THE HOLINESS WITNESS IN THE ECUMENICAL CHURCH

THE HOLINESS WITNESS IN THE ECUMENICAL CHURCH

by
Donald W. Dayton

I have been asked to reflect today on "the holiness witness in the ecumenical church." I hope that you will indulge me if I make this paper a little informal in character. Others of our society have attempted more systematic treatment of these issues. Timothy Smith has on various occasions attempted to reassert the ecumenical vision of the 19th century as a part of his effort to recover for us the significance of the antebellum era that was so formative for the emergence of our movement. John Smith of the Church of God (Anderson) cultivated the ecumenical dimensions of his movement for a generation and paid his own way for a quarter of a century to the Faith and Order discussions of the National Council of Churches. Our new president Howard Snyder wrote his B. D. thesis at Asbury Seminary on questions of unity in the Holiness Movement-in the midst of ill-fated merger talks between the Wesleyans and the Free Methodists. And a few years ago in his presidential address to us David Cubie argued by means of a motif analysis of Wesleyan and Methodist thought that the love motif so takes precedence over the purity motif that separation from other Christians should be a step of last resort.

Surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses I am ashamed to admit that I only recently came to this theme in my own thinking. I am at present not sure why this has been so. After my undergraduate years in a Wesleyan institution, education and employment have been gained primarily in "ecumenical" settings. But my movement back toward Christian faith has come, for the most part, through non-ecclesiastical questions that have allowed me to duck the question of the holiness witness in the ecumenical church for what seemed to be more important questions of social concern. I do remember intimations of this question after the 1973 "Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern" when I was one of the few signers of that document that welcomed the response of the Church and Society Unit of the National Council of Churches (others were concerned that any association with the NCCC would discredit their social reform agenda among "evangelicals"). My work with such journals as Sojourners and The Other Side led to a meeting with leaders of the NCCC to discuss in private (even in secret) the ecumenical meaning of the recovery of "evangelical social concern" in the mid-1970s. I had something of the feeling at that time that the broader "evangelical" world was moving toward bridging the chasms bequeathed us by the fundamentalist/modernist controversy, but for some reason I assumed that my growing identification with our own movement precluded any formal involvement in the "ecumenical movement" as such.

This began to change about a decade ago with an invitation to participate in a variety of consultations under the sponsorship of the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research in Collegeville, Minnesota, under the directorship of Robert Bilheimer, who had worked at the World Council in Geneva on most of the WCC assemblies since World War II and was now attempting to build up informal grass-roots networks in a form of "countercultural" ecumenism, something at odds with more formal ecumenism. There I was drawn into a larger picture especially by the influence of Thomas Stransky, one of the finest Christians I have known, who had worked in the Secretariat for Christian Unity during Vatican II and has recently accepted the directorship of the Tantur ecumenical center just outside Jerusalem. Some of you here have experienced also the impact of the Collegeville center and Tom Stransky on your own lives, especially when a couple of years ago two summer consultations were held in Collegeville on issues surrounding the role of the holiness, pentecostal, and evangelical traditions in the larger church world.

Contacts in Collegeville led to involvement in the formal ecumenical agencies of our time. I went to the Vancouver Assembly of the World Council of Churches on a press pass, and had my understanding of the Council transformed. I was stunned to sit through two profoundly theological addresses which bore exalted Christological visions only to discover that the media was interested almost exclusively in a side comment by Allan Boesak that violence might be justified in some forms of social oppression such as that existing in South Africa. In press reports the next day the theology of these addresses was ignored as alarmist headlines and articles reported a call for a "militarized clergy." It was this intimate experience of media distortion that more than anything else raised for me the question of whether I ought to rethink the nature of my rather cavalier lack of interest in such ecumenical questions. When I discovered that this experience had been shared by most of the other journalists from "evangelical" contexts, I worked with them in the drafting of an "Open Letter" testifying to what we were experiencing at Vancouver.

