“The Consistory of the German Reformed Churches of Falkner Swamp, Skippack, and Whitemarch to the Classis of Amsterdam, July 1729,” in Hambrick-Stowe, ed., Colonial and National Beginnings, 274–284.
10. Coetus, a word of Latin origin, refers to a group or assembly of neighboring congregations within the denomination which serves as an assembly to adjudicate ecclesiastical matters, such as the formation of new congregations and the ordination of ministers. For more on the first Coetus of the German congregations, see Good, History of the Reformed Church, 331–43.
11. Trans. “The Synod of the Reformed High-German Church in the United States of America.”
12. Richards, History of the Theological Seminary, 78.
13. Ibid., 67.
14. Ibid., 217.
15. “The State of the Church” (1863), in Nordbeck and Zuck, ed., Consolidation and Expansion, 521–25.
16. These 1855 national statistics are from Robert Baird, State and Prospects of Religion in America (London, 1855), cited by Smith, Revivalism and Social Reform, 17.
17. Ibid.
18. A good beginning place for a study of the contextual history of American from the 1730s to the 1860s is Noll, America’s God. In this volume, Noll describes the surprising synthesis of religious, political, and philosophical principles that surfaced in nineteenth-century America.
19. Noll, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada, 163.
20. Minutes of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America . . . , A. D 1789 to A. D. 1820, 152–53.
21. Noll, History of Christianity, 163–64.
22. The modern standard study of the emergence of revivalism in the colonies is Kidd, The Great Awakening.
23. Ibid., 268ff., 312ff., points out that revivals had continued between 1760 and 1800.
24. Keller, The Second Great Awakening in Connecticut.
25. From an 1832 letter by the Reverend Edward D. Griffin, in Sprague, Lectures on Revivals of Religion, 151–52.
26. See the discussion in Layman, general introduction to Born of Water and the Spirit, 10–11.
27. Murray, Revival and Revivalism, 133.
28. Ibid.
29. Good, History of the Reformed Church in the Nineteenth Century, 130–34.
30. Richards, History of the Theological Seminary of the Reformed Church. 219.
31. Hambrick-Stowe, ed., Colonial and National Beginnings, 9.
32. Richards, History of the Theological Seminary of the Reformed Church, 219.
33. For more on Asbury, see the definitive biography by Wigger, American Saint.
34. For more on Finney, see Hardman, Charles Grandison Finney 1792–1875, and Hambrick-Stowe, Charles G. Finney.
35. Finney, Lectures on Revival, 12–13.
36. Noll, History of Christianity, 169.
37. Noll, America’s God, 19.
38. Mead, “The Rise of the Evangelical Conception of the Ministry in America (1607–1850),” 219.
39. Noll, America’s God, 9.
40. Hatch, Democratization of American Christianity, 6.
41. Ibid., 5.
42. Hart, John Williamson Nevin, 25.
43. Ibid., 26.
44. Schaff, America, 95. A new edition of America is scheduled for a future volume of MTSS.
45. Littlejohn, Mercersburg Theology, 21.
46. Noll, America’s God, 94.
47. Hodge, Systematic Theology, I:1–2: “ . . . the Bible contains the truths which the theologian has to collect, authenticate, arrange, and exhibit in their internal relation to each other.” The task of systematic theology is to “take those facts, determine their relation to each other and to other cognate truths, as well as to vindicate them and show their harmony and consistency.”
48. Noll, America’s God, 95.
49. Murray, Revival and Revivalism, 174.
50. Hudson, Religion in America, 151.
51. Schaff, America, 96.
