Revival And Reformation Quotes

To begin a reform, go not into the places of the great and rich; go rather to those whose cups of happiness are empty--to the poor and humble.

The Qur’an calls Jesus Al-Masih, the Messiah—literally, “the anointed one” or “the one who wipes away injustice.” Rather than adopting the Jewish framing of the messiah as a political redeemer, the Qur’anic understanding of the messiah is a reformer anointed by God to revive the theory of Abraham and the structure of Moses. Or, in a related sense, as a great clarifier who wipes away the filmy haze obscuring clear understanding.

Unctionized by the Spirit’s might, John cried, ‘‘Repent!’’ And they did! Repentance is not a few hot tears at the penitent form. It is not emotion or remorse or reformation. Repentance is a change of mind about God, about sin, and about hell!

One prominent spiritual leader insists, “The only way to have a genuine spiritual revival is to have legislative reform.” Could he have that backwards?

What distinguishes the arid ages from the period of the Reformation, when nations were moved as they had not been since Paul preached in Ephesus, Corinth, and Rome, is the latter's fullness of knowledge of God's Word. To echo an early Reformation thought, when the ploughman and the garage attendant know the Bible as well as the theologian does, and know it better than some contemporary theologians, then the desired awakening shall have already occurred.

Finally, it is my prayer that these truths will cause men to seek reformation. Revival changes the affections, but reformation changes our course.

When what makes other people sleep keeps you awake every night, it is a sign that you are called into the assignment of a revivalists, reformers and change agents.

With the growth of civilisation in Europe, and with the revival of letters and of science in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the ethical and intellectual criticism of theology once more recommenced, and arrived at a temporary resting-place in the confessions of the various reformed Protestant sects in the sixteenth century; almost all of which, as soon as they were strong enough, began to persecute those who carried criticism beyond their own limit. But the movement was not arrested by these ecclesiastical barriers, as their constructors fondly imagined it would be; it was continued, tacitly or openly, by Galileo, by Hobbes, by Descartes, and especially by Spinoza, in the seventeenth century; by the English Freethinkers, by Rousseau, by the French Encyclopaedists, and by the German Rationalists, among whom Lessing stands out a head and shoulders taller than the rest, throughout the eighteenth century; by the historians, the philologers, the Biblical critics, the geologists, and the biologists in the nineteenth century, until it is obvious to all who can see that the moral sense and the really scientific method of seeking for truth are once more predominating over false science. Once more ethics and theology are parting company.

Wherever Reformed convictions gained a foothold, there was a revival of classical learning and interest in the arts and sciences—not only among the highly educated, but even among the daily laborer, who also had more access to basic education.

again. Here is a sober lesson. Even after times of spectacular revival, reformation, or covenantal renewal, the people of God are never more than a generation or two from infidelity, unbelief, massive idolatry, disobedience, and wrath. God help us.

we must all accept the responsibilities that come with the positions we hold, and we must ensure that obligations and restraints actually protect and empower us. We need to inhabit these institutions, love them, and reform them to help make them more lovely to others as well.

Caesar’s civic reforms were promising, but how and when would he put the Republic back together again? Over years of war it had been turned upside down, the constitution trampled, appointments made on whim and against the law. Caesar took few steps toward restoring traditional rights and regulations. Meanwhile his powers expanded. He took charge of most elections and decided most court cases. He spent a great deal of time settling scores, rewarding supporters, auctioning off his opponents’ properties. The Senate appeared increasingly irrelevant. Some groused that they lived in a monarchy masquerading as a republic. There were three possibilities for the future, predicted an exasperated Cicero, “endless armed conflict, eventual revival after a peace, and complete annihilation.

I believe that the imperative need of the day is not simply revival, but a radical reformation that will go to the root of our moral and spiritual maladies and deal with causes rather than with consequences, with the disease rather than with the symptoms.” He concluded, “It is my considered opinion that under the present circumstances we do not want revival at all. A widespread revival of the kind of Christianity we know today in America might prove to be a moral tragedy from which we would not recover in a hundred years.

The Sunnah is treated as an independent source of religion. It is distinct from Hadīth. Since at times the Hadīth also contains a record of the Sunnah, people have erroneously equated the two. The Sunnah refers to that tradition of Prophet Abraham’s (sws) religion which the Prophet Muhammad (sws) instituted among his followers as religion after reviving and reforming it and after making certain additions to it. The Sunnah was transmitted to the ummah by its perpetual adherence and thereby carrying the same stamp of authority as the Qur’ān.

