ACTS BIBLE
The Remnant Church, Since Acts — class 9 of 13 · Jonathan Edwards, Freedom of the Will
By 1700, the Protestant movement was almost two hundred years old. The initial heat of the Reformation had cooled.1 In the American colonies, churches were full but hearts weren't. In England, the official church had become a polite social institution. Many people were baptized, attended services, and called themselves Christians, but something was missing. The name of Christ was being worn without being meant.
Remember the diagnosis from Class 2: do not bear God's name to emptiness, not merely swearing. That flat, hollow name-bearing was exactly what covered the English-speaking world in 1700. And into that flatness, God sent fire.2
This is the Bible's third beat playing again. From Genesis 3 forward, God pursues people who are not looking for Him, "no one seeks God" (Romans 3:11), so the seeking runs the other way: "the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost" (Luke 19:10). Revival isn't the church working itself into a lather. It is the pursuing God arriving.3
Starting in the 1720s and rolling through the 1740s, with aftershocks running to 1800, a spiritual awakening swept the American colonies and jumped the Atlantic to Britain.4 It wasn't organized by a denomination. It didn't start in a capital city. It started when a handful of preachers began telling people, plainly, that being religious wasn't the same as being saved, and that Christ had done the whole work of rescue for those who would trust Him.
The main figures you should know:
These weren't popes or bishops. They were pastors, preachers, and one sickly young missionary.10 And the gospel they preached drove people out of comfortable pew-sitting into either real faith or real resistance.
Say the objection out loud, because it's the first thing a modern person thinks when they hear the word revival: wasn't this whipped-up emotion? Crowd hysteria dressed up as the Holy Spirit? The objection has teeth. At Enfield in 1741, Edwards read a sermon called "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" in a level voice, no theatrics at all, and people cried out in the pews before he could finish.11 Boston's Charles Chauncy built a career prosecuting the revival as "enthusiasm," and he had real evidence to point at: a preacher named James Davenport led bonfires of books and fine clothes and later had to publicly retract, and some converts cooled as fast as they had caught fire.11 Here is what makes the Awakening worth trusting anyway: its own leaders made that critique earlier and harder than its enemies did. Edwards answered not by defending every tear but by writing a whole book, Religious Affections (1746), sorting the true work of the Spirit from nervous excitement, and his test was never how loudly you wept. It was how you lived afterward.12 A movement that polices itself with Scripture isn't a con. It is a church being sanctified in public.
The preachers of the Awakening hammered on three points that the formal churches had dulled.13
The cross actually did it. When Jesus died, He accomplished salvation for His people, tetelestai (Greek: 'it is finished,' Jesus' cry from the cross (John 19:30); class 2's word), Class 2's word: paid in full. Nothing remains for the sinner to add, earn, or contribute. You come with empty hands or you don't come at all.
Because that work is finished, you must be born again to receive it. Being baptized as an infant, attending services, behaving morally, none of it is the new birth. Jesus told Nicodemus, a religious professional, "Unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God" (John 3:3). The Greek word there is gennēthē anōthen, anōthen means both "again" and "from above." The double meaning is on purpose. This birth is a second birth, and it comes from above, from God, not from the person being born. A baby doesn't author its own birth. Neither does a Christian.
And the righteousness is His, counted to you. The Awakening didn't preach a bare pardon. Whitefield's signature doctrine was imputed righteousness: Christ lived the perfect life we could not live, and that whole obedient life is credited to the one who trusts Him. Edwards said the Northampton fire first fell while he was preaching justification (God declaring a sinner righteous because of Christ's finished work) by faith alone.13
Put those three points together and you get the Awakening's core claim: Christ finished the work, lived and died and rose, and God Himself applies that finished work to the sinner by giving them a new birth from above.14 The sinner isn't the source. The sinner is the recipient.
This is why the Awakening terrified comfortable church members. It told them that wearing the name of Christ wasn't the same as being in Christ. It exposed hollow name-bearing for what it was.
In 1754, Edwards published the book that became the theological backbone of the Awakening's understanding of salvation: A Careful and Strict Enquiry into the Modern Prevailing Notions of That Freedom of Will Which Is Supposed to Be Essential to Moral Agency, usually just called Freedom of the Will.15
The book is a response to a question that had been dividing Protestants for two centuries: if salvation is God's work from start to finish, what about human choice? Aren't we "free"? Don't we "decide" to follow Christ?
Edwards' answer is careful and, once you see it, devastatingly clear.16
He makes a distinction that changes everything: there's a difference between natural ability and moral ability. A person has natural ability to do something when nothing physical stops them, they have the body parts, the opportunity, the knowledge. A person has moral ability to do something when they actually want to do it, when their strongest inclination leans that way.
Here's Edwards' point: every person naturally has the ability to come to Christ, no one is physically prevented. But no fallen person has the moral ability to come, because no fallen person, left to themselves, actually wants Christ more than they want sin. The will always chooses according to its strongest desire. And the fallen human will's strongest desire is never God.
