THE THEOLOGY OF A MOVEMENT:
THE SALVATION ARMY IN ITS FORMATIVE YEARS

by

John R. Rhemiek

The concern that spawned this research is quite simply expressed. The preeminence of things spiritual cannot be missed by anyone seriously considering The Salvation Army. Somehow theology had to be at the forefront of the movement. What role did theology play in the formation of The Salvation Army as an international religious denomination?

This question took our family to England for four months of research and the research took us to Victorian England, a country of contradictions of which its people and its leaders were aware and by which they were greatly troubled. Alongside incomprehensible wealth was incomprehensible poverty. Neighborhoods of mansions were juxtaposed with ghettos in which people daily died from starvation and the innumerable diseases associated with abject poverty. Opposite the entrepreneurs of the Industrial Revolution were the masses out of work or working for less than subsistence wages. Englishmen began to ask, why, in the midst of unprecedented economic growth leading to vast individual and national wealth, were there so many desperately poor people?

This question was raised with deep concern as there developed among the poor a moral, ethical and spiritual poverty. Some writers referred to Christian England as Heathen England, and there was great reservation in calling these masses Englishmen. They were misfits who did not belong to Victorian society. They were disfranchised, cut off from the benefits of their society. Worse, Victorian society had no solution for the disfranchised, only a number of programs.

By the time the Army came to town, some people were ready for a more apocalyptic approach. Perhaps God was a way out, and perhaps He did care and was still personally involved in the human predicament. The Army took the evangelical faith and clothed it in ideas which opened up its most precious treasures to the most common people. Many of those without vision and hope, aliens in their own world, began to think that there might be a light shining at the end of a long, dark tunnel.

Why this theology was a theology of grand ideas must be left for another time as must we defer consideration of the specifics of that theology. To summarize as background for this paper, it was a theology of salvation and sanctification wed in such a way as to imply a doctrine of God and man. In this understanding of God and man many of the disfranchised who felt disowned for so long, found a new comfort, a new sense of belonging, a home, so to speak, and a new hope.

It would be misleading to suggest that the Army alone espoused the doctrines of salvation and sanctification or that they alone preached them with urgency. There was something more than preaching that confronted a spiritually alienated public and won them as converts to God and the Army.

The Army confronted a deeper cultural need among the masses than economic, social and religious disfranchisement. It confronted a cultural need, metaphysical in essence, a deprivation of the faith side of human nature, resulting from the philosophical world-view of the day.

It is not an overstatement to say that theologies and philosophies of history have moved the world toward self-understanding. Theology and philosophy alone have the capacity for discussing the essential concerns of knowing and being. Through these two conceptual areas, mankind has tried to come to a knowledge of itself and that which is around and beyond it. In nineteenth century England, the theological and philosophical exercises grappling with "knowing" and "being" resulted in a peculiar cultural context. In a very real, though unconscious sense, two different cultural expressions were brought together. Two unique perceptions of reality confronted each other in tense conflict.

One of these cultural expressions is characterized primarily by faith, emotion and the infinitude of truth and reality. It is an image culture. In an image culture, essential truth and reality are seen through symbols and not directly. In this sense, truth and reality can never be fully grasped. They are infinite, defying the limitations of finite mind. The individual is caught up in an idea of truth and reality which is infinitely greater than he or she.

However, truth and reality are not to be thought of as plums dangling just beyond one's reach, always enticing but ever eluding one's grasp. Truth and reality form the very world of which the person is a part. Truth and reality are all around and a part of the person. They form a plot of land, the bounds of which can never be reached, but the grounds of which can be traversed and investigated to the heart's content. The more one travels through life, the closer one observes it, the better is one's discernment and the more one understands himself and defines his place in the world. This is culture in which the emotive character of a person is primary and where reason nurtures and develops that emotional character of human nature.

This cultural phenomenon is seen in art where the representative figures are not analyzed to break down the picture into respective parts, but rather studied to build a picture of infinite perspective. To look at the art of the roof of the Sistine Chapel is to bring forth a response of awe that defies words. The heart is left pounding, the mind racing in a hundred directions at once, not in an effort to capture and contain everything before its eyes, but to

explore and be a part of it all. This culture is found in the monastic life. The monastery was the seat of learning, but it was much more than that. It was a way of life, in fact, the best way of life reserved for only a few. The disciplined life characterized by worship and contemplation was primary. These emphases answered the emotional needs of human nature firstly and the rational needs secondly. The monk felt his place in God's economy and felt God's presence close to him. It was for the feeling that he came apart from the world.