About the same time Brother Jeff Gros of the Faith and Order Commission of the National Council followed up on Collegeville Interaction and visited our Society when it met in Anderson, Indiana, a few years ago to invite us to participate in the theological discussions of the NCCC. David Cubie and I have served these last four years as your liaison representatives to the Faith and Order Commission, where we have had the privilege of participating in and influencing the direction of such discussions, along with representatives of various Pentecostal and evangelical groups that Jeff Gros has brought into this arena. I remember how nervous the WTS executive committee was about proposing this representation in response to the invitation that we had-and the surprise at the lack of resistance when the proposal was brought to the floor. Rather, some of our members declared that such a step was long overdue. As I have reflected on the last four years of dialogue, I am convinced that this decision was one of the most visionary and important that we have ever undertaken as a society.

I have been overwhelmed in the last few years at the way in which an ecumenical world has opened up to me. I prevailed upon Collegeville contacts to intervene for an invitation to the plenary sessions of the WCC Faith and Order Commission a couple of summers ago in Norway. This led this last spring to a sabbatical term in Geneva, where in part out of the concern of Emilio Castro to open up the Council more to "evangelicals" and others outside the ecumenical movement, I was hosted by the Commission on World Mission and Evangelism as something of a "consultant" on relationships with non-member churches and movements. In that context I was able to meet with a variety of leaders of the WCC to advocate a "more inclusive ecumenism" and to invite them to take up the problem of reconceiving the ecumenical vision in a way that would find common ground with those groups now outside the formal ecumenical movement-and to carry the same message to the Secretariat offices in the Vatican. (My major paper written during this period as a way of introducing the holiness movement and related currents to the WCC will be published in the January issue of The Ecumenical Review). And when I was recently elected to the executive board of he North American Academy of Ecumenists, I had occasion to reflect on the famous line of the Pogo cartoon: "We have met the enemy and they is us!"

I have been reluctant to comment publicly on the meaning of these experiences until I had overcome my own disorientation and found my "ecumenical legs." I feel that the time has now come to talk more explicitly about these issues and experiences and invite the Wesleyan Theological Society also to reflect on these questions and perhaps to take them up with a certain intentionality. Again I have decided to leave the articulation of the Wesleyan ecumenical vision to such passionate advocates as Tim Smith and David Cubie. I will restrict my comments today to the exploration of some practical issues and the proposing of some concrete steps that might be taken up by the society.

On many occasions I have reflected on the ecumenical commonplace that such dialogue and engagement often drive one more deeply into one's own tradition in an effort to understand who one is and what one brings of value to wider ecumenical dialogue. Much of my struggle over the last few years has been to get some clarity on this question; thus I would invite you to think with me for a few minutes about the question of who we are as advocates of the holiness movement and as members of the Wesleyan Theological Society. What gifts do we bring to the wider Christian Church and what stance do we take with regard to it?

The most obvious answer and one that I have found regularly assumed in various contexts is that we are basically Wesleyan "evangelicals." This answer assumes that we share the general orientation of other "evangelicals" (including their suspicion of the ecumenical movement and its agencies) and that we would find our participation in a wider church world shaped by the same concerns. The more I have worked with this position, the more problematic it has become. I have been forced to a different articulation for both substantive and practical reasons.

First the more substantive issue: In what sense are we to be considered "evangelicals"? Obviously the answer to this question depends upon the content carried by the word "evangelical." In one sense we are paradigmatic of what one might mean by "evangelical." Our movement took shape in the midst of the nineteenth century heyday of "evangelicalism," and we are carriers of that tradition. But the situation is complicated by the use of the label "evangelical" by a party of fundamentalists that emerged from that movement after World War II. The label used by this party carries a different meaning, one that I am increasingly convinced is at odds with our identity and one that would destroy the distinctive witness of our own movement if adopted or even acceded to. Let me illustrate.