So when Scripture commands "repent and believe," the command is real, and the person is genuinely responsible for refusing, they have every natural capacity to obey. But they will never obey unless God changes what they want. That change of wanting is the new birth. God doesn't override the will; He transforms it, so that the person now genuinely wants Christ and freely comes.
Edwards argues this from Scripture, from philosophy, and from plain observation of how human choice actually works. Every choice you have ever made, you made because in that moment it was what you most wanted. You were free, nobody forced you, and yet your choice was completely determined by your desires. Freedom and determination aren't opposites. The will is free to do what the heart most wants; it's never free from the heart.17
What Edwards gives the church with this book is the answer to an objection that had been used for centuries to resist the gospel: "If God has to save me, then I'm not really free, and it's not really my choice." Edwards replies: you are free, you are choosing, and that's exactly why you're guilty, because what you're freely choosing is sin. Your need for God to change your heart doesn't cancel your responsibility; it explains your condition.18
This matters for our four convictions. It grounds the teaching that God's choice to save is based on His will, not on anything we contribute (conviction 3), and that salvation is God's work from start to finish (conviction 4). We receive. We don't author.
Jesus gave His church a mission: "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you" (Matthew 28:19-20). The Greek for "make disciples" is mathēteusate, not "make converts," not "get decisions," but mathētēs, a learner, an apprentice, someone under training. The command is to produce people who follow Jesus as students follow a master for life.
For much of the period before the Awakening, Protestant mission had been thinner than the command of Matthew 28 required. Strong churches existed in their own lands, but the need to send the gospel outward had to be recovered.
The Awakening broke that paralysis.19
David Brainerd rode alone into Native American territory, learned the languages, preached through interpreters, and saw real conversions among the Delaware people.20 He died young and exhausted. But his diary, edited and published by Edwards, put a fire under the next generation.21
William Carey, an English Baptist who founded the Baptist Missionary Society in 1792, sailed for India in 1793 and is often called the father of modern Protestant missions.22 He translated the Bible into multiple Indian languages during his lifelong ministry based at Serampore.
The Wesleys and Whitefield preached to coal miners, factory workers, sailors, and others, populations the official church had often neglected.23 Whitefield began the field preaching, taking the gospel to the Kingswood colliers near Bristol in 1739, and Wesley, reluctant at first about anything so irregular, followed him into the open air, treating every person as a soul Christ died for.
This is the pattern: when the church recovers the gospel, it starts going. When it forgets the gospel, it stays home. The Awakening recovered the gospel, and the result was a missionary movement that would, over the next century, carry the name of Christ to places it had never reached.24
And, crucially, the people who went were people who believed Edwards' theology. They believed salvation was God's work, not theirs. You would think that would make them passive ("if God's going to save them, why go?"). The opposite happened. Because they believed God was actually saving people, they believed their preaching would actually work. A preacher who thinks salvation depends on his cleverness gets discouraged by failure. A preacher who thinks God saves people through the preached word keeps going, because the outcome isn't on his shoulders.
Paul says it this way: "I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth" (1 Corinthians 3:6). The Greek verb for "gave the growth" is ēuxanen, imperfect tense, meaning kept on giving the growth, continuously. The planter plants. The God who grows things grows things. The planter's job isn't to manufacture life; it's to plant and water and trust.
Revival is never tidy. The Awakening split churches.25 Established pastors resented the traveling preachers who told their congregations they weren't really saved. Some converts had emotional experiences that didn't translate into changed lives, and Edwards himself wrote carefully about how to tell true spiritual fruit from fake (his Religious Affections, 1746, is a whole book on this).12 The leaders themselves were still sinners, and the movement still had to be tested by Scripture rather than romanticized.
But here is what the Awakening left behind:
Remember where we started.28 The third commandment forbids bearing the name of YHWH to emptiness, carrying His name as His representative when the carrying is hollow. That was the spiritual state of the English-speaking world in 1700. Full churches, empty hearts. Baptized people who had never been born again. Christ's name worn like a family surname, not meant like a marriage vow.
The Awakening was God's answer to hollow name-bearing. The preaching was direct: you say you belong to Christ, do you? Jesus Himself said, "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 7:21). The Greek construction is emphatic: ou pas ho legōn, "not every one who is saying." The saying isn't the proof. Lord-saying without Lord-meaning is the very emptiness the third commandment names.
That diagnosis isn't historical. It's current. Our world is full of people who carry Christ's name without meaning it, on websites, in political slogans, on tax forms where they wrote "Christian" because their grandmother did. The First Great Awakening's work isn't finished. The Awakening's question is still the question: are you bearing His name, or just wearing it?
The answer is the same answer Edwards and Whitefield and Brainerd preached.29 You can't manufacture the new birth. You can only ask for it, from the God who gives it. And the One who finished the work on the cross, tetelestai (Greek: 'it is finished,' Jesus' cry from the cross (John 19:30); class 2's word), is still giving new hearts to those who come to Him empty-handed.
Next class: the nineteenth century, Spurgeon in London and Carey's heirs across the oceans, the gospel going global while unbelief learns to talk like church.