THE FUNDAMENTALIST LEAVENING OF THE HOLINESS MOVEMENT, 1914-1940
THE CHURCH OF THE NAZARENE: A CASE STUDY

by

Paul Merritt Bassett

The smell of battle hangs over those portions of H. Orton Wiley's Christian Theology which have to do with the character and role of Scripture. It is not at first apparent, but when the work is seen in the' context of the popular religious press, especially the holiness press, surrounding it, and when it is compared with the other serious theological endeavors of the holiness movement to that time, the polemical character manifests itself. To have brought the battle to the consciousness of the target audience of Christian Theology would have been most impolitic. Nonetheless, Wiley did enter the fray, declaring the unsuitability of either the liberal or the Fundamentalist positions with respect to the authority and inspiration of the Bible. He attempted a third alternative, much more Wesleyan, and classically orthodox, than the two extremes. But he came in on cat's paws and a generation or two of holiness preachers thought he was basically a Fundamentalist. The contrast between his position and the "received" position of the great majority was not perceived, though the clues are ample and Wiley does not dissemble.

The struggle surfaces briefly where Wiley works with "The Christian Book, " as subsection of his chapter on "The Christian Revelation. " In a move not at all prefigured by his theological models — Pope, Miley, and Curtis — and in a mood totally foreign to them, Wiley speaks of false conceptions of the Bible. "Three worthy monarchs," says he, "have had sceptres thrust into their hands and thereby [have been] forced into a false and unworthy position before God and man." These worthy but ill-used "monarchs" are in the Church, the Bible, and reason. '

Of the abuse of the prerogatives of the Church, we need say nothing fi here. But Wiley's critique of the abuse or misuse of Scripture's authority is highly significant.

At first reading, this paragraph appeared to refer to the scholasticisms that characterized both Lutheranism and the Reformed tradition in the century between the death of Calvin and the rise of Pietism. But an examination of Wiley's bibliography would show that while this is one point of reference, it is not the only one. His acquaintance with early Protestant scholasticism is little more than passing. The past tenses of the cited paragraph notwithstanding, they referred to a then contemporary issue. Tone and context both point to fundamentalism.3

That Fundamentalism is a referent here is more strongly confirmed by what Wiley says of the third of the maltreated monarchs, Reason.

Here was a clear attack on both Liberalism and Fundamentalism, then, from within the ranks of the Holiness Movement. Both alternatives, Wiley seems to be saying, tragically overextend the province of reason or logic; and Fundamentalism, with its defense of Scripture, has been no less forgetful of the genuine content of the Bible and no less damaging in its substitution of Scripture for the living Christ than has Liberalism.

Not content with critique of untenable alternatives, Wiley then turns to construct a genuinely Wesleyan third alternative. It is neither liberal nor fundamentalist. It leans in neither direction. It is an authentic alternative, and it is that deliberately. To understand it best, it seems right to review the development of the attitude toward the Scriptures that developed in the years during which Wiley's own denomination, the Church of the Nazarene, was becoming a denomination indeed. Wiley and the denomination and the Protestant-wide controversy over the Bible ripened together.

One of the lesser known differences between Wesleyanism and Calvinism in the last century. buried in the tussle over free-will, is that of hermeneutic principle. And this, in turn, is intimately linked, both as cause and effect, to divergent doctrines of inspiration and authority. The difference would not have been clearly apparent up until the 1870s. But around that time as Sandeen has shown, American Calvinism in its Princeton mutation clearly, but unwittingly, broke from the old paths in the matter of biblical interpretation and in its description of the authority and inspiration of the Book.5

The Westminster Confession had been quite clear in insisting that the authority of Scripture rests on two sources, perhaps three: perhaps the witness of the Church, certainly its divine origin and certainly the witness of the Holy Spirit in the believers.

The rise of modern science, in the meantime, with its redefinition of what a fact must be and of reality itself, based upon these re-defined facts, had narrowed the definition of what truth or a truth must be and how it would be determined to be truth or a truth indeed. 7 Nineteenth century theologians, with varying degrees of awareness and complicity, accepted the new definitions of fact, or reality and of truth.8

The turn this took in the theology developed at Princeton helped to set the stage for the development of Fundamentalism Charles Hodge and B. B. Warfield in particular applied the new (now commonplace) definitions to the rising argument in Calvinist circles concerning the authority of Scripture and produced a doctrine of inspiration that admitted only one of the two or three sources of authority declared by the Westminster divines. Says Hodge,

This is to say that the proof of authority lies external to Christian experience. The Bible is authoritative because it is inspired. The venerable notion of the testimonium Spiritus sancti, a doctrine essential to Calvin's theology, to Luther's, and to evangelical theology in general, is reduced to a minor role in Hodge and in subsequent Princetonian, then Fundamentalist, theologies.10

Concurrently with the development of the Princeton theology, American Methodism was developing its own systematics, though it was not at all hesitant to draw from its British forebears in the faith. It was not immune to the scientific revolution in definitions, but its insistence upon experience as a source of theology kept the more nearly positivistic and rationalistic influences at bay in the nineteenth century Consequently, the Methodist theologies contemporary with Hodge and Warfield seem in many ways to be in quite another world when they speak of Scripture authority. Miner Raymond, whose Systematic Theology, published in 1877, was the first American Methodist systematic clearly links biblical authority to the testimonium Spiritus sancti,11 as also does the most influential Methodist theology of the time, the Compendium of Christian Theology by W. B. Pope. 12 Raymond does tend to bury the idea in the more pressing contemporary concern with experience; Pope, on the other hand, peppers his discussion of revelation with it so that it is never more than two logical steps away at any point in the consideration.

It may be debated whether the Princeton mutation is at this point genuinely Calvinistic though one is inclined to believe it is. There is no doubt whatsoever that Raymond and Pope are Wesleyan. And there is a clear, very clear, and significant difference in the two views of Scripture. John Miley, whose Systematic Theology of 1892 comes to be required reading in the Nazarene's "Course of Study for Licensed Ministers" from 1911 to 1932 [in 1911, it stood alone; from 1916 to 1932 it was an alternative, along with Ralston's Elements of Divinity]13 tends as Miner Raymond did to overlay the testimonium Spiritus sancti with the doctrine of experience, but the older notion is still there and very significant to the understanding of the authority of Scripture. 14 So it may be confidently asserted that by 1900, a distinguishing tenet of Wesleyan theology in contradiction from the Calvinism of Princeton and those whom it influenced is the insistence upon the internal witness of the Spirit as a source of biblical authority — "internal witness" being taken in both an individual and a corporate sense.

This may help to explain why Methodism and the holiness movement did not concern themselves more than very minimally with the issues being raised by the so-called "higher criticism" in the period 1870-1914, while the reformed tradition was abubble with controversy.15 For Wesleyans, the authority of Scripture depended to some degree upon its own self authentication, but more importantly, experience of the authenticating voice of the Living Word clinched the matter.