To stand in the cathedral was to be immersed and dwarfed in the infinite magnitude of Almighty God. The theology of the cathedral spoke to the worshiper through the panorama of sight that moved the emotions rather than in rational discourses of philosophical and theological constructs.

The feudal system embodied an image culture. It pulled society together into one dominant expression of life characterized by order. Everyone belonged to the whole.

With the invention of the printing press and the widespread dissemination of knowledge in written form, a change in culture took place. The world moved from an image culture to a culture dominated by the "word." Somehow, written words seemed to have the capacity to capture truth, to analyze it and define it. Culture dominated by the printed word argued that anything that could not be put into print and explained was less real, less important and less worthwhile. Could reality be so objectified as to make its meaning absolute? Victorian England suggested strongly, yes!

The quest for knowledge became an occupation or exercise rather than a way of life. Analysis was a key concept and words were the vehicles for detailed explanation. The scholastic endeavor was to take the complex and break it down into its simplest form. The vision of one immersed in an inexhaustible sea of reality, there to explore, search, study and find one's being, was replaced by the idea of man attacking the problems of truth and reality in order to dominate them and put them to useful service.

Man could master reality, see it as it is and in that mastery gain the answer to every problem of the human situation. The mystery of life was not so much something that awed a person and inspired a reverence for life, it was more a problem to be solved. Truth and reality were no longer sacred and approached in fear and trembling. Now, the person was sacred, truth and reality the mud and clay to be discovered through his intellect and molded by his ingenuity. Symbols were no longer lenses through which to view reality even though dark and blurred. They were forms to be analyzed, studied and explained away in words that revealed reality in its "naked truth." Individual man was pre-eminent, and reason was the means of his exaltation. It was this cold, analytical culture that depreciated the emotive aspect of human nature resulting in problems for others as well as the poor.

The intellectuals found that they too were alienated. However, what the poor could not do, the intellectuals accomplished. They discovered the cause of their disfranchisement. A utilitarian society seemed to have captured the mystery of life in the discovery of the mechanical nature of the universe, a view the intellectuals regarded as partial and destructive.

Carlyle's Signs of the Times asserted that this mechanistic view could not embrace man's highest interests, for only the dynamic, emotional character of man could delve into ". . . the mysterious springs of Love, and Fear, and Wonder, of Enthusiasm, Poetry, Religion, all which have a truly vital and infinite character," 1 In Sartor Resartus Carlyle called people back from the empiricism, materialism and mechanism of middle-class philosophy, once more to pursue God in a reverence for nature where the infinite blends with the finite. Tennyson's In Memoriam affirmed the existence of a spiritual reality not on any rational basis but rather on an intuitive basis of faith. Faith alone can understand the spiritual.

Both the intellectuals and the poor were imprisoned in a world view which was too narrow for them. The intellectuals lived in a philosophical and social climate where all of the parameters of truth, right, and good, seemed to have been uncovered. This left very little room for the expression of imagination and creativity which were pre-eminent concerns for this select group of people. They and that which was most dear to them were put in the background for something more "useful," more practical, the tangibles of life like wealth and power. The intellectuals fought this restructuring of reality in their writing and this in itself gave them hope.

It was another story for the poor. They did not think in terms of the restructuring of reality. They were faced with survival itself. Their lives hung on the thread of abject poverty, threatened with extinction by a way of life that seemed to have all the answers and regarded poverty as an ill with its roots only in the individual and not in the very concepts of reality that reigned. The poor were left not only without a home in their land, but also without a hope in their hearts.

These impoverished masses were the remnants of an image-oriented culture. They still lived at the emotional and mysterious edge of reality. The lives of the poor who labored from night to night and had nothing, and the millions who did not even have a job at which to labor, were filled with questions that seemed to have no answers. Their lives were filled with anguish, anxiety, anger, fear, shame and hopelessness. They could appreciate emotion and drama far more than rational argument or doctrinal discourse. They could understand truth and reality much better in symbol but had little appreciation for philosophical or theological oration. But, there was little place for that emotion which formed the very core of their being.

Sensationalism was a dirty word in Victorian England and it seemed to be applied to anything that touched the emotions. When sensationalism was charged it was the appeal to feeling that was being largely criticized. Feeling in religion was seriously suspect. In a culture dominated by the word, society was looking for comfort in objective truth. If one went according to a prescribed formula or set of instructions, one could assume that things would work out properly. One need not worry about feeling which could be terribly misleading. Applied to salvation it resulted in a sort of instrumental approach accomplished through proper understanding and obedience to religious principles of respectability.