Forcing new loans upon the bankrupt on condition that they shrink their income is nothing short of cruel and unusual punishment. Greece was never bailed out. With their ‘rescue’ loan and their troika of bailiffs enthusiastically slashing incomes, the EU and IMF effectively condemned Greece to a modern version of the Dickensian debtors’ prison and then threw away the key. Debtors’ prisons were ultimately abandoned because, despite their cruelty, they neither deterred the accumulation of new bad debts nor helped creditors get their money back. For capitalism to advance in the nineteenth century, the absurd notion that all debts are sacred had to be ditched and replaced with the notion of limited liability. After all, if all debts are guaranteed, why should lenders lend responsibly? And why should some debts carry a higher interest rate than other debts, reflecting the higher risk of going bad? Bankruptcy and debt write-downs became for capitalism what hell had always been for Christian dogma – unpleasant yet essential – but curiously bankruptcy-denial was revived in the twenty-first century to deal with the Greek state’s insolvency. Why? Did the EU and the IMF not realize what they were doing? They knew exactly what they were doing. Despite their meticulous propaganda, in which they insisted that they were trying to save Greece, to grant the Greek people a second chance, to help reform Greece’s chronically crooked state and so on, the world’s most powerful institutions and governments were under no illusions. […] Banks restructure the debt of stressed corporations every day, not out of philanthropy but out of enlightened self-interest. But the problem was that, now that we had accepted the EU–IMF bailout, we were no longer dealing with banks but with politicians who had lied to their parliaments to convince them to relieve the banks of Greece’s debt and take it on themselves. A debt restructuring would require them to go back to their parliaments and confess their earlier sin, something they would never do voluntarily, fearful of the repercussions. The only alternative was to continue the pretence by giving the Greek government another wad of money with which to pretend to meet its debt repayments to the EU and the IMF: a second bailout.

Cultural relativists prefer to wrap the issue of sharia in the intellectual equivalent of a black jilbab or blue burqa and intone the old platitudes that we should be nonjudgmental about the religious practices of others. Why? The ancient Aztecs and other peoples practiced human sacrifice, tearing the still-beating hearts out of their sacrificial victims. We teach our children that this happened five hundred years ago, but we don't condone it -- and wouldn't if the practice were suddenly revived in Mexico today. So why do we condone the 'sacrifice' of women or homosexuals or lapsed Muslims for 'crimes' such as apostasy, adultery, blasphemy, marrying outside of their faith, or simply wishing to marry the partner of their choice? Why, aside from the publication of reports by human rights organizations, is there no discernible reaction? In the twenty-first century, I believe that all decent human beings can agree that such barbarous acts should not be tolerated. They can and must be condemned and prosecuted as crimes, not accepted as legitimate punishments. The abuses carried out under sharia are irrefutable. If we are to have any hope for a more peaceful, more stable planet, these punishments must be set aside.

If the older churches often found themselves unable to cope with growth and mobility, the newer sects—especially the Separates and the Baptists—did not. Nor did churches swept by the revival and its message that the experience of the Spirit, the New Birth, constituted true religion. For the Awakening recalled a generation to the standards of reformed Protestantism, which had prevailed at the time of the founding of America. It revived values summed up best by its greater emphasis on individual experience and its lessened concern for traditional church organization. At the same time it produced a concentration on morality and right behavior, a social ethic supple enough to insist on the rights of the community while it supported the claims of individualism.

Cultural relativists prefer to wrap the issue of sharia in the intellectual equivalent of a black jilbab or blue burqa and intone the old platitudes that we should be nonjudgmental about the religious practices of others. Why? The ancient Aztecs and other peoples practiced human sacrifice, tearing the still-beating hearts out of their sacrificial victims. We teach our children that this happened five hundred years ago, but we don’t condone it—and wouldn’t if the practice were suddenly revived in Mexico today. So why do we condone the “sacrifice” of women or homosexuals or lapsed Muslims for “crimes” such as apostasy, adultery, blasphemy, marrying outside of their faith, or simply wishing to marry the partner of their choice? Why, aside from the publication of reports by human rights organizations, is there no discernible reaction? In

The global jihad espoused by Osama bin Laden and other contemporary extremists is clearly rooted in contemporary issues and interpretations of Islam. It owes little to the Wahhabi tradition, outside of the nineteenth-century incorporation of the teachings of Ibn Taymiyya and the Ibn al-Qayyim al-Jawziyyah into the Wahhabi worldview as Wahhabism moved beyond the confines of Najd and into the broader Muslim world. The differences between the worldviews of bin Laden and Ibn Abd al-Wahhab are numerous. Bin Laden preaches jihad; Ibn Abd al-Wahhab preached monotheism. Bin Laden preaches a global jihad of cosmic importance that recognizes no compromise; Ibn Abd al-Wahhab’s jihad was narrow in geographic focus, of localized importance, and had engagement in a treaty relationship between the fighting parties as a goal. Bin Laden preaches war against Christians and Jews; Ibn Abd al-Wahhab called for treaty relationships with them. Bin Laden’s jihad proclaims an ideology of the necessity of war in the face of unbelief; Ibn Abd al-Wahhab preached the benefits of peaceful coexistence, social order, and business relationships. Bin Laden calls for the killing of all infidels and the destruction of their money and property; Ibn Abd al-Wahhab restricted killing and the destruction of property… The militant Islam of Osama bin Laden does not have its origins in the teachings of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab and is not representative of Wahhabi Islam as it is practiced in contemporary Saudi Arabia, yet for the media it has come to define Wahabbi Islam in the contemporary era. However, “unrepresentative” bin Laden’s global jihad of Islam in general and Wahhabi Islam in particular, its prominence in headline news has taken Wahhabi Islam across the spectrum from revival and reform to global jihad.

