Personal Experience as a Mark of Grace

The following is part of an article written by Klemet Preus in LOGIA (Vol. XVIII, No. 2, 15-16) on the subject of Lutherans resisting evangelicalism.  It is a solid warning for any church.

By the time of the Great Awakening in the 1730s, one hundred years after the arrival of the first Puritans, this morphology was completely entrenched in the ecclesiastical and social fiber of New England. The practice of Evangelicalism has always been to cultivate a religious experience as the ground of faith.

In the early 1800s, when the Second Great Awakening occurred, the morphology of conversion had evolved to the point that extreme, emotional experiences were considered mandatory for full assurance of God’s grace. A pastor named Charles Finney codified the type and necessity of such experiences. Possibly the most influential churchman in the history of America, Finney popularized the traveling itinerant preaching of the so-called revivalists and was the most significant preacher in a long line of revivalist preachers including Dwight Moody, Billy Sunday, Billy Graham, and currently, Joel Osteen. Finney lectured extensively on the nature and importance of the conversion experience:

God has found it necessary to take advantage of the excitability there is in mankind, to produce powerful excitements among them, before he can lead them to obey. Men are so sluggish, there are so many things to lead their minds off from religion and to oppose the influence of the gospel, that it is necessary to raise an excitement among them, till the tide rises so high as to sweep away the opposing obstacles. They must be so excited that they will break over these counteracting influences, before they will obey God.¹⁴

The special working of the Spirit had to be felt in rather dramatic ways. Finney’s own conversion experience provided his assurance of salvation. In his Memoirs he shares it:

The Holy Spirit descended upon me in a manner that seemed to go through me, body and soul. I could feel the impression, like a wave of electricity, going through and through me. Indeed, it seemed like the very breath of God. I can recollect distinctly that it seemed to fan me like immense wings. . . . I wept aloud with joy and love; and I do not know but I should say, I literally bellowed out the unutterable gushings of my heart. These waves came over me, and over me, and over me, one after the other, until I recollect I cried out, “Lord, I cannot bear any more.”¹⁵

Touted as indispensable, Finney’s dramatic experience became the inalienable right of every Christian. Faith was defined as experience.

The experiential understanding of faith is propagated in America today by what has been called the Church Growth Movement, an amorphous movement within Evangelicalism that began and is centered in Pasadena, California, at Fuller Theological Seminary. One of that movement’s chief advocates and proponents is C. Peter Wagner, who served as dean of the Institute for Church Growth at Fuller Theological Seminary, where many leaders of Lutheran churches have studied. Wagner believes that the ideal sermon

is not intellectual, but emotional; it is not rational, but experiential; it is not exegetical, but allegorical; it is not doctrinal, but practical; it is not directed as much to the head as the heart, [the effect being] not that you learn more, but rather that you feel better.¹⁶

Notice that sermons are not ideal simply because they are gospel-centered, orthodox, doctrinally sound, or even coherent.

14.  Charles G. Finney, “What a Revival of Religion Is” (1864) in The American Evangelicals, ed. McLoughlin (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 87.
15.  Charles G. Finney, Memoirs of Charles G. Finney (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1903), 20.
16.  C. Peter Wagner, Look Out! The Pentecostals Are Coming (Carol Stream, IL: Creation House, 1973), 39–40.