America Blows a Gasket

While compiling the “A Study In Scarlet” blog series into one document in preparation for publishing, it became clear that a more detailed look into the mechanics of the decision to adopt grape juice was necessary. This will be the second chapter, and so it will make more sense when read in that context. Call it “A Study in Scarlet: Investigations in Communion Wine, Part 1.5”, following this.

Introduction

America’s gas tank is filled with the fuel of eschatology. One cannot drive through history without feeling the thrumming of utopian idealism or catastrophic apocalypticism roaring under the hood. From the Puritan ‘City on a Hill’ to Manifest Destiny, from climate alarmism to American Zionist sentiments, eschatology has provided the inertial force propelling America towards glory, progress, and national identity.

Before a time when the spiritual consciousness of the Christian nation had cooled and hardened by a couple of world wars, the political, social, and religious movements of the nations were powered by the thermal energy of eschatological thought. A robust understanding of American history is impossible without including the eschatological hope that electrified the air, and no period in our short history has experienced more millennial fervor than the decades of the 19th century.

Questing to discover the impetus behind the grape juice swap runs through it all. A closer look at the progression of American eschatological thought and the moral praxis created by the prevailing certainty of an imminent Kingdom on earth is necessary to understand the symbol of wine withering on the vine.

More Than An AfterMarket Mod

Familiarity with eschatology is growing, but many believers still would not be able to define the word, and fewer would be able to delineate its major subdivisions. Eschatology (Greek: eskhatos = last) is the study of last things, or more popularly, the “End Times”. In common parlance, it generally refers to God’s judgment of the world at the end of history, accompanied by mind-melting apocalyptic images, with the Second Coming of Jesus Christ stilling the tumultuous wind and waves of history.

History started in a garden and will end in a garden city, which all Christians concur. The meandering course history takes to arrive at that end bears a significant difference among believers, now more so than ever.

Eschatological conversations are often attended by sleeve rolling and nostril puffing from cantankerous thunderpuppies. Observers of the conversation roll their eyes at what seems like a superfluous contention, since fighting about a thousand years of peace is not unaccompanied by its ironies. There is an unspoken assumption among many believers that eschatology is a vestigial Christian organ, as though it is a loose flap of skin dangling off the body of orthodoxy. Or to change the metaphor to something less gross, many treat it as some aftermarket modification of one’s faith that has no functional purpose, like putting a racing spoiler on a Toyota Corolla. Maybe it looks cool, but ultimately, it is an unnecessary luxury for those who have the time, money, and need something to argue about.

But this is wrong. It is much more like the crankshaft that comes off the engine, providing the kingdom torque that moves the car forward to its destination. Whether Jesus comes soon or late, He cometh, and His future coming affects the way we conduct ourselves in the present. It can’t not. Our 18th and 19th century brothers understood the horsepower of the kingdom to catalyze faith into action better than we, whose eschatology provided the kinesis for their Christian political, ecumenical, and social movements. For them, eschatology was where the rubber met the road; present in both the map and the mechanics of the Kingdom car.

A Brief Primer

The four eschatological positions recognized today are postmillennialism, amillennialism, and premillennialism, with the latter further bifurcating into dispensational and historic premillennialism. It is important to note that these views did not always exist in the tidy manicured garden boxes we have today. Though most could be found in their primordial forms throughout history, there was much more elbow rubbing and mingling of views in the past. Each derives its name with respect to when Christ will return in relationship to His millennial reign found in Revelation 20, when Satan will be hog-tied and Christ’s reign instituted. Let’s get our bearings with Scripture.

Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven, holding in his hand the key to the bottomless pit and a great chain. And he seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years, and threw him into the pit, and shut it and sealed it over him, so that he might not deceive the nations any longer, until the thousand years were ended. After that he must be released for a little while. Then I saw thrones, and seated on them were those to whom the authority to judge was committed. Also I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded for the testimony of Jesus and for the word of God, and those who had not worshiped the beast or its image and had not received its mark on their foreheads or their hands. They came to life and reigned with Christ for a thousand years. The rest of the dead did not come to life until the thousand years were ended. This is the first resurrection. Blessed and holy is the one who shares in the first resurrection! Over such the second death has no power, but they will be priests of God and of Christ, and they will reign with him for a thousand years

Revelation 20:1-6

Only here, in all the Bible, is the millennial reign of Jesus spoken of directly, and from these verses each positions receive its prefix. Now, defining a huge part of our theology based on a phrase found in only one passage, and that in the most symbolic book in the Bible, leaves much to be desired. Thus, the naming schemata compartmentalize ideas and motifs that really are seen throughout the entirety of God’s word. But, since this is the ball we have been given, we will play with it until such a time as someone invents a better ball.

