Journal: Southern Baptist Journal of Theology
Volume: SBJT 28:3 (Fall 2024)
Article: A Theologian Who Fanned The Flames Of Revival: August Tholuck And The German Awakening Movement
Author: Richard Weikart

A Theologian Who Fanned The Flames Of Revival: August Tholuck And The German Awakening Movement1

Richard Weikart

Richard Weikart is Professor Emeritus of History at California State University, Stanislaus, Turlock, California. He earned his PhD in History from the University of Iowa. Dr. Weikart has written numerous books with his most recent book entitled, Unnatural Death: Medicine’s Descent from Healing to Killing (Discovery Institute, 2024). He has also written Darwinian Racism: How Darwinism Influenced Hitler, Nazism, and White Nationalism (Discovery Institute, 2022), and The Death of Humanity: And the Case for Life (Regnery Faith, 2016). He is married to Lisa and they have seven children.

On April 9, 1822, a little over four years after his own conversion experience in the Berlin Awakening, August Tholuck wrote in his diary, “O burning in me is an unquenchable, blazing fire to be in Christ himself and to lead millions of souls with me into him.”2 Tholuck’s spiritual zeal epitomized the German Awakening Movement, which rejected the rationalist theology dominating the German Protestant Church in the early nineteenth century. The Awakening Movement promoted a return to greater theological orthodoxy, but like the earlier Pietist movement (which exerted considerable influence on the Awakening Movement), it was decidedly opposed to an orthodoxy that was cold and lifeless. Instead, it urged church members to seek a conversion experience and to engage in Bible studies and other gatherings for Christian edification. It also promoted the establishment of Bible societies, mission societies, and many charitable institutions and organizations. Tholuck was involved in many of these activities.

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It is unlikely that Tholuck personally led millions of souls to salvation. Nonetheless, as a theology student and adjunct professor at the University of Berlin in the early 1820s and as a theology professor at the University of Halle after 1826, he would have a profound influence over multitudes of people. Indeed, just a week after he expressed the desire to lead millions to Christ, he reported in his diary that he had already helped twenty-five people come to Christ.3 In reflecting back on his career in 1873, Tholuck stated that early in his Christian life, “I adopted for my own life the famous motto of Count Zinzendorf: ‘Ich hab nur eine Passion, und die ist Er, nur Er.’ (I have but one passion, and that is He, and He alone). To bring back souls to Christ, was from that time the daily, nay, the hourly problem as well as the joy of my life.”