Higher education has played a key role in the church’s training of true two-handed warriors since its earliest days. One could argue that the manner in which Jesus trained his apostles was so consistent with first-century rabbinic educational practices that the church was actually established with a ‘school’ at its very heart. And there is little doubt that the church began establishing more formal schools as early as the First Century when Mark the Evangelist and/or his disciples founded the world’s first ‘Christian College’ in the catechetical school connected to the Roman rhetorical university at Alexandria. Soon, this blending of the Spirit-driven early church with the truth-seeking Greco-Roman liberal arts tradition proved a powerful combination.
College Against Culture
It is difficult to imagine what European civilization might have become without the integrative mindset fostered among the faculty and students of the Alexandrian school, including three of the most influential minds of the Patristic era: Clement, Origen, and Athanasius. This single educational community provided clear-headed theological reflection and courageous cultural leadership in some of the most significant turning points in early church history.
This was particularly evident in their fourth century battle against the heresy of Arianism. By this time the Alexandrian school had grown into an academic powerhouse with strong secular connections and studies, so much so that Eusebius reports that even nonChristian noblemen entrusted their sons to instruction there. The school became the training ground from which their most famous alumnus, Athanasius, launched his attack against the official Roman endorsement of Arianism. Each time he was rebuffed and even excommunicated at Rome, Athanasius would return to Alexandria for counsel and prayer with the faculty and students of this robust educational community. The common perception that orthodoxy finally prevailed because of Athanasius contra mundum, “One Athanasius against the world,” is far too individualistic an interpretation. The battle was actually, “One Christian college against their culture.” And the Christian college won.
Over the centuries since, Christian colleges and theological seminaries have often proven significantly more effective than local churches in nurturing faculty and students whose leadership is genuinely transformational. Although God often furthers his kingdom through unschooled saints, a surprising number of the names in the honor-roll of church history are intricately connected to the schools where they studied and/or taught. Martin Luther and the University of Wittenberg; Timothy Dwight and Yale; John Henry Newman and Oxford, Charles G. Finney and Oberlin College; Fr. Michael Scanlon and the Franciscan University of Steubenville; D. L. Moody and A. J. Gordon and the institutions that bear their names to this day, each stand as a monument to the extent and influence of Christian higher education.
The Life of the Mind and the Life of the Spirit
One of the keys to the influence of these learning communities is the surprising degree to which the life of the mind and the life of the Spirit can and often do coexist in these learning communities. Church-related colleges and universities birthed many of the most significant reformation and renewal movements in history, while most reformation and renewal movements have, in turn, spawned colleges themselves. This is particularly event in American higher education where more than half of our first 600 colleges were established by evangelicals. In fact, the broad historic definition of the term evangelical is best applied to movements who hold to both the power of the Holy Spirit to produce new birth and holy lives with the power of the holy scriptures to guide and shape the life and practice of the church.
It is in these renewal schools that the integration of the life of the Spirit and the life of the mind has achieved its greatest synergy. The study of the Word of God, and the World of God, when empowered by the Spirit of God has proven profoundly transformational in the lives of students and in their ability to transform church and society. In other words, they were effective because they were able to train young men and women to become what we have called two-handed warriors. By cultivating both the life of the mind and the life of the Spirit they were able to produce students capable of mastering both faith formation and culture making.
The Troubled History of Maintaining a Two-Handed Approach
This potential Spirit/Mind synergy is of particular importance to faith-based colleges at the outset of the twenty-first-century. The dawn of the new millennium finds the evangelical College movement emerging from a century of cultural isolation into a remarkable renaissance. Attendance is booming, endowments are up, intellectual respectability is growing, U.S. News and World Report ratings are climbing. It is quite possible that the twenty-first-century will present the Christian college movement with the opportunity to articulate a distinctively Christian worldview in American society in a manner unparalleled in over one hundred years.
However, the history of American higher education is littered with colleges who have abandoned their lofty ambitions to train two-handed warriors for a decidedly more “one-handed” approach. Burtchaell (1998), Marsden and Longfield (1992), Marsden (1994), Reuben (1996), Benne (2001), Ringenberg (2006), Budde and Wright (2004) have carefully outlined how easily colleges lose their spiritual cutting-edge. Whether Catholic or Protestant, Reformed or Wesleyan, nearly every time a church-founded college or university manages to achieve societal respectability and financial independence they have immediately abandoned their integrative mission. Like prodigal sons, once they “received their inheritance” they have immediately “set off for a distant country where they squandered their wealth” and their ability to train true two-handed warriors. Their graduates go into the world with one hand tied behind their backs to the detriment of their own souls and the culture they create. It turns out that balancing a commitment to the life of the mind and the life of the Spirit even in a Christian college is not so easy as one would suppose.
The Twenty-First Century Challenge
Will the twenty-first-century be any different? Burtchaell’s (1998) chronicling of the demise of nearly every Christian college in American history (including at least two CCCU schools) reads like a modern-day Book of Judges. Knowing that within a few generations of the death of nearly every college’s founding leadership, “the people of God did what was evil in the sight of the LORD and worshipped other Gods” (Judges 3:7) is depressing reading for anyone who has given their life to Christian higher education.
Burtchaell concludes his book with a sobering challenge:
“The failures of the past, so clearly patterned, so foolishly ignored. And so lethally repeated, emerge pretty clearly from these stories. Anyone who requires further imagination to recognize and remedy them is not up to the task of trying again, and better” (p. 851).
Will the leaders of 21st century Christian colleges rise to his challenge? The future of two-handed higher education may very well depend upon it.
In future posts I will explore key movements history of higher education and how their educational philosophy and practices could help 21st century Christian colleges nurture two-handed warriors.
More than a century before the New Deal, Public Education, or the Civil Rights movements, the Second Great Awakening fostered a nation-wide “benevolent empire” of care for the poor, freedom for the oppressed and education for all.
By Gary David Stratton, Professor, Johnson University (TN) and James L. Gorman, Assistant Professor, Johnson University
Generally regarded as a second groundswell of evangelical Protestant religious interest following the Revolutionary War, the Second Great Awakening was more extensive and enduring than the Great Awakening of the 1730s-1740s. The Second Great Awakening began as a rural movement in the 1790’s and achieved notoriety in the Cane Ridge Revival (1801) led by Barton Stone in the south and the Yale College revival (1802) led by Timothy Dwight in the north. The movement was marked by great educational and social reform, culminating in the ministry and Oberlin college presidency of Charles Grandison Finney, who published one of revivalism’s most influential works, Revival Lectures, in 1835.
Kidd (2007) asserts that dividing the early American awakening into two distinct timelines may “obscure the fact that the evangelical movement continued to develop after 1743 and before 1800” (p. xix). No certain or obvious stopping point for the Great Awakening exists; the same is true for the Second Great Awakening. For instance, Scots-Irish Presbyterianism was crucial to the story of evangelicalism’s development during the Revolutionary period and provides a direct link from the colonial Great Awakening to the early-republic Second Great Awakening (Schmidt). Similarly, New Divinity ministers kept Jonathan Edwards’ vision of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit alive in Congregational churches across New England and into New York, while Pietist revivals in Pennsylvania and New Jersey never completely died out. The same could be said for developments among Baptists, Methodists, Anglicans, etc., who each sought the outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon their ministries.