Initially, the four positions part ways into couples, with two reading the Scriptures as indicating Christ will return before His millennial reign (premillennial), and the other two believing he will return after His millennial reign (postmillennial).

Premil splits again into Historic and Dispensational premillennialism, which generally follow a similar game plan (think Left Behind series), diverging from each other concerning where the Jews fit into this whole business. Dispensationalists separate out the Jews as having a slightly different inheritance than the Christians; Historic tosses them all into the same salvific pot. For both, the end is very near, and the sky is ever darkening with ominous tribulation and imminent persecution. Some think Christ will return sometime before their next oil change, and believe we can hasten this coming by evangelizing every last pagan on the planet. Somewhere out there, right now, is the last pagan PowerBall walking around, and once he is saved, the clouds will open and the Lord will descend. Satan reigns now in this present darkness, and will be supplanted by the bodily Christ reigning on earth when He returns.

Postmillennial views split up into Amillennialism and Postmillennialism proper. These both see the Church living in the millennium now, where Christ is currently reigning. Amillennial technically means “no millennium,” which we all agree is poorly named because they do believe in a millennium, but it would require a lot of seam ripping and fabric cutting to rename it, so we all just get used to the ill-fit. For the Amils, Christ is reigning in the heavenlies as I write, and history will continue to roll ineluctably towards the future, both wheat and weeds growing together, until Jesus returns to sort things out. 

Intramural debates ought to be encouraged, so long as everyone remembers we are all on the same road, some just think the destination is further away than others. Most Americans, according to polling data, have pitched their tents in one of the premillennial camps, which has generally been the dominant view in America for a hundred years or so. However, in my personal investigations, I have found that most Christians’ eschatology is a multicolored wad of playdough made from pieces plucked from several of the orthodox positions, Hollywood apocalyptic films, kitschy Christian fiction, and dusty inherited keepsakes from their parents. It really is something pastors need to do a better job of leading their congregation in, and there are some encouraging signs that this is happening.

For our purposes, the eschatology du jour of early America up through the end of the 19th century was postmillennialism (PM). Today, most PMs believe that we are currently in the millennial reign of Christ, that the Holy Spirit is growing His Kingdom through the Church, and will continue to do so until the world is recognizably “the Kingdom of our God and of His Christ” (Revelation 11:15). Since the resurrection, when Jesus was given authority over all things, God has been slowly and irrevocably making all of Christ’s enemies into an ottoman (1 Corinthians 15:25). One day, perhaps hundreds or thousands of years from now, all nations will be baptized and taught to obey his commands (Matthew 28:19-20). When this has been accomplished, and the whole earth is filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea (Habbakuk 2:14), Christ will return to a Christian world*, Heaven and Earth will be remarried, and the last enemy to be destroyed, Death (1 Corinthians 15:26), will be yeated into the lake of fire (Revelation 20:14).

Postmillennialism is now, and was then, an optimistic doctrine. The earth will be covered with the knowledge of the Lord, and in a way that is visible. This means an expectation of results. The grape juice swap was largely the result of the flooring the PM hope without anyone bothering to check the anointing oil. After redlining the engine for a few decades, it puttered to the side of the road, smoking, with the piston rods sticking out of the hood. And that puddle forming in the highway dust was communion wine. This is a short history of that breakdown.

Starting the Engine

Though there was notable diversity of thought in early America, the Puritans were generally PM, characterized by an optimistic outlook of the gospel’s power to change the heart of the world. Still, claiming Puritans on the PM team is a bit anachronistic. In the 1750s, many commentators on Revelation moved freely between various interpretative schemes; the ossified millennial boundaries of today were then only loosely sketched out ¹. When exactly the millennium would kick off is where Puritan PM varied from modern day PM understanding, many believing they were living in a period of flourishing immediately preceding the millennial reign of Christ, which preceded His second coming and the end of history. They were the prep team, readying the car, greasing the axles, and topping off the fluid.

When the millennium arrived, it would be a time of unprecedented general holiness marked by the suppression of wickedness, flourishing of righteousness, and church prosperity. After this extended period of Christ’s global reign from Heaven (which Edwards believed meant an extended period, not a literal thousand years), He would return to a Christian world, resurrect the human seeds planted in history, and reign bodily forever. Metaphorically, as well as literally, colonial New England was on the frontier of a vast landscape of promise and possibility. But many dangers lurked along the treelines that threatened this millennial hope, which would need to be guarded against.

