By Walt Garlington
It is common knowledge that Christian revival meetings have long been part of Dixie’s heritage. They’ve been with us since the Great Awakening in the middle of the 18th century, but the Great Revival of Cane Ridge, Kentucky, in 1801 [feature image above] was the real beginning of this spiritual phenomenon as a fixture in Southern life. Once common also in the New England and other Northern States, they have largely disappeared there. Our Yankee cousins have become content with a God who can be analyzed and critiqued with the rational mind, who will stay tamely on the pages of a book or a journal. The Southerner wants something different: He does not simply want to think about God; he wants, much like the Holy Prophet Moses on Mount Horeb, to experience God – to encounter Him here and now – to see and grasp as much of His mystery and wonder and glory as he can.
The students and teachers at Asbury University in Wilmore, Kentucky, are the latest examples to manifest this longing in Southrons. Another revival is underway there: the Asbury Revival, as it is being called. But will they find what they are seeking – the life of fruitful repentance, the meeting with God?
It is our contention that these are best accomplished in the Orthodox Church – through her practices of prayer, fasting, and so forth; her worship, particularly the Divine Liturgy; and especially in the monastic life – and, furthermore, that the theology of Protestants (and Roman Catholics) makes it difficult, at best, to attain man’s true end of union with God. With the help of the testimony of Prof. Thomas McCall of Asbury Theological Seminary (which is next door to Asbury University) regarding the Asbury Revival, let us examine those claims.
Prof. McCall describes scenes from the Asbury Revival:
When I arrived, I saw hundreds of students singing quietly. They were praising and praying earnestly for themselves and their neighbors and our world—expressing repentance and contrition for sin and interceding for healing, wholeness, peace, and justice.
Some were reading and reciting Scripture. Others were standing with arms raised. Several were clustered in small groups praying together. A few were kneeling at the altar rail in the front of the auditorium. Some were lying prostrate, while others were talking to one another, their faces bright with joy.
They were still worshiping when I left in the late afternoon and when I came back in the evening. They were still worshiping when I arrived early Thursday morning—and by midmorning hundreds were filling the auditorium again. I have seen multiple students running toward the chapel each day.
The worship continued throughout the day on Friday and indeed all through the night. On Saturday morning, I had a hard time finding a seat; by evening the building was packed beyond capacity. Every night, some students and others have stayed in the chapel to pray through the night. And as of Sunday evening, the momentum shows no signs of slowing down.
This display of zeal for God is wonderful, but the fact that constant worship, prayer, Bible reading, contrition over sin, confession, etc., are seen as something abnormal shows the disconnect between Southerners and the Apostolic Faith. It is the norm in the home life, the parish life, and the monastic life of Orthodox believers to constantly be doing these things (and these exertions are intensified even more during the four lenten seasons of the Church year).
In the home, the individual believer (along with his family if he has one) has his morning and evening prayer rule to say, along with readings from the Holy Scriptures and the Holy Fathers of the Church, as well as the Jesus Prayer and other short prayers to say throughout the day as time allows.
A look at a few portions from the Morning Prayers of the Orthodox will be helpful at this point:
O heavenly King, O Comforter, the Spirit of truth, who art in all places and fillest all things; Treasury of good things and Giver of life: Come and dwell in us and cleanse us from every stain, and save our souls, O gracious Lord.
All-holy Trinity, have mercy on us. Lord, cleanse us from our sins. Master, pardon our iniquities. Holy God, visit and heal our infirmities for thy Name’s sake.
Having arisen from sleep, we fall down before thee, O Blessed One, and sing to thee, O Mighty One, the Angelic Hymn: Holy, holy, holy art thou, O God. Through the Theotokos have mercy on us.
Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit.
From my bed and sleep Thou hast raised me: O Lord, enlighten my mind and my heart, and open my lips that I may praise thee, O Holy Trinity: Holy, holy, holy art thou, O God. Through the Theotokos have mercy on us.
Both now and ever, and unto ages of ages. Amen.
