Journal: Reformation and Revival
Volume: RAR 01:4 (Fall 1992)
Article: The Starving of the Church-IV
Author: Jim Elliff

RAR 1:4 (Fall 1992) p. 105

The Starving of the Church-IV

Jim Elliff

We have now come to the fourth of five forgotten doctrines which are related to reformation and revival: The nature of saving faith as opposed to empty faith. It is my contention that the way in which we have preached a half gospel and the careless way we have received people into our churches have contributed to the need of revival perhaps as much as any other thing. Only a wide-scale reformation of thinking can abate this excessive accessing of unsaved persons into our churches. We have made a large and comfortable portal into our churches and “many there be that enter thereby.” Even true revival, particularly following Finney, has not always dealt as decisively with this issue as might be imagined. Certainly “revivalism” has not significantly altered the pattern. Genuine revival, on the tracks of a reformation of thinking, offers the best solution.

Unregenerate Church Membership

Perhaps the Great Awakening offers to us the better model when it comes to understanding adequately the nature of faith. In Joseph Tracey’s The Great Awakening, the new birth as change was given to be the core consideration of the Awakening:

The history of religious opinions and practices shows that the most important practical idea which then received increased prominence and power, and has held its place ever since, was the idea of the “new birth,” as held by the Orthodox Congregationalists of New England, and others who harmonize with them; the doctrine, that in order to be saved, a man must undergo a change in his principles of moral action, which will be either accompanied or succeeded by exercises of which he is conscious, and can give an account; so that those who have been thus changed, may ordinarily be distinguished from those who have not; from which it follows that all who exhibit no evidence of such a

RAR 1:4 (Fall 1992) p. 106

change ought to be considered and treated as unregenerate and in the road to perdition, and therefore not admitted to the communion of the churches. This doctrine of the “new birth,” as an ascertainable change, was not generally prevalent in any communion when the revival commenced; it was urged as of fundamental importance by the leading promoters of the revival; it took strong hold of those whom the revival affected; it naturally led to such questions as the revival brought up and caused to be discussed; its perversions naturally grew into, or associated with, such errors as the revival promoted; it was adapted to provoke such opposition, and in such quarters, as the revival provoked; and its caricatures would furnish such pictures of the revival, as opposers drew. This was evidently the right key; for it fitted all the wards of th...