This confidence that the authority and inspiration of Scripture could not be undone by those who could attack only from non-religious grounds and therefore could not touch the experiential validation of the truth and authority of the Word is seen the very first attempt at a theology treating most of the topics usually considered in a full-scale systematic theology produced among the holiness people. E. P. Ellyson's Theological Compend was published in 1908 by deliberate arrangement to celebrate the merger that year of the Holiness Church of Christ and the Church of the Nazarene, a date and event since taken to mark the birth of the Church of the Nazarene as a national denomination.16

In this first wide-gauged systematic theology from within the Holiness movement itself, there is not a word concerning the doctrine of revelation. Strange, in a way, because the leaders of the merging groups, and to some degree the rank and file, surely were not ignorant of the rising tide of positive appreciation for biblical criticism in the United States nor of the negative reaction to it. Their multitude of periodicals speaks of it and warns of its excesses. But apparently in 1908 a Wesleyan systematic theologian could safely let not only the topic itself but also the broader area of revelation go unexamined. Probably there was no perceived need for it either catechetically or apologetically. The authority and inspiration of Scripture were believed to be divine, and that was believed to be self-explanatory.

The temper of the times was not long in changing, however. By 1913, B. F. Haynes, editor of the neonate Herald of Holiness is including in almost every issue both an affirmation of confidence in the divine authority and inspiration of Scripture and an attack on those otherwise inclined. His method was two-fold. He would either approach the subject in his own editorials or by way of his comments upon editorials and articles appearing in other religious periodicals. Seldom are his sources Methodist or otherwise Wesleyan, though Haynes himself had been reared in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, had served as pastor in several of her distinguished pulpits in Tennessee (including McKendree Church of Nashville) and had edited a paper on behalf of a large contingent within his conference. 17 To be sure, he had suffered the wrath of certain bishops for his outspoken ways, and ecclesiastical demotion was familiar territory to him. But it is yet surprising to see him drawing so little from his own tradition and so much from the more Reformed-oriented Herald and Presbyter, D. L. Moody, Reuben Torrey, and others. This is especially impressive in the light of the almost-every-issue criticism of Moody, Torrey and the Reformed tradition in general for its rejection of "second blessing holiness."18

In September of 1913, the Herald of Holiness began carrying an advertisement advising and urging the purchase of Arthur T. Pierson's book, Many Infallible Proof: The Evidences of Christianity, or the Written and Living Word of God. 19 Though the book was published by Fleming Revell, it was being offered through the Nazarene Publishing House. It is quite probable that Ellyson read the work before writing his Compend, but still felt no need to enter the lists on the topic upon which it expounds.20 The book itself was almost a generation old when the Herald began to advertise it. Pierson, at the time of writing in 1886, was pastor of Bethany Presbyterian Church, Philadelphia, and a leader in the Niagara conferences and other forerunners of Fundamentalism. His quarrel was not with the so-called "higher critics, " however. In fact, his book pays them scant heed. That battle was to come later. Rather, he wrestles with the skepticism born of the Enlightenment and carried over into the various forms of agnosticism that were in vogue in certain circles throughout the nineteenth century.21

One very interesting note sounded by Pierson, however, must be underlined, for it is a note retained in classical evangelical Protestantism from Luther and Calvin, through the Pietists and Wesley, maintained by the early Holiness movement and lost by them in the heat of the Fundamentalist controversy. That is the intimate, even inextricable relationship between Christology and the inspiration of Scripture. Pierson's sub-title cites it … The Written and living Word of God. Throughout the work, he links the two. So he says,

The climax of the work is in his discussion of "The Divine Person," without which discussion, Pierson makes it clear, declarations about the Book (which he does not call "divine") are spiritually and theologically empty.23

Haynes, for his part, is also faithful in the early years of the warming controversy to keep Christology central and to avoid presenting the credentials of the Scripture apart from the context of the person and work of Jesus Christ. So it is that in October, 1913, he can write, "Yes, blessed be God, this inspiration of the Bible is verbal in the most acute, intense, literal, all inclusive sense. Nothing short of this would be like or worthy of God, and nothing short of this would meet man's need."24 And in April, 1914, he could write,

The verbal inspiration for which Haynes so stoutly contends is not the verbal inspiration that became a fundamentalist watchword, perhaps shibboleth, a decade later. The argument had not yet developed sufficiently for Haynes to mean what they meant nor for his readers to take it in the later sense. He simply meant that none of the Scripture was of human devising-that it was God's own Word, given by His special inspiration only. Haynes is thinking essentially of the Word, not of words.

Nonetheless, the climate was becoming more heated every day, and the approach of a Pierson, and the assumption of an Ellyson, and the balance and terminological equivocation of a Haynes would not suffice. The very term "verbal inspiration" takes on an increasingly technical meaning, and the tendenz of the term and of the battle in which it plays such a critical role is already clear by 1914.26

Up to that year, the "Course of Study" for the Nazarene ministry seems to have assumed that John Miley's treatment of the doctrine of revelation was sufficient. But in 1914, the list of books includes Miley's theology and adds All About the Bible by Sidney Collett as required fare for the third year theological student. 27 This work was to remain on the "Course of Study" until 1944. Collett, whose book first appeared in Great Britain in 1905, under the title The Scripture of Truth, shows clearly the earlier ambiguity of the term "verbal inspiration," as well as hinting at the direction the definition was to take. Ironically, Collett himself retained without a single change his own definition of the term, however. So that, for him, it meant the same in the twentieth edition of circa 1934 as in the first. 28 He argues for a verbal inspiration that is not merely an inspiration of thoughts, nor yet a process of mechanical dictation. "If the testimony of Scripture is to be believed, God always gave the words, but He did not always give the thoughts!"29 What keeps Collett back from a mechanical dictation theory is the variety of personalities that shines through the various biblical books, "hence, any attempt to define the exact nature or method of inspiration can only engender fruitless discussion, which must end in confession."30 He goes on to quote with approval a sentence from an address delivered by the Dean of Westminster at the Abbey in late 1904: "Behind and beneath the Bible, above and beyond the Bible, was the God of the Bible." "Herein," says Collett, "lies the true and only explanation of the mystery of inspiration."31

So Collett, and Haynes, held desperately to a divinely inspired Bible by means of the term "verbal inspiration." And both insisted on the subordinate character of the Bible with reference to the Person and Work of Christ (Haynes) and God Himself (Collett). But the relationship of christology to the doctrines of inspiration and revelation was no clearer than the meaning of the term "verbal inspiration."