Noll (2003) notes that while awakenings may be works of the Holy Spirit, such movements can also be studied as the effect of human leadership. “By taking note of the agents who, whether perceived as servants of God or merely adept shapers of culture, historical explanation adds the sphere of human responsibility to realms of theological principle, religious conviction or social tectonics” (p. 141). By following three key exemplars of the movement, it is possible to sketch out many of the key characteristics of the Second Great Awakening.
Barton Stone and the Cane Ridge Revival (1801)
If one were to mark the “beginning” of the Second Great Awakening, based on criteria of numerical size and geographical extent of awakening, the best starting point would be the “Great Revival in the West” (1797-1805). The leaders were revivalist Presbyterians who followed Jonathan Edwards’ balanced approach to awakening to stoke the fires of awakening through the Revolutionary era who found particularly fertile ground in Kentucky. The rapid expansion of the fledgling nation across the Appalachians created a vast territory with little or no rule of law, where settlers and outlaws often battled to an uneasy seasons of peace, and leaving a spiritual vacuum which revivalists rushed in to fill.
One of the best known of these revivalists was Barton Stone, a “discontented Calvinist” and pastor of two Presbyterian churches in Bourbon County, Kentucky. After witnessing revival in Scottish style “sacramental meetings” in Logan County under the preaching of James McGready (who Stone knew and trusted from his academy days) Stone became convinced that God could grant the gift of faith without an extensive season of “seeking” God. He returned to Bourbon County determined to preach that his men could “believe now, and be saved.” (Alvarez, p. 45) After growing success in Concord began to attract large crowds, Stone called for a weeklong sacramental meeting at Cane Ridge. The meetings attracted between 10,000 and 20,000 people with many “falling” under the power of the Spirit and coming to faith in a matter of hours (Conkin).
Denominational ties began to lose their meaning in meetings where as many as seven pastors from four denominations were preaching in various parts of the camp simultaneously. Calling themselves simply “Christians,” the movement spread throughout the Ohio and Tennessee Valleys, where Stone eventually joined forces with Alexander Campbell in 1832, forming a denomination with a handshake. Denominational unity (a strong ideal of Jonathan Edwards’ revivalism) and innovation (first modeled by George Whitefield in the Great Awakening) became hallmarks or the Stone-Campbell movement and the entire Second Great Awakening. “The Disciples, Christian Churches, and Churches of Christ founded by these leaders effectively evangelized the Upper South and opening West because they had translated the Christian message into an effective American idiom” (Noll, p. 51).
Timothy Dwight and Yale College
When the faculties at Harvard and Yale rejected the (First) Great Awakening, entrenching these institutions as “Old Light” bastions, “New Light” friends of the awakening were quick to take up the charge in the founding of a flurry of new colleges with a revival bent. Some New Divinity colleges, such as Dartmouth, and Amherst, were founded directly on Jonathan Edwards’ principles of revival. Others, like Williams, and Rutgers were later captured by followers of Edwards’ educational vision. In the end, nearly all colleges of the era were eventually influenced by the Edwards/Dwight project of integrating revivalism with Scottish Common Sense Realism, in no small degree due to influence of his grandson, Timothy Dwight, who was named to the presidency of Yale in 1795 in a striking Edwardsean takeover of what had once been an “Old Light” institution.
Like his grandfather, preaching was central to Dwight’s approach to preparing the way for spiritual awakening and presidential sermons were the core of the college curriculum. Dwight preached twice each Sunday in mandatory college church services: a morning sermon addressed to a doctrinal topic, and an afternoon discourse on more practical and experiential applications of faith, using scripture and Common Sense Realism (Thomas Reid and John Witherspoon) to defend his theology. Still, revival eluded Dwight for his first seven years at Yale, as students commitment to ‘French infidel philosophy’ often exceeded those committed to Christian faith.
It wasn’t until students who had been touched by revivals in the rural churches of the Connecticut River Valley instituted a Jonathan Edwards’ style concert of prayer–a weekly meeting of “united and fervent prayer that God might pour out his Spirit upon the college”–that the Second Great Awakening finally came to Yale. By the end of the summer term, no less than eighty out of 230 students had been “hopefully converted to God and admitted to the college church, thirty-five of which became preachers of the gospel.
Yale experienced three further revivals under Dwight and these outpourings of the Spirit became a welcomed and promoted aspect of the president’s educational program. When students petitioned to cancel classes in a season of spiritual awakening, Dwight refused and instead carefully guided them back to a biblical holism committed to fostering the life of the Spirit in the day-to-day life of the college; an approach that eventually spread to many if not most of America’s colleges.
Under Dwight’s presidency Yale College grew into the largest and most influential college in the Americas and so that higher education became a hallmark of the Second Great Awakening. At one point 35 of the 150 college presidents in the United States were graduates of Dwight’s Yale. Marsden notes that Dwight’s emphasis upon “revival and moral philosophy, were the chief collegiate supplements to traditions of regulated worship…” and laid the foundation for nearly a century of academic ascendancy that “may be called with justice the great age of Christian higher education in the history of the country” (p. 58).
Noll notes that Dwight and these “revival colleges” were instrumental in effecting a “surprising intellectual synthesis” of evangelicalism and common-sense moral reasoning that dominated the nation’s thinking and led to the remarkable “Christianization” of American society (Noll, 2005, p. 9).
Charles Grandison Finney
Regarded as the father of modern revivalism, Charles G. Finney was the human catalyst for some of the most impressive urban revivals in United States history and in the process created the methodology for virtually all evangelists who followed. In 1821 he was converted in the early stages of the Second Great Awakening and left his law studies with the declaration, “I have a retainer from the Lord.” After brief theological training, the local Presbytery licensed Finney as an itinerant home missionary in upstate New York. Bright, athletic, unusually tall, and musically gifted, his theatrical preaching drew enthusiastic crowds and produced numerous converts. The largely “New School Presbyterian” New York Presbytery embraced these measures and published a pamphlet of his revival efforts in the tradition of Jonathan Edwards’ Faithful Narrative.
Finney considered himself a theological descendant of Jonathan Edwards’ revivalism. However, his highly volunteeristic theology of conversion led him to reject Calvinistic views and preach “man’s duty to change his own heart.” Rather than pressing his audience to begin the long process of seeking a salvation granted only by God, Finney called sinners to make an instantaneous decision to repent and believe. His view of conversion as a “free decision” led him to adopt and popularize a highly “democratic practice” of evangelism known as New Measures (Smith, 2007, 2-8), including dramatic and colloquial preaching, an extensive time of singing before preaching, the inclusion of women as leaders, the use of an anxious seat (precursor to the altar call), the use of celebrity, novelty, and story to persuade, and public prayer meetings for God to pour out his Spirit upon particular sinners.