So the question arose now, as it had in the wake of the Mongol holocaust: if the triumphant expansion of the Muslim project proved the truth of the revelation, what did the impotence of Muslims in the face of these new foreigners signify about the faith? With this question looming over the Muslim world, movements to revive Islam could not be extricated from the need to resurrect Muslim power. Reformers could not merely offer proposals for achieving more authentic religions experiences. They had to expound on how the authenticity they proposed would get history back on course, how their proposals would restore the dignity and splendor of the Umma, how they would get Muslims moving again toward the proper endpoint of history: perfecting the community of justice and compassion that flourished in Medina in the original golden moment and enlarging it until it included all the world. Many reformers emerged and many movements bubbled up, but all of them can sorted into three general sorts of responses to the troubling question. One response was to say that what needed changing was not Islam, but Muslims. Innovation, alterations, and accretions had corrupted the faith, so that no one was practicing the true Islam anymore. What Muslims needed to do was to shut out Western influence and restore Islam to its pristine, original form. Another response was to say that the West was right. Muslims had gotten mired in obsolete religious ideas; they had ceded control of Islam to ignorant clerics who were out of touch with changing times; they needed to modernize their faith along Western lines by clearing out superstition, renouncing magical thinking, and rethinking Islam as an ethical system compatible with science and secular activities. A third response was to declare Islam the true religion but concede that Muslims had certain things to learn from the West. In this view, Muslims needed to rediscover and strengthen the essence of their own faith, history and traditions, but absorb Western learning in the fields of science and technology. According to this river of reform, Muslims needed to modernize but could do so in a distinctively Muslim way: science was compatible with the Muslim faith and modernization did not have to mean Westernization.

Here and there, a few drops of this freshness were scattered on a human heart, and gave it youth again, and sympathy with the eternal youth of nature. The artist chanced to be one on whom the reviving influence fell. It made him feel — what he sometimes almost forgot, thrust so early as he had been into the rude struggle of man with man — how youthful he still was. “It seems to me,” he observed, “that I never watched the coming of so beautiful an eve, and never felt anything so very much like happiness as at this moment. After all, what a good world we live in! How good, and beautiful! How young it is, too, with nothing really rotten or age-worn in it! This old house, for example, which sometimes has positively oppressed my breath with its smell of decaying timber! And this garden, where the black mould always clings to my spade, as if I were a sexton delving in a graveyard! Could I keep the feeling that now possesses me, the garden would every day be virgin soil, with the earth’s first freshness in the flavor of its beans and squashes; and the house! — it would be like a bower in Eden, blossoming with the earliest roses that God ever made. Moonlight, and the sentiment in man’s heart responsive to it, are the greatest of renovators and reformers. And all other reform and renovation, I suppose, will prove to be no better than moonshine!

Protestants use a different vocabulary to describe the continuously needed restoring and refreshing in the church. Our two favorite words are “reform,” indicating the kind of reformation of faith and life according to Scripture which took place in the sixteenth century, and “revival,” denoting an altogether supernatural visitation of a church or community by God, bringing conviction, repentance, confession, the conversion of sinners and the recovery of backsliders. “Reformation” usually stresses the power of the Word of God, and “revival” the power of the Spirit of God, in his work of restoring the church. Perhaps we should keep the word “renewal” to describe a movement which combines revival by God’s Spirit with reformation by his Word. Since the Word is the Spirit’s sword, there is bound to be something lopsided about contemplating either without the other.14

In religious affairs, history shows us that churches have their palmy days, and then again their times of drought. The Universal Church has been thus circumstanced; it has had its Pentecosts, its Reformations, its revivals; and between these there have been sorrowful pauses, in which there was much more cause for lamentation than for rejoicing, and the Miserere was more suitable than the Hallelujah.

Medieval authoritarianism began to dissolve with the Renaissance. But on the Continent, its political counterpart, medieval feudalism, was not seriously threatened before the French Revolution. (The Reformation had only strengthened it.) The fight for the open society began again only with the ideas of 1789; and the feudal monarchies soon experienced the seriousness of this danger. When in 1815 the reactionary party began to resume its power in Prussia, it found itself in dire need of an ideology. Hegel was appointed to meet this demand, and he did so by reviving the ideas of the first great enemies of the open society, Heraclitus, Plato, and Aristotle. Just as the French Revolution rediscovered the perennial ideas of the Great Generation and of Christianity, freedom, equality, and the brotherhood of all men, so Hegel rediscovered the Platonic ideas which lie behind the perennial revolt against freedom and reason. Hegelianism is the renaissance of tribalism. The historical significance of Hegel may be seen in the fact that he represents the ‘missing link’, as it were, between Plato and the modern form of totalitarianism. Most of the modern totalitarians are quite unaware that their ideas can be traced back to Plato. But many know of their indebtedness to Hegel, and all of them have been brought up in the close atmosphere of Hegelianism. They have been taught to worship the state, history, and the nation.

[I]n order for the movie [Lord, Save Us from Your Followers] to mock Christian moralists it had to rely on the objective standard of Christian morality to do so. Think about it. Because Christianity is grounded in an immutable standard of rightness and wrongness--an absolute moral compass, if you will--it has the unique ability to be self-critical and self-correcting and to repent, reform, revive and return to the right standard that Merchant [the film's producer], and others, are bemoaning has been compromised. Without orthodoxy (right ideas) there is no way to criticize others for lacking orthopraxy (right behavior).

