Great Awakening: New Age Spirituality Dictionary on Great Awakening

Great Awakening

A Christian revivalist movement that swept the American colonies from 1725 to 1760. In experiences of ecstatic joy and release, converts "awakened" to Christ and knew him experientially. By 1730, Theodore J. Frelinghuysen, a Dutch Calvinist, and Gilbert Tennent, a revivalist Presbyterian, had begun the Awakening from their churches in New Jersey. In 1734, Jonathan Edwards, the most formidable apologist for this experiential religion, witnessed to the "surprising work of God" in his Congregationalist church at Northampton, Massachusetts. British evangelist George Whitefield toured the colonies between 1738 and 1740 lending impetus and cohesiveness to the movement. Itinerant revivalists carried the Awakening to the South.

Its distinguishing characteristics included the insistence on the personal nature of conversion to Christ, itinerant ministry, and a novel preaching style appealing openly to the emotions. Mobile ministry and individual conversion tended to undermine the parish structure of the old tax-supported churches and led to a proliferation of separate and voluntary ones. The revivalists succeeded in revitalizing colonial Protestantism by a typically modern appeal to individual experience. They accommodated New World Calvinism and Anglicanism to conditions of dramatically expanded personal liberty.

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For more articles related to Great Awakening , see: Great Awakening , New Age, New Age Spirituality, Body Mind and Soul.

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