"In the New Testament's boldest innovations, that which we call the State and that which we call the Church are agencies that cater to differentiable loyalties.  The State demands a loyalty that all men can give, irrespective of their religious orientation; the Church demands a loyalty which only he can give who believes in the Christ.  The State has a sword with which it constrains men, coerces them if need be; the Church has a sword also, but it is the sword of the Word of God, a sword that goes no farther than moral suasion."

The Reformers and Their Stepchildren (Dissent and Nonconformity)

“By Zeus, I shall tell you just how it looks to me, Scorates,” he said. “Some of us who are about the same age often meet together and keep up the old proverb. Now then, when they meet, most of the members of our group lament, longing for the pleasures of youth and reminiscing about sex, about drinking bouts and feasts and all that goes with things of that sort; they take it hard as though they were deprived of something very important and had then lived well but are now not even alive. Some also bewail the abuse that old age receives from relatives, and in this key they sing a refrain about all the evils old age has caused them. But, Socrates, in my opinion these men do not put their fingers on the cause. For, if this were the cause, I too would have suffered these same things insofar as they depend on old age and so would everyone else who has come to this point in life. But as it is, I have encountered others for whom it was not so, especially Sophocles.”

“I was once present when the poet was asked by someone, ‘Sophocles, how are you in sex? Can you still have intercourse with a woman?’ ‘Silence, man,’ he said. ‘Most joyfully did I escape it, as though I had run away from a sort of frenzied and savage master.’ I thought at the time that he had spoken well and I still do. For, in every way, old age brings great peace and freedom from such things. When the desires cease to strain and finally relax, then what Sophocles says comes to pass in every way; it is possible to be rid of very many mad masters. But of these things and of those that concern relatives, there is just one cause: not old age, Socrates, but the character of the human beings. If they are orderly and content with themselves, even old age is only moderately troublesome; if they are not, then both age, Socrates, and youth alike turn out to be hard for that sort.”

The Republic Of Plato: Second Edition

The widespread religious revival that began with the Dutch Reformed Churches in New Jersey in 1726, spread to Presbyterians and Congregationalists for the next ten years, and reaching its highest point in New England in the 1740’s has numerous teaching points that should be emphasized. These include:

1. The examination of the effects of the real Holy Spirit movement led by the preaching of Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield with an eye toward analyzing the excessive emotionalisms, body agitations, visions, trances, and other odd manifestations that were part of the revival movement. This teaching would discourage the need for seeing the inward grace of a saved Christian and remind students that the Great Awakening was supernaturally stirring to believers in a spiritually supernatural way; but they were taken to attention seeking heights by profiteering itinerants. This uncontrolled exuberance was not revealing of the Lord’s expectations for true pattern of future worship expectations and requirements. That both Edwards and Whitefield also discouraged the excessive emotionalism during the revivals shows God’s desires to focus on the message and not on the feeling or the look.

2. There are historical and biblical patterns established with Great Awakenings. Usually, spiritual revivals on grand scales precede spiritual apathy and exceedingly deviant sin and relaxation of morals with the religious leaders unable to change the direction their church is moving. It seems that God prepares and strengthens his church for future tribulations and trials, and increases those following His will and ways through the advent of special Holy Spirit efforts that awaken the righteous cause and will in mankind. Modern day cries out for such redemption, renewal, and restoration, and Christians should be praying daily for such a supernatural event to occur in their time and place.

3. The United States is still benefitting from the Great Awakening. The revival was not only changing to the Church and personal faith; it contributed to the making of America. Some scholars have declared the arrival of the Fourth Great Awakening that began in the 1960’s with a return to sensuous religion, experiential content to the Bible and a focus upon personal sin, leading through the 1990’s moral majority movement, with the attack on pro-life and pro-family. However, when the spiritual experiences of the First Great Awakening are compared, it is apparent that The Fourth Great Awakening has not yet occurred, but may well be showing developments that will one day quench the wickedness and apathy present in our world today.

Bibliography

Carpenter, John B. "The Fourth Great Awakening or Apostasy: Is American Evangelicalism Cycling Upwards or Spiraling Downwards?" Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 44, no. 4 (2001).