By 1920, the terms have been sharpened and the enemy more clearly identified. In the intervening years, the proportion of editorials and editorial comments on the authority and inspiration to those on the Person and work of Christ changes radically. There was parity in 1914, but by 1920 the former were outnumbering the latter by 10 to 1. And now, in 1920, the "higher critics" as a class, and occasionally a specific one from among them, are clearly and frequently targets. In July, editor Haynes, noting the decrease in membership in the larger Protestant denominations, especially the Methodist Episcopal churches, North and South, says, "We repeat, as we have often said in these columns, that the curse of higher criticism is chiefly to be credited with this state of things . . 32 By October, 1920, Haynes begins to use that hypostatic language to describe the Scriptures which was to become typical of Fundamentalism.

Throughout March of 1920, the Herald of Holiness had featured a series of articles by J. Warren Slote entitled, "Is the Bible Inspired? Some Suggestions." The mood of the series is calm and it is innocent of any of the issues that later racked the Fundamentalists themselves. Innocent, but not unaware.

Two weeks later, Slote insisted that while the Bible is not a science text, it is scientifically accurate. And in response to the documentary hypothesis he insists on the unity of the Book.35 His last article examines Jesus' attitude toward the Old Testament and concludes

This side of the controversy, Slote's reasoning appears to be quite naive, even circular. But within its own context, in terms of the state of the controversy in 1920, his point of view is very like that of the usual conservative at that early stage.37 Verbal inspiration is the battle line, however ill-defined the term may have been. The Bible is authoritative because it is God's word. The notion of the testimonium Spiritus sancti is ignored, even in Wesleyan circles. There is not a word of it in the periodicals of the Church of the Nazarene from 1912 onward for a generation, but there is no end of defenses of the Bible on the grounds of its own self-authentication.

In 1923, the sixth General Assembly of the Church of the Nazarene submitted an "Approved Constitution" to the various districts of the Church for their decisions and voted to act on the whole at the seventh Assembly, to be held in 1928.38 The proposed changes show many kinds of tensions to be testing the new denomination, not the least of them being the issues raised by the surging battle for the Bible. Up to 1923, the "Article of Belief" referring to Scripture had read: "By the Holy Scriptures we understand the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments, given by Divine inspiration, revealing the will of God concerning us in all things necessary to our salvation; so that whatever is not contained therein is not to be enjoined as an article of faith."39 The indebtedness of the article to the Thirty-nine Articles of Episcopalianism and to the Twenty-five Articles of Methodism is patent. So also is the item on Scripture in the "Agreed Statement of Belief," a sort of liturgical summary of Nazarene doctrine: "We believe in the Divine inspiration of the Old and New Testament Scriptures, and that they contain all truth necessary to faith and Christian living."40

Neither the periodicals of the Church printed between the sixth and seventh Assemblies nor the minutes of the district assemblies, nor the minutes of the 1928 Assembly show any sign of debate over what came to be the new "Article of Faith" on the Scripture. This lack of noteworthy debate shows clearly the perceived need of the Nazarenes to align themselves in the now-raging controversy. Now the Article read: "We believe in the plenary inspiration of the Holy Scriptures by which we understand the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments, given by divine inspiration, inerrantly revealing the will of God concerning us in all things necessary to our salvation; so that whatever is not contained therein is not to be enjoined as an article of faith." The "Agreed Statement of Belief" was also altered to read: "We believe in the plenary inspiration of the Old and New Testament Scriptures, and that they contain all truth necessary to faith and Christian living."41

Affirmations of full inspiration and inerrancy seemed to be required in the creed now. But why? The rationale is nowhere to be found except in the broader context of American Protestant wars over the Bible. There is no written evidence to inform us, but "informed sources" report that it was H. Orton Wiley who framed the new article.42 Certainly, the phrase "plenary inspiration" is his — not originally, of course, but as it commends itself to the doctrines of Wiley's denomination. But there is much room to doubt that the word "inerrantly" is his as well. In his own systematic theology, he will argue for the integrity of the Book, and even assert its freedom from what he calls "essential error." But "inerrance" seems to be deliberately avoided as saying both too little and too much.43 The word itself had, by 1928, become one of the shibboleths of Fundamentalism, and much more an emotional than a cognitive term. Charles Hodge had earlier rejected the idea, if not the term.44 A. A. Hodge and B. B. Warfield, a decade later, insisted upon inerrancy as necessary to the authority of Scripture.45 The General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. in 1893 declared its allegiance to the position of Warfield in the resolution of the Brigg's case, and went on to claim that the Princeton position of Warfield was integral to that of the Westminster Confession and the declarations of the larger Catechism.46 In the spring of 1919, the newly founded World's Christian Fundamentals Association, an interdenominational group that numbered among its members some powerful leaders (especially among the Presbyterians and Baptists) — such as Reuben Torrey Charles G. Trumbull, Lewis Sperry Chafer, and Griffith Thomas — made belief in a verbally inspired, inerrant Bible one of its nine points. This very point was quoted with unreserved approval in the Preachers Magazine a decade later.47

These, and later, declarations tended to force the issue of biblical authority and inspiration. The only alternative to inerrancy seemed to, be errancy. The only alternative to infallibility, fallibility. The only alternative to verbal, ideational.

During the years between 1923 and 1928, the Church of the Nazarene adopted as her own heroes the principal soldiers in the ever more clearly defined Fundamentalist camp. There were no Wesleyans, no Methodists, except Harold Paul Sloan, who were carrying the battle.48

The newly launched Preacher's Magazine carried as its lead article in its first issue, January, 1926, an article by F. M Messenger, "Modernism vs. Christianity," which draws heavily on the argumentation of J. Gresham Machen's Christianity and Liberalism, published not quite two years earlier.49 The next issue of the Preacher's Magazine (February, 1926) carries E. P. Ellyson's "The Present Crisis or Christianity vs. Religion, " in the lead.50 Ellyson, a former member of the Society of Friends and later a general superintendent of the Church of the Nazarene, again avoids discussion of the problem of biblical authority, but instead insists on the essential relationship of orthodox Christianity to genuine Christianity. 51 Nonetheless, the attraction of the fundamentalist response to the liberals among the Nazarenes is seen in the warm review given by P. H. Lunn to a book entitled Where the Higher Criticism Fails. (The book itself is calm enough.)52

Both the Herald of Holiness and the Preacher's Magazine for the period 1923 to 1928 promote heavily the works of William Jennings Bryan, Reuben Torrey, A. T. Pierson, and Sidney Collett. The Preacher's Magazine features in its front cover pictures and drawings of prominent religious leaders, past and contemporary, including several with whom it argues theologically in its pages.53 One is impressed that in this period second blessing holiness" was not as critical to the denomination as it had earlier been. Orthodoxy on this point was the de iure mark of the "good Nazarene. " A fundamentalist orthodoxy with respect to the inspiration and authority of Scripture had become a de facto mark of the "good Nazarene."

This is re-inforced by the tone and words of the Address of the General Superintendents to the 7th General Assembly, in 1928.