The self-understanding of the neo-evangelicalism of the twentieth century is well expressed by Bernard Ramm in The Evangelical Heritage. In that book Ramm develops a sort of "historical geography" that he uses to define the "evangelical heritage." "Evangelicalism" in his sense belongs to the Christian west rather than the Christian east and to the world of the Reformation rather than to the Catholic tradition. From the Reformation Ramm traces his line through Protestant (and especially Reformed) orthodoxy which came under attack in the Enlightenment. For Ramm the "evangelical" is one who attempts to sustain the structures of Protestant Orthodox theology over against the Enlightenment and its offspring, "liberalism." As Ramm sees it, this was done most clearly in the l9th century by Old School Calvinism. Represented by the old Princeton Theology of Hodge and Warfield, it laid the foundations for modern fundamentalism and the neo-evangelical theological tradition that emerged from it. This analysis of the nature of "evangelicalism" focuses on the fundamental question of accommodation to enlightenment themes and turns "evangelicalism" into a position on a spectrum somewhere to the left of the supposed fundamentalist rejection of such issues and slightly to the right of conservative neo-orthodoxy (i.e. the position occupied by Karl Barth). The result is that "evangelical" in this vision is equated with "conservative" or "traditional" and is opposed most fundamentally to "liberal." Ramm is not as ophisticated about these matters as he might be, but I am convinced that something like this vision underlies nearly every articulation of the "neo-evangelical" vision.

How might we react to such an analysis? One might well argue that we in the Wesleyan tradition take a different turn at every key point in Ramm's flow chart. Though Augustinian and thus Western in some senses, Wesley thought Pelagius a much-maligned saint and derived many of his distinctive ideas from the Eastern tradition, especially the Cappadocian Fathers. One might well argue that much misunderstanding of Wesley's thought, especially of his concepts of "perfection," has been caused by the tendency to interpret what derives from the East in Western terms. Similarly, I am becoming increasingly convinced that Wesley is as much Catholic as he is Protestant in his fundamental thought forms, not only in the sense that he derives them from the uia media of Anglicanism rather than the continental reformation but also in that his basic soteriological vision is more Catholic than Protestant in its orientation to the language of sanctification and the cultivation of Christian virtues. We celebrate the influence of Luther on Wesley's Aldersgate experience, but we forget that when Wesley finally got around to reading Luther's commentary he was horrified and regretted that he had endorsed it. Wesley is only distantly related to Protestant Orthodoxy in the technical sense and was more a product of pietist revolt against Orthodoxy, which shared much of the Enlightenment critique of Orthodoxy. In the nineteenth century it would be "New School" Presbyterianism rather than "Old School" Presbyterianism with which we would find our affinities. Our distinctive theological emphases were bitterly opposed in the 19th century by the Old School Calvinists (cf. Warfield's two-volumes of attacks on varieties of "perfectionism."), and those emphases did not characteristically take the shape of "protestant orthodoxy." On the latter point one has only to read the polemics of Pope, Hills, and Wiley against the strict inerrantist doctrine of Scripture or to notice the Grotian and governmental sources of our doctrine of atonement over against the "penal sub-stitutionary" doctrine of the Orthodox tradition. Ramm's flow chart is developed to defend a theological position fundamentally at odds with our own-in spite of the fact that we have in many places been deeply assimilated into this "neo-evangelical" vision.