The implications of these fertility differences have been fully explored by Eric Kaufmann of the University of London in his book, Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? (2010). Kaufmann noted that because only the irreligious sector of Europe’s population is declining, while the religious sector is growing, only the irreligious European population is headed towards extinction, with the result that differential fertility may produce a huge religious revival in Europe.

His teaching as to the absence of any freedom of will or choice in man, and of salvation as being solely by the grace of God, went so far as to lead to the neglect of right conduct as a part of the Gospel. Among the doctrines carried over from the Church of Rome was that of baptismal regeneration, and, with this, the general practice of baptising infants. While reviving the teaching of Scripture as to individual salvation by faith in Christ Jesus and His perfect work, Luther did not go on to accept the New Testament teaching as to the churches, separate from the world, yet maintained in it as witnesses to it of the saving Gospel of Jesus Christ; he adopted the Roman Catholic system of parishes, with their clerical administration of a world considered as Christianized. Having a number of rulers on his side, he maintained the principle of the union of Church and State, and accepted the sword of the State as the proper means of converting or punishing those who dissented from the new ecclesiastical authority. It was at the Diet, or Council, of Speyer (1529) that the Reform party presented the protest to the Roman Catholic representatives, from which the name Protestant came to be applied to the Reformers. The League of Smalcald in 1531, bound together nine Princes and eleven free cities as Protestant Powers.

In every revival of truth, the pendulum tendency to extremes finds abundant illustration. All reform movements, including the present one, are characterized by "a lunatic fringe". Neither

Especially in the Deep South, where Democratic victory was impossible without the neutralization of part of the black electorate, it also implied a revival of political violence. And, a noticeable shift away from support for state-sponsored modernization (the economic corollary of the discredited New Departure) accompanied the reemergence of white supremacist rhetoric. The depression heightened the attractiveness of retrenchment and tax reduction to white voters who associated expensive government with new state programs that primarily benefited corporations and blacks, and who feared that high taxes threatened both planters and yeomen with the loss of their land. And with Republicans proposing as an economic program little more than a milder version of “reform,” they had little to offer white voters to counteract Democrats’ racist appeals.64

If revival should ever occur, it will revolve around the energetic resolve of doctrinally accurate church members, ministers and theologians of our day bound together in the truth.  Revival has often happened when the country or state is under their greatest duress of sin and blindness.  However, no matter how far a country or state may sink into sin, or despise the Gospel, revival will never occur at the expense of the truth.  Wickliffe was in his Roman Catholic Oxford, Huss in his dark Bohemia, and Luther was in his religiously superstitious Germany.  Calvin and Zwingli were Roman Catholic priests turned Christian in a politically tender Switzerland, and the Scottish Presbyterians were facing the onslaught of a Roman Catholic persecution.  This is how God brings revival – in deep darkness and distress, but never at the expense of the truth.  For, as our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ said, only the truth shall set you free.

It is obvious that if many bishops had acted like Msgr. de Castro Mayer, Bishop of Campos in Brazil, the ideological revolution within the Church could have been limited, because we must not be afraid to affirm that the current Roman authorities, since John XXIII and Paul VI, have made themselves active collaborators of international Freemasonry and of world socialism. John Paul II is above all a communist-loving politician at the service of a world communism retaining a hint of religion. He openly attacks all of the anti-communist governments and does not bring, by his travels, any Catholic revival. These conciliar Roman authorities cannot but oppose savagely and violently any reaffirmation of the traditional Magisterium. The errors of the Council and its reforms remain the official standard consecrated by the Profession of Faith of Cardinal Ratzinger in March 1989.

Rev. David Wilkerson Warned that Former Witches Have Infiltrated Many Christian Churches: David Wilkerson exposed the current efforts of false teachers to infiltrate Christianity. Rev. Wilkerson was the pastor at Times Square Church in New York City, where he founded Teen Challenge, an addiction recovery program. He wrote, The Cross and the Switchblade, and he served as an evangelist for over 50 years (1). Throughout his ministry, Rev. Wilkerson preached against apostasy, including dominionism and the teaching that there is no literal return of Jesus (2). Shortly before his death, he stated that several former witches warned him that occultists were infiltrating the Church. They said witches are penetrating congregations and masquerading as super-spiritual Christians (3). Today, it is difficult to find a Christian Church that has not been transformed by this occult revival. References: 1. Wilkerson, David. The Cross and the Switchblade. Jove Publications. 1962. 2. Wilkerson, David, Rev. “Witchcraft in the Church.” Believers Web.org, 3. IBID.

The increase in diversified organizations engaged in meeting various human needs is ultimately due to the fact that the command of love of neighbour is inscribed by the Creator in man's very nature. It is also a result of the presence of Christianity in the world, since Christianity constantly revives and acts out this imperative, so often profoundly obscured in the course of time. The reform of paganism attempted by the emperor Julian the Apostate is only an initial example of this effect; here we see how the power of Christianity spread well beyond the frontiers of the Christian faith. For this reason, it is very important that the Church's charitable activity maintains all of its splendor and does not become just another form of social assistance.

All hope is lost? Good. That means the conditions for a black swan revival are improving by the day. The stone-cold deader we get, the more God is hastening the day. Nothing is dying but what has needed to die for a long time.