And yet, for all of this obvious sympathy with Fundamentalism and openness to an increasingly carefully constructed Fundamentalist terminology, there was still a small hint that the testimonium Spiritus sancti was not forgotten and that modernism and higher criticism were not to be the modern Ichabod for Nazarenes.

Floyd W. Nease, president of Eastern Nazarene College and product of Bresee's and Wiley's Pasadena University, wrote in the August, 1927, issue of the Preacher's Magazine on "The Preacher's Attitude Toward the Critical Study of the Bible." "Is it basically more fair," he asks, "for the representatives of Fundamentalism to assume that the liberalists are a set of knaves than for the latter to assert that the Fundamentalists are ignoramuses and fools?"58 He urges the values of higher criticism, deploring its "destructive" practices and urges pastors to own and say sets of critical commentaries.

A year later, Stephen S. White, newly installed president of Bethany Nazarene College, wrote on "The-Holiness School and Fundamentalism," pointing out the tendency toward harshness and legalism among Fundamentalists, but indicating that the Nazarene's aim should be to emphasize experience, proper religious experience, as an avenue to a proper Fundamentalism.59 Here, in Nease and White, both young but recognized educational leaders, was a call for fairness-even acceptance of the positive contributions of modernism. These declarations, in the context of the declarations of the General Superintendents cited earlier, are quite conciliatory, relatively speaking. In 1924, a lead editorial by J. B. Chapman, cited by Timothy Smith as "the high-water mark of the [Nazarene] effort to make common cause with embattled Fundamentalists," had argued that Nazarenes could in no way accept nor tolerate any aspect of the modernist enterprise. 60 But Chapman, so well-respected throughout the Church, was not voicing an opinion held by certain significant leadership.

And here we confront an ambivalence if not an enigma. By 1928, the General Superintendents, whose number was augmented in that year by Chapman's elevation, were quite clear in their sympathies with Fundamentalism as it sought to defend the Scriptures — almost unreserved sympathies. Chapman, editor of the Herald from 1923 to 1928 and editor of the Preacher's Magazine from its first issue, in 1926, until well into his super-intendency, was also clearly favorable to the Fundamentalists, and numbered himself among them with respect to the battle for the Bible. Chapman's popularity among Nazarenes in general probably speaks of a general sympathy for the Fundamentalists, and support for them in the matter of the defense of the Book, among Nazarenes everywhere. The influence of J. B. Morrison, who was given a wide and warm welcome into the Church of the Nazarene in 1922, was among her most popular and heeded preachers, and who was elected General Superintendent just 14 years later, in 1936, was clearly directed in support of the biblicist position of the Fundamentalists.61

Nonetheless, Fundamentalism could not gain the Nazarenes' total allegiance even on so important an issue as biblical authority. Two courses of events illustrate the ambivalence, but cannot explain it.

In the summer of 1925, the Herald of Holiness began carrying advertisements of a book by Basil W. Miller and U. E. Harding entitled Cunningly Devised Fables: Modernism Exposed and Refuted. It was published without the trade imprint by the Nazarene Publishing House and is the first extended head-on attack of modernism to come from the Nazarenes.62 The work is warmly endorsed in the 2 September 1925 Herald of Holiness by A. M. Hills. In his review he clearly states that Miller was the author, that Harding's name was used to give credibility and a wider reading of the book.63 Harding was an evangelist of wide acquaintance in the holiness movement; Hill's reputation as a scholar and controversialist was probably without parallel among the holiness people. The book itself carries a laudatory introduction by James B. Chapman.64 The chapter titles give more than adequate clue to the contents and character of the work: "Modernism's Blind Rejection of the Fundamentalists," "Modernism's Fraudulent Fictitious, Uninspired Bible," "Modernism's Mud God, Non-miraculous Universe, Dead Soul and Deified Man, " "Modernism's Unbalanced, Illegitimate Jesus and the Fable of the Resurrection, " "Modernism's Stainless Sin, Fablized Salvation and Bloodless Atonement," "Modernism's Godless Conversion Through Religious Education," "Modernism's Degenerate Church," "Modernism's Satanic Missionary Program," "Modernism's Hell-Hatcheries of Her Vile Dogmas" (primarily her seminaries), "Modernism's Non-Christian Program of Evolution," "The Old Book and the Old Faith. "

It may be observed that the barbs in the chapter titles are only made more prickly by the contents of the chapters themselves. But the most important datum to be underlined is the hypostatizing of the Bible, and the author's willingness to attribute to it that which most orthodox theology gave to the divine persons alone. Furthermore, this is done, as it would later be done in Hills' work, without reference to the Holy Spirit as the agent of continuing inspiration and without reference( the focus, foundation, activator and absolutely essential hermeneutic "principle," as it were, of scripture. (Again, references to the Holy Spirit as at least the Spirit of interpretation and to the Living Word when the Bible was under discussion, all absent in Miller's work, were standard in orthodox theologies.) The term "Word of God, " for Miller refers only to the written Word. He calls it, for instance, "the gate of heaven," "the House of God," "the Holy of holies," "light, eternal light . . . the only light in time."65

To be sure, in calmer moments, Miller clearly stated that Jesus Christ, not the Bible, was his redeemer, as did most Fundamentalists. But the effect of Miller's argument was to raise the Bible to the sort of divinity traditionally attributed only to the Trinity. Again, Miller, and other Fundamentalists, would stoutly deny this if we were engaged in a soteriological discussion. But in terms of theological method and system, and with reference to such critical areas as epistemology and its corollary, revelation, he, and they, have not a Trinity but a Quadrinity.

The Publishing House now has no data on the press run of the book, so its popularity is not readily quantifiable, and one's own boyhood memories present very unreliable evidences from a scientific point of view. But in that boyhood, passed 15 to 25 years after the publication of the work, one can remember the laity of the congregations of which his father was pastor being very much aware of the book as a sort of standard catalog of the errors of the Modernists, especially on the issue of biblical authority.

But however popular such a work might have been among the denomination in general, some official circles were much more careful. The report of the General Board of Education to the 1923 General Assembly had recommended that J. B. Chapman and Basil W. Miller's manuscript entitled The Faith Once Delivered to the Saints be referred to the Committee on Education for consideration for inclusion in the "Course of Study for Licensed Ministers."66 The Committee on Education passed the matter on to the newly created and elected Book Committee. 67 This bit of maneuvering was not at all necessary, for the General Board of Education had the right to act on the matter, as did the Committee on Education (the separate jurisdictions of the two committees not being clear then).68 Either could have placed it on the Course of Study. Neither would. Why? Is there a clue in the fact that the chairman of the first and third committees (General Board of Education and Book Committee) was James B. Chapman and that the secretary was H. Orton Wiley?69

The matter surfaces again in the 1928 General Assembly with some interesting nuances in evidence. The resolution passed by the 1928 Assembly says,

There is no hint given as to the origination of this resolution, but the equivocations in terms — including the title, Manuscript Committee for Book Committee, "Minister's Course of Study" for "Course of Study for Licensed Ministers" — and the proposal that the Assembly Committee on Education recommend it both for publication and inclusion in the Course of Study (two actions not really now within that Committee's authority) point to it as a move from outside the circles that had been mandated to work with the matter. And note, too, that the work was now attributed to Miller alone. Why was Chapman's name withdrawn?

