Great Awakening

Great Awakening

1. This cause a division in established churches because the people convinced more that the religious experience was individual faith and salvation.

2. After hearing one of Edward’s emotional sermons, they maybe think that is so true that the salvation and the religion was more intimate and was a direct result from God and could not be attained by human works.

3. The effects that the Great Awakening have on colonial society was that served to undermine allegiance to traditional authority.

Great Awakening

• Was a period of great revivalism that spread throughout the colonies on 1730s and 1740s.

• Put a greater importance on the individual and their spiritual experience.

• It began at the same time as the Enlightenment.

• Individuals grew to rely more on a personal approach to salvation than church dogma and doctrine.

• It pushed individual religious experience, decreasing the importance and weight of the clergy and the church in many instances.

• New denominations arose or grew in numbers as a result of the emphasis on individual faith and salvation.

First Great Awakening

• Was a wave of religious enthusiasm among Protestants that swept the American colonies in the 1730s and 1740s, leaving a permanent impact on American religion.

• Made religion intensely personal to the average person by creating a deep sense of spiritual guilt and redemption.

• The new styles of sermons and the way people practiced their faith breathed new life into religion in America.

• People began study the Bible at home.

• During the first decades of the 18th century, in the Connecticut River Valley, a series of local “awakenings” began in the Congregational church with ministers including Jonathan Edwards.

• The first new Congregational Church in the Massachusetts Colony during the great awakening period, was in 1731.

• The supporters of the Awakening and its evangelical thrust were: Presbyterians, Baptists and Methodists. They became the largest American Protestant denominations by the first decades of the 19th century.

• The opponents of that were: Anglicans, Quakers and Congregationalists

o Second Great Awakening occurred in 1800 to 1830s.

o The third occurred from the late 1850s to the 20th century.

o And the Fourth Great Awakening occurred in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Jonathan Edwards

• Was born in October 5, 1703.

• He was a Christian preacher and theologian.

• America’s most important and original philosophical theologian.

• Played a critical role in shaping the First Great Awakening, and oversaw some of the first revivals in 1733 to 1735 at his church in Northampton, Massachusetts.

• He emphasized a personal approach to religion.

• Delivered the sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” in 1741, in what explained that salvation was a direct result from God and could not be attained by human works as the Puritans preached.

• Was the grandfather of Aaron Burr, third Vice President of the United States.

GREAT AWAKENING

• In 1733, a Christian revival began in Northampton and reached an intensity in the winter of 1734. In six months, nearly 300 were admitted to the church.

• By 1735, the revival had spread and popped up independently across the Connecticut River. However, criticism of the revival began, and many New Englanders feared that Edwards had led his flock into fanaticism.

• Over the summer of 1735, a number of New Englanders were shaken by the revivals but not converted.

• Edwards was acquainted with George Whitefield, who was traveling the Thirteen Colonies on a revival tour in 1739-40. They worked together to

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