In 1830 Finney moved his efforts into urban settings with a tremendous success in a great revival in Rochester, NY that is still regarded as “the greatest revival in American history” (Cross, p. 13). The experience launched Finney into national prominence, and after accepting brief pastorates in New York and Boston, he eventually settled at Oberlin College (OH) as a faculty member and later president. It was during this era that Finney delivered and published his wildly popular Revival Lectures, one of the most widely read books in American religious history. Rather than instructing evangelicals to wait passively for God to send revival, Finney’s great confidence in God’s willingness to grant the awakening gift of the Spirit in answer to prayer led him to declare, “A revival is no more a miracle than a crop of wheat.”
William G. McLoughlin’s interpretation that Finney was asserting that revivals were ‘worked up’ while Edwards believed revivals were ‘prayed down’ (p. 11) misses Finney’s remarkable emphasis upon prayer and the sophisticated nuance of divine and human interaction in both revivalists’ theologies. Still, it seems a fitting epitaph for much evangelism after Finney when “revival meetings” became standard practice in virtually every Christian denomination in the United States and beyond.
Finney’s emphasis on the filling of the Holy Spirit as the key to perfectionistic holiness evidenced in self-sacrificing love for the lost, the disadvantaged, and the oppressed became the impetus for his version of the Second Great Awakening’s vision to create a “benevolent empire” of “good government, Christian education, temperance reform, relief for the poor and the abolition of slavery” (T. L. Smith, p. 60-61).
Oberlin was one of the first colleges in the nation to admit blacks and women as students in full standing and the clear leader for the anti-slavery movement in the mid-west. Due to the enduring popularity of Finney’s Memoirs and Revival Lectures, his influence upon revivalist evangelicalism eventually rivaled and even eclipsed that of Jonathan Edwards. Noll contends,
“[A] good case can be made that Finney should be ranked with Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, and Andrew Carnegie […] as one of the most important public figures in nineteenth-century America” (Noll, 2002, p. 176).
While it is as difficult to find a clear ending point to the Second Great Awakening as it is to find a clear beginning, its impact was felt deep into the nineteenth-century and beyond. More than a century before the New Deal, Public Education, or the Civil Rights movements, the Second Great Awakening fostered a nation-wide “benevolent empire” of care for the poor, freedom for the oppressed and education for all
Religiously, the awakening left enduring practices of concerted prayer, revival/camp meetings, anxious seats/altar calls, new measures, that still influence nearly every evangelical Protestant denomination today. Theologically, the Second Great Awakening marked the end what Guelzo calls one hundred years of “theological bungee-jumping” between God and human roles in conversion, so that gradually and in increments the idea of gradually seeking salvation was replaced by immediate conversion.
Politically, it is difficult to miss the connection to the democratization of American society and the democratization of the church. However, the direction of that influence is difficult to measure. Globally, the Second Great Awakening birthed the beginning of a massive evangelical missionary movement, first to the Native American communities and eventually to foreign missions. Culturally, the awakening contributed to a sense of national cohesion at a time of profound social change, but most likely also fueled a sense of manifest destiny that deeply wounded the very Native American populations the revivalists most wanted to evangelize.
Gary David Stratton (Ph.D. Biola University) is University Professor of Spiritual Formation and Cultural Engagement and Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Johnson University (TN). James L. Gorman (Ph.D. Baylor University) is Assistant Professor of History at Johnson University. Based upon Stratton and Gorman’s “The Great Awakening [1730s to 1740s]” in the “Encyclopedia of Christianity in the United States” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016).
In these ‘revival colleges’ the anti-slavery movement found a welcomed sanctuary, the largest foreign missionary movement in history found its origin, and literature, art and the sciences found a home in the academic curriculum, resulting in a profound spiritual/intellectual synthesis throughout American society.
While most Christian traditions look to the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost as the historical birth of the church , seventeenth and eighteenth-century Puritans in England and colonial America emphasized the outpouring of the Spirit as God’s ongoing means for awakening unbelievers to seek the Lord and reviving the spiritual life of believers. The Puritans believed in religious education and the personal catechizing of every family in every parish every year, however their pastoral experience warned them that such efforts would eventually fall upon deaf ears and hard hearts if not for the continual renewing work of the Spirit. They developed an ecclesiology that all but demanded outpourings of the Spirit recur periodically for ongoing reformation of the church and society.
No one did more to help set Old World revivalism on its feet in the new world, than Northampton, MA Congregationalist minister Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758). A “towering intellectual figure” often described as “America’s greatest theologian,” Edwards viewed the outpouring of the Spirit as an acceleration or intensification[viii] of the Holy Spirit’s normal activity so that much is “done in a day or two, as at ordinary times … is done in a year.” Like all Puritans he held that such outpourings were God-granted events to be sought by ministers and their congregations as their only hope for advancing the gospel on the earth: “(F)rom the fall of man to this day wherein we live the Work of Redemption in its effect has mainly been carried on by remarkable pourings out of the Spirit of God.” (See, Do America’s Colleges Need ‘Revival’?)
Edwards wasn’t talking in mere theoretical language. In 1734 over 300 men and women—nearly a quarter of Northampton’s population—professed conversion to Christ in a single six-month period. “There was scarcely in the town, old or young, left unconcerned about the great things of the eternal world… The work of conversion was carried on in a most astonishing manner… and the number of true saints multiplied… (until) the town seemed to be full of the presence of God.” Edwards’ popular account of Northampton’s revival, Faithful Narrative (1737), caused churches across the colonies to pray for similar outpourings. It wasn’t long before the answer came.
The First Great Evangelical Awakening
The First Great Awakening was a broad religious awakening felt throughout much of the British Isles and American colonies from roughly 1734 to 1742. Early movements included field preaching revivals in the United Kingdom under the leadership of Methodist leaders John and Charles Wesley, a revival in the Connecticut River valley that eventually spread to Jonathan Edwards’ church, as well as revivals among Dutch Pietist immigrants in New Jersey under the leadership of Theodore Freylinguysen, and New Jersey Presbyterians under the leadership of Gilbert Tennent. The awakening reached its zenith in the theatrical preaching of British Methodist George Whitefield, whose evangelistic tour of the colonies in 1740-1741 became the first genuinely “national” event in American history.
In ten weeks Whitefield spoke to audiences whose total attendance equaled at least half the population of the colonies he visited, including “virtually every New England inhabitant.” By the time the awakening subsided as much as twenty-percent of the total population of the American colonies had professed faith in Christ. Due to the tremendous evangelistic impact of these revivals, leaders became known as evangelicals and the movement first became known the Evangelical Awakening. As Noll concludes, The Great Awakening, “marked the beginning of a distinctly evangelical history . . . (and) a consistent pattern of convictions and attitudes that have been maintained over the centuries since.” (See, The Great Awakening & the Birth of American Celebrity Culture)
Religious Affections and Religious Education
Despite the apparent victory of revivalism, Edwards was convinced that the weakness of the First Great Awakening rested in ministers’ uncritical acceptance of revival experiences and mere professions of faith as signs of genuine conversion. Like his Old World forebears, he sought a thorough reformation of both the individual and society. He penned A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1743) to challenge ministers to guide those who professed faith away from short-lived counterfeit conversions and towards genuine faith.  Edwards believed that only an encounter with the “divine and supernatural light” provided by Holy Spirit was capable of transforming human affections out of the sinful lowlands of self-interest and into love of God for God’s sake. This meant that the only uncounterfeitable fruits of genuine repentance were neither emotional experiences nor ecstatic visions, but rather a sacrificial love of others and passion to grow in the knowledge of Christ for no other reward than knowing his love. Parents and ministers were charged with catechizing the next generation, as well as reminding them of the glory of heaven and the ever-present threat of hell, so that by rigorous discipline they might experience genuine conversion. Edwards exhorted his congregation, “The religious education of children is one of the principle means of grace that God has appointed in his church.” (See, Jonathan Edwards Goes to the Movies: Religious Affections and Story Structure.)