Christian History Magazine - Issue 23: Spiritual Awakenings in North America. Worcester, PA: Christian History Institute, 1989.

Cross, F.L. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church. 3rd ed. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Rogers, Mark. "Review of the Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America by Thomas S. Kidd." Trinity Journal 30, (2009).

Thornbury, John F. "Another Look at the First Great Awakening." Reformation and Revival 4, no. 3 (1995).

References

[1] F.L. Cross, The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd ed. (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 705.

[2] Mark Rogers, "Review of the Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America by Thomas S. Kidd," Trinity Journal 30, (2009): 159.

[3] Cross, 705.

[4] Christian History Magazine - Issue 23: Spiritual Awakenings in North America,  (Worcester, PA: Christian History Institute, 1989).

[5] John F. Thornbury, "Another Look at the First Great Awakening," Reformation and Revival 4, no. 3 (1995): 17.

[6] John B. Carpenter, "The Fourth Great Awakening or Apostasy: Is American Evangelicalism Cycling Upwards or Spiraling Downwards?," Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 44, no. 4 (2001): 649.

The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America

“Anyone can achieve their fullest potential, who we are might be predetermined, but the path we follow is always of our own choosing. We should never allow our fears or the expectations of others to set the frontiers of our destiny. Your destiny can't be changed but, it can be challenged. Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one.”

Further information:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heidegger/

"This text does not require 'interpretation' or 'application' so that it can be brought near our experience and circumstance.  Rather, the text is so powerful and compelling, so passionate and uncompromising in its anguish and hope, that it requires we submit our experience to it and thereby reenter our experience on new terms, namely the terms of the text.  The text does not need to be applied to our situation.  Rather, our situation needs to be submitted to the text for a fresh discernment.  It is our situation, not the text, that requires a new interpretation.  In every generation, this text subverts all our old readings of reality and forces us to a new, dangerous, obedient reading."

A Commentary on Jeremiah: Exile and Homecoming

"The Holy Spirit is with the Father and the Son the true, eternal God in so far as like the begetting Father and the begotten Son, He is the communion and self-impartation realised and consisting between both from all eternity; the principle of their mutual love proceeding from both and equal in essence; the eternal reality of their separateness, mutuality and convolution, of their distinctness and interconnexion.  To this extent it may well be said that it is in the Holy Spirit that the mystery of God's trinitarian essence attains its full profundity and clarity.  He is at once the innermost secret of God, and in God's relationship with man the great, bright and incontrovertible revelaton of the unity and diversity of the Father and the Son.  It is in the Holy Spirit that the commission of the Father and the obedience of the Son, the good-pleasure of the Father and the glory of the Son, obviously coincide in the decree which is the intra-divine beginning of all things."

Church Dogmatics by Karl Barth

"If God's creation is a history, this means that it takes place in time.  Time, in contradistinction to eternity is not merely the negation of time.  It is not in any way timeless.  On the contrary, as the source of time it is supreme and absolute time, i.e., the immediate unity of present, past and future; of now, once and then; of the centre, beginning and end; of movement, origin and goal.  In this way it is the essence of God Himself; in this way God is Himself eternity.  Thus God Himself is temporal, precisely in so far as He is eternal and His eternity is the prototype of time, and as the Eternal He is simultaneously before time, above time, and after time.  But time as such, i.e., our time, relative time, itself created, is the form of existence of the creature; it is, in contradistinction to eternity, the one-way sequence and therefore the succession and division of past, present and future; of once, now and then; of the beginning, middle and end; of origin, movement and goal.  When God creates and therefore gives reality to another alongside and outside Himself, time begins as the form of existence of this other.  It is itself, of course, the creation of God (or more correctly, the creation of His eternity).  But it actually begins together with His creation, so that we have to say that His creation is the ground and basis of time."

Church Dogmatics by Karl Barth

If you can be a part of a congregation of Christians that gather for Church free from harassment, arrest, persecution, oppression, torture, or death then you are more blessed than 3 billion people in the world.

"Everyone gets dead, and it was his turn."

Spoken by actor John Wayne as character Hondo Lane in1953 movie Hondo.

"Every Saint has a past, every sinner a future"