Later Revivals

The leaders of the Reformation, the Puritan and Pietist movements and the first two great awakenings included trained theologians who combined spiritual urgency with profound leaning. Men who had mastered the culture of their time and were in command of the instruments needed to destroy its idols and subdue its innovations. Later revivals depended more on lay evangelists without formal theological training. While not without positive effects it also lead to a progressively shallower spirituality among evangelicals and a loss of intellectual command.
This was combined with a gradual movement into a kind of worldliness which Edwards had attacked: a covetous immersion in affluence. The dynamic prayerful concern for God’s kingdom was replaced by religious forms and legalistic moralism, camouflaging the laity’s ultimate concern for the feathering of their own nests rather than the enjoyment of God and the advancement of His glory. There was an increasing disunity among branches of evangelicalism and a growing individualism.
There is no single or simple explanation of this transformation. Perhaps the root cause of the decay of evangelicalism in American was the replacement of the old comprehensive concept of revival with the post-Finneyan machinery of revivalism. One cannot minimize the critical and complex interrelationship between reformation of doctrine and structures and spiritual revitalization in the church. Reformation grows out of awakened spiritual interest and spiritual renewal seldom persist long without continuing reformation
The easy road to revival often results in only a simple shift of human depravity to the other side of the coin. It is simply a movement from asceticism (American work ethic with its pride, ambition, avarice, envy, self-righteousness, conformity and respectability) to licentiousness (uncontrolled lust, riotous indulgence in a sensory experience and resistance to authority) or vice versa. Each sees the faults of the other and yet cannot see its own roots in human depravity. Each condemns the other while missing the biblical solution to both. A similar process also happens inside the church.