Much more is at stake in this discussion than getting the family tree right. Several points should be noted. In the first place we are more conjunctively related to the rest of the Christian tradition than Ramm's disjunctive analysis would allow. We cannot so easily and radically cut ourselves off from the rest of Christendom. We are vitally related to most other branches in the very center of our thought and theological understandings. We are, to follow the suggestion of Albert Outler, something of an ecumeni-cal bridge tradition in that we reach instinctively in all these directions. Secondly, we are not oriented by the fundamental issue that defines Ramm's central problematic-the crisis of traditional belief precipitated by the Enlightenment. We have not noticed the extent to which Methodism is the first major religious movement after the Enlightenment and is to great extent contextualized to it-as evidenced for example by Wesley's more positive appropriation of "reason" over against, for example, Luther's tendency to call reason a "whore." Nor have we noticed that Wesley does not give "orthodoxy" the same technical status that fundamentalism and Protestant Orthodoxy give it. Wesley loved to note that the Devil himself is "orthodox" but far from the "true religion of the heart." This does not mean that Wesley had no concern for "orthodoxy" in the more general sense, but it does mean that he perceived the fundamental problem to be something other-a matter of the will. One might well argue that the Wesleyan analysis of the fundamental issue remains basically the same before and after the Enlightenment precisely because "orthodoxy" is not made the central question. This means that our tradition has found it easier to incorporate critical thought than the fundamentalist tradition has. It also means that the fundamental enemy in the Wesleyan vision is not "liberalism" as it is for the fundamentalist or the neo-evangelical but "nominal Christianity." The latter comes in many varieties, both conservative and liberal. The point is that the Wesleyan analysis of the human condition turns on a different axis and that we are often in danger of obscuring the distinctiveness of our own fitness by offering it as a version of "evangelicalism" in a world in which Ramm's vision of what it means to be "evangelical" so dominates that it is difficult to hear any other voices.

But there are other dimensions of this problem that become apparent when one reflects on what might be our contribution to the wider church world. Our first answer to this is usually in terms of our vision of the spiritual life and the "perfect love" that defines the center of our theology and life. I would not negate this response, but I have come to realize new dimensions of this position. I had not realized how far off the map of many of the traditional churches such a position is, especially as it is distant from those who, as evidenced by the Lima document on "Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry," tend to pick up ecumenical questions in terms of church order and ministry issues. Our tendency to practice forms of open communion and to allow a variety of baptismal practices, subordinating questions along these lines to more central questions of the life of the Spirit, is rather unusual and an important witness to the rest of the world not only about basic priorities but also about practical solutions to issues that haunt the ecumenical movement.

And we have other unique gifts to bring to wider discussions that are very much alive today. We do not often stop to reflect on the fact that social issues have, historically at least, been given a high rofile in our tradition. We sometimes so stress the centrality of Christian experience that we for-get that the emphasis on sanctification is inherently a call to Christian integrity and the "Christianizing of Christianity." The Wesleyan tradition heightens the significance of the ethical response and has made such issues as defining of Christian integrity as important as "confession" and "doctrine" in other traditions-in a significant anticipation of such debates as for example, that over whether the opposition to apartheid should be lifted to the level of status confessionis in the Reformed tradition by officially declaring it "heresy." The holiness churches have, if anything, accentuated this tendency in the Wesleyan tradition. The Wesleyan and Free Methodists were founded explicitly in response to questions of Christian integrity with regard to slavery. We have in our midst the Salvation Army, one of the profoundest witnesses in the Christian tradition to the social concern and compassion that is central to Christian faith and probably the largest welfare organization in the world outside the federal government. But the Salvation Army is only the most obvious illustration of a theme that has been almost universally expressed throughout the history of the holiness movement-a "preferential option for the poor" that has it roots in Wesley himself but which came to the fore as a protest against the embourgeoisement of Methodism in the nineteenth century. Yet herein lies an irony in our generation: these issues have become widely debated outside our Wesleyan circles and the conclusion largely accepted that Christian faith includes this "preferential option for the poor," but such movement has largely not been in response to our witness, for we have largely withdrawn from such discussions.

A similar contribution of the holiness movement, beset by a similar irony, has to do with the ministry of women. A very strong case can be made that the holiness movement played a key role in the emergence of the nineteenth century women's movement and the ministry of women in the Christian church. We have over a century's experience with this issue and have achieved percentages of women in the ministry as yet unthinkable in other churches. This history deserves to be shared with the rest of the church world, but we have not been sufficiently in contact with the rest of that world that they have any inkling that such a history and experience exists. And we have allowed ourselves to be so assimilated into the broader evangelical" world and allowed other sociological forces to erode these distinctives so much that we have ourselves forgotten what might be our most distinctive contributions to the rest of the church world.

