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The word “revivalism” is a bit of slur for some today, and not just the highbrows, or the mainline, or the progressive evangelicals. I hear this term at times from quite unlikely sources.

Photo by Christian Dubovan on Unsplash

What do people mean by the term when they are criticizing it? I’ve long pondered this, wrote about it in King Jesus Gospel, but it’s a term that still turns the lip upward for many. Why?

Most today blame revivalism for the origins of the Four Spiritual Laws (4SL) gospel. The way some Calvinists blame Arminianism for all things bad in the church, the way some Catholics blame Luther for the breakdown of Christian unity, so also many renewal-hoping evangelicals with a yearning for a more robust theology blame revivalists for the problems of evangelicalism. It’s a good target because no one has to use any evidence. 

I’m no expert on revivalism’s history, but I have dabbled around in quest for an answer about who reduced the gospel and what I have found, and which has to be somewhat tentative until I get my head around even more evidence, might surprise the critics of revivalism.  So a brief case that we need to focus more narrowly on the source and less generally on the movement dubbed “revivalism.”

Who’s to blame? Wesley? Edwards? Whitefield? Finney? Moody? Sunday? Graham?

But, after reading scores of pages in and about each, it appears to me that one cannot blame Wesley, Edwards, Whitefield or Finney. We could dip into Moody but what one finds in Moody is more or less the same emphases we find in Wesley and Finney, namely, a more robust and moral-transforming gospel. But something is to be found here that is of interest to our question: Moody’s famous gospel, which he may well have picked up from Henry Moorhouse[1] and which shows more influence from Spurgeon than anyone else, was expressed in three Rs:

ruined by the fall,
redeemed by the blood
and regenerated by the Spirit.

Coursing through all of Moody’s sermons is his famous emphasis on the love of God and less emphasis on the severity of God, and the absence of God as judge in his mnemonic expresses this. Alongside this simplified and mnemonic device of Moody was the notable feature, found just as intensely in Finney, that conversion was instantaneous and that it could happen now by faith (with less emphasis on repentance), and you could know if it had happened. Or else you needed to do it and you can.[2]

So I’ll tell you what I have concluded, and I could be wrong and I have nothing to lose there – I’m trying to map a history if I can. My conclusion so far is this: The aim of most critics of revivalism is the confluence of five elements:

(1) Billy Graham’s preaching with Youth for Christ from 1945 on,
(2), Bill Bright and Campus Crusade for Christ’s Four Spiritual Laws tract from 1952,
(3) the Bible as taught by Henrietta Mears,
(4) James Kennedy’s Evangelism Explosion,
and (5) the proliferation of gospel tracts that sought to rework the Four Spiritual Laws.

In short, revivalism is code for post World War II evangelistic rallies, sermons, evangelism, and tracts. Code for manufactured, institutionalized, and predictable evangelism techniques. As a footnote, Billy’s first impromptu sermon in the summer of 1936, when he was put on the spot in public by a friend, was a basic “Jesus died for us, we can be forgiven and have peace with God” kind of sermon (Martin, 68).

 Blaming revivalism is criticizing the evangelical habit of working harder at decisions than disciples; it’s pointing a long finger at a thin soteriology without a robust theology, Christology, pneumatology and ecclesiology; and it may well not know that it appears to me that “God loves you” as the first law in the four spiritual laws departs from any form of evangelism among previous revivalists. (I could be mistaken here.) Furthermore, this critique takes dead aim at individual conversion absent ecclesial formation and context. Finally, it is disgusted by techniques – music, lighting, ambience, the whole set-up – that are designed to generate emotive responses to stirring stories.

When people talk today about “revivalism” that is what most of them have in mind. I suggest that the silent chaser in this one is that people don’t want to criticize Billy Graham so they blame “revivalism” when the only real revivalism most of us have known is Billy Graham. To be sure, the Torrey Johnson-sponsored Billy Graham rode the success and even celebrity of Moody, a master of publicity, and Sunday, a larger-than-life personality who loved a crowd, when he began preaching. Nor should we forget the red scare at work in some of Billy’s early preaching. So it ought at least to be observed that Billy Graham didn’t make up that Youth for Christ gospel and neither did he invent any techniques (other than getting George Beverly Shea to sing hymns). I contend the swipes at revivalism are swipes at more or less Billy Graham, covered up out of respect.

So my contention is that we need to be courageous enough to say this: those who want to criticize revivalism are taking dead-aim at Youth for Christ’s Four Spiritual Laws, the gospel of Billy Graham’s crusades, James Kennedy’s Evangelism Explosion and the reduction of the gospel to gospel tracts. All mixed up with local contexts where evangelism was planned and predicted and platformed.

They are claiming that in the middle of the 20th Century American post-fundamentalist evangelicalism went astray and we are suffering for it even today.

On that, they are right.

[1] S. N. Gundry, Love Them In:  The Proclamation Theology of D. L. Moody (Chicago: Moody Press, 1999), 90. For the three R’s in Moody’s theology and preaching, see Gundry. Gundry has been able to dislodge many stereotypes and myths about Moody, and they are summarized on pp. 228-229.

[2] From a sermon in London by Moody called “What Must I Do to be Saved?”:

http://www.biblebelievers.com/moody_sermons/m17.html

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