The Committee on Education did take the matter up and recommended that it be referred to the Committee on Course of Study. This recommendation was approved by the Assembly, but there is irony in .he move. 71 There was not then and never had been a Committee on the course of Study. Surely such an experienced hand as H. Orton Wiley, secretary of the referring committee, knew that. The net effect of the assembly's actions was to kill the project so that however strongly identified popular Nazarene feeling might be with that of the Fundamentalists, a clearly Fundamentalist work was not to find its way into the Course of Study.

H. Orton Wiley's presence at every step, always in a policy-shaping role, is circumstantial evidence that his was a major influence that kept that book from the official list. This evidence, plus the common knowledge that Wiley framed the 1928 "Article of Belief" on Scripture, except perhaps for the word "inerrantly," are critical data in explaining why Fundamentalism did not capture the Church with its biblicism. The clinching datum is still a dozen years in the future, but there is mounting testimony to Wiley's rejection of Fundamentalism as he takes over as editor of the Herald of Holiness from James Chapman at the 1928 assembly. In Wiley's tenure of eight years (1928-1936), editorials taking up the struggle are almost non-existent, though Wiley is not at all slow ;o manifest his confidence in the authority and inspiration of Scripture. 72 His grounds for doing so will be made clear and will be shown to be quite different from those of much of Nazarenedom — lay and official. For now, 1923 to 1928, and even later, Wiley seems to have followed the more politic road of keeping the official structure and doctrine of the church away from endorsing doctrinaire Fundamentalism, even on the point of biblical authority rather than attempting to formulate a positive position which might, in the heat of the larger fray, be misunderstood.

One remaining piece of evidence needs to be examined to show both the Fundamentalist leavening of the Church of the Nazarene and her ambivalence toward that brand of conservativism in the period between the World Wars. It had become obvious as early as 1919 that the new denomination leaded a systematic theology of its own. The two which were recommended in the "Course of Study" were already by that time quite old and not synchronized with the age of the assembly line, urbanization, and obviously increasing social mobility. Benjamin Field's The Student's Handbook of Christian Theology had been published in 1886; John Miley's Systematic Theology was dated 1892; and older than them both, but recommended from the beginning, was Samuel Wakefield's Christian Theology, a revision of Watson's Institutes, published in 1869. William Burton Pope's Compendium of Christian Theology and Charles Hodges' Systematic Theology, neither of them in the "Course of Study" but both very widely used in the colleges of the holiness movement, date from 1881 and 1871 respectively. These could not meet the onslaught of modernism. They knew little of it.

So it was that in 1919 a formal request was made by the General Department of Education to H. Orton Wiley, then president of Northwest Nazarene College, Nampa, Idaho, that he write a full-range systematic theology.73 About the time that Wiley was being importuned, A. M. Hills, a member of the Pasadena University faculty, began to write his own systematic theology, urged on by his former students. 74 For whatever reasons, Hills' theology was published almost a decade before Wiley's, first appearing in 1931. It was not published by the Nazarene Publishing House, but by C. J. Kinne, a Nazarene elder long connected with denominational literature and publishing interests. A search of several sorts of correspondence revealed nothing as to why the Publishing House did not print the work. Conversations with some persons contemporary with the events suggested that Hills was considered too liberal with respect to the authority and inspiration of Scripture.75 This is indeed quite surprising if it be true, for Hills was clearly a Fundamentalist.76 And whatever may have been the earning for moderation, conservatism without dogmatism, on the part of many in the movement, especially that wing encompassed by the Church of the Nazarene, Hills' work left no room for maneuver. Only his resistance to the theory of mechanical dictation keeps him from an almost complete identification.77 He does go so far as to say that "we no longer have an absolutely inerrant Bible," but this has to do with the disappearance of the "original autographs," and it is a declaration made more nearly as a logical necessity than as an admission of any authentic problems.78 The misquotation of OT passages by NT writers, and the errors in identifying OT authorship of passages by NT authors, are all but explained away by noting that the NT writers were more interested in truth than strict accuracy, and that there are so few discrepancies.79] Hills, drawing deeply from Hodge also disavows any intent to "bind up the cause of Christianity with the literal accuracy of the Bible."80 But the entirety of his discussion of "revelation" is finally about the Bible, and it is governed from beginning to end by the canons of formal logic. 81 Finally he is moved to present a nearly postatization of the Bible. As an example of this latter, we cite two paragraphs toward the close of Hills' argument for the authority of Scriptures.

"It (the Bible) caused the idol-gods to fall on their faces, and struck the heathen oracles dumb. It was a heaven-sent wind that swept away the poisonous malarias of heathenism, and let in the sunlight of truth, and the pure atmosphere of heaven. With its still small voice of holy influence it whispered to souls who were planning iniquity, and in love with secret sin, and somehow the spell was broken, and the spirit of wisdom came, and they repented and turned to God.

It uncovered the world of despair to men rushing on in their mad career of wickedness, and they fled with fear and trembling from the wrath to come. Through all the years, it has rebuked every iniquity, and encouraged every thing that was lovely and of good report. It put the spirit of human pity and brotherly love into the hearts of cruel men, and they tore down their amphitheaters and stopped their gladiatorial shows, and struck the shackles from the limbs of slaves."82

There is not one word of the continuing work of the Holy spirit in revelation, i.e., the testimonim Spiritus sancti, nor one word of Jesus Christ expends on the topic of revelation ,Of course Hills does believe that redemption comes through Christ and not through the Bible. But his magnum opus leaves quite another impression. This is a systematic theology, and it might be expected to be sufficiently guarded in expression so that one would not gain an impression that the written Word is the Savior. The fact is that Hills accepted much of the Fundamentalist argument for the authority and inspiration of the Bible without seeing that he was arguing that where Scripture appeared to fail, or at least falter, the principle weight of authority in his system fell on the testimonium logicum.83 Here was the position that Wiley so clearly scored — "a worthy desire to maintain belief in the plenary inspiration of the Bible, as well as its genuineness, authenticity and authority as the Rule of Faith [Wiley here has simply cited Hills' outline point for point] [resorting] to a mere legalistic defense of the Scriptures. It depended upon logic rather life.84

Nonetheless, in spite of Wiley's critique of theologies such as Hills' as being too biblicistic; and the critique of grass roots opinion, as it was expressed in administrative leadership, that Hills' work was too liberal with respect to Scripture, the Fundamentalism of Hills took hold of the Church of the Nazarene in the 1930's and 1940's. The conciseness and logical precision of his sections on revelation and Scripture lent themselves to the pedagogical methods of many a teacher who failed to catch the presuppositions at work in the whole of Hills' work. The question of biblical authority was set in the ideological context of Fundamentalism, however, sharp may have been the differences upon specific details.85

