1730 Great Awakening Evangelistic Movement Led to Major Prophecy Changes
PART 3
February 14, 2012
1780 TO 1880 – CENTRAL CORE OF PROPHECY REVISIONIST AGE
Secular historians credit John Wesley, together with his brother Charles, for what is now referred to as the “Great Awakening” and “Evangelical Movement.”
The three waves of the “Great Awakening Evangelical Movement,” following its beginning its 1730 beginning, swept across the globe, introducing major changes in what was considered orthodox prophetic teachings prior to 1730. I do not believe many of these changes were justified! The most dramatic revisions in the prophetic teachings occurred between 1780 and 1880.
“The Wesleyan holiness movement provided a theologic
al explanation for what was happening to these Christians. They adapted Wesleyan soteriology to accommodate their new understanding.”
Begin Excerpt from Wikipedia on History of the Pentecostal Movement
Early Pentecostals considered the movement a latter day restoration of the church’s apostolic power, and most historians of modern Pentecostalism write that the movement emerged from late 19th century radical evangelical revival movements in America and Great Britain.
There was no one founder of modern Pentecostalism. Instead, isolated Christian groups were experiencing charismatic phenemena such as divine healing and speaking in tongues. The Wesleyan holiness movement provided a theological explanation for what was happening to these Christians. They adapted Wesleyan soteriology to accommodate their new understanding
Edward Irving‘s Catholic Apostolic Church also shared many characteristics later found in the Pentecostal revival.
The first stage of his later development which resulted in the establishment of the Irvingite or Holy Catholic Apostolic Church in 1832 was associated with the Albury Conferences at his friend Henry Drummond‘s seat, Albury Park at Albury, Surrey concerning unfulfilled prophecy, followed by an almost exclusive study of the prophetical books and especially of the Apocalypse, and by several series of sermons on prophecy both in London and the provinces. His apocalyptic lectures in 1828 crowding the largest churches of Edinburgh on summer mornings.
In 1830, however, there was opened up to his ardent imagination a new vista of things spiritual, a new hope for the age in which he lived, by the revival in a remote corner of Scotland of those apostolic gifts of prophecy and healing which he had already in 1828 persuaded himself had only been kept in abeyance by the absence of faith.
At once, he welcomed the new powers with an unquestioning evidence that could be shaken by neither the remonstrances nor the desertions of his dearest friends, the recantation of some of the principal agents of the gifts, his own decent into a subordinate position, the meagre and barren results of the manifestations, nor their general rejection both by the church and the world. His excommunication by the presbytery of London in 1830 for publishing his doctrines of the humanity of Jesus Christ, and the condemnation of these opinions by the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in the following year, were secondary episodes that only affected the main issue of his career insofar as they further isolated him from the sympathy of the church; but the irregularities connected with the manifestation of the gifts gradually estranged the majority of his own congregation, and on the complaint of the trustees to the presbytery of London, whose authority they had formerly rejected, he was declared unfit to remain the minister of the National Scotch Church of Regent Square.
After he and those who adhered to him (describing themselves as of the Holy Catholic Apostolic Church) had in 1832 removed to a new building in Newman Street, he was, in March 1833, deposed from the ministry of the Church of Scotland by the Presbytery of Annan on the original charge of heresy. With the sanction of the power, he was now, after some delay, reordained chief pastor of the church assembled in Newman Street, but unremitting labours and ceaseless spiritual excitement soon completely exhausted the springs of his vital energy. He died, worn out and wasted with labour and absorbing care while still in the prime of life,
From 1826 he was the centre of a “school of the prophets,” which published the Morning Watch, or Quarterly Journal of Prophecy periodically from 1829 to 1833.
In 1828 his Doctrine of the Incarnation Opened aroused opposition for its denigration of the human side of Christ’s nature. After a similar work by him appeared in 1830, he was charged in ecclesiastical courts with maintaining “the sinfulness of Christ’s humanity.” Despite his protest that he had been misinterpreted, he was excommunicated by the London presbytery, and in 1833 he was deposed from his ministry by the Church of Scotland.
By then a convinced believer in such pentecostal phenomena as speaking in tongues, Irving preached throughout Great Britain, returning to London to assume a minor position in the evolving Catholic Apostolic Church. Formed shortly after his death by several disciples and associates, the sect sought to emphasize the unity of all Christians in a universal church and to prepare for the Second Coming. The church flourished until the end of the 19th century, though later members rejected the name “Irvingites” for their group. A close friend of the English authors Thomas Carlyle, Charles Lamb, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Irving was honoured by burial in the Glasgow Cathedral crypt.
Prophetic teachers of this generation have lived with the two division diagrams so long they think they came over on the Mayflower. But basically these diagrams were a product of the first of the week rapture position, which is such an ingrained part of prophecy teaching today. The so-called “first of the week” position, as well as what is known as the “middle of the week” position, cannot be found in existence in any published book about the Bible before 1760. In fact, it is the term “week,” appropriated by the revisionists, that is largely responsible for the mass exodus from orthodox prophetic teaching, which occurred in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The bulk of all prophetic teaching of today is based, directly or indirectly, on the revisionist teaching on Daniel 9:27, which, to a large extent, was accelerated with the initial appearance of the “first of the week” position in the early 19th century. If the teaching on Daniel 9:27 by the revisionists is incorrect, then much of today’s prophetic teaching is in error. I believe this is the case, and I have been labeled as a revisionist myself because of it. I am certain that the great Bible expositor B.H. Carrol, who continued to believe the pre-1760 teachings until his death, was correct in what he taught concerning Daniel’s 70th week. For you see, before 1827, the majority of orthodox prophetic teachers were convinced that the “he” in Daniel 9:27 was Jesus Christ, not the antichrist – THEY WERE RIGHT. We are not waiting for a “week of seven years” to be fulfilled! Why not? Because Jesus has already fulfilled most of the first 3 and ½ years. We are facing a tribulation period of the last 3 and ½ years, preceded by a much briefer period of peace than many are expecting.
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