Having been thinking about "religious experience" and the Great Awakenings, I am curious as to your thoughts on Archibald Alexander's Thoughts on Religious Experience. I tended to notice among Edwards and his followers, like Piper, they tend to place a high view on the emotions and experience that at times it (if not always) becomes the defining mark of true conversion and piety. I am suspicious of such views and think, more often than not, that its pervasive influence on evangelicalism is destructive, especially among the charismatics. What are Dr. Alexander's views? Is he more restrained?
In
Recovering Mother Kirk, DG Hart presents Archibald Alexander as someone whose 'roots were in the revivals of eighteenth-century Virginia' (p192) and who himself 'led' a revival in winter 1814-15 (p191). (I knew I'd re-read this recently when I was looking in this book for something different, it's only taken me this long to hunt it down again to reply to this thread!)
This makes Alexander suspect in Hart's presentation because (as far as I understand Hart's position) he refuses to recognise a distinction between 'good revivals' and 'bad revivals' because for him 'revival' per se prioritises the unusual and dramatic over the ordinary, and puts emotions and experience in the driving seat. Hart pitches 'conversion' against 'catechism' and presents it as misguided to demand that before children who have been baptised and catechised can make a credible profession of faith, they must demonstrate that they have been through 'the crisis of conversion.' (p192)
However, in
Thoughts on Religious Experience, Alexander comes across as balanced and thoughtful, and he speaks to many of the things that Hart is so concerned about.
* He warns that experience often degenerates into enthusiasm, and that the ardour/intensity of feelings is immaterial (pxviii, BOT 1967)
* He says it does not matter whether someone is brought into a state of grace gradually or suddenly (p15)
* He spends several paragraphs on the pitfalls of 'giving a testimony' (everyone within a denomination gives strikingly similar testimonies, people generally don't have either the discretion or the humility to give an accurate account of how God has worked in their souls, it remains impossible for anyone to judge on the basis of a testimony whether someone is genuinely converted, it tends to foster spiritual pride...) (p29-30)
* He has a chapter on 'sympathy,' or what we might call 'social contagion' - extravagant ecstatic or hysterical responses affecting whole congregations under emotional preaching - which he deplores (Chapter 5)
* He demonstrates that it is not necessary to go through a crisis conversion (p99) and instead places more value on things like resting on God's way of salvation by Jesus Christ and being attracted to God's ordinances (p102-105)
I have found a lot of value in DG Hart's critique of revivalism and the excessive emphasis on emotions and experience in Edwards and his putative followers like Piper. On the other hand, I have sometimes thought that Hart's polemics work best as a corrective, rather than something programmatic that you could implement to live by.
So If we do like Alexander, and anchor the treatment of experience to truth, this is a big safeguard against giving emotions/experience too high a prominence. We are in fact emotional creatures, we do have psychological experiences, and it would be unrealistic and irresponsible to airbrush this out of religion altogether. But it's the
truth that matters, and the impact of the truth on our whole persons (including but not restricted to our emotions).
Alexander, pxviii: "... genuine religious experience is nothing but the impression of divine truth on the mind, by the energy of the Holy Spirit ..."
p105: "... holy affections thus produced by the contemplation of truth are the very opposite of enthusiasm, which always substitutes human fancies or impulses for the truths of God, which it uniformly undervalues."