The effect of Hills' work is seen in the 1936 edition of E. P. Ellyson's Theological Compound of 1908. It is now renamed Doctrinal Studies, and the "Forward" is a bit defensive with respect to the change in spirit in the new presentation. "Doctrinal Studies recognizes the Bible as the Word of God, a revelation of the will of God to man, and the final authority as to Christian doctrine."86

Now a chapter ("lesson") is added to the original work, speaking of the need for the Bible and of its inspiration. While the tone of the chapter is quite simple and irenic, and clearly aimed at quieting conservative anxieties, it clearly yields nothing to the right nor to the left, to the Fundamentalists nor the liberals. For instance, Ellyson says, "Science can discover man as a dual being, as having a physical body and natural life, and develop a system of psychology from this point of view; it can place man among the animals as a superior animal, and may think of him as a religious animal, but it must stop there . . . Without the Bible we would know man only as the highest of animals. But man is spirit, as well as natural life and physical body, and belongs on the spirit level; it is the spirit that makes him human, a man." 87

In speaking of revelation and inspiration, Ellyson again refuses to battle. "The Bible is the inerrant revelation of the will of God to man, the infallible rule of Christian faith, containing all necessary truth for our salvation, holy living and triumph in death."88 This declaration would satisfy neither side-the liberal being dissatisfied with the claim of normativeness, the Fundamentalist unhappy with the qualified character of its inerrancy. Nonetheless, Ellyson evidently felt a need to include a chapter on the matter in the newer appearance of the work.

It remained to H. Orton Wiley both to offer a genuine Wesleyan alternative to Fundamentalism and modernism and to place the official theology of the Church of the Nazarene, if not the grass roots, back on truly orthodox turf.

Wiley has no doubt that the Bible is the primary source of Christian theology. "The Holy Scriptures," says he, "constitute the quarry out of which are mined the glorious truths utilized in constructing the edifice of Christian doctrine."89 But there is a profound ambiguity here, for he goes on to say,

Here is a passage at a far remove from the hypostatizing of the Bible regularly practiced by the Fundamentalists and such Nazarenes as Hills, Miller and Chapman. Positively, Wiley seeks to revive the venerable notion of the testimonium Spiritus sancti. He says that the recognition of the dual source of theology — Scripture and the spiritual illumination of the Church (experience) —

Wiley then points out the tendency of Protestantism to neglect the principle of spiritual consciousness, the spiritual illumination of the Church, as it has insisted on the authority of Scripture alone.

These are remarkable words, given their ecclesiastical context. In Protestantism at large, the Fundamentalist controversy was still alive in 1941. And by contrast, Wiley's colleague Hills quoted Miley and came up with a definition of the theological role of Scripture that was completely amenable to the Fundamentalists.

For Wiley, this declaration would be both inadequate and leading. For him, moral and religious intentions, far from being tests of the value of Scripture are themselves to be judged by Scripture Logical or rational coherency consistency are no tests of the character of the Bible. The question is not whether the written word proves true under the most searching of rational inquisitions, for that would be to make an instrument a criterion. For Wiley, Scripture (as revelation) and reason are methodological correlates One does not authenticate the other.95 The fact that Scripture meets the profoundest sense of religious need is no test of the value of Scripture, per se; rather it is testimony to the adequacy of the Living Word of whom it testifies.96 And, again, it is the living Word who satisfies the soul with truth, not the Bible in se. To speak of the Scripture's "sublime and transforming power in the spiritual life" is to say too much, for it is Christ and Christ alone who transforms through His Holy Spirit.97

The theological role of the Bible, as Wiley sees it, is to serve as the foundation for Christianity, as a religion. He quotes Pope at length and with apparent approval, the gist of the matter being seen in the assertion that "as the basis for the science of theology the Bible is Christianity."98 Thus, in the construction of a theology, the Bible is absolutely authoritative. But what makes the Scripture spiritually authoritative, for Wiley, is not its power to meet human needs, objections and criteria, but its witness to the essential revelation, Jesus Christ.99 He is the direct revelation from God.

To these things, Hills and other Fundamentalists would probably give assent, but only in pro forma fashion. But such a doctrine of biblical authority as Wiley here implies, and the theological role he here implies that the Scripture ought to play, could in no way fit into the various Fundamentalist theological systems. That they would not fit is in large part a consequence of the Fundamentalist presupposition that Scripture is the revelation of God. For Wiley, that revelation extends beyond the Bible to Christ and into the living body of Christ, the Church. Both experimentally and methodologically, one comes from faith in Christ to belief in the authority of Scripture, and not vice versa. Again, what the Fundamentalists, such as Hills, would want to confess, spiritually, they betray methodologically for they too would insist upon the christocentricity of their faith. But systematically, by beginning from the ground of the authority and inspiration of Scripture, they cannot give Christ the pre-eminence. Wiley scores them deeply at this point without naming them.

In terms of systematic theology, then, the Bible is an intermediate authority.

The irony in the matter lies in the fact that though Wiley was clearly opposing the Fundamentalist position with respect to the character of Scripture, his obvious orthodoxy and compatibility on most other critical issues, and the rigorously christocentric character of his whole work, encouraged many a Fundamentalist in the holiness movement to account him a powerful ally-even on the very point at which he differs with them. Perhaps the best example of this irony is seen in the very introduction of Christian theology written by General Superintendent James B. Chapman. There is no evidence that suggests that Chapman had moved away from his earlier position, which was clearly Fundamentalist. Yet, his endorsement is ringing: " . . . you will find the scope adequate, the theses orthodox, the arguments convincing, and the conclusions clear and unequivocal. "102 So it was that at least quasi-official approval was given to a work really a bit at odds with what officialdom believed. And this was followed by inclusion in the "Course of Study" as the standard theology for Nazarenes.

Fundamentalism could not leaven the whole lump. But it has continued to affect the Church of the Nazarene, especially as it has become more and more clear that she has inherited two basically incompatible points of view; not on some peripheral item, but with regard to the central issue of spiritual-theological authority.

FOOTNOTES

1. H. Orton Wiley, Christian Theology (3 vols.; Kansas City, Missouri: Nazarene Publishing House, 1940), I, p. 140. Hereinafter, references to this work will be abbreviated thus: CT I.140, etc.

2. CT I.141.

3. Cf. CT III.401-402 and I.83-86.

4. CT I.141-142.

5 Ernest R. Sandeen, The Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American Millenarianism, 1800-1930 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago, 1970), esp. pp. 103-131.

6. Philip Schaff, Bibliotheca Symbolica Ecclesiae Universalis. The Creeds of Christendom with a History and Critical Notes (3 vols.; New York: Harper, 1877), III, pp. 602-603.