However, the Church's ineffectiveness in reaching the masses, made this view suspect. In Christianity and the Working Classes, one author described the Church as patronizing and stiff. "This stiffness goes with, and accounts for, that self-repression and objection to showing emotion, which has been the cause of many of our blunders at home and abroad." 2 ". . . there is no inconvenient expansion, and we try no new thing." 3

"It cannot adapt itself; it would like to catch the ear and heart of all, but it is clumsy, and out of its element and therefore fails. The workers want to be moved and excited. In our people there is a deep well of wholesome emotion." 4

The Salvation Army brought into the religious circles of Victorian England an expression of theology that directly confronted the emotive nature of man. It was expressed in images and ideas that were powerful and peculiarly appropriate for the poorer classes caught up in a word culture that left them emotionally destitute. This was a theology dramatically expressed.

Nowhere is this dramatic expression of the Army more clearly set forth than in its own literature. Sunday School Teachers' Manuals contained short plays to be performed to help Sunday School Teachers learn how to study their lessons at home. These short plays emphasized teaching through illustration and story-telling. Aspiring ministers were told how to prepare for their ministry in language that enabled them to see what they were being exhorted to do. Let me try to illustrate this dramatic language in comparing two ways of saying substantially the same thing. The first statement on lay involvement in evangelism is typical of a more intellectual expression with little, if any, dramatic appeal.

What our famed Liverpool Minutes say of every Methodist Minister is applicable to every Christian: he is bound to be in spirit 'a Home Missionary,' eagerly doing all he can to bring his kinsfolk and neighbors to Christ. 5

This second statement is from The Officer magazine and is highly dramatic in nature.

Upon the rocks of sin the immense ship "Humanity" has struck. Millions upon millions of doomed souls move about its decks and shriek for help. We cannot save them without risk, without suffering; it may be in saving them we may lose our own lives. Shall we hold back or press forward? Face the raging seas of opposition and rescue thousands. 6

Early Army literature was filled with metaphors, dreams, visions, biographies. The message was clothed with actors and images so that those reading could see what they were reading and in seeing it feel it even more keenly.

Central to the Army's message was the most dramatic literature of all, the Bible. The cornerstone of Salvation Army theology was a literal sense of Scripture. Compatible with Aquinas, this view made a place for metaphor if that is what Scripture required, and along with Aquinas asserted that any other sense of Scripture must be based on the literal sense if confusion and contradiction were to be avoided. The literal sense was primary and definitive. Included in this literal sense was a faith in the historicity of Scripture and the truth of revelation. It is not hard to understand why this sense of Scripture provided an appropriate foundation for a dramatic expression of theology. The literal sense of Scripture is sensational, but not superficially so. Bairstow asserts:

The ten plagues of Egypt - the dividing of the waters of the Red Sea, the pillar of cloud by day, and a fire by night; the thunders and lightnings of Mount Sinai, the mount altogether in a smoke: the voice of a trumpet exceeding loud and long, and waxing louder and louder; Moses speaking, and the living God answering him by a voice - all this was sensational, but the startling record thrills human hearts still, . . .7

The dramatic form of Army literature was rhetorical and inspirational, rather than methodical and rationalistic. Resting on the literal sense of Scripture, it conjured up in the mind's eye dynamic, dramatic images. Imagine in your own mind's eye a world dying in sin and poverty, sickness and degradation, and an Army marching with trumpet and drum and flags flying, to vanquish evil and save the lost. Even more than your imagination, even more than Ezekiel who had a vision of bones being clothed with flesh and new life, the early salvationists saw an Army of real people like themselves, raised up and marching forward.

When Scripture becomes so embodied in human lives, we must have the most powerful, dramatic expression possible. What is drama except a description of life? The foundation of drama is life. When we look at life and find that it manifests God, then this is dramatic theological expression.

This dramatic expression of theology brought the Scriptures to life among a most needy segment of society. It also helped to awaken a word culture from its preoccupation with form, order and propriety to the truth that people were more complex than Nineteenth Century Utilitarianism had suggested. It argued that God was far more tolerant of the peculiarities of human nature and far more approving of genuine, non-traditional spirituality than many supposed. In this it helped many of those disfranchised to regain a sense of purpose for their future. In addition to finding a place to belong-a home so to speak-they found a hope; they did have some influence on the future before them.