One of the most dangerous did not arise from the uncharted wilderness, but from where all the worst problems of history arise – the desks and pens of the philosophers. Creeping in around the edges of the New World was a growing friction between Puritan theology and Enlightenment thought. They are not now, and were not then, willing tango partners. The former was founded on rigid faith and moral rigor buried two miles deep in the sovereignty of God, manifested in divine election and absolute control over the course of history. Enlightenment ideals boasted that man’s pristine reason was outgrowing archaic faith, surpassing the purile hypothesis of some distant will of God directing history. In its place, human choice would turn the wheels of history, enabling a “can-do” ingenuity that saw the future as nothing but progress through the powers of reason, scientific discovery, and capacity for self-improvement.

Before Darwin’s biological evolution, the evolution of history was a widespread and living assumption introduced by the philosopher Hegel, who saw history progressing toward increasing human agency, freedom, and self-realization. Religion was not outside this Force of history, the geist, to which all things were subject. Hegel’s upward spiral of history was part of the background in both secular and religious circles of the 19th century as well. Darwin, writing in the latter half of the century, merely applied the existing assumptions of history to biology.

Of course, not all Enlightenment thought was rotten, and the Puritans, no intellectual slouches themselves, conceded its good points while criticizing the hubris mushrooming among sophisticated minds and their rosy view of human nature. Man’s position had remained unchanged for the Puritan: he was as depraved as he ever was, and no amount of this geist business was going to evolve him out of it. Though the Puritans did not mount a wholesale literary campaign against Enlightenment rationalism, their polemics and apologetics were often directed at specific theological or philosophical issues as they arose.

Puritan colleges, like Harvard and Yale, were founded to aid in the intellectual struggle against godless ideologies and preach the gospel of the sovereign God, churned out fistfuls of theological powerhouses. One of those geniuses, perhaps the brightest theological mind America has ever produced, was Jonathan Edwards.

Early to Edwards

As the religious fervor of the Puritans cooled and the population grew on the East Coast, religious life in America congealed. Enlightenment influences seeped into religious thought, augmenting its intellectual depth, but at the same time infusing the red-hot zeal with slag, resulting in a cold, brittle, and inflexible faith. Though church membership neared eighty percent in colonial New England, religion became something one did, like eating breakfast or milking the cows; an intellectual nod to the reality of the spiritual world, similar to the tacit and dispassionate acknowledgment of physics. Christianity in the first third of the 18th century was sleepy.

It was onto this somnolent state that Jonathan Edwards’ preaching rang with alarm. While he is most famous for his brimstone-hurling sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, he had a zealous heart that matched his prodigious theological genius, and all of it spiced with an affinity for the apocalyptic. He saw God working in history by what Paul Choi calls the “historical/redemptive apocalypticism”: history would spiral upwards in a series of revivals, agony, and ecstacy, culminating in the millennium.² The PM hope found its first and greatest American expression in Jonathan Edwards’ capacious mind.

As far as when that millennium would occur, as I say, there was some difference of opinion. Edwards believed, as was common amongst his ilk, that it would commence in the year two thousand. You’ve arrived! The calculus was simple: two millennia from Creation to the institution of the Mosaic Law, two millennia from the Law to Christ, and two millennia of Gospel would bring history to the start of the seventh thousand-year chunk beginning in the year of our Lord, two thousand. And since the Bible has a thing with ‘sevens’, the math worked out pretty well. But much needed to be done in preparation for Y2K.

Edwards, as well as most clergy at the time, viewed history and God’s relation to man in the light of Calvinistic sovereignty of God. Mankind was inherently sinful, and through Adam’s original sin, death was passed on to all men, who were born spiritually dead, unable to participate at all in salvation because…well, they are all dead; dead men don’t help. Having been around a lot of dead bodies, I can testify that the participation among the dead nears zero. God, too, would sovereignly direct the course of history, by the counsel of His own will, to the cosmic end He had penned before creation. An emphasis on personal conversion, pious living, and sanctification through the Holy Spirit, all working towards a certain millennium, was woven into Edwards’ sermons.

Through his preaching and that of men like George Whitefield, revival began in New England, swelling the membership in congregational churches significantly. The First Great Awakening was short and powerful, like a left hook, with some historians confining it snugly into the 1730s and 40s. It was a time of repentance, highlighted with emotional confessions and sound biblical teaching. Some of the “Old Lights”, Calvinists of the older generation, scowled at revivals and the overly emotional young punks like Edwards who preached with passion. Edwards saw revivals as consistent with the way God brought about salvation in history, and his personal writings were filled with wonder reflecting on the ponderous events that God was working in America, and he marveled at their meaning. 