7. Cf. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Macmillan, 1925; Free Press Paperback ed.; New York: Macmillan, 1967).

8. Cf. Karl Barth, Die Protestantische Theologie im 19. Jahrhundert (Zurich: Evangelischer Verlag, 1952). In the English edition, Protestant Thought: From Rousseau to Ritschl (Tr. Brian Cozens; New York: Harper and Row, 1959), cf . the chapters on Feuerbach, Strauss, and Ritschl in particular. A slightly later but very clear example of the influence of empirical science on Christian theology is D.C. Macintosh, Theology as an Empirical Science (New York: Macmillan, 1919).

9. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology (2 vols.; New York: Scribner, Armstrong, 1874), I, p. 153. Also see, B. B. Warfield, "The Present Problem of Inspiration," Homiletic Review 21 (1891), 410-416.

10. Cf John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion I. 71. Luther's stance is also clear: "We ought not, then, to believe the Gospel simply because the Church has approved it, but because we are sensible of the fact that it is the Word of God . . . Every person may be sure of the Gospel when he has the testimony of the Holy Spirit that this is the Gospel-a personal testimony. " (from WA 30Z, 687-688.) Also see, Sandeen, op. cit., pp. 118-130.

11. Miner Raymond, Systematic Theology (3 vols.; Cincinnati: Hitchcock and Walden; New York: Nelson and Phillips, 1877), I, pp. 194, 208-216.

12. William Burt Pope, A Compendium of Christian Theology: Being Analytical Outlines of a Course of Theological Study. Biblical, Dogmatic, Historical (3 vols.; 2nd ed.; New York: Phillips and Hunt; Cincinnati: Walden and Stowe, n.d.), I, pp. 150-155, 175, 206, 228.

13. John Miley, Systematic Theology (2 vols.; New York: Eaton and Mains; Cincinnati: Curts and Jennings, 1892). Thomas N. Ralson, Elements of Divinity (Nashville: Redford, 1847). Ralson also speaks of the testimonium as the greatest of all sources of authority. but he too nearly inundates the notion with talk about experience. Cf., pp. 719-730 of the edition done by T. O. Summers (Nashville: Cokes-bury, 1924).

14. Miley, op. cit., I. 34-35.

15. Cf. Sandeen, op. cit., 103-161, 188-207. Note that the authors of the Fundamentals were almost to a man steeped in the theology of the Reformed tradition, including the Anglicans there represented. Cf. also the denominational affiliations table presented by Sandeen, op. cit., 152, for the highly significant Niagara Conference of 1878-a millenarian forerunner (so Sandeen) of the Fundamentalist Movement.

16. Edgar P. Ellyson, Theological Compend (Chicago and Boston: Christian Witness, 1908). Ellyson was at the time president of Texas Holiness University, Greenville. He was elected one of the original General Superintendents of the denomination at the 1908 meeting.

17. Cf. B. F. Haynes, Tempest-Tossed on Methodist Seas (Kansas City: Pentecostal Church of the Nazarene, 1914).

18. This may be in consequence of two matters: his less than pacific career among the Methodists, which included several instances of episcopal censure, and his association with the Pentecostal Alliance, which, while heavily supported by a number of Tennessee Methodists, was largely in the hands of Cumberland Presbyterians and members of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S., both clergy and lay. These were all holiness people, but they were influenced as much by the Oberlin School, with its roots in the Reformed tradition, as by Wesleyanism. Cf. Timothy L. Smith, Called Unto Holiness: The Story of the Nazarenes. The Formative Years (Kansas City: Nazarene Publishing House, 1962), pp. 180-199.

19. Herald of Holiness, 17 Sept. 1913, p. 13. Pierson's book was published in New York by Fleming H. Revell, 1886.

20. The copy of Pierson's book held by the library of Nazarene Theological Seminary, Kansas City, Missouri, is from the library of Edgar P. Ellyson and bears the number 260 in his own collection. The style of Ellyson's bookplate in the volume indicates a purchase date no later than about 1903.

21. E. g., Pierson, op. cit., pp. 145-162, where he writes concerning the "moral beauty of the Bible."

22. Ibid., 29.23. Ibid., 185ff. "In the study of Christian evidences, having considered the witness of prophecy and of miracle, the harmony of the Word of God with science, and with our moral nature, we now go a little deeper and touch the heart of the whole body of Christianity-the Person of Christ. Here is the focal center of all Christian evidence . . ." (p. 215).

24. Herald of Holiness, 15 October 1913, p. 1. The title of the editorial is "Verbal Inspiration."

25. Herald of Holiness, 8 April 1914, p. 4. The title of the editorial is "Christ the Center and the source."26. For a short analysis of the process by which the idea of verbal inspiration came to be sharpened, narrowed and made more technical, cf. Sandeen, op. cit., 123-130. Originally, the term "verbal" meant something more akin to "in idea" or "in concept, " but even by 1912, in the seventh volume of the Fundamentals, George S. Bishop was writing, "God wrote the Bible, the whole Bible and the Bible as a whole. He wrote each word of it as truly as He wrote the decalogue on the tables of stone." (Amzi C. Dixon, Louis Meyer, Reuben A. Torrey, eds., The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth, vol. 7 (Chicago and Los Angeles: Testimony, 1912), p. 53.)

27. Sidney Collett, All About the Bible: Its Origin-Its Language-Its Translation-Its Canon-Its Symbols-Its Inspiration-Its Alleged Errors and Contradictions-Its Plan-Its Science-Its Rivals (New York, et al.; Revell, n.d.). Cf. Herald of Holiness, 11 March 1914, p. 11.

28. (London: Marshall, 1905). Cf. "Foreward to the Twentieth Edition, " pp. III-IV, and pp. 78-85 in any edition.

29. Ibid., 83.

30. Ibid., 78.

31. Ibid., 80.

32. Cf. Herald of Holiness, 21 July 1920, pp. 1-3.

33. Herald of Holiness, 20 October 1920, p. 3.

34. Herald of Holiness, 10 March 1920, p. 8.

35. Herald of Holiness, 24 March 1920, p. 6.

36. Herald of Holiness, 31 March 1920, pp. 8-9.

37. Cp. Slote's view with that of Collett, op. cit., 78-85, 96-99.

38. Cf. Sixth General Assembly, Journal . . . 1923, p. 54-56.

39. Manual. . . 1923, p. 22.

40. Ibid., p. 29.

41. Manual . . . 1928, p. 22; also p. 28.

42. Conversations: Mildred Bangs Wynkoop, 27 October 1977, Carl O. Bangs, 4 April 1975; Ross Price, 7 July 1969.

43. CT I. 212. Also cf. CT I. 205-206.

44. Charles Hodge, op. cit., I. 170.

45. Archibald A. Hodge and B. B. Warfield, "Inspiration, " Presbyterian Review 2 (1881), 225-260.

46. Minutes of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, 16 (1893), pp. 162-169.

47. Preacher's Magazine, October 1929, pp. 308-309. Presumably, the quotation and comment were inserted by Editor James B. Chapman.

