Introduction

Charles Chauncy was the Grand Poo-Bah of the Old Light coalition that opposed the New Light evangelists George Whitefield, Gilbert Tenent, and James Davenport during the First Great Awakening. Modern evangelicals have anointed the New Lights the winners and the Old Lights the villains. Why is this the case and is there more to the story?

The Old Lights were the quiet custodians of the New England Way, a legacy that valued covenant community, personal responsibility, and the common good. They are the remnants of a time when evangelism was seen not as an end in itself, but as a means to serve the greater work of building the Kingdom of God. Yet their influence on theology has been drowned out by the louder, more fragmented voices of New Light discourse.

The dream of a “city on a hill” was not merely about shining the tallest light. It was about building a Christian civilization that was a beacon of virtue and prosperity. Their goal was to raise the standards of Christian life for Englishmen, with the conversion of England as the final goal. The people of the world would come to the city on a hill and ask, “What is your secret? How can we become like you?” And the answer would be to follow the Lord Jesus Christ. In Chauncy’s day, the vision was dimmed and replaced by the flickering new light of a thousand isolated souls, each converted according to the new procedure, each carrying an individual torch that lacked the collective power of the city on a hill.

Chauncy was the main spokesman for the Old Lights, but he took this mantle slowly. Unlike social media users today, Chauncy deliberated about the Awakening before he criticized it. He became concerned about the innovations from the New Lights such as their uncharitableness toward other Christians, their stirring up division in the church, their encouragement of an uneducated ministry, their use of itinerant preaching to undermine the local church, and their innovations of the doctrine of conversion.¹

Shall we continue repeating the story that the Old Lights are the bad guys and the New Lights the good guys? What happens when we consider the issues point by point? Consider five reasons Charles Chauncy was concerned about the First Great Awakening.

First, Excessive Enthusiasm

Chauncy was concerned about the way New Light preachers made certain measures of enthusiasm the test for avoiding the charge of “unconverted.” Benjamin Trumbull, writing his History of Connecticut, disputes the dependability of Chauncy’s claim of excess enthusiasm.² But Jonathan Edwards, who fits somewhere between the Old Lights and the New Lights, was aware of and acknowledged the spread of enthusiasm throughout the years of awakening.³ In Douglas Winiarski’s 2017 book, Darkness Falls on the Land of Light: Experiencing Religious Awakenings in Eighteenth-Century New England, he documents many cases of emotional excess during the Awakening. This included mysterialism (claiming to hear secret messages from God), condemning professing Christians of not being converted, burning books, and schism.

James Davenport was a New Light itinerant preacher marked by imprudence, folly, and rascality. As the leader of the excesses, he traveled with zealous lay exhorters, preached unprepared sermons, shouted at the congregation, predicted the imminent end of the world, and encouraged physical effects like jerking, fainting, and screaming, as evidence of the Spirit’s work. In Davenport’s incurable weakness for bombast, he would make unannounced but unforgettable guest appearances at minister’s front doors, to accuse them of being unconverted.⁴

Chauncy’s resistance to Davenport was an act of protecting the church from an untrustworthy person. After the Awakening, Chauncy observed that there was little evidence of reformation in those areas where reform was needed. One result of the First Great Awakening was an increase in superstition and enthusiasm.

The excesses of the First Great Awakening continue today, with people expecting divine revelation in the cathedral of the self rather than the Word of God.

Second, Undermining Local Churches

Chauncy was concerned about the way itinerate preachers like George Whitefield undermined the authority of local churches. Whitefield generated such a sensation—even British newspapers reported on his North American activity—that he became the central dividing line among the New England pastors. Some pastors invited Whitefield to preach in their church. Other pastors refused Whitefield access to their pulpit because he was not properly licensed to preach. By rejecting the itinerants, Chauncy and the Old Lights thrust the revivalists into the thick of the combustible spiritual anxieties of the masses. From this polarization, a dissolution of local church authority was taking place within the otherwise tidy New England towns.