On these issues there is a very practical and concrete problem with entering the discussions as "evangelicals." Our distinctive contribution to the rest of the church world has largely to do with non-traditional and innovative themes that have been a part of our life and witness. The connotations of the word "evangelical" are so oriented to the defense of the "traditional" that if I enter the ecumenical arena as an "evangelical," it is assumed that I carry a set of concerns precisely the opposite of what is the case. This was a major problem in entering the Faith and Order Commission in the NCCC. Many of the women who have just recently begun to play a role in these discussions were very threatened when Jeff Gros began to invite various "evangelical" types in. They assumed that such participation would erode their own somewhat fragile position because they believed that it meant the expansion of participating by a dimension of the church world which they assumed to be opposed fundamentally to the ministry of women. In a similar way I discover that if I allow myself to be perceived as an "evangelical" in these discussions, I am assumed to be represented well by such institutions as Wheaton College and Fuller seminary. These institutions are such important political symbols of "evangelical power politics" that it becomes important in public meetings to feature these institutions and their representatives. My own distinctive witness is consistently marginalized. Such "evangelical" institutions are so dominant that I find my own witness constantly discredited. Thus in discussions with the study project on "evangelicalism" of the Lutheran World Federation center in Strasbourg I met the constant accusation that I was a marginal "left-wing evangelical" in my reservations about certain "evangelical" theological formulations and in my commitment to a form of Christian faith that gave such a prominent place to ethics in general and social ethics in particular. I tried to insist that I was more representative of my own tradition than they would allow-and that they were reading the whole "evangelical" experience through a sub-culture represented by the Evangelical Theological Society. The theological political situation is such that as long as I admit to being an "evangelical" I am read in terms of the wrong categories.

Thus recently I have come to the position that I refuse to appear in ecumenical contexts as an evangelical." I insist that I be called by my own name, that I belong to a "holiness" church that is as distinct from "evangelicalism" as, for example, Pentecostalism, and deserves to be treated as a distinct ecclesiastical tradition. This adoption of such an apparently "disreputable" label as "holiness" is sufficiently disorienting that I am able to fill the term with a more appropriate content and enter the discussion on my own terms. This strategy is very difficult to carry out consistently and it is so against the ingrained patterns of thought and the forces of ecclesiastical politics that I often experience it as a form of beating my head against a brick wall. It was out of these high levels of frustration that I made my major discussion paper for a dialogue at the WCC a plea "for a moratorium on the use of the label "evangelical' " on the grounds that it is "theologically incoherent, sociologically confusing, and ecumenically pernicious...."

Instead of the "evangelical" analysis represented by Ramm, I have offered in these ecumenical contexts an alternative analysis of what is at stake in these discussions-one that attempts to work with categories more appropriate to our own tradition and one that I think is a more accurate description of much of the broader "evangelical" world than is conveyed in the perspective of Ramm and other "neo-evangelicals." I have argued that if one looks at the National Association of Evangelicals, the World Evangelical Fellowship, the colleges of the Christian College Consortium, or other clusters of movements and institutions that constitute the "evangelical world" one actually finds a cluster of distinctively new movements and currents in the church that have arisen outside and in protest over against the style of the traditional churches of the ecclesiastical mainstream-a sort of "third force" in the church that finds expression in a variety of movements including adventism, pietist and revivalist movements, the holiness movement, pentecostalism, various forms of restorationism, the Southern Baptists as a distinct tradition, and so forth. This protest includes certain theological dimensions, but it must be understood on other levels as well, especially in terms of a form of class warfare based on new sect formation rooted in the nineteenth century. The conflicts that we are experiencing culturally today are in many ways not so much a resurgence of "evangelicalism" as the emergence into the broader culture and the middle classes of movements founded among the lower-classes in the nineteenth century but now claiming a place in the sun. Thus I present myself more as a representative of a church with a sectarian past now entering the larger church world with a distinctive witness.

