Book Description

"The 2019 Carroll Ellis Symposium, "America's Greatest Revival: Cane Ridge Reconsidered," was held August 13, 2019 at the Hillsboro Church of Christ in Nashville, Tennessee, hosted by Scott Sager of the Office of Church Services at Lipscomb University. The event coincided with the 218th anniversary week of the great Cane Ridge meeting led by Barton W. Stone from August 6th to 12th, 1801 in Bourbon County, Kentucky, at the meeting house of the Presbyterian congregation he served at Cane Ridge. Answered in Fire preserves the authors' presentations from that day for wider distribution and it provides something not available in the oral presentations: documentation of sources used by the presenters, including scattered eye-witness accounts of Cane Ridge and other revivals, as well as scholarly interpretations. It offers readers in one volume bibliographic pointers toward the literature about the revival's events, context, and impact. Through the narrative, analysis, and reflection takes a deeper look at a seminal event of the Second Great Awakening in America and ponders its meaning for its heirs today. The Cane Ridge revival can be considered the remarkable beginning of a reform movement in American Protestantism that under the initial leadership of Stone, Thomas and Alexander Campbell, and Walter Scott grew rapidly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Cane Ridge meeting attracted thousands of participants and observers from a wide variety of Christian groups in the region. Despite their differences, participants joined in fasting, prayer, singing, and preaching to seek repentance and renewal, compelled by a unifying sense of divine presence and awed by manifestations of the power of the Spirit of God. Yet, for the most part, the experiential narratives of this and similar revivals during the Second Great Awakening in America have not persisted in Churches of Christ, which have for nearly two centuries emphasized cognitive apprehension of the biblical message, conformity to scriptural examples in matters of church life, and obedience to the ethical demands of the New Testament"--