The First Great Awakening is one of the pivotal events in early American history, a significant turning point in the development of the American mind, and a critical factor in the redefinition of the American cultural and religious landscapes. New sectarian and denominational movements sprang out of the Awakening and continued through the American Revolution, expanding further in the Second Great Awakening in the 1800s.

An understanding of the Awakening is critical to encompassing the American character, and a number of recent studies have done much to build upon the large body of scholarly work analyzing and interpreting the revivals as well as the revivalists and their critics, but as Michał Choiński rightly points out at the beginning of his book, “relatively little has been written on the very language of early revivalism”—responding to Allen C. Guelzo's twenty-year-old complaint about the need for such a study (9). The Rhetoric of Revival is an interesting choice to debut the Jonathan Edwards Center's New Directions in Jonathan Edwards Studies series. While a study of Edwards's career and influence would seem a more obvious choice, this work strives to situate Edwards's sermonic work in the context of a broad shift in formal religious rhetoric from an emphasis upon “classical oratory to the art of preaching” (31), and thus sets the stage for future volumes to explore Edwards's place as America's first great theologian, philosopher, and orator and the model upon which later evangelists shaped their personae and oratorical style.

The book is composed of three sections. The first examines the classical forms of rhetoric in which seventeenth- and eighteenth-century American clergymen were schooled as they trained for the ministry at college. The second presents the cultural context of the midcentury revivals, emphasizing the ways in which eighteenth-century clergymen modified classical rhetorical modes to better suit colonial Anglo-American audiences. Choiński then demonstrates how First Great Awakening evangelicals rejected the learned, intricately constructed sermonic style favored by settled ministers in favor of a “plain style” that revolutionized ministerial rhetoric as the revivals electrified the colonies. The third, much larger section offers a selection of revivalist sermons by Edwards, George Whitefield, Gilbert Tennent, Jonathan Dickinson, Jonathan Parsons, and Andrew Croswell as demonstrations of how the gradual jettisoning of ornate preaching composition, so much a feature of the previous century, proved instrumental in the revivalists' success in attracting large audiences and in gaining converts.

What is well known about the First Great Awakening revivalists is that they charged the elder generation of clergymen with indulging the sin of pride by showing off their college educations through the composition of sermons that were needlessly complex in structure, copiously laced with scholarly jargon, and thus too often left audiences confused and disinterested—spiritually deprived. They deplored the established preachers' emphasis upon reason to reach their audiences rather than a simple appeal to emotion, which could be “utilized only as a reinforcement of the rational” argument (37). Rather than trusting in the mind to change the heart, the revivalists reversed the equation, believing that stirring the emotions must precede rational reflection. Choiński, quoting Edwards's grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, locates the “roots of the ‘rhetoric of the revival’” in Stoddard's exhortation to his colleagues to abandon the academic, Ramus-infused, and lawyerly linguistic contortions with which they attempted to present what were, at bottom, simple Gospel truths (37).

The transition of preaching style in eighteenth-century America was heretofore best examined by Perry Miller in The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Harvard University Press, 1953), by Harry S. Stout in The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (Oxford University Press, 1986), and by Allen C. Guelzo in his 1997 essay “The Literature of the Colonial Revivals of Religion, 1735–1760” (in New Directions in American Religious History, edited by Harry S. Stout and D. G. Hart [Oxford University Press, 1997], 141–172), which speaks potently of the need for the kind of study Choiński undertakes. He begins by explicating the evolution of classical rhetoric and oratory from St. Augustine to Petrus Ramus, then demonstrates how this influenced seventeenth-century sermonizing. Following a brief summary of the meaning of revivalism in America and how the revivalists altered ministerial rhetoric, he carefully arranges his argument that the New Lights were every bit as meticulous as their immediate forebears and their Old Light opponents in the construction and delivery of their sermons. He is careful to note that there is a critical difference between the sermon delivered from the pulpit and the printed version that sometimes followed, as the latter “included considerable amendments and lengthy alterations” made by the author, the publisher, or both (39). Therefore, the analyst cannot consider an Awakening sermon “only as a static text” but must read it knowing that it and others like it “moved people to tears, instigated religious conversions, and . . . [took] place . . . in a complex social and linguistic context” (39–40).

The choice of examples, then, is a fine cross section of New Light evangelical preaching that nicely illustrates Choiński's thesis, though the date range of their delivery and publication, 1739–1745, would seem to contribute to an outmoded dating of the Awakening as a whole. As good as The Rhetoric of Revival is at highlighting the development of early evangelical rhetoric, a more useful study would have incorporated examples and analyses of the works of antirevivalist clergymen to show how that the Old Lights, too, had to transform their rhetoric to make the case against New Light theology and behavioral extremism.

The Rhetoric of Revival is a much needed, important, and fascinating study, though one that will likely appeal only to a narrow readership of specialists in early American religious history and culture, who will nonetheless find illumination in its pages.