The Great Awakening

When I was a young teen, I thought my emotional experiences in worship situations were the Holy Spirit speaking to me. That is what my college age Lutheran Camp Counselors told me and I believed them completely! Thus began my emotional walk with God - straight to Lutheran College where I could have a mountaintop experience every day!!! What could be better?

(Why didn't I remember Jesus telling his disciples at Transfiguration that it could not be so? But that He would be with them anyway?)

Fast forward to the years I was teaching my little girls a song from our history curriculum...that included the Great Awakening as a significant movement in America's historical timeline. Huh? What was the Great Awakening? What was the Second Great Awakening? I had no idea.



From http://www.wfu.edu/~matthetl/perspectives/four.html:

"The Awakening reinterpreted the meaning of the covenant between God and his creature. In Puritan theology the focus was on what God has done for us. In the aftermath of the Awakening, the new emphasis was on what man can do in response to God's great gift. The responsibility for salvation is not God's but man's."

From http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/eighteen/ekeyinfo/grawaken.htm:

"What historians call “the first Great Awakening” can best be described as a revitalization of religious piety that swept through the American colonies between the 1730s and the 1770s. That revival was part of a much broader movement, an evangelical upsurge taking place simultaneously on the other side of the Atlantic, most notably in England, Scotland, and Germany. In all these Protestant cultures during the middle decades of the eighteenth century, a new Age of Faith rose to counter the currents of the Age of Enlightenment, to reaffirm the view that being truly religious meant trusting the heart rather than the head, prizing feeling more than thinking, and relying on biblical revelation rather than human reason."

hmmm. Valuing emotional experiences over God's Word.....uh oh.

Long story short, when we get to the part in the history song that goes "...the first Great Awakening..." I added this comment: "..The first Great Awakening-BOO!" so the kids would know it was NOT the good thing that many Christians of that time unfortunately, believed. AND the song was written by folks who to this day believe it was a wonderful blessing to God's people.