The Second Great Awakening
This quest to educate and revive an entire generation toward genuine faith and experiential knowledge of God drove Edwards’ spiritual descendants in the development of perhaps the most influential educational movement in American history—the revival college. When the faculties at Harvard and Yale rejected the First Great Awakening, friends of the revival (known as “New Lights”) founded of a flurry of liberal arts colleges with a revival bent. Some, like Dartmouth, Amherst, and Mount Holyoke were founded directly on Edwardsean principles. Others, like Williams, Princeton, Rutgers and the University of Georgia were later captured by followers of Edwards’ educational vision. In the end, nearly all colleges of the era were eventually influenced by the Edwardsean project. As noted higher education historian and Edwards biographer George. M. Marsden notes, “Much of the antebellum collegiate education was shaped by New Englanders with an Edwardsean heritage, (who) controlled most of the nations leading colleges, including the state universities.”
Timothy Dwight and Yale College
The power of the revival college movement was made possible in no small degree due to the influence of Edwards’ grandson, Timothy Dwight (1753-1817). Dwight was appointed president of Yale College in 1795 in a striking pro-awakening takeover of what had once been an anti-awakening institution. Yale experienced four revivals under Dwight and these outpourings of the Spirit were clearly a welcomed and promoted aspect of the president’s educational program. Yet Dwight was so committed to the life of the Spirit flowing through the normal day-to-day life of the college he refused to cancel classes during seasons of spiritual awakening, even when petitioned by the student body to do so. Dwight instead carefully guided them his students to a more holistic approach to the Spirit’s work in the life of college, an approach which eventually spread to many if not most of America’s colleges.  Under Dwight’s presidency Yale grew into the largest and most influential college in the Americas and the educational center of what came to be known as the Second Great Awakening (c. 1790-1840)—a society-wide transformation of much greater duration and depth than the more short-lived First Great Awakening. (See, The College Chapel: Puritan Relic or Campus Hot Spot.)
Revival Colleges and Social Reform
The best of these revival colleges formed the intellectual backbone of a transatlantic revivalism that became a dominant theme in America from 1800 to 1860, and a “central mode of our search for national identity.” In these colleges, literature, art and the sciences moved into the academic curriculum for the first time, the anti-slavery movement found a welcomed sanctuary, the largest foreign missionary movement in history found its origin, a vision for universal public education found a champion, women and African-American students matriculated for the first time,, a resilient ethic of moral citizenship found a remarkable incubator , and a generation of national leaders marked by both the knowledge of learning and the knowledge of God was born. (See, Higher Education and the Knowledge of God.)
Mark A. Noll notes that the leaders of these colleges were key to a “surprising intellectual synthesis” of revival and common-sense moral philosophy that dominated American thinking from 1790 to 1865 and which led to the remarkable “Christianization” of American society. Dramatic church growth among all revival-oriented denominations—particularly Baptists and Methodists led to the formation of nearly 500 new revival colleges across the Western frontier. These educators were revivalists first and foremost  Their effectiveness as educators came, not in spite of their commitment to the work of the Holy Spirit in higher education, but rather because of it. (See, The Holy Spirit and the Liberal Arts)
Revivalism Ruined and Renewed
Sadly, the success of revivalism eventually led its undoing as churches and colleges began to rely upon periodic seasons of awakening to produce spiritual maturity in their members rather than ongoing religious education and discipleship. Highly volunteeristic conceptions of conversion and high-pressure tactics to secure decisions gradually eroded Edwardsean concerns regarding counterfeit conversions and safeguards to encourage the genuine fruit of Spirit-created repentance. The publication of Christian Nurture (1847) by Congregationalist minister Horace Bushnell (1802- 1876) began an intellectual and practical backlash against revivalism’s over-emphasis upon public professions of faith, and birthed the modern religious education movement.
While educational leaders such as A. B. Simpson (Nyack College), A. J. Gordon (Gordon), and V. Raymond Edmond (Wheaton), as well as Baptist, Wesleyan, Pentecostal, and Charismatic renewal movements preserved concern for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit and even sparked modest revivals in many churches and colleges, modern evangelicalism has yet to produce a synthesis of revival and Christian education capable of effecting a society-wide movements on the level of the First and Second Great Awakenings.
Adapted from, Gary David Stratton. 2015. “Revivalism,” in George Thomas Kurian and Mark A. Lamport, eds. Encyclopedia of Christian Education, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littleton Academic Press of America.
 Joel 2:28-32; Ezekiel 39:29; Acts 1:4-8; 2:1-21; 4:24-31.
 Thomas S. Kidd, The Great Awakening: the Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 2; Mark A. Noll, The Rise of Evangelicalism: the Age of Edwards, Whitefield, and the Wesleys (Downers Grove, Ill: InterVarsity Press, 2003), 18. Richard F. Lovelace, Dynamics of spiritual life: an Evangelical Theology of Renewal (Downers Grove, Ill: Inter-Varsity Press, 1979), 121.
 Richard Baxter, The Reformed Pastor (Morgan, PA: Soli Deo Gloria Publications, 2002), 67-122. See also, Perry Miller and Thomas Herbert Johnson, The Puritans (New York: Harper & Row, 1963). J.I. Packer, The Redemption & Restoration of Man in the Thought of Richard Baxter: a Study in Puritan Theology (Carlisle, UK: Paternoster Press, 2003).
 Donald G. Bloesch, The Holy Spirit: Works and Gifts (Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press, 2000), 106-110. See also, Geoffrey F. Nuttall and Peter Lake. The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 15ff.
 George M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: a Life New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 152. See also, Noll, Rise of Evangelicalism, 53-60.
 Harry S. Stout, The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 228. See also, Noll, Evangelicalism, 44.
 Gerald R. McDermott, Understanding Jonathan Edwards: an Introduction to America’s Theologian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Robert W. Jenson, America’s Theologian: a Recommendation of Jonathan Edwards (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
 Samuel C. Storms, Signs of the Spirit: an Interpretation of Jonathan Edwards’ Religious Affections (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2007), 25.
 Jonathan Edwards, “A faithful narrative of the surprising work of God in the conversion of many Souls in Northampton, and neighbouring towns and villages of the County of Hampshire, in the Province of the Massachusetts-Bay in New England (1737),” in The Works of Jonathan Edwards,Vol. 4:The Great Awakening, ed. C. C. Goen (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1972), p. 21.
 Jonathan Edwards, A History of the Work of Redemption (1755) (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 138.
 Ibid, 13-14.
 Noll, Evangelicalism, 71-99.
 Harry S. Stout,The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 1991).
 Noll, Evangelicalism, 13. See also, Gary David Stratton, “Paparazzi in the Hands of an Angry God: Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, and the Birth of American Celebrity Culture,” The Other Journal (Fall, 2010), 23-35.
 Stout,Divine Dramatist, 90; Frank Lambert, Pedlar in Divinity: George Whitefield and the Transatlantic Revivals, 1737-1770 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 128; Arnold Dallimore, George Whitefield: The Life and Times of the Great Evangelist of the Eighteenth-century Revival (Westchester, IL: Cornerstone Books, 1979), 527; and Harry S. Stout, “Whitefield, George,” Dictionary of Christianity in America, ed. Daniel G. Reid (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1990), 1252.
 For further exploration into the realities versus myths of the Great Awakening see, Frank Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening” (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); Harry S. Stout, “Religion, Communications, and the Ideological Origins of the American Revolution” The William and Mary Quarterly: A Magazine of Early American History 34 (1977), 519-541; and Michael J. Crawford, Seasons of grace: colonial New England’s revival tradition in its British context (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 13ff.
 Noll, The Rise of Evangelicalism, 18-19.
 Jonathan Edwards, A treatise concerning religious affections, in three parts (1746), in The Works of President Edwards, vol. 2, ed. John E. Smith and H. S. Stout(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959).
 Jonathan Edwards, “A divine and supernatural light (Matthew 16:17).” In Sermons and Discourses, 1730-1733, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, 17, ed. M. Valeri and H. S. Stout (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 405-426.
 Marsden, Edwards, 28-29.
 Jonathan Edwards, In Sermons and Discourses, 1743-1758, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, 25, ed. Wilson H. Kimnach (Jonathan Edwards Center, Yale University, 2008), 723.
 Leon. B. Richardson, History of Dartmouth College (Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth College Publications, 1932), 239-40.
 Claude M. Fuess, Amherst, the Story of a New England College (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1935), 30.
 Joseph A. Conforti, Jonathan Edwards, Religious tradition & American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 69-89.
 David W. Kling, “The New Divinity and Williams College, 1793-1836” (Religion and American Culture, 1996): 195-223.
 Frederick Rudolph and John R. Thelin, The American College and University: a History (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1990).
 Ian H. Murray, Revival and Revivalism: the Making and Marring of American Evangelicalism, 1750-1858 (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1994), 132.
 Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 499. George M. Marsden and Bradley J. Longfield (Eds.), The Secularization of the Academy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 8-9.
 Brooks Mather Kelley, Yale: a History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974).
 Revivals were noted in 1802, 1808, 1812-1813, 1815 by Chauncey Goodrich, “Narrative of revivals of religion at Yale College from its commencement to the present time.” Journal of the American Education Society X, 1838, p. 295-302. See also, Charles E. Cunningham, Timothy Dwight, 1752-1817: a Biography (New York: Macmillan, 1969), 300-334.
 John Wolffe, The Expansion of Evangelicalism: the Age of Wilberforce, More, Chalmers and Finney (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2007).
 Noll, Evangelicalism, 200.
 George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth Century Evangelicalism, 1870-1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 222. See also, Richard Carwardine, Transatlantic Revivalism: Popular Evangelicalism in Britain and America, 1790-1865 (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1978)
 William C. Ringenberg, The Christian College (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2006), 85-96.
 Julie Reuben, The Making of the Modern University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 74-77.
 Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 9.
 Smith, Revivalism and Social Reform, 5. Author’s italics.
 Allen C. Guelzo, “An Heir or a Rebel? Charles Grandison Finney and the New England Theology,” Journal of the Early Republic, 17 (1997): 61-94. See also, Allen C. Guelzo, “Oberlin perfectionism and its Edwardsean Origins, 1835-1970,” In Jonathan Edwards’ writings: text, context, interpretation, ed. S. J. Stein (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996) and Allen C. Guelzo and Douglas A., Sweeney, The New England theology: from Jonathan Edwards to Edwards Amasa Park. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006).
 Horace Bushnell, Views of Christian Nurture, and of Subjects Adjacent Thereto (1847) (Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1975). See also, Conrad Cherry, Nature and religious imagination: from Edwards to Bushnell. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980), Robert Bruce Mullin, The Puritan as Yankee: a Life of Horace Bushnell (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 2002).Harold William Burgess, Models of Religious Education: Theory and Practice in Historical and Contemporary Perspective. Wheaton, IL: Victor Books, 1996), 81-83. Ironically, Bushnell and Charles G. Finney, perhaps the most famous revivalist of the era were great friends and admirers of each other’s work. See, Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, Charles G. Finney and the Spirit of American Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 1996), 253, 274-275,298.
References Baxter, Richard. The Reformed Pastor. Morgan, PA: Soli Deo Gloria Publications, 2000. Bloesch, Donald G. The Holy Spirit: Works and Gifts. Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press, 2000. Burgess, Harold William. Models of Religious Education: Theory and Practice in Historical and Contemporary Perspective. Wheaton, Ill: Victor Books, 1996. Bushnell, Horace. Views of Christian Nurture, and of Subjects Adjacent Thereto (1847). Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1975. Carwardine, Richard. Transatlantic Revivalism: Popular Evangelicalism in Britain and America, 1790-1865. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1978. Cherry, Conrad. Nature and Religious Imagination: from Edwards to Bushnell. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980. Conforti, Joseph A. Jonathan Edwards, religious tradition & American culture. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Crawford, Michael J. Seasons of grace: Colonial New England’s Revival Tradition in its British Context. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Cunningham, Charles E. Timothy Dwight, 1752-1817: a Biography. New York: Macmillan, 1969. Dallimore, Arnold. George Whitefield: The Life and Times of the Great Evangelist of the Eighteenth-century Revival. Westchester, IL: Cornerstone Books, 1979. Edwards, Jonathan, “The religious education of children is one of the principle means of grace that God has appointed in his church (Psalms 78:5–7),” in Sermons and Discourses, 1743-1758, ed. Wilson H. Kimnach. Jonathan Edwards Center, Yale University, 2008. ______________. “A divine and supernatural light (Matthew 16:17),” in Sermons and Discourses, 1730-1733:The Works of Jonathan Edwards, 17, ed. M. Valeri. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999, 405-426. ______________. A faithful narrative of the surprising work of God in the conversion of many Souls in Northampton, and neighbouring towns and villages of the County of Hampshire, in the Province of the Massachusetts-Bay in New England, in The works of Jonathan Edwards,4, ed. C. C. Goen. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1972. ______________. A History of the Work of Redemption, in The works of Jonathan Edwards, 9, ed.J. Wilson. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989. ______________. A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, in Three Parts (1746), in The Works of President Edwards, 2, ed. John E. Smith. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959. Fuess, ClaudeM. Amherst, the Story of a New England college. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1935. Goodrich, Chauncey. “Narrative of revivals of religion at Yale College from its commencement to the present time.” Journal of the American Education Society X (1838): 389-310. Guelzo, Allen C. “An Heir or a Rebel? Charles Grandison Finney and the New England Theology,” Journal of the Early Republic, 17 (1997): 61-94. ____________ “Oberlin perfectionism and its Edwardsean Origins, 1835-1970,” In Jonathan Edwards’ Writings: Text, Context, Interpretation, ed. S. J. Stein, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. Hambrick-Stowe, Charles E. Charles G. Finney and the Spirit of American Evangelicalism. Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 1996. Jenson, Robert W. America’s Theologian: a Recommendation of Jonathan Edwards. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Kelley, Brooks M. Yale; a History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974. Kidd, Thomas S. The Great Awakening: the Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. Kling, David W. “The New Divinity and Williams College, 1793-1836,” Religion and American Culture, 6 (1996): 195-223. Lambert, Frank. Pedlar in Divinity: George Whitefield and the Transatlantic Revivals, 1737-1770. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. ______________. Inventing the “Great Awakening.” Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. Lovelace, Richard F. Dynamics of Spiritual life: an Evangelical Theology of Renewal. Downers Grove, Ill: Inter-Varsity Press, 1979. Marsden, George M. and Bradley J. Longfield (Eds.), The Secularization of the Academy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Marsden, George M. Fundamentalism and American culture: The Shaping of Twentieth Century Evangelicalism, 1870-1925. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. ______________. Jonathan Edwards: a life. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. McDermott, Gerald R. Understanding Jonathan Edwards: an Introduction to America’s Theologian. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Miller, Perry, and Thomas Herbert Johnson. The Puritans. New York: Harper & Row, 1963. Morgan, Edmund S. The Gentle Puritan: a life of Ezra Stiles, 1727-1795. New York: Norton, 1984. Mullin, Robert Bruce. The Puritan as Yankee: a life of Horace Bushnell. Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 2002. Murray, Ian H. Revival and Revivalism: the Making and Marring of American Evangelicalism, 1750-1858. Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1994. ____________. America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. ____________. The Rise of Evangelicalism: the Age of Edwards, Whitefield, and the Wesleys. Downers Grove, Ill: InterVarsity Press, 2003. Nuttall, Geoffrey F. Richard Baxter. London: Nelson, 1966. Nuttall, Geoffrey F. and Peter Lake. The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Packer, J. I. The Redemption and Restoration of Man in the Thought of Richard Baxter: a Study in Puritan Theology. Carlisle, UK: Paternoster Press, 2003. Reuben, Julie A. The Making of the Modern University, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Richardson, Leon B. History of Dartmouth College. Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth College Publications, 1932. Ringenberg, William C. The Christian College. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2006. Rudolph, Frederick and John R. Thelin. The American College and University: a History. Athens GA: The University of Georgia press, 1990. Storms, Samuel C. Signs of the Spirit: an Interpretation of Jonathan Edwards’ Religious Affections. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2007. Stout, Harry S. “Religion, Communications, and the Ideological Origins of the American Revolution” The William and Mary Quarterly: A Magazine of Early American History 34 (1977): 519-541. ____________. The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England. New York: Oxford University Press. 1986. ____________. “Whitefield, George,” Dictionary of Christianity in America, ed. Daniel G. Reid. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1990. ____________. The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism. Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 1991. Stratton, Gary D. “Paparazzi in the Hands of an Angry God: Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, and the Birth of American Celebrity Culture,” The Other Journal. (Fall, 2010). Sweeney, Douglas A. and Allen C. Guelzo. The New England Theology: from Jonathan Edwards to Edwards Amasa Park. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006. Wolffe, John. The Expansion of Evangelicalism: the Age of Wilberforce, More, Chalmers and Finney. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2007.
Adapted from Gary’s article, “Revivalism and Higher Education,” in The Encyclopedia of Christian Education, Scarecrow Press, 2014.
If James K. A. Smith is correct in asserting that Jesus establishes particular ‘hot spots of sacramentality’ and endues them with a special sense of God’s presence, then the Christian college chapel must become the campus hot spot once again.
Campus worship services convened in a literal college chapel building and/or a figurative chapel program remain one of the most distinctive and symbolic methodologies in the history of American Christian higher education. Rooted in the British Puritan understanding of the college as a vehicle for the ongoing reformation and revival of church and society, chapel services are as old as the nations’ first college (Harvard, 1626) and endure today in most overtly Christian colleges and universities, as well as in many denominationally affiliated schools. Often the symbolic center of controversy over changes in the soul of a given college or university,[i] college chapels serve as significant campus ethos-shaping institutions—especially where chapel architecture and/or compulsory attendance dominate the campus landscape and schedule.[ii] Even as contemporary Christian colleges and universities struggle for an adequate theology of worship in a learning community, chapel programs and their staff serve as hubs for most co-curricular spiritual formation and service-learning opportunities on campus.
The Origins of the College Chapel Program
Puritan Liberal Education and Revivalism The British Puritan penchant for Christian higher learning crossed the Atlantic with the first pilgrims so that George M. Marsden regards the Puritan founding of Harvard College just six years after their first settlement in the New World as “one of the remarkable facts of American history.”[iii] Following the model of Emmanuel College, Cambridge—the hotbed of English Puritanism—and the writings of Jonathan Edwards, early American colleges integrated a classic liberal arts education in the classroom with Puritan revivalistic worship services in a college church,[iv] consistent with how Puritans “combined highly intellectual theology with intense piety.”[v] (See, Revival and Moral Philosophy: A Puritan Vision for Higher Education.)
True to the Protestant doctrine of Sola Scriptura and revivalism’s commitment to preaching as the primary means of conversion and grace, colleges preserved a time and place for students to sit under the biblical preaching of the college president. Compulsory attendance at two Sunday worship services (open to the public) and daily preaching and/or prayer services for the college community was central to the Puritan conception of higher education, and became the standard for Harvard, Yale, and the vast majority of American colleges that followed them. Since these services normally took place in a college chapel building (often the most architecturally dominant and symbolically significant structure on campus), they inevitably became known as chapel services.
The College Church and the Preaching President
When a college had an especially eloquent president—such as Timothy Dwight at Yale (1795–1817), Francis Wayland at Brown (1827-1855), Charles G. Finney (1852–1875) at Oberlin, or John McLean at Princeton (1854-1888)—“the effect on the students could be electric.”[vi] Yet, while most of college presidents were clergyman,[vii] few were remarkable preachers. The success of the chapel program often demanded largely upon periodic religious revivals among the students lest chapel preaching fall upon hard hearts and deaf ears. [viii] This only increased the influence of revivalism on Protestant Christian education, especially in the aftermath of the First Great Awakening, when the founding of numerous revival oriented colleges—such as Dartmouth, Princeton, and Brown—eventually led to the explosion of more than five-hundred revival colleges across the American frontier during the Second Great Awakening (1790-1840).[ix] (See, Do America’s Colleges Need ‘Revival’?)
Apologetics and Common Sense Realism
At the turn of the nineteenth-century, the challenge of European radical skepticism [x] led to a dynamic connection between revival colleges and the philosophical worldview of Scottish Common Sense Realism.[xi] Apologetic sermons on moral philosophy joined revivalism as the focal points of the college chapel program. Marsden notes that, “…these two programs, the revival and moral philosophy, were the chief collegiate supplements to traditions of regulated worship…”[xii] and laid the foundation for nearly a century of academic ascendancy that “may be called with justice the great age of Christian higher education in the history of the country.”[xiii]
Chapel services remained so integrally identified with American higher education that compulsory chapel attendance continued in virtually all colleges—even state universities—late into the nineteenth-century. [xiv] Today, many if not most historically denominational colleges maintain college chapel buildings, worship services, and chapel staff who aid students in spiritual formation as well as service-learning opportunities in the local community and global village.
The College Chapel Program and the Soul of the American University
Secularization and the Demise of Compulsory Chapel Programs As the most visible symbol of faith on campus the college chapel has often served as a lighting rod in the well-chronicled tension between the educational and spiritual missions of Christian colleges. Since the post antebellum demise of the revival college movement (sometimes called the old-time college) only a handful of American colleges and universities have been able to overcome the forces of secularization and maintain their uniquely Christian soul.
Some scholars emphasize the demise of compulsory college chapel programs as a unique development in the transition from Revival College to Modern University. [xv] They point to the elimination of compulsory chapel at Harvard (1886) and Yale (1926) as key marking points in the forty-year secularization of the American academy.[xvi]
Other researchers emphasize the continuity of anti-spirituality pressures facing Christian colleges since Harvard’s faculty rejected the First Great Awakening in 1741.[xvii] They see growing pressure against chapel programs in contemporary Christian colleges as part of an ongoing pattern in the history of Christian higher education.
Managing the Tensions of Worship in a Learning Community
Both sides of this debate recognize that the dualism of post-Enlightenment conceptions of knowledge create a nearly inevitable force against the life of the Spirit in colleges committed to the life of the mind.[xviii] Today’s colleges chapel programs face increasing faculty pressure to become more denominationally-diverse, historically-rooted, and intellectually-challenging, even as post-modern, consumer-oriented, doctrine-phobic students demand more experientially-based, relationally-connected, and individually-catered worship experiences.[xix] Managing these pressures has led to two primary approaches to chapel in Christian colleges.
Chapel as an Educational Essential
Many colleges view their Chapel education programs as an educational essential of a Christian college—not unlike the general studies courses in a college’s core curriculum. As the Gordon College (MA) website states, “Because Chapel and Convocation programs are viewed as an integral component of a Gordon education, regular attendance is required for graduation, much like other non credit-bearing elements of the Gordon experience…”[xx] Similar to the Puritan college church, chapel services serve the broader educational mission of integrating highly intellectual pursuits with intense personal piety.[xxi] Chapel services are required of most students and held in a large often symbolically enriched worship space and at a protected time in the college schedule.[xxii]
Ideally, such chapel programs serve as a corporate spiritual discipline that both symbolically and educationally tie together the entire Christian college experience so that chapel is “foundational for university-wide commitment to integrate faith, learning, and living across campus.” [xxiii] However, just as in historic revival colleges, weak preaching and programming can quickly lead to student dissatisfaction, complaints, and misbehavior from the captive audience.[xxiv]
Chapel as a Student Service
Others colleges employ a model that views chapel services as one student service among many—not unlike other voluntary co-curricular activities. These chapel services are often (although not always) invested with the time, space, personnel, and financial support required to remain ethos-shaping forces on campus, but not because attendance is enforced.[xxv] As the Bethel University (MN) website declares, “Chapel is the heart and soul of spiritual life on the Bethel campus. Chapel attendance is not required, but we believe it’s a vital part of building community and learning about our shared faith.”[xxvi] Students may choose to voluntarily attend worship services to help them worship God in everything they do, but these colleges believe that such heart practices are best-pursued voluntarily.[xxvii]
Ideally, such an approach enhances the worship experience for all who take part and reduces the need to police student attendance and behavior. Practically, the threat of a conspicuously empty chapel often leads to tailoring worship to the tastes of the majority of undergraduate students and subsequently to great faculty and minority student dissatisfaction. The student services model is nearly always the first step towards to end of a vital college chapel program.[xxviii] they often start strong in the first decade after attendance is no longer taken, only to gradually dwindle to a small percentage of the campus. Julie Reuben notes that once ‘critical mass’ is lost, college administrations often discover there is no going back from the ‘disaster’ of a voluntary chapel.[xxix]
The Heritage of the College Chapel
Two Theological Poles of Worship While modern Christian colleges have yet to develop a widespread theology capable of managing these tensions at the level of the Puritan model, [xxx] both sides in the debate agree that chapel programs should be a time when at very least a sizable majority of the college community gathers together to celebrate their common faith in meaningful expressions of corporate worship, learn the central tenants of the Christian faith, and consider together how to live out their faith throughout their campus community, scholarship, personal lives, and future calling.
Protestant theologies of worship have consistently emphasized that all of life and not just sacred times and places are potentially acts of worship. Commitment to the life of the mind required to forge a genuinely Christian worldview can make “the classroom as a chapel, scholarship as devotion,” so that, “Christianity at the base of the curriculum and suffusing all studies (is) the essence of Christian education.” [xxxi] However the affirmation that all of life can be worship need not discount our need for worship services that train our hearts and minds to worship and provides a means of grace by which the Spirit forms our soul in unique and intense ways. As James K. A. Smith asserts, “Jesus seems to establish particular hot spots of sacramentality and . . . endues them with a special sense of presence,”[xxxii] and there is little doubt that a Christian college chapel service should certainly be one of these hot spots.
Back to the Future
These two poles of worship guided the Puritans in their integration of a liberal education in the classroom and revival in the college chapel precisely because the renewing power of the presence of the Holy Spirit in the chapel is the best defense against hard hearts and deaf ears and in the classroom. Perhaps it is not surprising that both voluntary student-service chapel programs and compulsory educational-essential programs work best in seasons of religious awakening,[xxxiii] nor that both types of chapel programs benefited from the last season of spiritual awakening on American college campuses (1995).[xxxiv] As the contemporary Christian college movement continues to develop deeper theologies of worship in learning communities there is reason to hope that such intentionality could lead them back to the future of a second “great age of Christian higher education.”[xxxv]
Adapted from, Gary David Stratton. 2015. “The College Chapel,” in George Thomas Kurian and Mark A. Lamport, eds. Encyclopedia of Christian Education, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littleton Academic Press of America.
