Renewals, revivals, and awakenings are unpredictable, by definition. Christians should not credulously accept them as de facto works of God just because they’re on the news, or on YouTube. Sometimes revivals turn out just to be frothy chaos; sometimes they introduce aberrant beliefs and practices. But sometimes they produce godly results that last for generations: lives transformed and renewed, people called into vocational ministry, and communities brought to greater wholeness of bodies and souls.
In February 2023, the religion news beat took a sudden detour from its usual narratives of white evangelicals and politics, the rise of the unaffiliated (the “nones”), denominational schisms, and megachurch scandals. For several weeks, the news was dominated by an improbable and apparently unorchestrated revival at Methodist-affiliated Asbury University in central Kentucky. By late February, some 50,000 people had descended on the campus to pray and sing with Asbury students. The work’s logistical load at Asbury was massive (they did have courses to teach, after all!). University leaders eventually decided it was time to conclude the formal revival meetings.
As Jesus taught, the Holy Spirit does not operate on human calendars: “The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” (John 3:8) It may seem surprising, in contemporary college culture, for a huge student-led revival to come out of nowhere and capture the notice even of the secular media. Aren’t all today’s college students supposed to be censorious, anti-religious, and “woke”?
In our age, religion typically appears in the elite media only when it is connected to politics or scandal. But the Asbury renewal echoed a theme woven deep in American history, and in the history of Christianity: the outbreak of religious awakening in unexpected times and places. As Christians meditate on the mysteries of Easter, a fresh look at the Asbury revival suggests that Christianity means expectations will always be defied—even in 2023.
Earlier Revivals
The spiritual outpourings of the Book of Acts have been the primary Christian template for revival since the apostolic period. In America, the modern history of revivalism began with the First Great Awakening of the 1730s and ’40s. Although some skeptical scholars have dismissed the significance of those revivals, most American history courses still acknowledge the First Great Awakening as one of the biggest social upheavals before the American Revolution. It also provided a style of popular appeal and moral intensity to Patriots such as Patrick Henry, who attended Virginia revival meetings as a boy.
In some ways, the Second Great Awakening of the early 1800s was even more consequential than the First in shaping American Protestantism. As Ross Douthat recently noted, just when an aging Thomas Jefferson was (ludicrously) predicting in 1822 that rationalist Unitarianism would dominate American religion, the lawyer-turned evangelist Charles Finney was going through a conversion experience and contemplating a call to ministry.
Finney’s revivals introduced novel tactics and human-centered theology that bothered many traditionalist Christians, even at the time. But Finney’s success demonstrated again that the cool, skeptical rationalism of a Jefferson almost never appeals to the people at large. By the 1830s, upstate New York was so dramatically transformed by rampaging Finneyite revivals that some called it a “burned-over district.”
The Second Great Awakening was the greatest era of Protestant growth in American history. The old colonial denominations, especially the Congregationalists and Anglicans (the latter called Episcopalians after American independence), did modestly well during the Second Great Awakening. They remained the denominations of choice for many political and financial elites. But the real dynamos of the Second Great Awakening were the Baptists and especially the Methodists.
Baptists were a tiny sect as of 1776. Methodists were almost nonexistent in America at that time. By the eve of the Civil War, however, the Methodists and Baptists had become the largest Protestant denominations in the country, with tens of thousands of congregations each. If you go to virtually any downtown area in the South or the Midwest, there will be First Baptist Church on one corner, and First Methodist on the other. Those churches were largely founded during the Second Great Awakening.
The Methodists and Baptists, unlike the Episcopalians and Congregationalists, never were officially “established” churches in colonial America. They had an entrepreneurial spirit that the old churches lacked. If they didn’t pray hard and work hard, they had no reason to expect that their churches would survive.
Yet they didn’t “dumb down” religion to make it palatable to the culturally fashionable.

Written by Gregg R. Allison |
Friday, August 26, 2022
This enlivening work of the Spirit shouldn’t surprise us. Jesus himself affirmed, “It is the Spirit who gives life” (John 6:63). The mystery of godliness confesses that Jesus was “justified” or “vindicated by the Spirit,” a reference to the Son’s resurrection (1 Tim. 3:16). And Paul underscored that Christ “was declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead” (Rom 1:4). With his resurrection through the Spirit crowning his saving work, Christ is said to be raised for our justification (Rom 4:25).