This stance requires a profound reorientation at many points, but I am convinced that it is in many ways a more accurate reflection of the situation. I cannot here defend this vision fully (some more laboration will be in the January (1988) issue of The Ecumenical Review in my essay "Yet Another Layer of the Onion; or, Opening Up the Ecumenical Door to Let the Riffraff In" and I can make available my WCC paper calling for a "moratorium on the use of the label 'evangelical' "), but I would like to indicate some implications of this reorientation. In the first place, this perspective turns the "evangelical" position on its head. That position tends to see itself at the center as the preserver of "orthodoxy" and to see the rest of the church world as having left the center under the influence of liberalism. From this perspective the task of the "evangelical" is to call the rest of the church world "back" to the truth. My perspective grants to the ecumenical churches a more central role as the churches of the traditional mainstream, but argues that the newer movements of the nineteenth century are carriers of insights of importance for the whole life of the church and that ecumenical discussion is impoverished because it lacks these key voices. (For example, in Geneva I argued in the meetings of the Commission on World mission and Evangelism that internal conflicts within the WCC were in part the product of the distance between CWME and Faith and Order in that the former was operating out of the missionary visions of the nineteenth century, while the ecclesiology of the latter, as reflected in BEM, is truncated because the WCC includes very few of the voices of churches that made the missiological vision definitional of church existence-and I quoted B. T. Roberts to the effect that he did not know whether bishops were definitional of the church but he did know that a mission to the poor was.) Shifting the categories frees the "evangelical" world from the burden of claiming that all Christians must become "evangelicals" and allows them to adopt the more modest task of witnessing to a set of values and convictions that should permeate the whole. In this vision "evangelicalism" becomes one of several "parties" in the church world, playing a role not unlike the role of the "evangelical" party in the Church of England in the nineteenth century.

But this analysis has major implications for how we understand ourselves. Let me indicate two major issues. I have emphasized the extent to which the holiness movement must see itself in large part as founded in protest against the nineteenth century embourgeoisement of Methodism against the tendency to move toward patterns of traditional church life, toward forms of congregational life, theology and music that marginalized the poor; toward the growth of seminaries intimately tied up in this development; and so on. We are experiencing now, a century later, our own embourgeoisement and repeating many if not most of the patterns of the experience of Methodism in the nineteenth century. And to make it worse, we in the Wesleyan Theological Society, are the major carriers of this impulse toward embourgeoisement. It is crucial that we reflect together on the question of who we are and what we have to bring to wider church discussions. We are subject to many forces-denominationalization, "evangelicalization," the search for social and cultural respectability, etc.-that erode our distinctives and cause us in many cases to participate in the dissolution of our own tradition. I struggle with these questions very intensely-in part because the very questions with which I am dealing here could be seen as the epitome of the process of embourgeoisement and the search for respectability. I am inclined on certain levels to accept the validity of such a suggestion, but to argue that such forces are in part irreversible and that our task as Wesleyan intellectuals is to articulate the significance of our tradition in ways that preserve as much of the values of the past as possible in the new social and ecclesiastical reality in which we find ourselves.

But this analysis also leads to a very important argument for our own involvement in a larger church world. I have argued more fully in the January issue of The Ecumenical Review that I have come to understand the holiness movement and related currents as a profound "canonical corrective" to the life and theology of the Protestant mainstream. This began to dawn on me when I began to realize how many distinctive themes of the holiness movement are derived from the book of James: the search for purity of heart and the shunning of double mindedness; a certain down to earth vision of Christianity as a way of life in the "wisdom" tradition; the profound conviction that "faith without works is dead" and Wesley's comment that the devil is "orthodox" but fails to manifest true "heart religion"; the concern for the poor (it was James that was used to battle the nineteenth century pew rentals that holiness people found so prejudicial to the poor); and so forth. Those traditions of church life derived from the Reformation experience have often been explicit or implicit carriers of Luther's tendency to suppress this canonical witness. From this angle the emergence of the holiness movement (and of the larger Wesleyan tradition in general) is a sort of canonical corrective to magisterial Protestantism. Far from being a witness to the original vision of Protestantism now eroded by the acids of modernity, as the "evangelicals" would have us believe, we are a protest against the blind spots of this tradition in both its "liberal" and "conservative" expressions.