Tis not unlikely that this [Great Awakening] of God’s Spirit, that is so extraordinary and wonderful, is the dawning, or at least a prelude, of that glorious work of God, so often foretold in Scripture, which in the progress and issue of it, shall renew the world of mankind.³

The Awakening had a profound effect, leading to a resurgence of spiritual fervor in New England. An estimated twenty-five to fifty thousand souls were saved, as the brush-fire Awakening scorched the colonies. Church membership surged, apathy ignited into ardor, and a once dormant emotional life was illuminated with the beauty of Christ. Educational institutions like Rutgers, Princeton, Dartmouth, and Brown were spawned from the movement, some specifically to graduate pastors and missionaries trained to dutifully and cogently graze the growing flocks of New England.

Edwards, like many of his Puritan precursors, believed America was a specially chosen land, a ‘City on a Hill’. Observing the times, he concluded that there were many reasons to think:

“…that God might in [America] begin a new world in a spiritual respect, when he creates the new heavens and the new earth…And if these things are so, it gives us more abundant reasons to hope that what is now seen in America, and especially in New England, may prove the dawn of that glorious day: and the very uncommon and wonderful circumstances and events of this work, seem to me strongly to argue that God intends it as the beginning or forerunner of something vastly great. I have thus long insisted on this point, because if these things are so, it greatly manifests how much it behooves us to encourage and promote this work, and how dangerous it will be to forbear so to do.”⁴

America was the seedbed from which the Kingdom of God on earth would sprout and vine. Since this was the case, it behooved believers to spur the work and fear the danger of forbearing to participate in the mighty work God was manifestly bringing about.

But the organic growth of the Kingdom sprouting before their eyes was not without its thorns. In a terrific act of foresight, Edwards saw the humanistic drift that the encroaching Enlightenment would bring about if left unchecked. Humans, then as much as ever, really liked to get in front of the parade of God’s glory.

In 1754, he wrote Freedom of the Will in response to the Enlightenment’s influence on Boston clergy, forcefully buttressing God’s sovereign grace and election, and admonishing against the slip towards a watery, lukewarm Christian humanism with its sunny view of man’s inherent goodness.

“Among the clergy, this [Enlightenment influence] often manifested itself in a liberal theology based on a vision of the modern self, with morality based on reason and human choice and an Arminianism focused on the individual will. Edwards saw clearly that an assault on Calvinism’s fundamental ideas of humankind’s total depravity and God’s sovereign grace would open the floodgates to a human-centered religiosity.”⁵

Edwards warned of the sprinkling of sand into the sugarbowl, and the saltless silica of humanism that diminishes the sweetness of the Spirit’s work. He had no idea to what extent his prophetic spidey-sense was destined to become a reality.

But for the time, there was reason to be heartened; the Gospel spread, hearts were turned back to God, and the temporal flourishing of religious piety effervesced with expectation of the Kingdom of God that was now in focus and within reach. From this point forward, “American history marked by the 1740s can be understood best in terms of the degree to which, after the Great Awakening, the American populace was filled with the notion of an impending millennium.” ⁶

Historian Sydney Ahlstrom captured the collective spirit of the moment: “A new and irrepressible expectancy entered the life of the churches. A national sense of intensified religious and moral resolution was born. Millennial hopes were kindled.” ⁷ What remained was for the superova ideas of Edward’s cosmic genius to touch down on the earth, to grow legs, strategy, and direction.

Carrying the torch after Edwards’ death in 1758 were his intellectual disciples, Samuel Hopkins (1721-1803) and Joseph Bellamy (1719-1790), who structured Edwards’ thoughts into a more practical theological system. (Hopkins wrote the first systematic theology penned in America.) In many ways, these men were true to Edward’s teaching and vision, particularly in their staunch belief in the sovereignty of God and the wistful attitude towards the future hope of Christ’s millennial reign. Both knew of the real-world implications and the need to build the Christian substructure for a holy and just nation. And if that were to happen, the light of the gospel must necessarily penetrate societal ills, the duplicity of which was increasingly glaring. Social hypocrisies, such as slavery and alcoholism, needed to be evaluated in light of the optimistic eschatology Edwards and his protégés preached.

Perhaps one of the most challenging tasks was making Christianity and Edward’s theology relevant to an increasingly Enlightened audience. Bellamy demonstrated the plausibility of Edwards’ eschaton numerically, going so far as to make graphs, calculating an estimate of how many would be saved in the millennium, assuming a doubling of the population every twenty years.⁸ The number was 2,095,150, if you want to know. This mathematical exercise was a reasonable appeal aimed at minds drinking from the Enlightenment trough by showing that God’s prophecies did not necessarily need to manifest magically from the ether. What seemed more likely, more reasonable, was that God’s providence would be brought about by humans living out the gospel truth applied to society.

