When Jesus ascended to heaven and sat down at the right hand of God the Father, He poured out His Holy Spirit at Pentecost. This significant historical and redemptive event was not the last time Christ poured out His Spirit in redemptive history. Mindful of these subsequent acts, Pentecostal Outpourings , presents historical research on revivals in the Reformed tradition during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Investigating the British Isles, it observes the outpourings experienced among Welsh Calvinistic Methodists, Irish Dissenters, Calvinistic English Baptists, and Scottish Presbyterians. It then moves on to evaluate the revival instincts among Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, and the Dutch Reformed in America. May the knowledge of these outpourings of the Holy Spirit help us seek God earnestly to revive His Church once again. Table of Contents: Preface - Steve Lawson I. Revival in the British Isles 1. The Power of Heaven in the Word of Life: Welsh Calvinistic Methodism and Revival - Eifon Evans 2. Melting the Ice of a Long Winter: Revival and Irish Dissent - Ian Hugh Clary 3. The Lord Is Doing Great Things and Answering Prayer Everywhere: The Revival of the Calvinistic Baptists in the Long Eighteenth Century - Michael A. G. Haykin 4. Revival: A Scottish Presbyterian Perspective - Iain Campbell II. Revival in America 5. Edwards's Revival Instinctive and Apologetic in American Presbyterianism: Planted, Grown, and Faded -Robert Davis Smart 6. The Glorious Work of God: Revival among Congregationalists in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries - Peter Beck 7. Baptist Revivals in America in the Eighteenth Century - Tom Nettles 8. Dutch Reformed Church in America (the 18th century) - Joel Beeke

A mix of thematic essays, reference entries, and primary source documents covering the role of religion in American history and life from the colonial era to the present. Often controversial, religion has been an important force in shaping American culture. Religious convictions strongly influenced colonial and state governments as well as the United States as a new republic. Religious teachings, values, and practices deeply affected political structures and policies, economic ideology and practice, educational institutions and instruction, social norms and customs, marriage, and family life. By analyzing religion's interaction with American culture and prominent religious leaders and ideologies, this reference helps readers to better understand many fascinating, often controversial, religious leaders, ideas, events, and topics. The work is organized in three volumes devoted to particular periods. Volume one includes a chronology highlighting key events related to religion in American history and an introduction that overviews religion in America during the period covered by the volume, and roughly 10 essays that explore significant themes. These essays are followed by approximately 120 alphabetically arranged reference entries providing objective, fundamental information about topics related to religion in America. Each volume presents nearly 50 primary source documents, each introduced by a contextualizing headnote. A selected, general bibliography closes volume three.

Evangelicals in nineteenth-century America had a headquarters at Princeton. Charles Hodge never expected that a former student of Princeton and his own replacement during his hiatus in Europe, John W. Nevin, would lead the German Reformed Church's seminary in a new, and in his mind, destructive direction. The two, along with their institutions, would clash over philosophy and religion, producing some of the best historical theology ever written in the United States. The clash was broad, influencing everything from hermeneutics to liturgy, but at its core was the philosophical antagonism of Princeton's Scottish common-sense perspective and the German speculative method employed by Mercersburg. Both Princeton and Mercersburg were the cautious and critical beneficiaries of a century of European Protestant science, philosophy, and theology, and they were intent on adapting that legacy to the American religious context. For Princeton, much of the new European thought was suspect. In contrast, Mercersburg embraced a great deal of what the Continent offered. Princeton followed a conservative path, never straying far from the foundation established by Locke. They enshrined an evangelical perspective that would become a bedrock for conservative Protestants to this day. In contrast, Nevin and the Mercersburg school were swayed by the advances in theological science made by Germany's mediating school of theology. They embraced a churchy idealism called "evangelical catholicism" and emphatically warned that the direction of Princeton and with it Protestant American religion and politics, would grow increasingly subjective, thus divided and absorbed with individual salvation. They cautioned against the spirit of the growing evangelical bias toward personal religion as it led to sectarian disunity and they warned evangelicals not to confuse numerical success with spiritual success. In contrast, Princeton was alarmed at the direction of European philosophy and theology and they resisted Mercersburg with what today continues to be the fundamental teachings of evangelical theology. Princeton's appeal was in its common-sense philosophical moorings, which drew rapidly industrializing America into its arms. Mercersburg countered with a philosophically defended, churchly idealism based on a speculative philosophy that effectively critiqued what many to this day find divisive and dangerous about America's current Religious Right.

This unique and persuasive work establishes the significance of the thought of Puritan William Ames (1576-1633) in deepening and systematizing established Reformation teaching on Christian doctrine and life in a way that ensured its subsequent development through the early modern period and beyond.