Reformed revivalists

Nathanial William Taylor was President of Yale College and a Reformed theologian who modified Calvinist teaching on free will, determinism and original sin to fit the sensibilities of Jacksonian American democracy. Consider this from Concio ad Clerum. A Sermon Delivered in the Chapel of Yale College, September 10, 1828:

Finally, I cannot conclude without remarking, how fearful are the condition and prospects of the sinner. His sin is his own. He yields himself by his own free act, by his own choice, to those propensities of his nature, which under the weight of God's authority he ought to govern...

He is going on to a wretched eternity, the self-made victim of his woes. Amid sabbaths and bibles, the intercessions of saints, the songs of angels... he presses on to death. God beseeching with tenderness and terror--Jesus telling him he died once and could die again to save him--mercy weeping over him day and night--heaven lifting up its everlasting gates--hell burning, and sending up its smoke of torment, and the weeping and the wailing and the gnashing of teeth, within his hearing--and onward still he goes. See the infatuated immortal! Fellow sinner--IT IS YOU.

You like that prophet Nathan move he puts on the clergy in the chapel? I do. Now, what do you expect next? "Oh, sinner, come forward now, and accept Christ as your Lord and Savior. You chose to sin; now choose Christ, that he might redeem you for everlasting life."

That would be a good guess, but that's precisely not what he says. He says,

Bowels of divine compassion--length, breadth, height, depth of Jesus's love--Spirit of all grace, save him--Oh save him--or he dies forever.

Now that's pretty cool because after having rhetorically brought the sinner to his knees, he promptly ignores him. Rather, turns his attention to God, addressing the Holy Trinity in prayer, pleading for the sinner's salvation. So the hearer, convicted of sin, isn't asked to do anything, believe anything, change anything. He is only permitted to overhear the preacher's conversation with God in which the condemned sinner learns from whence comes his salvation. And in that disclosure the Thing itself is given to the sinner.

This is very different than the typical revivalistic pitch of the Second Great Awakening, and, dare I say, of most evangelistic pitchs in our own day and time. Taylor has found room for revivalism within the Reformed tradition's insistence that, from start to finish, salvation is God's work and not our own. Not many people can pull that off. Most Reformed Christians either don't do evangelism, either for aesthetic or doctrinal reasons, or they become de facto Arminians.