page_title: First Great Awakening
section_title: Northampton revival
hierarchical_section_title: First Great Awakening / Events in America / Northampton revival
caption_attribution_description: A monument commemorating the location where Edward's famous Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God sermon was preached.
context_page_description: The First Great Awakening or the Evangelical Revival was a series of Christian revivals that swept Britain and its thirteen North American colonies in the 1730s and 1740s. The revival movement permanently affected Protestantism as adherents strove to renew individual piety and religious devotion. The Great Awakening marked the emergence of Anglo-American evangelicalism as a trans-denominational movement within the Protestant churches. In the United States, the term Great Awakening is most often used, while in the United Kingdom the movement is referred to as the Evangelical Revival.
  Building on the foundations of older traditions—Puritanism, pietism and Presbyterianism—major leaders of the revival such as George Whitefield, John Wesley and Jonathan Edwards articulated a theology of revival and salvation that transcended denominational boundaries and helped forge a common evangelical identity. Revivalists added to the doctrinal imperatives of Reformation Protestantism an emphasis on providential outpourings of the Holy Spirit.
context_section_description: The most influential evangelical revival was the Northampton revival of 1734–1735 under the leadership of Congregational minister Jonathan Edwards.  In the fall of 1734, Edwards preached a sermon series on justification by faith alone, and the community's response was extraordinary. Signs of religious commitment among the laity increased, especially among the town's young people. Edwards wrote to Boston minister Benjamin Colman that the town "never was so full of Love, nor so full of Joy, nor so full of distress as it has lately been. ... I never saw the Christian spirit in Love to Enemies so exemplified, in all my Life as I have seen it within this half-year." The revival ultimately spread to 25 communities in western Massachusetts and central Connecticut until it began to wane in 1737.
  At a time when Enlightenment rationalism and Arminian theology was popular among some Congregational clergy, Edwards held to traditional Calvinist doctrine. He understood conversion to be the experience of moving from spiritual deadness to joy in the knowledge of one's election (that one had been chosen by God for salvation). While a Christian might have several conversion moments as part of this process, Edwards believed there was a single point in time when God regenerated an individual, even if the exact moment could not be pinpointed.
  The Northampton revival featured instances of what critics called enthusiasm but what supporters believed were signs of the Holy Spirit. Services became more emotional and some people had visions and mystical experiences. Edwards cautiously defended these experiences as long as they led individuals to a greater belief in God's glory rather than in self-glorification. Similar experiences would appear in most of the major revivals of the 18th century.
  Edwards wrote an account of the Northampton revival, A Faithful Narrative, which was published in England through the efforts of prominent evangelicals John Guyse and Isaac Watts. The publication of his account made Edwards a celebrity in Britain and influenced the growing revival movement in that nation. A Faithful Narrative would become a model on which other revivals would be conducted.
caption: Monument in Enfield, Connecticut commemorating the location where Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God was preached
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