Suddenly the Judge shall come, and the deeds of each shall be revealed: but with fear we cry out in the middle of the night: Holy, holy, holy art thou, O God. Through the Theotokos have mercy on us.
Lord, have mercy. (12 times)
A Prayer to the Holy Trinity:
Arising from sleep I thank thee, O holy Trinity, because of the abundance of thy goodness and long-suffering thou wast not wroth with me, slothful and sinful as I am; neither hast thou destroyed me in my transgressions: but in thy compassion raised me up, as I lay in despair; that at dawn I might sing the glories of thy Majesty. Do thou now enlighten the eyes of my understanding, open my mouth to receive thy words, teach me thy commandments, help me to do thy will, confessing thee from my heart, singing and praising thine All-holy Name: of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit: now and ever, and unto ages of ages. Amen.
The focus on repentance, on blessing and hymning God, on receiving Grace from Him, on being aware of the closeness of His Presence, is quite intense – and this from only a small portion of the Morning Prayers.
But let us go onward. Prof. McCall continues, “Many people say that in the chapel they hardly even realize how much time has elapsed. It is almost as though time and eternity blur together as heaven and earth meet. Anyone who has witnessed it can agree that something unusual and unscripted is happening.”
Once again, this is the proclaimed as something unusual at Asbury, but in Orthodox worship it is not. When the Divine Liturgy begins, normal time, chronos, ends, and our entry into heavenly, eternal time, kairos, begins (this is experienced to a lesser degree during prayer, readings of Christian books, and ascetic exercises outside of the Divine Liturgy). The Divine Liturgy is the union of Heaven and earth par excellence, when Christ is present among His people in the bread and wine offered to Him on the holy altar. And, as the Holy Fathers say, where Christ is present, there are myriads of angels with Him. In the Orthodox Church, week after week, Heaven truly touches the earth, and man receives a foretaste of the timelessness of Paradise.
Prof. McCall also adds this:
I am teaching a class in theological anthropology at the university this semester, and as we met last Friday, I reminded my students that we are creatures made for worship and communion with Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is our telos, the end for which we were created. We are never more fully alive and whole than when we worship. And what we are experiencing now—this inexpressibly deep sense of peace, wholeness, holiness, belonging, and love—is only the smallest of windows into the life for which we are made.
If this is so, then monastic life is essential to Christianity, the place where men and women can live out their God-given telos to the fullest extent possible. Archbishop Chrysostomos of Etna writes:
Monasticism is not something unto itself—a peculiar and exclusive institution. In the true monastic every Christian sees what he can be. He beholds a model to be emulated. He embraces the higher faculties of the soul and beholds what it is that embodies all that to which Christians aspire. As an old adage has it: “Christ, the light of Angels; Angels, the light of monastics; monastics, the light of all men.” Monasticism reaches up to Christ, derives from Christ, and brings the Christian Faithful into a direct encounter with the light that flows forth from Christ and His Angels.
Just as the body has need of various victuals and craves the things that sustain it, so the soul needs an image of purity. It is this image which the monk and nun have always presented (‘Introduction’, in Metropolitan Cyprian of Oropos and Fili, The Monastic Life, trans. Archbishop Chrysostomos of Etna and Bishop Auxentios of Photiki, Etna, Cal., Center for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies, 2001, p. 16).
Here is where the doctrinal differences begin to show up more starkly. For Protestants, monasticism is not simply superfluous, it is an erroneous institution, an example of mankind trying to earn his salvation by his works. For salvation is by faith alone, say the Protestants. The Orthodox priest Fr. George Florovsky speaks to this:
Without Luther there would not have been a Calvin, as Calvin himself acknowledges. Both share the doctrine of justification by faith “alone.” Both share the doctrine of the sovereignty of God, as specifically defined by them — that God alone operates a system of salvation that is mono-energism, not synergism. Both firmly believe that man in himself has no value to God. Any value of man is “imputed” to man by God by a type of divine fiction whereby God looks at man through Jesus Christ and, instead of seeing the real human person, sees Jesus Christ, whom that man has acknowledged as his vehicle of salvation by faith, by believing in Christ. The “new understanding” of Luther, transmitted to Calvin and other Reformers, was one which in the deepest theological sense created a fiction of the entire redemptive process.