But as Kierkegaard often reflected, being a "corrective" is a tricky business. When separated from that which it is intended to correct, the corrective has a tendency to turn in on itself and to become demonic. Most of us have experienced this negative side of our movement (in its legalism, its cultural sterility, and other dynamics). This began to dawn on me two decades ago at Asbury Theological Seminary as I watched the liberating effect of Kenneth Kinghorn's course on Martin Luther on the students who took it. Such students, in reaction to their background, often went so far in the direction of Luther as to abandon the distinctive theological formulations of their own traditions. But there were some who managed to achieve a balance found in preserving a subtle dialectic of the "grace-full" themes of Luther and the "methodistic" disciplines of their own tradition without falling into either the ethical passivism sometimes associated with the former or the legalistic over-scrupulosity of the latter. It may well be that the health of our own tradition as well as its appropriate witness to the healing of others may well depend on a fuller and systematic intention to be in dialogue with and relationship to other expressions of the Christian tradition. In saying this, I do not think that I am saying anything basically new. Methodism has always struggled with the question of whether it is a movement for the renewal of the church and the reform of the nation or a new church brought forth in the providence of God with a distinctive vision of the shape of Christian faith and life. These questions ought to be more alive for us in the Wesleyan Theological Society, and we ought to be about the task of more intentionally bringing our concerns into dialogue with the rest of the church world.

This emerging way of articulating what I have come to believe is at stake as I have reflected on my ecumenical experience of the last decade leads me to believe that the Wesleyan Theological Society has a key role to play in the years that lie ahead. I am not sure who else among us has the vision and the tools to articulate a controlling vision that will shape our future and make it intentional rather than a product of the social forces of embourgeoisement and denominationalization. We need to think more profoundly about who we are in the larger context of the church and the distinctive character of our calling to be a force for renewal beyond the boundaries of our own marginalized subculture. For the last several months I have been haunted by a question pressed on me by a staff member of the Secretariat for Christian Unity in the Vatican. Noting our sectarian background and theological and cultural isolation, he asked me, "Do these people really want to be noticed and participate in a wider dialogue? Don't you think in many ways that they would rather be left alone?" Sometimes I think this comment is all too true and that we lack either the confidence or the faith to take up the difficult task of finding the appropriate "holiness witness in the ecumenical church." But on the other hand, I think that we have no choice and that we need to open ourselves up to this possibility and task. Thus I would invite you to join me in thinking more fully about these questions. And as a way of stimulating discussion on these questions, I would make a series of concrete proposals and suggestions:

