A THEOLOGY OF REVIVAL FROM THE LATE PURITAN MIND OF JONATHAN EDWARDS AND ITS IMPLICATIONS TO EVANGELICAL SPIRITUALITY IN THE PHILIPPINES * By Edwin M. Vargas A. W. Tozer, an unschooled theologian yet of a sharp mind and of a tender heart who lived at a time past not too distant from ours, lamented like a modern day prophet: Evangelical Christianity is now tragically below the New Testament standard. Worldliness is an accepted part of our way of life. Our religious mood is social instead of spiritual. We have lost the art of worship. We are not producing saints. Our models are successful business men, celebrated athletes and theatrical personalities. We carry on our religious activities after the methods of the modern advertiser. Our homes have been turned into theaters. Our literature is shallow and our hymnody borders on sacrilege. And scarcely anyone appears to care. 1 Such a tragic description of the spiritual state of evangelical Christianity appears to be much more real today than in Tozer’s days. Every spiritually sensitive Christian can now smell in the air a sick church in a dying world, 2 content with a neat little religion of lifeless formality and mechanistic programming, 3 equipped with the latest high-tech gadgets and armed with the most advanced techniques of ministry, still orthodox in doctrine yet so spiritually weak and ugly and on the verge of giving up the ghost. So the greatest challenge we are facing today, I believe, goes beyond just the scandal of the evangelical mind, 4 as Mark Noll proposes, given his North American context in mind, to as deep as the scan dal of evangelical spirituality. To borrow from * Presented to the 1 st Annual Forum on Theology held on February 24-25, 2005, Victory Leadership Institute, Taguig City, Philippines. The author was International School of Theology – Asia’s official representative to this forum, which was organized by Asian Theological Seminary. 1 Gems from Tozer: Selections from the Writings of A. W. Tozer (Penn.: Christian Publications, 1969), 47. This booklet is locally printed here in the Philippines by Evangelical Classics, along with Tozer’s The Pursuit of God. 2 “A sick church in a dying world” is a phrase borrowed from Leonard Ravenhill, the source of which I was not able to locate, except from memory, as of the writing of this paper. 3 This phrase is also not mine but from D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones about which the same case applies as does the other phrase that preceded it. 4 See Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1994).