Jonathan Edwards During The First Great Awakening

The terms “Old Lights” and New Lights” were first used during the First Great Awakening, which spread through Great Britain and its North American colonies in the middle of the 18th century. “In A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God”, Jonathan Edwards, considered to be the originator of the Awakening in British North America, describes his congregants’ vivid experiences with grace as causing a "new light" in their perspective on sin and atonement. The Awakening resulted from powerful the preaching of ministers such as Edwards’ and his sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” that gave listeners a sense of personal guilt and of their need of salvation by Christ. The preachers of the Great Awakening encouraged their listeners

to pull away from ritual and ceremony of traditional Protestantism. The Great Awakening made religion intensely personal to the average person by fostering a deep sense of spiritual guilt and redemption, and by encouraging introspection and a commitment to a new standard of personal morality. New Lights embraced the revivals that spread through the colonies, while Old Lights were suspicious of the revivals (and their seeming threat to authority). Revivalism sometimes also had political implications, as an example, in Connecticut, Old Lights politicized their religious differences with the New Lights by passing a series of laws in the General Assembly designed to suppress their form of worship. Old Lights and New Lights were sometimes referred to by different names such as those that developed as a result of faction within The Presbyterian Church in Pennsylvania. Those members of the church who embraced the revivalism were similarly called the "New Side" while those who opposed it were called the "Old Side."