48. Cf. Frederick A. Norwood, The Story of American Methodism: A History of the United Methodists and Their Relations (New York and Nashville: Abingdon, 1974), pp. 382-386.

49. P.5.50. Pp. 6-9.51. Cp. Ellyson's Theological Compend, pp. 30-70. He devotes twice as much space in the Compend to christology as he does to the doctrine of God, which is the next most important topic there. Cf. Preacher's Magazine, February, 1926, pp. 7-8.

52. Cf. Preacher's Magazine, January 1926, p. 28.

53. E.G., the cover of the May 1926 issue carries the picture of D.L. Moody, while A. M. Hills is quite critical of Moody for rejecting the doctrine of "second blessing holiness" in his article on Moody in the series, "Great Preachers That I Have Known" (Preacher's Magazine, May 1929, p. 175).

54. Seventh General Assembly, Journal . . . 1928, p. 49.

55. Ibid., 52. This is noted as a "Principle that will guarantee our future. "

56. Ibid., 58.

57. rbid., 63.

58. P. 26.

59. Herald of Holiness, 22 August 1928, pp. 8-9.

60. Smith, op. cit., 319; Herald of Holiness, 5 November 1924, p. 1.

61. Morrison had taken the field against modernism in Methodism as early as 1917, especially at the point of the influence of higher criticism: cf. Little Methodist, April 1917, p. 3. But he was well aware of the fact that while one might be a Wesleyan Fundamentalist, the heart of the Fundamentalist gospel was Reformed. Aware he was of the fact, but he did not see its implications with respect to the concepts of biblical inspiration and authority. Cf. Smith, op. cit., 315-316.

62. The initial advertisement appears in the 3 June 1925 issue.

63. P. 13.

64. "The merit of this book is such that, as a friend of the authors', I shall be contented if it can but have the circulation and the reading which it deserves. Let the unbeliever read it as a cure for his doubts. Let the uncertain read it to steady his trembling feet. Let the believer read it to confirm his faith and to fill his quiver with arrows for the conflicts of the days to come." (P.8).

65. Op. cit., 132-133.

66. Sixth General Assembly, Journal . . . 1923, p. 238.

67. Ibid., 159.

68. The Committee on Education was an assembly committee in liaison between the General Assembly and the General Board of Education Several reports of the latter to General Assemblies indicate that it had jurisdiction over the content of the Course of Studies for Licensed Ministers. That the former could recommend manuscripts is shown by several actions doing just that (e.g., Fifth General Assembly, Journal. . . 1919, p. 113).

69. Cf. Fifth General Assembly, Journal . . . 1919, p. 8; Sixth General Assembly, Journal . . . 1923, pp. 6, 11. Wiley was secretary of all three committees.

70. Seventh General Assembly, Journal . . . 1928, pp. 113-114.

71. Ibid., 241.

72. Wiley began his editorial tenure with the 25 July 1928 issue. Not until issue for 27 November 1929 does he write an extended editorial on the Bible. On this occasion, it is in commemorating Universal Bible Sunday. He had, in the 17 July 1929 issue, presented an editorial entitled "The New Archeology and the Bible, " but this was primarily limited to a bit of commentary on an article reprinted from the Presbyterian.

73. Cf. Chapman's introduction to Wiley's theology, CT I. 5.

74. Cf. A. M. Hills, Fundamental Christian Theology: A Systematic Theology (2 vols.; Pasadena, Calif.: C. J. Kinne, 1931), "Dedication," I.iii. Alas, I have lost the reference to Hills' own indication as to when he began to write, but he put it in the context of the end of "the late War. "

75. Conversations: Mildred Bangs Wynkoop, 27 October 1977; C. B. Widmeyer, summer 1972. [Date in my notes is illegible.]

76. To be sure, Hills is outside the camp of the Fundamentalists, generally speaking, with respect to the millennium, for most of them were pre-millenialists and he was unabashedly post-millenial, and he admits that "we no longer have an absolutely inerrant Bible. " (Op. cit., I.131. Italics his.) But his mode of argument, "proofs" of inspiration and authority, and theological method all mark him off as belonging among them.

77. Ibid., I. 130-131.

78. Ibid., I. 131 -132.

79. Hodge, op. cit., I.170.

80. Hills, op. cit., I. 134.

81. Cf. ibid., I. 101-203, where in one hundred pages there is no word of the Living Word, nor of the testimonii Spiritus sancti. The style is that of a lawyer's brief. Very seldom indeed did classical theology speak of revelation as if it referred to the Bible alone.

82. Ibid., I. 146.

83. Cf. ibid., I. 184-203, where Hills dissects higher criticism. This he does by pointing to the logical fallacies of the practitioners of historical-literary criticism. While he does a credible work in casting doubt upon critical theories, he really does nothing positive to demonstrate the point he seems to want most to make, i.e., the reliability of the Bible.

84. CT I. 142.

85. E.g., Bible School Journal, April 1935, pp. 53-63(1essonfor21April 1935, "The Holy Scriptures"). While the adult exposition by E.P. Ellyson shows no clearly fundamentalist sympathies, and may even be trying very carefully to lead away from them, the sections written by Basil W. Miller and D. Shelby Corlett, the latter being the section for the teacher of youth, are clearly committed to the Fundamentalists' presuppositions. Corlett quotes Hills three times, draws upon his arguments another three or four times, and quotes Collett once in his twenty-four column inches.

86. (Kansas City: Nazarene, n. d. ) Date is taken from "Foreword, " p. 6, as is the quotation.

87. Ibid.. 22.

88. Ibid., 24.

89. H. Orton Wiley and Paul Culbertson, Introduction to Christian Theology(Kansas City: Beacon Hill, n.d.), p. 27. Alsocf. CTI.33-34.

90. Wiley and Culbertson, op. cit., 27. Also cf. CT I. 34-37. In this latter passage, Wiley is as critical of Protestant biblicism as he is of Roman Catholic papalism.

91. CT I. 35-36.

92. CT I. 36-37.

93. Cp. Miley, op. cit., I. 12 and Hills, op. cit., I. 12.

94. Cf. CT II. 37 and III. 345-348.

95. Cf. CT I. 146.

96. CT I. 142-146.

97. Cf. CT I. 134-138.

98. Cf. Pope, op. cit., I. 41. Also see CT I. 143-145.

99. Cf. CT I. 135-142 and Wiley and Culbertson, op. cit., 42.

100. CT I. 139-140.

101. CT I. 138.

102. CT I. 6. Chapman goes on to say, "Without the slightest reservation, I commend Dr. Wiley and his work on Systematic Theology to all men everywhere to whom such commendation from me can carry meaning." (Pg. 6-7).