When the wickedness of the wicked grieves and humbles and distresses Christians. Sometimes Christians do not seem to mind anything about the wickedness around them. Or, if they do talk about it, it is in a cold, and callous, and unfeeling way, as if they despaired of a reformation: they are disposed to scold sinners - not to feel the compassion of the Son of God for them. But sometimes the conduct of the wicked drives Christians to prayer, breaks them down, and makes them sorrowful and tender-hearted, so that they can weep day and night, and instead of scolding the wicked they pray earnestly for them. Then you may expect a revival. Indeed, it is begun already.

Homecoming Sonnet Salutations to all, today is my homecoming, To dwell in grief is treachery on life. I sought plenty escape in translations, but true ointment lies in the soil of life. So I return, shattering shackles of sorrow - Reignite me oh life, resuscitate me unto duty! I want no more to sob through the alleys of pity - Sanctify me oh divine nature, with renewed tenacity. Today I break all spell of ominous cowardice, Today I vivify my veins as the volcanic vanguard! I refuse to be castrated by pathetic redundancy, Today I revive my vows as defender of the world!

Here were gathered the men and women who based their hopes of reforming the world and of making all things new on dress and on diet. They revived the Pythagorean, the Essenian, and the Monkish notions of Asceticism with some variations and improvements peculiarly American.

The word reformation comes from the Latin verb reformo, which means “to form again, mold anew, or revive.” The Reformers did not see themselves as inventers, discoverers, or creators. Instead they saw their efforts as rediscovery. They

during the years 1797–98. In the 1790s, revivals (led by Reformed pastors) also broke out in the Connecticut Valley in the United States. They became early manifestations of the so-called “Second Great Awakening” (late 1780s – early 1840s). This awakening encompassed multiple disparate elements: the widespread distribution of Christian literature; Reformed preaching in Connecticut by theological descendants of Jonathan Edwards; the faithful gospel witness of Methodist circuit riders; the occurrence of emotionally high-octane camp

Periodic revivals and times of faithfulness (such as Josiah’s reforms [2 Kings 23]) are not enough to usher in God’s worldwide dominion. Despite Israel’s earthly failure God still does not abandon His plan to reign over the whole world through His appointed human king.

Iran is the only country in the Middle East where a former head of state has stepped down from power at the end of his constitutionally mandated term of office and continues to live peacefully in his own home. The undeniable and serious flaws in their country’s electoral process have not prevented Iranians from learning about democratic practices and internalizing democracy-friendly values. Indeed, the debate over democracy has been near the heart of Iranian politics for a decade now. The years since the early 1990s have also been a time of intense discussions about religious reform in Iran. A group of Shia intellectuals, including some clerics, have questioned the authoritarian bent of Khomeini’s velayat-e faqih and argued for both limiting the powers of Iran’s clerical leaders and reconciling religion with democracy.

The history of the Reformation is different from the history of Protestantism. In the former, every thing bears testimony to a revival of human nature, to a transformation, social and religious, emanating from God. In the latter are too often seen a remarkable degeneracy from primitive principles, party intrigue, a sectarian spirit, and the impress of petty private feelings. The

As Booker had suggested, the reform movement’s prescription for failing schools was to close them and replace them with charter schools or schools based on models that had succeeded in other cities and states. But if charters or new models could succeed, why couldn’t a failing district school be revived, thereby sparing children the dislocation of having to leave teachers and classmates they had come to know and trust?

Countering this view, confessing Christians seek to maintain the unity of the church through discipline, not through division. The confessing movement is strongly committed to staying WITHIN. It is better for churches to learn to respect their own legislative processes and discipline themselves accordingly than to face the even greater problems of separation, division of property, and the anguish of divorce. Confessing Christians seek to reform their churches, not leave them. Those who split off leave the patient in the hands of the euthanasia advocates, the Kevorkians of dying modernity. The Holy Spirit will not bless willful unnecessary divisiveness. If classic Christians self-righteously leave, they abandon the legacy, the patrimony, the bequests, the institutions, and the resources that have been many generations in the making with much tears and sweat. Walking away turns out to have weightier moral impediments than hanging in. IT SEEMS UNTHINKABLE TO ABANDON, WITHOUT FURTHER PRAYERS FOR SPECIAL GRACE, THOSE HISTORIC COMMUNIONS BY WHICH SO MANY HAVE BEEN BAPTIZED. The faithful have committed themselves for generations to the support of these communions which their classic doctrines and evangelical revivals have engendered. To allow these resources to be permanently taken over by those inimical to the faith cannot be an act of responsibility... ...To flee the church is not to discipline it. No one corrects a family by leaving it. Separation does not foster discipline. Discipline is fostered by patient trust, corrective love, and willingness to live with incremental change if that is what the Spirit is allowing. Discipline seeks to mend the broken church by a change of heart.

Men for whom reason begins with the Revival of Learning, men for whom religion begins with the Reformation, can never give a complete account of anything, for they have to start with institutions whose origin they cannot explain, or generally even imagine.

Romans is the most influential document in Christian history. It stimulated not only the Protestant Reformation but many other revivals throughout history.