When Christians think of the atonement, their attention is riveted on Jesus Christ, the crucified one. And rightly so. But as proper as this focus is, the Son wasn’t the only member of the Trinity engaged in that act of sacrifice for human sin.
Indeed, we may think of the Father’s action in the death of his Son. After all, Jesus’s haunting cry of dereliction from the cross was, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:35, echoing Ps. 22:1). Then, with his last breath, Jesus called out loudly, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit!” (Luke 23:46). These gasping words of Jesus underscore the Father’s role in the atonement.
Less transparent is the role of the Holy Spirit. This is true in general, as theology is working to remedy the rather meager consideration it has often given to the Spirit and his work in creation, salvation, and consummation. Perhaps the work of the Holy Spirit that has been most neglected is his role in the atonement. And this brings us to our topic, with its twofold emphasis: (1) the role of the Holy Spirit (2) in penal substitutionary atonement.
This second emphasis was chosen because of an increasing number of attacks by some on penal substitution (Green and Baker; Weaver; Boersma; Heim; Baker). Others maintain that penal substitution is at the heart of the idea of atonement (Packer, ch. 2). Before we get too far, however, a definition is in order.
Defining Penal Substitutionary Atonement
Penal substitutionary atonement is an interpretation or model of what Christ’s death on the cross accomplished. As I’ve written elsewhere, its major tenets include:
1. The atonement is grounded in the holiness of God who, being perfectly holy, hates and punishes sin.2. A penalty for sin must be paid.3. People cannot pay the penalty for their sins and live; rather, the penalty is death.4. Only God can pay the penalty for sin, but he must partake of human nature to pay for human beings.5. By his death, the God-man, Jesus Christ, atoned for human sin.6. The atonement had to be accomplished in this way (“penal substitution theory”).
Now, this definition rightly highlights the central role of the Son, but there’s much more to be said, because the Son never acts alone.
Inseparable Operations and the Holy Trinity
Because God is triune, the work of the second person is never separated from the work of the first and third persons. This has traditionally been referred to as the doctrine of inseparable operations. It means that in every divine work, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit act indivisibly with one will and one power. For example, in the divine act of creation, God the Father spoke the world into existence through the Word (John 1:3)—the agency of God the Son—as God the Holy Spirit was hovering over the original chaos (Gen 1:2).
God the Holy Spirit was active from beginning to end in the divine work of atonement.
Read More
Related Posts:

A common critique is that this doctrine makes for lazy Christians. The objection goes something like this: If I am justified merely by faith and not works, then there is no need for me to do good works. But the Reformers scoffed at that notion, because it misinterprets what God is doing for us through faith in Christ! Since our salvation is secured by a gracious gift of saving belief in Christ’s works, then that will stir us up to love and good works.

To understand the importance of the statement “faith alone,” we need to remember why the Reformers sought to recover the doctrine of God’s grace. They wanted to emphasize the fact that we are made right with God not through any merit of our own but rather through God’s own free grace. In Christ, we receive unmerited favor from God.
The Roman Catholics in the sixteenth century would have agreed with this to some extent. They indeed believed we needed God’s grace to get to heaven. But how do we get the grace? Here’s what they said at the Council of Trent in 1547 (which is still Roman Catholic doctrine today):

If anyone says that the sinner is justified by faith alone, meaning that nothing else is required to cooperate in order to obtain the grace of justification, and that it is not in any way necessary that he be prepared and disposed by the action of his own will, let him be accursed. (Sixth Session, Canon IX)

Faith is the gift of God.
This is very strong language. What Rome is saying is that if you believe that it is purely by faith that you receive God’s grace, you will be accursed—that is, damned to hell. What’s the problem with this? It’s the very teaching of Scripture that they are condemning! Paul could not be clearer:

For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. (Eph. 2:8-9)

Rome wanted to say that we are saved by God’s grace in cooperation with faith and works. In fact, it even saw faith itself as one of the works that earns us God’s grace. But you can’t earn grace—otherwise, it’s not grace, not a gift. Rome taught a theological contradiction, one that Paul warned against in Ephesians 2.
In response to Rome’s perversion of biblical doctrine, the Reformers returned to the Scriptural truth that nothing we do can earn favor with God.
Read More
Related Posts: