A Link to the Past
The following (very long) quote is from this excerpt from the autobiography of John Williamson Nevin. The fellow who has posted these first four chapters looks like he’s going to be posting the entire autobiography in stages, which should make for excellent reading.
[Concerning the revivals during the Great Awakening:] God forbid that I should undervalue the significance of this momentous passage in my life; it was for me a true awakening and decision in the great concern of personal experimental religion, which went beyond all I had known before, and entered deeply into all my subsequent history. But God forbid also, on the other hand, that I should not, at the same time, speak freely of the vast error and fault there was in the whole movement. It was based throughout on the principle, that regeneration and conversion lay outside of the Church, had nothing to do with baptism and Christian education, required rather a looking away from all this as more a bar than a help to the process, and were to be sought only in the way of magical illapse or stroke from the Spirit of God (what Dr. Bushnell has named the ictic experience), as something precedent and preliminary to entering the true fold of the Shepherd and Bishop of souls To realize this, then, became the inward strain and effort of the anxious soul; and what was held to be saving faith in the end, consisted largely in believing that the realization was reached. And so afterwards also, all was made to turn, in the life of religion, on alternating frames and states, and introverted self-inspection, more or less–under the guidance of some such work as Edwards on the Affections. An intense subjectivity, in one word–which is something always impotent and poor- -took the place of a proper contemplation of the grand and glorious obiectivities of the Christian life, in which all the true power of the Gospel at last lies, My own “experience” in this way, at the time here under consideration was not wholesome, but very morbid rather and weak. Alas, where was my mother, the Church, at the very time I most needed her fostering arms? Where was she, I mean, with her true sacramental sympathy and care? How much better it had been for me, if I had only been properly drawn forth from myself by some right soul-communication with the mysteries of the old Christian Creed. As it was, I could not repeat the Creed, and as yet knew it only as one of the questionable relics of Popery. I had never heard it at Middle-Spring; and it was entirely foreign from the religious spirit of Union College.
What I find remarkable is that his experiences in 1830 are so remarkably similar to my own in the 1990’s. I can hardly deny the significance of my early charismatic experiences, nor the fact that they confirmed me as a lifelong Christian. But I also cannot deny that their entire foundation–the belief that true Christianity is inward and subjective–was wrong and ultimately destructive.