While Edwards’s view of Christian charity tended to be nebulous, Hopkins took Edwards’s holy consciousness and handed it a shovel. Hopkins condensed this misty thought into “disinterested benevolence” – the idea that true Christian virtue means loving others selflessly, without regard for personal gain, going so far as to be willing to be damned onself to save the lost. This boots-on-the-ground approach became the central theological justification for collective action and the tsunami of social reform movements of the 19th century. Both believed “that mere theological rhetoric lacked the dynamic to enact virtuous action unless it was undergirded by the anticipatory events of the millennium, judgment, the eternal rewards and punishments of heaven and hell.” ⁹ Kingdom consciousness needed to move out of the head and heart and callous the hands.

Though both Bellamy and Hopkins erred on the side of God’s sovereign will as the impetus of human history, Man’s contribution in the equation of Kingdom growth began to take on more weight, tipping the scale towards human ability and away from the supernatural.
“[Hopkins’s] did make some telling concessions to a more humanistic age, and in ways he never intended, he began, or possibly continued, such a process of reinterpreting Calvinism as to make it more human-centered and benevolent.”¹⁰ To a nation huffing Enlightenment glue, this had an emboldening effect on the belief of man’s mustard-cutting potential.

The engine Runs Hot

After the American War for Independence, a nascent America was free to turn its back on England and face the blank canvas of a huge backyard. Eschatologically, the aftermath of the revolution intensified millennial hopes and certainty that America was elected by the sovereign God to usher in a new era of Kingdom growth and Christian virtue. Their hopeful outlook on the future and privileged position opened the door for the next generation to fuse America’s millennial future with a sense of American exceptionalism. ¹¹

One of the bright lights of post-revolution America was Timothy Dwight. Dwight, the one-time president of Yale University and grandson of Jonathan Edwards, attempted to balance the work of the Spirit in history and human participation in revivals. As a prolific poet, millennial sentiment dripped from his pen in his epic works, such as the Conquest of Canaan, an allegory of America’s providential destiny to usher in the millennium. Just a few weeks after America’s birthday, Dwight delivered a bird-song valedictory address to the graduating class of Yale that America was “the child of promise that would signal the coming of the millennial age, the place where the progress of temporal things towards perfection will undoubtedly be finished.”¹²

Millennial hopes were mainlined into the veins of the nation. Some of the greatest poets of the day stood over the cradle of America and pronounced prophetic, poetic incantations of the coming Kingdom, presided over by God’s providence, but hammered into certainty by human ingenuity and American know-how. Dwight’s specific articulation of these hopes was representative of a broad and influential current in American religious and cultural life. While not every American was a fervent millennialist, the general sense that America had a unique role in God’s plan was widely shared.

The zeitgeist of the moment was best captured by Joel Barlow, friend of Dwight and fellow bard, in his millennial poem The Vision of Columbus, where he “expressed a growing confidence in human progress, not only as an inevitable course of the advancement of society, but as a means to the millennium.”¹³ He declared to the nation what the theologians of previous generations had theorized in their treatises and postulated from their pulpits: “It has long been the opinion of the Author, that such as state of peace and happiness as is foretold in Scripture and commonly called the millennial period, may be rationally expected to be introduced without a miracle,”¹⁴ (emphasis mine).

Had we a temperature gauge on the eschatological engine, it would have inched up towards the red zone, with the needle touching the bottom of the capital H. And that H stood for Human. Edward’s PM teetered over the same cavernous, man-centered hubris he warned against so many decades before. The millennium was inevitable, according to Dwight and his contemporaries, not because of God’s sovereign Providence, but through the steady plodding of man’s will marching through the institutions, curing cultural diseases through science and reason, and preaching set to retune, not resurrect, man’s spirit.

Smoke from the Hood

Two men will be our focus for this last push to contextualize the eschatology/wine connection, who supplied the necessary ingredients to bring us to the elimination of wine from the sacrament: Charles Finney and his contemporary Lyman Beecher. As mentioned in the previous chapters, these men stand as exemplars for the time, but also were household names. Beecher was one of the most prominent and respected religious voices in the country, perhaps the equivalent of a Billy Graham in terms of name recognition. 

Following Dwight, Edwards’s eschatological baton was handed to Lyman Beecher. In the last chapter, Beecher was mentioned as the leading voice in the Temperance movement. You will be more familiar with his daughter, Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Underwriting his strong anti-alcohol disposition was his PM inheritance and the necessity to chase the sinful snakes of debauchery out of America. He was as staunch a PM thinker as the rest upstream from him, who hastened the divide begun by his forbears, in the drift away from the supernatural as the source of Kingdom growth towards man’s moral ability to pull himself up by his own britches. He believed “the millennial destiny of the world was contingent upon the moral character of America as a whole.”¹⁵

Beecher was as prodigious as he was indefatigable. Apart from shepherding a flock, he started at least a half a dozen societies, including those with ostentatious names as The Connecticut Society for the Reform of Morals. The Christmas parties must have been off the hook. And, of course, most important for our purposes, the American Temperance Society, the goal of which was to protect the nation’s future by curbing intemperance and promoting a disciplined, sober, and morally upright citizenry.

