Dwight L. Moody의 생애와 사상의 역사적 고찰

Dwight L. Moody. an Evangelist : A Historical Study of His Work and Thought

Dwight L. Moody (1837-1899) represented an evangelical wing of American Protestantism in the late nineteenth century. Unlike the contemporaneous Social Gospel movement which sought to transform the social structure itself in order to solve various social ills caused by industrialization. urbanization. and secularization. Moody strove to change society by changing individual persons. For Moody, human beings were sinful and the world was accordingly getting worse and worse. Only when they believed in the blood of Christ, they could be regenerated in nature by the Holy Spirit. The regenerated persons. then. could do what was good in God’s standard. Therefore Moody stressed that the hope for the world depended solely on the spriritually reborn individuals. The sense of urgency to save the ‘perishing’ souls motivated Moody to seek more and more conversions through mass revivals and other evangelical methods. Despite limitations or his individualistic. socially conservative approach to social problems, it should be noted that Moody’s place in the history or American Protestantism can be measured by his contributions. He not only vitalized dispirited evangelical Protestantism with his successful revivals, but also laid down the methodological foundations of urban mass revivalism. Besides. Moody was a forerunner of fundamentalism, foreign missions, and ecumecism which would all flower in the twentieth century.