I gotta have my orange juice.

Usually when I use the word “anxious” I have Edwin Friedman in mind. However, following are quotes and reflections from John Williamson Nevin’s The Anxious Bench.

My friend Jon observes that, while the anxious bench and even the altar call may have disappeared from many churches, reformed charismatic churches have an “anxious mic,” that is, the “prophecy mic.” In my experience, the absence of a confession and absolution from worship leaves a gap that needs filling. If there is a prophecy mic then it is frequently filled by the most anxious church members reassuring one another. By this means women often preach to the church.

I think it is interesting that the modern answer proposed for dead formalism is an equally dead emotionalism. Both are dead externalisms. Perfume will not awaken a dead body.

Study, and the retired cultivation of personal holiness, will seem to their zeal an irksome restraint; and making their lazy, heartless course of preparation as short as possible, they will go out with the reputation of educated ministers, blind leaders of the blind, to bring the ministry into contempt, and fall themselves into the condemnation of the devil. Whatever arrangements may exist in favor of a sound and solid system of religion, their operation will be to a great extent frustrated and defeated, by the predominant influence of a sentiment, practically adverse to the very object they are designed to reach. . . .

False views of religion abound. Conversion is everything, sanctification nothing. Religion is not regarded as the life of God in the soul, that must be cultivated in order that it may grow, but rather as a transient excitement to be renewed from time to time by suitable stimulants presented to the imagination. A taste for noise and rant supersedes all desire for solid knowledge. The susceptibility of the people for religious instruction is lost on the one side, along with the capacity of the ministry to impart religious instruction on the other. The details of christian duty are but little understood or regarded. Apart from its seasons of excitement, no particular church is expected to have much power. Family piety, and the religious training of the young, are apt to be neglected. (63-64)

It is certainly a little strange, that the class of persons precisely who claim to be the most strenuous, in insisting upon unconditional, immediate submission to God, scarcely tolerating that a sinner should be urged to pray or read the bible, lest his attention should be diverted from that one point, are as a general thing nevertheless quite ready to interpose this measure in his way to the foot of the cross, as though it included in fact the very thing itself. And yet a pilgrimage to the Anxious Bench, is in its own nature as much collateral to the duty of coming to Christ, as a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. In either case a false issue is presented to the anxious soul, by which for the time a true sight of its circumstances is hindered rather than promoted. (68)

A low, shallow, pelagianizing theory of religion, runs through it from beginning to end. The fact of sin is acknowledged, but not in its true extent. The idea of a new spiritual creation is admitted, but not in its proper radical and comprehensive form. The ground of the sinner’s salvation is made to lie at last in his own separate person. The deep import of the declaration, That which is born of the flesh is flesh, is not fully apprehended; and it is vainly imagined accordingly, that the flesh as such may be so stimulated and exalted notwithstanding, as to prove the mother of that spiritual nature, which we are solemnly assured can be born only of the Spirit Hence all stress is laid upon the energy of the individual will, (the self-will of the flesh,) for the accomplishment of the great change in which regeneration is supposed to consist. . . .

Religion does not get the sinner, but it is the sinner who “gets religion.” Justification is taken to be in fact by feeling, not by faith; and in this way falls back as fully into the sphere of self-righteousness, as though it were expected from works under any other form. In both the views which have been mentioned, as grounded either in a change of purpose or a change of feeling, religion is found to be in the end the product properly of the sinner himself. It is wholly subjective, and therefore visionary and false. The life of the soul must stand in something beyond itself. Religion involves the will; but not as self-will, affecting to be its own ground and centre. Religion involves feeling; but it is not comprehended in this as its principle. Religion is subjective also, fills and rules the individual in whom it appears; but it is not created in any sense by its subject or from its subject. The life of the branch is in the trunk. (114-116)

To acquire, in any case, true force, [the will] must fall back on a power more general than itself. And so it is found, that in the sphere of religion particularly, the pelagian theory is always vastly more impotent for practical purposes, than that to which it stands opposed. The action which it produces may be noisy, fitful, violent; but it can never carry with it the depth, the force, the fullness, that are found to characterize the life of the soul, when set in motion by the other view. (127)

This spiritual constitution is brought to bear upon [man] in the Church, by means of institutions and agencies which God has appointed, and clothed with power, expressly for this end. . . . Due regard is had to the idea of the Church as something more than a bare abstraction, the conception of an aggregate of parts mechanically brought together. It is apprehended rather as an organic life, springing perpetually from the same ground, and identical with itself at every point. In this view, the Church is truly the mother of all her children. They do not impart life to her, but she imparts life to them. Here again the general is felt to go before the particular, and to condition all its manifestations. The Church is in no sense the product of individual christianity, as though a number of persons should first receive the heavenly fire in separate streams, and then come into such spiritual connection comprising the whole; but individual christianity is the product, always and entirely, of the Church, as existing previously and only revealing its life in this way. Christ lives in the Church, and through the Church in its particular members. . . .

Where it prevails, a serious interest will be taken in the case of children, as proper subjects for the Christian salvation, from the earliest age. Infants born in the Church, are regarded and treated as members of it from the beginning, and this privilege is felt to be something more than an empty shadow. The idea of infant conversion is held in practical honor; and it is counted not only possible but altogether natural, that children growing up in the bosom of the Church, under the faithful application of the means of grace, should be quickened into spiritual life in a comparatively quiet way, and spring up numerously, “as willows by the water-courses,” to adorn the Christian profession, without being able at all to trace the process by which the glorious change has been effected. Where the Church has lost all faith in this method of conversion, either not looking for it at all, or looking for it only in rare and extraordinary instances, it is an evidence that she is under the force of a wrong religious theory, and practically subjected, at least in some measure, to the false system whose symbol is the Bench. If conversion is not expected nor sought in this way among infants and children, it is not likely often to occur. All is made to hang methodistically on sudden and violent experiences, belonging to the individual separately taken, and holding little or no connection with his relations to the Church previously. Then as a matter of course, baptism becomes a barren sign, and the children of the Church are left to grow up like the children of the world, under general most heartless, most disastrous neglect. The exemplifications of such a connection between wrong theory and wrong practice, in this case, are within the reach of the most common observation. (129-132)

How prophetic.