In two ways, Beecher disconnected the knuckles of his imminent Kingdom freight from the  Edwardsean engine. He shifted the center of reform from God’s sovereingty to man’s agency, and changed the goal of revivalism from salvific redemption to social reform. Human choice and ability as central to salvation and sanctification meant that both the individual and society were no longer fashioned by God’s sovereignty, but on man to get his act together and respond to the gospel with changed lives. Choi contrasts the stark alteration from Edwards to Beecher: “For Edwards, God’s redemptive work was at the heart of revivals. Redemption would lead to moral reform. But Beecher’s militancy against vice and immorality reprioritized the order by emphasizing reform over redemption.”¹⁶ The shift in focus was not one of merely the extent of sanctification but a swapping of the dishwasher, from God scrubbing the cup to make taking a brillo pad to the exterior.

Spurred by Edward’s millennial certainty, Beecher put his hand to the plow to clean up lingering social issues like slavery, alcoholism, and poverty that stood in the way of the millennial kingdom. Beecher matched the ‘Manifest Destiny” zeitgeist with a “Millennial Manifest Destiny”. Indeed, the two were inextricably linked. America’s density was to expand across the continent was couched under the larger, spiritual conquest of America as the launchpad to Kingdom expansion to the four corners of the globe. His near obsession with social and moral reform is explained by his tireless construction of the “benevolent empire” of the Kingdom, crowded with special interest societies, and all built on top of a crumbling Edwardsean foundation.

As evidence of his growing faith in humanity and the nearness of the Kingdom, he declared that “God has made man a moral free agent,” and wagered that if Christians committed themselves to the conversion of the world, then the millennium would commence in three months.¹⁷ Nothing like an imminent trumpet call the the flickering image of eternal bliss to steel the moral spine. If there was going to be a millennium, it was going to be up to American Christians to expunge the country of moral degeneracy.

Because of the preaching of men like Beecher, and the change in direction it heralded, “Seminaries reorganized their programs to stress sociology. Institutional churches and social settlement work became prominent in the cities. Crusades for the rights of oppressed groups of all sorts absorbed the energies of hundreds of clergymen.”¹⁸ Reflected in this reorganization of the nation’s seminaries is Beecher’s emphasis on an “ascetic ethics based on avoiding vice and engaging in militant social action”¹⁹ in stark contrast to Edwards’s grand narrative of salvation’s history as a masterpiece of God’s sovereignty.

FINNEY

Charles Grandison Finney was one of the headliners of the Second Great Awakening, the John Lennon of the speaking circuit. Two important nuggets we need to take from Finney are his heterodox views of human depravity and the ability to self-improve, and the manipulative forms his revivals took based on this theological dry rot. His approach to revivals highlights the growing belief in man’s ability to self-govern, pushing any sniff of immorality to the fringes, such as alcohol.

Finney’s revivals had unparalleled success, which he attributed largely to his methodological and psychological “new measures”. Contrary to Edward’s view of revival saturated with miraculous transformation through the Holy Spirit, Finney emphatically took the materialistic route: “A revival is not a miracle, nor dependent on a miracle, in any sense. It is a purely philosophical result of the right use of the constituted means—as much so as any other effect produced by the application of means.”²⁰

His prolonged meetings boasted an “anxious bench” of hand-wringing acolytes waiting for the slaying of the Holy Spirit, a bench purposely positioned in front of the stage where the would-be converts could be seen by all. Women were encouraged to testify at meetings – a radical notion at the time, foreshadowing the Methodist precedent for female clergy a generation later. Music selection, ventilation, and absence of distraction from dogs or children were all considerations to create an emotional atmosphere where conversion could be encouraged, even expected. New measures mutated the one-time Holy Spirit-led revivals of Edwards and the First Great Awakening into predictable, repeatable revivalism unburdened by the supernatural altogether. Many of Finney’s measures live on in emotionally manipulative modern worship services and altar calls.

Original sin was, according to Finney, “anti-scriptural and nonsensical dogma.”²¹ Grossly overestimating man’s moral capacity, Finney believed that since man could choose his way into sin, he could also choose his way out of it. As sunny as this view of man’s spirit may be, it also borders on what has historically been called a Pelagian heresy – a belief that humans are born morally erect or neutral, can choose to do good without repentance, and through striving may reach salvation. The supernatural, in other words, is superfluous.