We have already stated the most dramatic expression of theology. It is human life. The Army's theology was life-centered because it was lived, and it was lived in a very different way culturally. In the industrial age of Victorian England, people were learning to work and play. As the economy improved, more people could play. More time for playing as well as more things to play came into being. Philosophically, this word culture implied that reality lay outside a person in things and events. The key concept became "doing." Work was a means to happiness, but happiness came by doing as much of life as possible. Today we work for retirement so that we can do all the things we could not do while we were working.

In an image-oriented culture the key concept is "being." Here reality is located within the person. The world is important as it contributes to the enrichment and development of one's personhood. This was the cultural context to which the early members of the Army were more suited. In a day when work and play were opposites to many, these soldiers were finding pleasure and deep joy in the work of this movement. For them work and play were not so distinct, and since their work was a source of real joy, they were very teachable. Walter Ong ascribed this relationship of work, play and learning to a pre-word or oral culture. He wrote:

In an oral culture, verbalized learning takes place quite normally in an atmosphere of celebration or play. As events, words are more celebrations and less tools than in literate cultures. Only with the invention of writing and the isolation of the individual from the tribe will verbal learning and understanding itself become "work" as distinct from play, . . .8

For the early salvationists the practice of their faith was a way of life that brought great joy and satisfaction. They became the living dramas. To those filled with anxiety that seemed to defy resolution, the Army held out a hope that could be seen and felt. People were reaching out to people in a way that brought their spirits into dynamic relationship with each other. Booth brought his lay people so completely into the salvation ministry of the Army that one writer reported of Booth: "He directs and controls the preaching of 15,393 evangelists, of whom 645 are paid 'officers.' "

The Salvation Army was a way of life expressed in community action. A word culture dominated by reason is the realm of the thinker, the individual. An image-oriented culture dominated by the emotion is the realm of the community. The dramatic nature of the Army's theological expression was underscored by its community life. It saw itself living in a hostile world, not only distinct from the masses but also from dead churches, a lonely bastion surrounded by and in spiritual warfare with the powers of evil. The Salvation Army understood that God called all of His people to the vocation of priests with all of the divine authority and responsibilities assigned to that position. This radical sense of the priesthood of the believer contributed significantly to the Army's revolutionary and dramatic expression. It was revolutionary in its acceptance of the laity for the ultimate work of the kingdom and dramatic because an Army of clergy and laity came into being for all the world to see.

            Salvation Army expression caused writers to report its events in mental images. One reporter wrote:

Shortly after 7 o'clock last evening a "squad" under the command of a captain who at intervals blew a trumpet, a "call to sinners," were perambulating the streets of Bermondsey preparatory to proceeding to the "Salvation Factory" to "find peace." The processionists, as usual, went along singing hymns, and were preceded by a couple of youths armed with a long pole, from which were suspended a couple of naphtha lamps lighted, such as were used by street traders at night to display their wares on their barrows. 9

Another writer said specifically: "There is just one other point on which I should like to touch, in order to complete the mental picture with which Salvationism has impressed me." 10 However, with all of this fervent emotional character, the Army remained essentially conservative, and with the exception of sacraments, quite orthodox.

It was the clear understanding of its mission and a genuine, total surrender to that mission that kept the Army's theological expression essentially dramatic rather than sensational. The methods were never primary and for this reason the sensationalism of those methods never gained the pre-eminent place in the Army's theological expression. The methods, whatever they might have been, were subservient to the inner conviction of salvationists. The methods always clothed the spirit of salvationists. Bramwell, quoting his mother, put it this way: ". . . the exuberance, the noise, the laughter of a Salvation gathering is not a putting on but a letting out." 11

This inward fire of the message of Salvation, soberly understood and dramatically expressed, was the soil in which the seeds of self-sacrifice, Christian love, and a commitment to world evangelism at any cost, rooted. There was a place for the sensational, but it was never allowed to degenerate into a pervading sensationalism. It ever remained a dramatic expression of Salvation Army theology.

Nurtured by the seed ground of its social, philosophical, and religious origins, cultivated through the teachings of its theological constructs, and pruned through the dramatic expression of those notions of God and man, a new idea evolved in Victorian England. It was an idea of an Army of God called into service. Military language was utilized in mission days, but it was more rhetoric than reality. With the name change to The Salvation Army, the notion of war became a literal reality and the language far more emotionally and dramatically charged. Its world-wide mission was a real goal, not pep talk.