From its theological presuppositions ascetical and monastic forms of spirituality simply had to be rejected. They did not fit into their understanding of an authentic synergistic process of redemption, a process that is New Testamental, a process upheld by the Church from the beginning.
He quotes Martin Luther to illustrate his point:
But this most excellent righteousness, of faith I mean (which God through Christ, without works, imputes to us) … consists not in our works, but is clean contrary: that is to say, a mere passive righteousness. For in this we work nothing, we render nothing unto God, but only we receive and suffer another to work in us, that is to say, God. Therefore it seems good to me to call this righteousness of faith or Christian righteousness, passive righteousness … For there is no comfort of conscience so firm and so sure, as this passive righteousness is… Why, do we then nothing? Do we work nothing for the obtaining of this righteousness? I answer: Nothing at all. For the nature of this righteousness is to do nothing, to hear nothing, to know nothing whatsoever of the law or of works.
For the Protestant who has been saved forever by faith alone, there simply isn’t much left for him to do as a Christian; there is certainly no room for monasticism with its never-ending cycles of prayer, repentance, confession, prostrations, etc. His life necessarily becomes focused on worldly pursuits and objects: politics, money, career, entertainment, and so forth (which has, sadly, been the undeniable drift of the Western countries since the Great Schism). As a result, his spiritual life becomes dry and arid and boring, and he wishes with all his heart to experience “a new outpouring of the Spirit,” a “revival,” etc., to bring back what he felt at the time of his conversion. Hence the periodic awakenings throughout Southern history, Asbury included.
The Roman Catholics suffer from the opposite. In order to appease their angry God, they must toil endlessly to earn enough merits of righteousness to cancel the demerits of unrighteousness they have accumulated because of their sins, always with a certain amount of fear and dread of the abusive Father in heaven who had to murder his Son to assuage his offended honor.
The Orthodox have avoided both of these extremes. Salvation is from God, but man still has a vital role to play in attaining it: “For we are God’s fellow workers,” to use St. Paul’s words (I Cor. 3:9).
Maintaining this balance has allowed Orthodox Christians to create many beautiful things in this world – churches, cathedrals, icons, prayers, hymns, illuminated manuscripts, but most importantly the lives of her faithful members, and particularly the lives of the Saints.
Is God at work at the Asbury Revival? We must let Him answer that question. What we may say with certainty is that those at Asbury University and all the others across the South who are seeking for an unending revival, one that is renewed each and every day, they will find that in its unimpaired wholeness only in the Orthodox Church. For it is only there that the spirit of St. Anthony the Great of Egypt, the Father of Monks, lives, the spirit of daily revival:
And he [St. Anthony—W.G.] had come to this truly wonderful conclusion, ‘that progress in virtue, and retirement from the world for the sake of it, ought not to be measured by time, but by desire and fixity of purpose.’ He at least gave no thought to the past, but day by day, as if he were at the beginning of his discipline, applied greater pains for advancement, often repeating to himself the saying of Paul (Philippians 3:14): ‘Forgetting the things which are behind and stretching forward to the things which are before.’ He was also mindful of the words spoken by the prophet Elias [Elijah] (1 Kings 18:15), ‘the Lord lives before whose presence I stand today.’ For he observed that in saying ‘today’ the prophet did not compute the time that had gone by: but daily as though ever commencing he eagerly endeavoured to make himself fit to appear before God, being pure in heart and ever ready to submit to His counsel, and to Him alone.
Walt Garlington is a chemical engineer turned writer and editor of the website Confiteri: A Southern Perspective. This longtime Southern Baptist, then Anglican, was united to the Orthodox Church in 2012 and makes his home in Louisiana where he attends a GOA parish.