Rehearsing the apex of evolutionary understanding of religion, Finney stated,

There is nothing in religion beyond the ordinary powers of nature. It consists entirely in the right exercise of the powers of nature. It is just that, and nothing else. When mankind becomes truly religious, they are not enabled to put forth exertions which they were unable before to put forth. They only exert powers which they had before, in a different way, and use them for the glory of God.²²

Sound theological minds took umbrage with Finney’s wayward heterodoxy, particularly because of how viral it went. In response to the obvious challenges he faced with the specious theology, he responds in his systematic theology, “Whenever he sins, he must, for the time being, cease to be holy. This is self-evident. Whenever he sins, he must be condemned; he must incur the penalty of the law of God … If it be said that the precept is still binding upon him, but that with respect to the Christian, the penalty is forever set aside, or abrogated, I reply, that to abrogate the penalty is to repeal the precept, for a precept without penalty is no law. It is only counsel or advice. The Christian, therefore, is justified no longer than he obeys, and must be condemned when he disobeys or Antinomianism is true … In these respects, then, the sinning Christian and the unconverted sinner are upon precisely the same ground.” ²³

Viewing the sacrament through Finney’s tenuous understanding of justification, and combined with the growing conviction that alcohol was a positive evil, it is not surprising that the wine at the heart of worship was starting to be viewed as a toad at the root of Christian expression souring. Who wanted to risk sipping the devil’s cup at the Lord’s table, just to be unjustified and on the same ground as the unbeliever?

Michael Horton bundles Finney’s theology with this stinkbomb summary, “Thus, in Finney’s theology, God is not sovereign, man is not a sinner by nature, the atonement is not a true payment for sin, justification by imputation is insulting to reason and morality, the new birth is simply the effect of successful techniques, and revival is a natural result of clever campaigns.” This bundle package of stank theology and his naturalistic moralism saw the church as an agency of social reform, and spearheaded the “Christian political and social crusades to build their faith in humanity and its resources in self-salvation.”²⁴ The engine is redlining and driving with rapidity towards an elaborate Christian doctrine of humanism.

From the ashes of postmillennialism gutted of grace arose the Social Gospel that became a juggernaut force within a majority of mainline protestant churches. Christianity became indistinguishable from a humanistic, utopian Elysian paradise on earth, not too different, in fact, than Marx’s communistic endgame. Faith in the finished work of Jesus Christ to save and sanctify the soul was transferred into faith in government and society to reconstruct the Kingdom to fit the realities of democracy, science, and human potential.

Jesus Christ, the risen son of God, giver of grace and Lord of all history, was metaphoricalized, demystified, and demoted into a buddy Jesus, a good teacher, a pristine exemplar, who showed up to hand out WWJD bracelets. The object that carried the sign of the new covenant, wine, was exchanged for grape juice, a metaphorical swap mirrored by the lack of need for saving, just a good shaving and cleaning up of the moral countenance of a society already pretty good and set on becoming better.

Summary

The American story, separate from eschatology, is a plotless novel. No period in America’s short history has experienced more eschatological fervor than the 19th century. Crowded with evolutions, revolutions, bloodshed, and reformations, it was a time when the future expectations of Kingdom promises fueled social causes, paving the way to Kingdom reality – reverberations that continue to echo to this very day. 

While reductionistic explanations must be avoided when connecting historical cause and effect, the thermal energy of eschatological thought energizing moral reform cannot be underestimated. Just as oxygen is a necessary cause of fire, but not sufficient to bring it about alone, so eschatology is a necessary cause of the grape juice swap. Without it, the combustion would not have happened.

“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” Somewhere in this witicism by Eric Hoffer is the story of the progressive incontinence of PM’s eschatological hope into the overwrought moralism and fastidious perfectionism of the late 19th-century Social Gospel. What Edwards began was an organic and whimsical masterpiece of the Holy Spirit moving on the wild garden of the American continent, Beecher, Finney, and other 19th-century moralists exchanged for kitsch, fluorescent silk flowers, with plastic stems jammed deep into the clay. The invented moral necessity for sinlessness identified wine as a substance preventing the arrival of the Kingdom, and despite centuries of symbolic gravity, it was treated as a source of sin, not the symbol of salvation.

It is also important to note that men like Beecher, Dwight, and others were not necessarily bad guys; we don’t need to pin their photos on the dartboard (mmm…maybe Finney’s). The point here is not to condemn men of the past for their blind spots, especially since we have advanced myopic disease of our own. But ideas have consequences, and the misunderstanding of the means of the Kingdom led to the predictable results of history. The proper response is a contrite spirit, understanding we are just as susceptible to our own wanderings, and humble gratitude to God that we can learn from the past.

For the purposes of full disclosure, I consider myself of the PM persuasion. So imagine you are me, researching the history of all this wine stuff, aghast to find that my own team had thrown a monkey wrench into the engine. But confronting unpleasant realities is necessary to learning, rather than sweeping mistakes into the penumbra of cognitive dissonance.

Concerningly, however, I have heard some of the same things coming out of the mouths of PMs of today as I have read from the pens of those who contributed to PM’s demise. I do believe, in the vein of Edwards, that it belongs to the church, through the miraculous works of the Holy Spirit, to till the earth and grow a Kingdom garden, and this plan of God is not dissuaded by man’s timorousness nor temerity. But not all progress is an unsullied good; cars ease transportation, but if the wheels fall off, they become roadblocks. When we take our eyes off the Lord Jesus and his sovereign rule over history and humanity, and hasten what he means to simmer slowly in the hearts of nations, we are destined to repeat the rhyme of the past.

Our fly-over these two hundred years or so was so swift and lofty that our subject of wine and its removal from the sacrament was a teeny spot of red on the vast landscape of history. But it is important to see the context and motivations of those pushing for grape juice, and the types of things they intended grape juice to mean.

I will end with this summation of the times by Jean Quandt so that we can get the birds-eye view of the topography of the hundred years or so we just traversed:

Whereas evangelical Protestantism had insisted that the kingdom would come by the grace of God acting in history and not by any natural process, the later version often substituted the providential gift of science for redeeming grace. These changes toward a more naturalistic view of the world’s progress were paralleled by a changing attitude toward the agencies of redemption. The churches and the benevolent societies connected with them were still considered important instruments of the coming kingdom, but great significance was now attached to such impersonal messianic agencies as the natural and social sciences. The spirit of love and brotherhood was still given a major role in perfecting the world, but it was often regarded as an achievement of human evolution with only tenuous ties to a transcendent deity.²⁵

References

1. Choi, P. (2021). The agony and the eschatology: apocalyptic thought in New England Evangelical Calvinism from Jonathan Edwards to Lyman Beecher (dissertation). p 273
2. Ibid, p vii
3. Edwards, J., Dwight, S. E., & Hickman, E. (1974). The works of Jonathan Edwards. vol. 1. Banner of Truth Trust. p 386
4. Edwards, 401
5. Choi, 165
6. Heimert, A. (2006). Religion and the American mind: From the great awakening to the revolution. Wipf & Stock. p 59
7. Sydney E. Ahlstrom, “The Great Awakening as the Refiner’s Fire,” in The Great Awakening: Documents on the Revival of Religion, 1740–1745, ed. Richard L. Bushman (New York: Atheneum, 1970), pp. 197–233.
8. Joseph Bellamy, The Millennium, in The Works of the Reverend Joseph Bellamy, vol. 1 (NewYork: Stephen Dodge, 1811), p 512
9. Choi, 259
10. Conkin, Paul K. The Uneasy Center: Reformed Christianity in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).
11. Choi, 260
12. Timothy Dwight, A Valedictory Address to the Young Gentlemen Who Commenced Bachelors of Arts, July 25th 1776 (New Haven, CT: Thomas and Samuel Green, 1776), 15-16.
13. Choi, 295
14. Joel Barlow, The Vision of Columbus; a Poem in Nine Books (Hartford, CT: Hudson and Goodwin, 1787).
15. Choi, 365
16. Choi, 364
17. Choi, 356
18. Smith, Timothy Lawrence. Revivalism and Social Reform: American Protestantism on the Eve of the Civil War. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980.
19. Choi, 368
20. Charles G. Finney, Lectures on Revival (W. G. McLoughlin, ed.) (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 1960), p 4
21. Finney, C. G., Carroll, D. J., Nicely, B., & Parkhurst, L. G. (1994). Finney’s Systematic Theology: Lectures on classes of truths, moral government, the atonement, moral and physical depravity, natural, moral, and gracious ability, repentance, faith, justification, sanctification, election, Divine Sovereignty & Perseverance of the saints. Bethany House Publishers. p 179
22. Finney, Lectures on Revival, p 9
23. Finney, Systematic Theology, p 46
24. Horton, M. (1995, January 1). The legacy of Charles Finney. The Legacy of Charles Finney. https://www.modernreformation.org/resources/articles/the-legacy-of-charles-finney
25. Quandt, J. B. (1973). Religion and social thought: The secularization of postmillennialism. American Quarterly, 25(4), 390. https://doi.org/10.2307/2711630