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11-076 Gilbert Tennent - III
Vol. 11- No. 76
2006
Lead: Gilbert Tennent was a vigorous advocate of the spiritual renewal in the colonies during the 1730s known as the Great Awakening. An early harsh critic of the skeptics of reform, he ended his ministry as a peacemaker. Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts. Content: Despairing of what he considered spiritual apathy in his New Brunswick, New Jersey Presbyterian congregation, around 1726 Tennent, a graduate of Yale and his father’s frontier seminary, the Log College, fell under the influence of a local pietistic Dutch Reformed pastor, Theodorus Jacobus Frelinghuysen. The young pastor came to believe that a spiritual life emerged from three steps: conviction of sin, rebirth or conversion, and a life of personal piety. By the mid-1730s Tennent was agitating for visible evidence of this conversion in candidates for the ministry. A bitter split was developing between traditionalists or Old Lights and those like Tennent, New Lights. The latter were champions of the emerging storm of revival that, whipped along by Anglican itinerant preacher, George Whitefield, was becoming the First Great Awakening. Tennent traveled with Whitefield in 1739 in the middle colonies and later itinerated on his own through New England, preaching conversion and thundering against those skeptical of the Awakening. In 1740 he published his most famous and uncompromising sermon, The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry in which he took on ministers whose spiritual intensity did not measure up to his ideals. In 1743 he moved to a large church in Philadelphia and there the emphasis of his ministry began to change from simply conversion to pastoral care and doctrinal purity. He too began to recoil from the excesses of spiritual enthusiasts and press for harmony and re-union within the church. Tennent became a strong supporter of the Log College’s successor, The College of New Jersey in Princeton, and prior to his death in 1764, saw a partial healing of the old wounds he himself had helped create. At the University of Richmond, this is Dan Roberts. Resources Coalter, Milton. Gilbert Tennent Son of Thunder. Westport: Greenwood Press Inc., 1986. Fisgburn, Janet F. Gilbert Tennent, Established “Dissenter.”Church History. <http://newman.richmond.edu:2625/pls/eli> (30 October 2003). Gaustad, Edwin S. Religious Issues in American History. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1968. Tennent, Gilbert. The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry. <http://www.sounddoctrine.net/Classic_Sermons> (30 October 2003). Westerkamp, Marilyn. Division, Dissension, and Compromise: The Presbyterian Church during the Great Awakening. Journal of Presbyterian History. <http://www.horeb.pcusa.org/oga/Journal/Division.html> (31 October 2003). Copyright 2006 by Broadcast Partners, LLC LAC021206
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