No, I don't like those people...

[an email reply]

I'll listen to that. The first great awakening was a strange phenomenon. Modern - most - Reformed academics play it down. It doesn't fit their modern narrative. Many of them don't believe in any kind of experience called regeneration. They called it 'enthusiasm', like a fainting spell. The first people to deride and belittle and wave off an awakening are the establishment clerics. A recent example is the resurgence of Calvinism among young people in the last decade. Immediately it was the establishment Reformed clerics who belittled it, mocked it, discounted it, even sneered at it and treated it with contempt. It threatened them because anything with the Holy Spirit in it threatens them.

John Owen wrote:

"As among all the doctrines of the gospel, there is none opposed with more violence and subtlety than that concerning our regeneration by the immediate, powerful, effectual operation of the Holy Spirit of grace; so there is not scarce anything more despised or scorned by many in the world than that any should profess that there hath been such a work of God upon themselves, or on any occasion declare aught of the way and manner whereby it was wrought... yea, the enmity of Cain against Abel was but a branch of this proud and perverse inclination."
- John Owen, A Discourse Concerning The Holy Spirit

The modern Reformed academics would scream, but John Owen is one of us!!! Really? John Owen told a surprised King that he'd give up all his learning to possess what John Bunyan had in his ability to preach. He was referring to the Holy Spirit in John Bunyan. John Bunyan, a lowly tinker, uneducated by the 'standards' of modern academics (the standards of cultural Marxism). Modern Reformed academics wouldn't even allow John Bunyan to enter their churches since he'd spent so much time in prison. "This is a family environment, sir. Yes, I'm sure you're a great believer and very 'holy', and so on - 'regenerated', as you people say - but you need to go back onto the street. This is a family church. We have children here."

- C.