Sardis – Dead Ritual Sardis means “those escaped.” This period of church history dates from the Protestant Reformation, AD 1517, to the time when the great revivals / Great Awakenings started, about AD 1750.   The Reformation churches did well to remove idols, prayer to saints and angels, and transubstantiation. They even did away with “tradition is equal with Scripture.” They coined the phrase “Sola Scriptura,” meaning “by scripture alone,” with no added tradition. But they did not go far enough. They replaced transubstantiation with consubstantiation and kept the false doctrines of amillennialism, cessationism, and replacement theology.   The Sardis church would “soil their garments” by adding Augustinian Calvinism to their doctrine. Calvinism would teach true Christians are chosen by God and are destined to heaven and no one, including the pope, could reverse that. So the threats of the pope could safely be ignored. The Sardis church, now fully believing that doctrine, would have no fear of Rome taking away their salvation. Even though we should not fear Rome sending us to hell, Augustinian Calvinism was considered a Valentian Gnostic heresy by the ancient church fathers. See the Gnostic list above for details.

As one revival convert put it, “I was born again in the fires of revival, and I do not intend to die in the ashes of its memory.

The society with lots of open disagreement and social conflict is the one surging with power in art, science, commerce, constructive social reform, and (most of all) religious revival; the hushed-up society where everyone is afraid to say what he thinks is on the brink of violence and collapse.

As a child, Andrew Murray’s “world” spanned two continents, Africa and Europe; but ultimately his preaching, teaching, and writing fueled spiritual awakening and revival with a worldwide impact. Andrew Murray was born in 1828 in South Africa, into a Dutch Reformed parsonage. At age ten he and a brother sailed to Scotland for schooling and later to Holland for theological studies, before returning ten years later to South Africa for pastoral ministries of their own.

The “old priestly office” having been “abolished,” Mann and his allies aimed to revive it, in effect, by promoting the school at the expense of the press, the lyceum, and other agencies of popular education. By giving the school system exclusive control over education, Mann’s reforms encouraged a division of cultural labor that would weaken the people’s capacity to educate themselves.

Anyone remotely aware of the current situation in philosophy knows of a revival of scholarship in philosophy of religion that promotes a critical realist view of God and of faith. This revival owes much to what is called the Reformed epistemology movement. In a remarkable article, naturalist Quentin Smith brought the news out of the closet, writing that orthodox Christians are making significant inroads in the philosophical world. “God is not ‘dead’ in academia,” wrote Smith. “He returned to life in the late 1960s and is now alive and well in his last academic stronghold, philosophy departments.”4

Whether or not Enochian represents a valid system for causing “magical” change in consciousness, there is no question that Enochian is at the very heart of the 20th century occult and neopagan revival—Dee and Kelley’s work is still detonating long past their deaths. It is possible, in fact, that we completely lack the ability to gauge their otherworldly work as a success or failure—as it seems to be unfolding on a millennial timespan, “outside the circles of time.

If we are not applying the lessons to be gained from yesterday's history to address the problems of today - then why does any of it matter? Does Babe Ruth's baseball score from 1917 matter to us today? No. Does it matter that Gandhi bickered with his wife, or that Lincoln got into a brawl over Sally at a bar? No. Then why do tribal matches that happened thousands of years ago still mean so much to us today? To keep us from moving forward? To remind us of our racial differences and indifference? To revive tribal bitterness? And what father or God would want his children to keep a record of every argument they have ever had with each other - if there is nothing positive - only harm - to be gained by constantly reminding them? Would a wise man steer his followers to hold onto past hurts - or to squeeze them for every drop of wisdom that could be gained from them - then release them? Isn't forgiveness a holy virtue? And if so, then why do we insist on keeping historical records of resentment? Is the Creator an advocate of love or hate? And if love, then why are we still pushing so much hatred? What is there ever to be gained from vocalizing hatred? Only more hatred. Who wants that? And why?

We need revival, a reformation of our hearts and minds. We don't need more self-help books, we don't need more welfare programs or feel-good efforts: we need more of Jesus Christ. Our battleground is not marriage, sexuality, sanctity of life, justice, or hunger. Our battleground is the gospel. Jesus is enough. I

They took to the streets not to bring about some specific reform or policy change but to stand against what they saw as evil and injustice, to demand that society conform to their vision of righteousness and truth, and above all to mark themselves out as being among the elect. It was tent revivalism for the twenty-first century, reduced to a collective show of force.

Likewise, Egypts vaunted economic reform--the mythology embroidered by the IMF and Washington--had also unraveled by the beginning of the new millennium. During 2000. the Cairo stock market collapsed, losing almost 50 percent of its value. By the end of the year share prices were lower than when the government first revived the exchange in 1995. The real estate boom had gone bust. Ahmed Bahgat , the builder of dreamland, suffered a heart attack in July 2000 while on a trip to Washington, where he was part of an official delegation making an unsuccessful effort to encourage investments from large U.S corporations. When news reached Cairo that he was in a hospital in Bethesda, Maryland,undergoing surgery to the aorta, shares in his company collapsed. Dreamland was effectively bankrupt. Beverly Hills and most of the other smaller developments also came to a halt, as speculators discovered they had overbuilt and luxury property prices dropped by more than half----Dreamworlds of neoliberalism Evil Paradises

A revival and a reformation must take place, under the ministration of the Holy Spirit. Revival and reformation [190] are two different things. Revival signifies a renewal of spiritual life, a quickening of the powers of mind and heart, a resurrection from spiritual death. Reformation signifies a reorganization, a change in ideas and theories, habits and practices. Reformation will not bring forth the good fruit of righteousness unless it is connected with the revival of the Spirit. Revival and reformation are to do their appointed work, and in doing this work they must blend.—The Review and Herald, February 25, 1902.

