This book tells the gripping story of New England's Natives' efforts to reshape their worlds between the 1670s and 1820 as they defended their land rights, welcomed educational opportunities for their children, joined local white churches during the First Great Awakening (1740s), and over time refashioned Christianity for their own purposes.

The First Great Awakening, an unprecedented surge in Protestant Christian revivalism in the Eighteenth Century, sparked enormous of controversy at the time and has been a source of scholarly debate ever since. Few historians have sought to write a synthetic history of the First Great Awakening, and in recent decades it has been challenged as having happened at all, being either an exaggeration or an “invention.” The First Great Awakening expands the movement’s geographical, theological, and sociopolitical scope. Rather than focus exclusively on the clerical elites, as earlier studies have done, it deals with them alongside ordinary people, and includes the experiences of women, African Americans, and Indians as the observers and participants they were. It challenges prevailing scholarly opinion concerning what the revivals were and what they meant to the formation of American religious identity and culture. Cover image: NPG 131, George Whitefield by John Wollaston, oil on canvas, circa 1742. © National Portrait Gallery, London

This book is an engaging look at spiritual awakenings that have happened in the church throughout history. It examines how these extraordinary movements of God translate into the larger cultural analysis of today. Spiritual awakenings have refreshed the people of God from the very origins of the church. What about these past movements can be instructive for the church today? Can we expect God’s awakening presence in our day? These questions brought about the “Surprising Work of God Conference” in the fall of 2015 in which speakers traced awakening movements from the Old and New Testaments to the present day. Great Awakenings represents the culmination of this conference as the collected works of notable speakers. Chapters address questions about spiritual awakenings through historical, theological, and sociological lenses. They look at the events that precipitated these awakenings, evaluating whether their causes were purely religious or otherwise, and finally suggest what about the awakenings is normative for the church today.

Themelios is an international, evangelical, peer-reviewed theological journal that expounds and defends the historic Christian faith. Themelios is published three times a year online at The Gospel Coalition (http://thegospelcoalition.org/themelios/) and in print by Wipf and Stock. Its primary audience is theological students and pastors, though scholars read it as well. Themelios began in 1975 and was operated by RTSF/UCCF in the UK, and it became a digital journal operated by The Gospel Coalition in 2008. The editorial team draws participants from across the globe as editors, essayists, and reviewers. General Editor: D. A. Carson, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School Managing Editor: Brian Tabb, Bethlehem College and Seminary Consulting Editor: Michael J. Ovey, Oak Hill Theological College Administrator: Andrew David Naselli, Bethlehem College and Seminary Book Review Editors: Jerry Hwang, Singapore Bible College; Alan Thompson, Sydney Missionary & Bible College; Nathan A. Finn, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary; Hans Madueme, Covenant College; Dane Ortlund, Crossway; Jason Sexton, Golden Gate Baptist Seminary Editorial Board: Gerald Bray, Beeson Divinity School Lee Gatiss, Wales Evangelical School of Theology Paul Helseth, University of Northwestern, St. Paul Paul House, Beeson Divinity School Ken Magnuson, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary Jonathan Pennington, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary James Robson, Wycliffe Hall Mark D. Thompson, Moore Theological College Paul Williamson, Moore Theological College Stephen Witmer, Pepperell Christian Fellowship Robert Yarbrough, Covenant Seminary

In the Beginning Was the Word provides a sweeping, engaging, and insightful survey of the relationship between the Bible and public issues from the beginning of European settlement through the American Revolution. It focuses throughout on how people negotiated between the Bible and other social authorities, such as ecclesiastical tradition, national and imperial politics, and economic mandates.

The First Great Awakening was a time of heightened religious activity in the colonial New England. Among those whom the English settlers tried to convert to Christianity were the region's native peoples. In this book, Linford Fisher tells the gripping story of American Indians' attempts to wrestle with the ongoing realities of colonialism between the 1670s and 1820. In particular, he looks at how some members of previously unevangelized Indian communities in Connecticut, Rhode Island, western Massachusetts, and Long Island adopted Christian practices, often joining local Congregational churches and receiving baptism. Far from passively sliding into the cultural and physical landscape after King Philip's War, he argues, Native individuals and communities actively tapped into transatlantic structures of power to protect their land rights, welcomed educational opportunities for their children, and joined local white churches. Religion repeatedly stood at the center of these points of cultural engagement, often in hotly contested ways. Although these Native groups had successfully resisted evangelization in the seventeenth century, by the eighteenth century they showed an increasing interest in education and religion. Their sporadic participation in the First Great Awakening marked a continuation of prior forms of cultural engagement. More surprisingly, however, in the decades after the Awakening, Native individuals and sub-groups asserted their religious and cultural autonomy to even greater degrees by leaving English churches and forming their own Indian Separate churches. In the realm of education, too, Natives increasingly took control, preferring local reservation schools and demanding Indian teachers whenever possible. In the 1780s, two small groups of Christian Indians moved to New York and founded new Christian Indian settlements. But the majority of New England Natives-even those who affiliated with Christianity-chose to remain in New England, continuing to assert their own autonomous existence through leasing land, farming, and working on and off the reservations. While Indian involvement in the Great Awakening has often been seen as total and complete conversion, Fisher's analysis of church records, court documents, and correspondence reveals a more complex reality. Placing the Awakening in context of land loss and the ongoing struggle for cultural autonomy in the eighteenth century casts it as another step in the ongoing, tentative engagement of native peoples with Christian ideas and institutions in the colonial world. Charting this untold story of the Great Awakening and the resultant rise of an Indian Separatism and its effects on Indian cultures as a whole, this gracefully written book challenges long-held notions about religion and Native-Anglo-American interaction