Notes [i] Widespread use word soul to describe the essence of uniquely Christian higher education was initiated by George M. Marsden in 1992 in his essay, “The Soul of the American University: A Historical Overview,” in The Secularization of the Academy, ed. George M. Marsden and Bradley Longfield (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). It was followed by Marsden, The Soul of the American University (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), Robert Benne, Quality with Soul: How Six Premier Colleges and Universities Keep Faith with Their Religious Traditions. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), Stephen T. Beers, The Soul of a Christian University: a Field Guide for Educators. (Abilene, Tex: Abilene Christian University Press, 2008), and others. [ii] Benne, Quality with Soul, 11-12, 193-14, 213-14. [iii] Marsden, The Soul of the American University, 33. [iv] William C. Ringenberg, The Christian College: A History of Protestant Higher Education in America (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2006), 38. [v] George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 44. [vi] Ibid. 64. [vii] In 1840 eighty-percent of all college presidents at overtly Christian colleges were clergyman, as well as nearly sixty-percent of state college presidents. Marsden, Soul of the American University, 81. [viii] Mark A. Noll, Rise of Evangelicalism: the Age of Edwards, Whitefield, and the Wesleys (Downers Grove, Ill: InterVarsity Press, 2003), 53-60. Italics mine. [ix] George M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press), 499. George M. Marsden and Bruce Longfield The Secularization of the Academy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 8-9. [x] Particularly David Hume and Voltaire. [xi] First proposed by Thomas Reid and developed by Princeton president Thomas Witherspoon, where Timothy Dwight studied. Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 93-113. Also, Noll, “The revolution, the Enlightenment, and Christian higher education in the early republic,” in Making Higher Education Christian, eds. Joel Carpenter and Kenneth Shipps (Grand Rapids: Christian University Press, 1987), 58-64. [xii] Marsden, Soul of the American University, 58. [xiii] Noll, “The revolution, the Enlightenment, and Christian higher education,” 64. [xiv] Ringenberg, The Christian College, 2003, 80-82. [xv] Such as Ringenberg’s The Christian College; Marsden’s The Soul of the American University; and Julie A. Reuben’s The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). [xvi] Reuben, Modern University, 119-122; Marsden, Soul of the University, 21. [xvii] Such as, James T. Burtchaell, The Dying of the Light: the Disengagement of Colleges and Universities from their Christian Churches. Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 1998), Michael L. Budde and John Wesley Wright, Conflicting Allegiances: the Church-based University in a Liberal Democratic society (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2004), and Benne, Quality with Soul. [xviii] Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 7-10. [xix] A youth group worldview described as “Moral Therapeutic Deism” by, Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton, Soul Searching: the Religious and Spiritual lives of American Teenagers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Also, Kendra Kreasy Dean, Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling Us about the American Church (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.) [xx] “Chapel Attendance Policy,” Gordon College Website, 2013-04-15. http://www.gordon.edu/page.cfm?iPageID=474 [xxi] Marsden, Fundamentalism, 44. [xxii] Benne highlights non-denominational Wheaton College and Baptist affiliated Baylor University as examples where this model currently appears to be working. Quality with Soul, 150. [xxiii] David S. Dockery, Renewing Minds: Serving Church and Society Through Christian Higher Education (Nashville, TN: Broadman, 2007), 108. Dockery is president of Union University, an educational-essential chapel school. [xxiv]Burtchaell, The Dying of the Light, 232, 320. [xxv] Benne, Quality with Soul, 49. [xxvi] “Worship/Chapel at Bethel,” Bethel University Website, http://cas.bethel.edu/campus-ministries/worship/chapel, 2013-04-15. [xxvii] Benne highlights Calvin College (Christian Reformed), Valparaiso University (Lutheran), and the University of Notre Dame (Catholic) as examples where this model appears to be attracting a critical mass of students, at least to Sunday services. Quality with Soul, 145-149, 160-165. [xxviii] Benne calls this the third college chapel model: institutions whose voluntary chapel programs are marked by very low attendance and without a designated chapel hour in the college schedule, Quality with Soul, 49. [xxix] Modern University, 123-124. [xxx] See David S. Dockery’s discussion of the lack of thorough theology in Renewing Minds, 124-137. Encouraging starts towards such a theology are found in, Duane Liftin, Conceiving the Christian College (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 2004), Cary Balzer and Rod Reed. Building a Culture of Faith: University-wide Partnerships for Spiritual Formation (Abilene, TX: Abilene Christian University Press, 2012), and James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2009)and Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013). [xxxi] James Bratt, as quoted in ed. Paul John Dovre, The Future of Religious Colleges: the Proceedings of the Harvard Conference on the Future of Religious Colleges, October 6-7, 2000 (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans Pub, 2002), 203. This “all of life can become worship” perspective is also prominent at many schools with required chapel. [xxxii] Desiring the Kingdom, 149. [xxxiii] Ringenberg notes this revival effect compulsory chapel programs, Christian College, 62ff, and Reuben in voluntary chapel schools, Modern University, 119. [xxxiv] In the 1995 campus awakening voluntary attendance at Hope College chapel jumped from a handful of students to nearly 90% of the student body, and student satisfaction with Gordon College’s compulsory chapel program jumped from less than 50% to over 90% in a single year. James C. Kennedy and Caroline Joyce Simon, Can hope endure?: a Historical Case Study in Christian Higher Education. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 188-195. Lyle W. Dorsett Timothy K. Beougher, Accounts of a Campus Revival: 1995 (Wheaton, IL: Harold Shaw, 1995), 139-170. [xxxv] Noll, “The revolution, the Enlightenment, and Christian higher education,” 64. R. Judson Carlberg, “The Evangelical Vision: From Fundamentalist Isolation to Respected Voice,” in The Future of Religious Colleges, ed.Paul John Dovre, 231.
Balzer, Cary and Rod Reed. Building a Culture of Faith: University-wide Partnerships for Spiritual Formation. Abilene, TX: Abilene Christian University Press, 2012.
Beers, Stephen T. The Soul of a Christian University: a Field Guide for Educators. Abilene, Tex: Abilene Christian University Press, 2008.
Bennie, Robert. Quality with Soul: How Six Premier Colleges and Universities Keep Faith with Their Religious Traditions. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001.
Budde, Michael L. and John Wesley Wright, Conflicting Allegiances: the Church-based University in a Liberal Democratic society. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2004).
Burtchaell, James T. The Dying of the Light: the Disengagement of Colleges and Universities from their Christian Churches. Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 1998.
Carlberg, R. Judson. “The Evangelical Vision: From Fundamentalist Isolation to Respected Voice,” in The Future of Religious Colleges, ed. Paul John Dovre. Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 2002.
Dean, Kendra Kreasy. Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling Us about the American Church, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.
Dockery, David S. Renewing Minds: Serving Church and Society Through Christian Higher Education. Nashville, TN: Broadman, 2007.
Dorsett, Lyle W. and Timothy K. Beougher. Accounts of a Campus Revival: 1995. Wheaton, IL: Harold Shaw, 1995.
Dovre, Paul J. The Future of Religious Colleges: the Proceedings of the Harvard Conference on the Future of Religious Colleges, October 6-7, 2000. Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 2002.
Kennedy, James C. and Caroline Joyce Simon, Can Hope Endure?: A Historical Case Study in Christian Higher Education. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Liftin, Duane. Conceiving the Christian College. Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 2004.
Marsden, George M. “The Soul of the American University: A Historical Overview,” in The Secularization of the Academy, ed. George M. Marsden and Bradley Longfield. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
__________. The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
__________. Jonathan Edwards: A Life. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.
__________. Fundamentalism and American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Noll, Mark A. “The revolution, the Enlightenment, and Christian higher education in the early republic,” in Making Higher Education Christian, eds. Joel Carpenter and Kenneth Shipps. Grand Rapids: Christian University Press, 1987.
__________. America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
__________. The Rise of Evangelicalism: the Age of Edwards, Whitefield, and the Wesleys. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003.
Reuben, Julie A. The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Ringenberg, William C. The Christian College: A History of Protestant Higher Education in America. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2006.
Smith, Christian and Melinda Lundquist Denton, Soul Searching: the Religious and Spiritual lives of American Teenagers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Smith, James K. A. Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2009.
__________. Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013.