The itinerant nature of Great Awakening preachers undermined the role of the local church. For example, on March 6, 1743, Davenport led about one hundred young people “in a ceremonial religious book burning to signal their purity from the corrupt New England establishment.” The point of the book burning was to separate people from the old-guard church leaders. The next day Davenport ordered people to burn the physical possessions they loved too much. By the spring of 1743, it was common for New Light preachers such as Eleazar Wheelock and Bathsheba Kingsley to foster separatist groups. These groups formed with a flurry of private revelation and clergy condemnation. The separatist tendency caused a schism in New England.⁵

One of the legacies of the First Great Awakening is undermining the local church. When disagreement arose, people started another church. This has contributed to evangelicals' low view of the local church.

Third, The Unconverted Ministry

Chauncy was concerned about the blistering sermons coming from the New Light ministers Gilbert Tenent and George Whitefield that accused duly ordained pastors of being unconverted. These sermons set off a rumpus of atrocious and anonymous attacks against Old Light ministers. A twenty-first-century evangelical hears this and thinks, “Yes, that is a big problem if ministers aren’t even Christians.” But what is really going on here?

As ecstasies expanded, emotional manifestations were now expected from genuine Christians. For those people not exhibiting emotional excess, they were liable to accusations of not being a true Christian. The New Lights couldn’t see that gradual conversion was a complementary means of coming to faith. So, those experiencing gradual conversion were cast as the antithesis, inherently unconverted. The pastor with a dateable conversion story was presumptively right. The minister gradually converted was presumptively unreliable. New Lighters encouraged church members to forsake their pastor if he did not conform to the newly constructed definition of conversion. Lay people made unsubstantiated claims of receiving special revelation from God and claimed spiritual authority beyond the church.

Chauncy got involved when his friend, the pastor Samuel Osborn, was removed from his church because he wasn’t “awakened.” That is, because Osborn didn’t define conversion like the New Light innovators, he was slandered as being “unconverted.” The New Lighters required a suitably heartfelt testimony of the conscious experience of the new birth. They were intolerant of someone who followed the older, established nurture/development model where God’s grace was mediated objectively through the church, beginning with infant baptism, catechismal instruction, and life within the covenant community. In this covenantal view of conversion, a person’s faith begins at a young age and continues to grow and mature over time. Conversion of this type was a gradual work of the Spirit in the heart of the person yet without dramatic material for crisis-experience storytelling.⁶

Chauncy called for Christian charity in the Osborn case, but the new requirement of a sudden conversion was treated with the authority of canon law. Ever since evangelicals have resolved their differences with quick accusations of “heresy.”

Fourth, The Rise of Lay Ministers

Chauncy was concerned that the Awakening was promoting uneducated and un-ordained men to become ministers. The rise of lay ministers began in force when the Baptist movement spun off from the Separatist Puritans in the first half of the seventeenth century. The Puritans, not at all interested in religious freedom for anyone but themselves, ostracized and frequently persecuted the growing number of Separatists who began rejecting infant baptism. This group of dissenters found themselves having to use laypeople to preach in their churches. From the Puritan perspective, this was just further evidence that the Baptists were illegitimate.

During the First Great Awakening, the further rise of lay ministers was justified because it was better to have a lay minister than an unconverted minister. An unconverted minister was someone who hadn’t experienced a dramatic conversion. Whitefield and Tennant accused established ministers of being unconverted because they hadn’t followed the new steps.⁷

This thinking became especially alluring to Baptists, whose numbers boomed during the Second Great Awakening. Their thumbs-down to educated preachers spread to other denominations. This can be seen from comments made by abolitionist Gerrit Smith, who said during a Civil War-era debate, “The true religion is too simple to make the training of a theological seminary necessary for those who teach it.”⁸

The assumption for many evangelicals has been that the Bible is too simple and the academy too complicated for them to belong together. Preaching that features funny-stories-pretending-to-be-illustrations makes Bible preaching seem drab.