Often men have acted as though one has to choose between reformation and revival. Some call for reformation, others for revival, and they tend to look at each other with suspicion. But reformation and revival do not stand in contrast to one another; in fact, both words are related to the concept of restoration.

In times of spiritual lethargy, God often sends seasons of refreshing by the power of the Holy Spirit. These extraordinary times advance the church in her mission and witness in the world.

There is no subject which is of greater importance to the Christian church at the present time than that of revival. It should be the theme of our constant meditation, preaching and prayers.

the term revival represents the powerful work of the Holy Spirit in which there is recovered a new awareness of the holiness of God among His people. This heightened knowledge brings in a new season of the conviction of sin, which, in turn, leads to heartrending repentance. This lowly humility ushers in an awakened love for Christ. Believers begin to pursue personal holiness. Love for other believers intensifies. The gospel spreads like wildfire. Sinners are brought to faith in Christ, and the church is enlarged and empowered.

One of Gunter’s fears was that the Bible was a ‘policy’, a deliberately manipulative hoax. This venerable theme, revived by Machiavelli, now seemed more compelling than ever. During the Reformation age, Christendom had been splintered into national churches closely controlled by secular governments – none more so than the Church of England. Apparently God’s eternal truth changed when you crossed a border, or on the whims of kings and queens. Bishop Earle’s ‘sceptic’ was ‘troubled at this naturalness of Religion to Countries, that Protestantism should be born so in England, and Popery abroad’. What if we only believe what we believe out of chauvinism and habit? A popular advice-book warned young Englishmen travelling to the Continent against sampling foreign churches, fearing not so much that they would convert as that they would conclude that all churches had good points and bad points, ‘and so, displeased on all sides, you dash upon the rock of Atheism’ – a fate to which those who had ‘seen many countries’ were proverbially prone. Even if you did not give ‘perfect credit’ to another religion, merely to ‘admit of a suspicion that things may be’ as others say was to set the woodworm to work.

His work is the real thing. It preserves us from two dangers. The first is the (Arminian) danger of false revivalism. Familiarity with the genuine is the best safeguard against the false. The second is the (Reformed?) danger of a false superiority.

Reformation is the recovery of biblical truth in its redemptive claim on the whole of life. Revival is the renewal of human flourishing by the Holy Spirit according to the gospel. Marriage is one of the primary flashpoints of controversy where we most need both reformation and revival in our times.

The late revival was not sent to RE-FORM the churches. It did not come with a piece of new cloth to patch the old garment, to mend up the old hope with some new experience; but to prepare the way for that kingdom of God, in which all things are new: and whether it be in many or few, the purposes whereunto it was sent, undoubtedly be answered.

It is not to improve or reform oneself nor to forsake the evil and turn to the good, as people generally believe.

For as the example of the sailor hardens and prejudices the heathen, so does the example of worldly-minded and unfaithful Christians harden and prejudice the sailor.”46 This was not a new concern bubbling up from the nationwide social reform and religious revival movements of the 1830s and 1840s.

Now, all political parties are alliances of groups with disparate interests, but the contradictions in the Democratic Party coalition seem unusually sharp. The Democrats posture as the “party of the people” even as they dedicate themselves ever more resolutely to serving and glorifying the professional class. Worse: they combine self-righteousness and class privilege in a way that Americans find stomach-turning. And every two years, they simply assume that being non-Republican is sufficient to rally the voters of the nation to their standard. This cannot go on. Yet it will go on, because the most direct solutions to the problem are off the table for the moment. The Democrats have no interest in reforming themselves in a more egalitarian way. There is little the rest of us can do, given the current legal arrangements of this country, to build a vital third-party movement or to revive organized labor, the one social movement that is committed by its nature to pushing back against the inequality trend. What we can do is strip away the Democrats’ precious sense of their own moral probity—to make liberals live without the comforting knowledge that righteousness is always on their side. It is that sensibility, after all, that prevents so many good-hearted rank-and-file Democrats from understanding how starkly and how deliberately their political leaders contradict their values. Once that contradiction has been made manifest—once that smooth, seamless sense of liberal virtue has been cracked, anything becomes possible. The course of the party and the course of the country can both be changed, but only after we understand that the problem is us.

