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The Welsh Revival 1904-05Character assassination?THE WELSH REVIVAL 1904-05 This book about the Welsh Revival of 100 years ago is from the pen of a theological liberal. It was first published in 1909. I am not quite sure why it has been republished now by an evangelical publishing house. Although it pretends to being an unbiased account, it has many axes to grind and appearing just five years after the awakening, it was actually written too close to the events to give a truly objective view of what went on. The writer does acknowledge that there was a genuine move of God, and yet, quite rightly points out that there was much which accompanied the true revival which was theatrical and spurious. Isn't that always part of the devil's work? Nothing new there then. And the writer is not just mildly liberal. He is rabidly liberal. So we find sustained scoffing at the reliability of Scripture ('Christianity is not founded on the Bible; it is founded on Christ' - how often have we heard that devious attempt to separate Jesus from his Word?). We find outraged rejection of the teaching of hell and the evangelical view of the cross. We find an incipient universalism and, to our astonishment, that the writer believes in the phenomenon of 'revival' in pagan religions too and sees them as a good thing. The writer's particular target seems to be the person of Evan Roberts, the most famous leader of the Welsh revival. There is a considerable amount of ink deployed to undermine his integrity. Roberts was indeed far from a perfect man and had many idiosyncrasies. But does he deserve this treatment? After the revival Roberts lived for many years in obscurity until his death in the 1950s. We can only wonder what such attempts at character assassination had on his spiritual life? JEBJohn Benton© Evangelicals Now - February 2005 |