Fifth, Innovations to the Doctrine of Conversion

Chauncy was concerned about how the First Great Awakening turned people away from the traditional means of grace to a narrowly defined individual conversion experience.⁹ Chauncy’s view of conversion was described in his books Prayer for Help (1737), The New Creature (1741), and The Outpouring of the Holy Ghost (1742). Chauncy placed conversion at the service of a larger theological framework—the New England Way—which set out to build a Christian society. In conversion, a person is convicted of their sin, which causes them to put faith in Jesus’ death and resurrection, which makes the person a new creature who increases in grace, fulfills his responsibility to God, supports the church, and lives with inward joy within the covenant community. Chauncy insisted that the internal change must be accompanied by external changes. This change often occurred gradually, in a process of Christian nurture. How do you know if someone is saved? Chauncy said by living a changed life.¹⁰

In contrast, the New Lights said the evidence of salvation was a dramatic conversion experience. It was as obvious as broad daylight to the Old Lights that the Spirit could convert someone slowly or quickly. But the hidebound theology of the New Lights only had vitality enough for a Damascus Road conversion. The First Great Awakening required a crisis conversion experience as normative for all conversion.¹¹ After Jonathan Edwards died, he was succeeded by Samuel Hopkins (1721 - 1803) and Joseph Bellamy (1719-1790). Their “New Divinity” accommodated synthesized revivalism and rationalism. They watered down union with Christ in subjective terms and reduced the church to a voluntary collection of people. The traditional means of grace were eschewed in favor of a subjective conversion experience.¹² Evangelicals end up not just advocating crisis-conversion events, but rejecting any type of conversion that looks different.

To retract an error is no easy task, especially in matters of theology, especially when that error has been taught as fact for three hundred years.

Conclusion

Chauncy and Jonathan Edwards debated the question “Is the Awakening a work of God?” Both sides acknowledged there was good and bad. Edwards emphasized the good and Chauncy emphasized the bad. Edwards argued that the Awakening was a work of God, despite the excesses. Chauncy argued the opposite and was especially concerned about the bodily effects, visions, trances, and mysterialism of the conversions. Chauncy’s point was that if you look at the fruit of the Awakening, it produced animosity, division, uncharitable judgments, bitterness, slander, and dishonoring of the ministers who labored over the souls of the congregation.¹³

One reason it's easy for evangelicals to side with the New Lights is that the Old Lights, in time, drifted doctrinally, including a shift toward Arminianism, the denial of Original Sin, and various forms of universal salvation. Chauncy started his ministry as a traditional Calvinist. His criticism of the Awakening comes from that standpoint. However, the Great Awakening accelerated the possibility of doctrinal change among critics such as Chauncy, who transitioned to be an Arminian scholar.¹⁴ This has undercut his standing in history and made it difficult to see his valid points against the New Lights in the First Great Awakening.

For Charles Chauncy, his reaction to the New Light's enthusiasm was to abandon Calvinism in favor of doctrines strained with rationalism.¹⁵ Similar to how the Young, Restless, and Reformed movement morphed into wokeism, the Old Lights morphed into bad doctrine. In each case, a group’s emphasis on something loosely Calvinistic undermined the structures of Calvinistic unity.

Footnotes

¹ Edward M. Griffin, Old Brick: Charles Chauncy of Boston 1705-1787 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980), 52, 62.

² Benjamin Trumbull, A Complete History of Connecticut (Forgotten Books, 2012).

³ Iain Murray, Jonathan Edwards: A New Biography (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 1987), 205-208.

⁴ Edward M. Griffin, Old Brick: Charles Chauncy of Boston 1705-1787 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980), 47, 66-70.

⁵ George Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (Yale, 2007), 275-277, 364.

⁶ Edward M. Griffin, Old Brick: Charles Chauncy of Boston 1705-1787 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980), 47, 48-49.

⁷ Edward M. Griffin, Old Brick: Charles Chauncy of Boston 1705-1787 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980), 54.

⁸ Thomas Kidd and Barry Hankins, Baptists in America: A History (Oxford University Press, 2015), 1-18.

⁹ Bradford Littlejohn, The Mercersburg Theology and the Quest for Reformed Catholicity (Pickwick Publications: Eugene, OR, 2009), 20.

¹⁰ Edward M. Griffin, Old Brick: Charles Chauncy of Boston 1705-1787 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980), 54f, 64.

¹¹ Jason Cherry, The Culture of Conversionism and the History of the Altar Call (JEC Publishing, 2016).

¹² Bradford Littlejohn, The Mercersburg Theology and the Quest for Reformed Catholicity (Pickwick Publications: Eugene, OR, 2009), 20-23.

¹³ Edward M. Griffin, Old Brick: Charles Chauncy of Boston 1705-1787 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980), 62-65.

¹⁴ Iain Murray, Jonathan Edwards, pg 281

¹⁵ George Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, pg 436