And the main thing that was wrong was that everything seemed to have gotten just a little worse, or at best remained the same. You would have predicted that at least a few facets of everyday life would improve markedly in twenty-two years. Her father contended the War was behind it all: any person who showed a shred of talent was sucked up by UNEF; the very best fell to the Elite Conscription Act and wound up being cannon fodder. It was hard not to agree with him. Wars in the past often accelerated social reform, provided technological benefits, even sparked artistic activity. This one, however, seemed tailor-made to provide none of these positive by-products. Such improvements as had been made on late-twentieth-century technology were—like tachyon bombs and warships two kilometers long—at best, interesting developments of things that only required the synergy of money and existing engineering techniques. Social reform? The world was technically under martial law. As for art, I’m not sure I know good from bad. But artists to some extent have to reflect the temper of the times. Paintings and sculpture were full of torture and dark brooding; movies seemed static and plotless; music was dominated by nostalgic revivals of earlier forms; architecture was mainly concerned with finding someplace to put everybody; literature was damn near incomprehensible. Most people seemed to spend most of their time trying to find ways to outwit the government, trying to scrounge a few extra K’s or ration tickets without putting their lives in too much danger. And in the past, people whose country was at war were constantly in contact with the war. The newspapers would be full of reports, veterans would return from the front; sometimes the front would move right into town, invaders marching down Main Street or bombs whistling through the night air—but always the sense of either working toward victory or at least delaying defeat. The enemy was a tangible thing, a propagandist’s monster whom you could understand, whom you could hate. But this war...the enemy was a curious organism only vaguely understood, more often the subject of cartoons than nightmares. The main effect of the war on the home front was economic, unemotional-more taxes but more jobs as well. After twenty-two years, only twenty-seven returned veterans; not enough to make a decent parade. The most important fact about the war to most people was that if it ended suddenly, Earth’s economy would collapse.

There is danger ahead as well as glory; for revival sometimes breeds fanaticism, sometimes goes to the extreme, so that often it is not even in the power of those who start the revival to control it when it has gone beyond a certain length. It is better, therefore, to be forewarned. We have to find our way between the Scylla of old superstitious orthodoxy and the Charybdis of materialism—of Europeanism, of soullessness, of the so-called reform—which has penetrated to the foundation of Western progress.

The people of God are farthest from reformation and revival when they are smugly content, like the church in Laodicea (Rev. 3:14-22). There is hope when by God’s grace they writhe in an agony of honest confession, horribly aware of the insidious and pervasive power of sin in their lives and their culture.

In 1857, in response to the massive numbers of forced migrant Muslim Tatars from the Crimea, the Ottoman Sublime Porte promulgated a Refugee Code (also translated from Ottoman Turkish into English in some texts as the Immigration Law). Responding to the grave need to provide shelter and food for its subjects, expelled initially from the Crimea but also from other border-land regions with Russia, the Ottoman government set out to swiftly disperse and integrate its forced migrants. It aimed to provide ‘immigrant’ families and groups with only a minimum amount of capital, with plots of state land to start life anew in agricultural activity. Families who applied for land in Rumeli (the European side of the Ottoman Empire) were granted exemptions from taxation and conscription obligations for a period of six years. If, however, they chose to continue their migration into Anatolia and Greater Syria then their exemptions extended for twelve years. In both cases the new immigrants had to agree to cultivate the land and not to sell or leave it for twenty years. Ottoman reformers were eager to see the largely depopulated Syrian provinces revived by these new migrants after several centuries of misadministration, war, famine, and several pandemics of the plague (Shaw and Shaw 1977: 115). The twenty-year clause also meant that these newcomers were released from the pressure of nineteenth-century property developers, as there was a kind of lien on the property, prohibiting its onward sale for twenty years.

Strict formalism and abstraction from reality are undoubtedly the most important, but by no means the only characteristics of the Romanesque style. For just as a mystic tendency is at work alongside the scholastic trend in the philosophy of the age, and a wild, unrestrained ecstatic religiosity finds expression in the monastic reform movement alongside a strict dogmatism, so also in art emotional and expressionistic tendencies make themselves felt alongside the dominant formalism and stereotyped abstractionism. This less restrained conception of art is not perceptible, however, until the second half of the Romanesque period, that is to say, it coincides with the revival of trade and urban life in the eleventh century. However modest these beginnings are in themselves, they represent the first signs of a change which paves the way for the individualism and liberalism of the modern age. Externally nothing much is altered for the present; the basic tendency of Romanesque art remains anti-naturalistic and hieratic. And yet, if a first step towards the dissolution of the ties which restrict medieval life is to be discerned anywhere, then it is here, in this astonishingly prolific eleventh century, with its new towns and markets, its new orders and schools, the first crusade and the founding of the first Norman states, the beginnings of monumental Christian sculpture and the proto-forms of Gothic architecture. It cannot be a coincidence that all this new life and movement occurs at the same time as the early medieval self-supporting economy is beginning to yield to a mercantile economy after centuries of uninterrupted stagnation.

The spiritual, political and economic situation in Europe was like a carefully built bonfire waiting to be lit, but the torch that set it burning was the spiritual crisis of Martin Luther. His struggle led eventually to the rediscovery of the doctrine of justification by faith. ... But what made the Reformation catch fire as an international movement of new life within the church was the reduplication of Luther's experience and insight among a number of Christian humanists who found this doctrine the key to their spiritual release and to their conceptual understanding of the needs in Western Christendom.

Ibn al-Wahhab was not the godfather of contemporary terrorist movements. Rather, he was a voice of reform, reflecting mainstream eighteenth-century Islamic thought. His vision of Islamic society was based upon monotheism in which Muslims, Christians, and Jews were to enjoy peaceful co-existence and cooperative commercial treaty relations.

Then, in dizzying succession, unparalleled glories: Bloodstone Medieval, Merthic (both Least and the more fantastical Late), Gallantine with its symmetries and restraint, Gallantine Reformed with all those festering ogees and broken pediments, Bluestone Revival, Imperial Bombast, and Industrial Modern, or, as the critics in the liberal press put it, High Hostile Crudstyle, the form propagated by the modernity-minded Wizard of Oz.