Undergirding the notion of an Army of God engaged in world conquest, was the absolute conviction that the Army had been divinely called into being. Individual salvationists believed that God was calling them apart for this special ministry. The most powerful proclamation of this divine call to mission came from the Founder himself. Booth was perceived in the prophetic mold of days past. And this sense of the prophetic was carried over to many others in the movement, not only the top leaders but those working in small and difficult neighborhoods. A letter to the editor of the Consett Guardian speaks of the leader of a Salvation Army meeting.

"Their leader seemed to be greatly favored by the earnest appeal of love she was constrained to deliver to the audience, for she spoke with authority, and not as a scribe. I may go further-that is, more like the mouthpiece of the unctions of the Divine spirit, for the power of God was over all." 12

However, there was one characteristic of the prophetical nature of Booth and his movement that carried the notion of the movement beyond that of an Army of God. Booth's son Herbert isolates this characteristic although he does not use the term prophetical or any of its derivatives.

"Now how often, dear General, we have all heard you say that the government of the Army was in its nature more paternal than military? How often you have reminded us that this spirit was its sole guarantee of permanence." 13

"When the Army grew, the family spirit and method grew with it. In the early days you were as a father in the midst of your people. You are regarded as such today. The movement will never know the full power of the spell of your personal influence until you are gone." 14

The paternal spirit of Booth the Founder was much more a prophetic than a militaristic trait. Booth was no war lord. He was a spokesman of God. This paternal spirit brought to the movement a family sense whereby Booth's following understood themselves to be not only an Army of God but more significantly, a new people of God. Regarding the Army's understanding of itself, Wyndham Heathcote, one-time officer, quoted from the "Field Secretary's Notes."

To a Salvationist, the birth of the Army in Whitechapel appeared to be a renewal of Pentecost. It was a genuine outburst of spiritual enthusiasm. It was as though Christianity was thrown into its first simplicity and zeal into the heart of the crowded metropolis, to shape and form itself once more. 15

This notion of a new people of God was dramatically expressed in The Officer of 1893 in an article on the work of officers. "Our work . . . to create a new people for God out of the raw material around us." 16 Like Ezekiel our Army is to come ". . . from the dead." 17 ". . . dead in sin, dead to their highest interests, dead to God's claims, dead to the dangers of eternity without God; . . ."18 "To definitely get a sinner converted and enrolled and in fighting form, is a greater victory than putting a dozen people on the rolls, who are members of churches and missions, . . ." "Go for the dead, and out of those ranks create a force who shall stand for God."19 "Nothing calls attention in the house so much as the new baby."20

The most powerful notion, and that to which all of the drama of the Army's theological expression led, was this notion of a new people of God. The early salvationists would understand I Peter 2:9-10 quite literally.

But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.

Notes

1Thomas Carlyle, "Signs of the Times," Sartor Resartus and Selected Prose, intro. Herbert Sussman (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), p. 16.

      2George Haw (ed.) Christianity and the Working Classes (London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1906), p. 48.

      3Ibid., p. 49.

      4Ibid., p. 50.

      5"The Claims of our Large Towns on the Churches," The Wesleyan-Methodist Magazine, I(June, 1877), pp. 450-51.

6"Incidents and Illustrations," The Officer, II, 5(May, 1894), p. 158.

7J. O. Bairstow, Sensational Religion, in Past and the Present Day (London: Elliot Stock, 62, Paternoster Row, E.C., 1890), pp. 6-7.

8Walter J. Ong, The Presence of the Word (New York: Simon and Schuster [A Clarion Book], 1967), p. 30.

9The Times [London], "The 'Salvation Army' in South London," October 22, 1879, p. 9

10Chichester, "The Salvation Army," The Month, LXX (September-December), p. 482.

11Two University Men (eds.), Modern Evangelistic Movements (London: Thomson & Cowan, 1924), p. 28.

12"Consett: A Night With The Hallelujah Army," The Salvationist, XI (January 1, 1879), p. 8.

13Ford C. Ottman, Herbert Booth (New York: Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc., 1928), p. 285.

14Ibid., p. 286.

15Rev. Wyndham S. Heathcote, My Salvation Army Experience (London: Marshall Brothers, 10, Paternoster Row E.C., 1891), p. 59.

16"Three Words To Officers," The Officer, I, 2(February, 1893), p. 41.

17Ibid.

18Ibid.

19Ibid.

20Ibid.

Edited by Michael Mattei for the
Wesley Center for Applied Theology
at Northwest Nazarene University
© Copyright 2000 by the Wesley Center for Applied Theology

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