said
"Somethin's got a hold on me! YEOW!"
The song is, I hardly need say, shameless and hilarious. You can watch the music video of the song here.
You’ll understand that my early impressions of revival, then, were highly skeptical, which brings me back to Asbury. Revivals have long been plagued by criticism about the emotionalism and groupthink that affects participants. One key aspect of them is the music, which is carefully curated and performed to maximize the emotional fervor of the hearers. For instance, Dwight Moody, one of the great 19th century American revivalists, was in part so successful at moving huge crowds of people because of his collaboration with Ira D. Sankey, a musician who wrote simple tunes for religious poems that people could easily learn and sing.
Music can greatly influence feelings, as anyone onward from David and King Saul can testify. Even Martin Luther is said to have emphasized music’s importance: “Next to the Word of God, music deserves the highest praise.” But musical manipulation is real. We all know this if we’ve ever seen a movie with, say, sunshine, clouds, and fluffy kittens cavorting, only to feel instantaneously on guard and suspicious of what’s coming as soon as the ominous music starts. Revivals, or—and this is key—any church service that places the emotional experience of its hearers as its primary focus, are designed to build people’s feelings of connection, excitement, and purpose precisely to perpetuate the belief that a spiritual experience has actually happened. The feels, not God’s word or His presence that He promised to bring believers, determine the authenticity of God’s presence.
In writing about Asbury, Joel Abbott notes poignantly this particular failure of revival. He experienced the emotional roller coaster of revivals in college, and once he left it after graduation, he watched as many of his once-passionate peers lost their faith. “The world was choking them out,” he said. The best ( or perhaps the worst) description of this trend was that of a girl who “grew up feeling like she was deeply in love with Jesus, but then she attended a Taylor Swift concert with the same emotional vibe and she realized she just liked the high she got from attending concerts.”
How awful. Did you notice where she first went wrong? Instead of focusing on Jesus’ love for her, she focused on her feelings of love for Jesus. And her feelings became her ultimate idol.
“Feelings will come and go, which means a belief built only on feelings will come and go,” wrote Jordan Alexander in a piece about Asbury, pointing out that real conversion requires a worldview far deeper than one built on emotions, as well as a deep and sustained consideration of beliefs. Many young people who flock to emotionally powerful events like that at Asbury haven’t studied the Bible in depth or spent significant time around long-time Christians who can help model being in the world and not of the world. Unfortunately, most of them will just as quickly fall back to their prior habits and practices after the event is over.
Historically, revivals had everything to do with turning people away from sin and bringing them to God in Christ. So much of what we saw with Asbury was, at its depth, people’s desire for deep and lasting meaning. It also was a cultural snapshot of people longing for religious meaning that they know is mostly gone in American culture, as Samuel Sey wrote. As Christians, “Our hope isn’t in a revival. Our hope isn’t in a Christian culture. All of these are good. We should earnestly pray that God would change our culture.” Indeed we should! We wilderness dwellers pray that God blesses our efforts to cultivate Christian culture here in Casper, Wyoming, and elsewhere (and you can subscribe to Christian Culture magazine here).
We should also continue to pray for the Holy Spirit to move unbelievers to faith, including people who attended Asbury and everywhere else in the world. We are so tempted, in our age dominated by emotions and visuals, to see the end of a huge event like Asbury and “to feel, once it ends, that Christ is no longer doing amazing things among His people.” But “[nothing] could be further from the truth,” as Cheryl Magness, a confessional Lutheran knows well. “Christ’s work among us does not depend on our doing — whether in the form of a multi-week revival, a beautiful church, powerful preaching, or the best music. Christ will claim His kingdom regardless of our frail, human efforts. What comfort there is in this!”
Last Friday, our heads or hands adorned with ashes, my church family and I remembered that not only from dust we are formed, and to dust we shall return. We are poor, miserable sinners, slowly dying, and completely helpless, in snow and in crowds and in all times and places. We also were given Christ Himself, through His word and body and blood, and told how God, our Creator and Redeemer, takes eternal care of us. We left the church in peace, knowing Christ has become sin for us, so that we would finally and totally be righteous before God.
And Lent goes on. We keep going to church. We don’t go to prove that our feelings about Jesus are real. We don’t go to test whether our belief is true. We go because He keeps bringing us back again and again, so that over and over, until our last breaths, Jesus keeps giving Himself to us.
If my sins give me alarm
And my conscience grieves me,
Let Your cross my fear disarm;
Peace of conscience give me.
Help me see forgiveness won
By Your holy passion,
If for me He slays His Son,
God must have compassion!
“Jesus, I Will Ponder Now” (LSB #440, vs. 5)