I have heard recently intimations of the renewal of a vision that was much more alive in the 1960s when the CHA was reorganized in an attempt to provide a coordinating agency for the various denominations in the holiness movement and perhaps even midwife the emergence of a larger distinctly "holiness" denomination out of the various fragments of the holiness movement. We have forgotten the extent to which many of the present holiness bodies have been formed by a sort of agglutinative process that has drawn together various aspects of the movement scattered across the land at the turn of the century. For some reason this trajectory of further coalescing seems to have been broken since the failure of Wesleyan and ree Methodist merger talks after the Wesleyan Church was formed in 1968. I have wondered if these questions ought not to come up again and if we have not been derailed from this path by various issues that have not had more power than they deserve. No doubt there has been a certain amount of bureaucratic resistance based in vested interests and perhaps even a tempering of such enthusiasm by the anti-ecumenical rhetoric of the fundamentalists and the evangelicals. But it seems to be that we in the WTS could raise this question again and debate it intentionally in our midst and in the other locations in which we serve. I am not necessarily arguing that such a merger is inevitable or even finally desirable, but I think that we could well offer significant leadership in debating such issues. It is entirely possible that such a move would produce a creative ferment within our churches and give birth to a new church that could become more of a force for our own witness that the smaller and more marginalized churches cannot make. Let the debate begin!
My experience in "ecumenical circles" has led me to the horrifying conclusion that as things are now, there is no chance that our witness can be heard because we are largely invisible in those contexts. We are so outside the discussions as to be totally unknown. This was brought home to me in Geneva as I became aware of the annual meeting of the executives of the "World Christian Communions" (Lutheran World Federation, World Alliance of Reformed Churches, World Methodist Council, The Seventh Day Adventists, The Salvation Army, etc.). I asked why the Christian Holiness Association is not represented in such meeting. I was told that the CHA apparently qualified but that no one had ever heard of it in Geneva. I approached a couple of members of the Board of Administration of the CHA asking why we are not represented and was told that no one had heard of the World Christian Communions. One member of the Board agreed that we should be represented, but that the issue would probably be the cost of attending such a meeting. I have wondered if there are not ways to raise this question in the CHA and encourage it to establish such a relationship one which is totally outside the formal structures of the ecumenical movement as such. Such a representation would have a great symbolic value and provide the platform from which other issues could be raised and by which we could be recognized as an ecclesiastical tradition along side of others.
I have indicated above that I think that our decision a few years ago to send representatives to the Commission on Faith and Order in the NCCC was an unusually farsighted and bold step. Not only has this brought us into visibility in that context, but it has also profoundly shaped the character of those discussions. It has been exciting to see the "holiness" position on various issues be represented by papers along side the view points of Catholics, Orthodox, and Magisterial Reformation views. I have chaired a section of the Apostolic Faith Study where we have tried to think through the distinctive features of the American context and the extent to which we carry a distinctive vision of what it might mean to confess the "apostolic faith." This has been largely an exercise in breaking open the theological categories of the mainstream churches to find categories for understanding and receiving the witness of those churches and movements largely outside the mainstream. Many in the Commission think this work the most important and creative of the last triennium, work that will be published and used to offer a "corrective" to the work of the Faith and Order Commission in the WCC. The interaction in the Commission has been invigorated by the bringing of new voices with new energies into what had become something of a lifeless discussion in pale imitation of the work in Geneva. I think that we need to continue this representation in the NCCC commission where there are other theological voices from non-member churches (Pentecostal, Evangelical, Catholic, etc.), but I have wondered if we ought not to discuss whether to pursue a possible liaison with the Faith and Order Commission of the WCC. I know from the reaction last Spring when I floated a more general proposal along these lines, that such a step would not necessarily be welcomed in the commission itself, but I do know that under Emilio Castro's administration there is a decided commitment to breaking open some of these discussions to wider representation. Other non-member traditions participate in Faith and Order discussions. The Catholics are represented by several positions in the commission, and the Adventists have been represented for some time. There would, of course, be some costs in working out such representation, but the full commission only meets three or four times in a decade and it might be possible to find other institutional sources to fund such representation. I am very concerned to see such arenas become more fully inclusive-and that there be a place somewhere that brings together the fragments of the church community in a way that does not yet take place.

(4) Over a decade ago now several of us here met a representative of the Vatican to the Society for Pentecostal Studies. He was fascinated to learn of the existence of the holiness movement and wondered at the time if the Vatican ought not to take up some form of formal dialogue with representatives of the holiness movement-parallel to those with a variety of traditions including Methodism and Pentecostalism. He seemed to feel that our tradition of spirituality has a special affinity with Catholic traditions of spirituality and might prove to be more interesting in many ways than the discussions with other forms of Protestantism. I experienced some sense of this same fascination this summer in Rome, and have wondered whether we ought not to pick up on such hints and pursue formally the possibility of such dialogue.

(5) The above suggestions have primarily to do with possible agenda within the larger church, but it also appears to me that we have other work that we could take up as well within the more narrow "evangelical" contexts. To some extent this work is being done by the new Asbury center for the study of the holiness movement. This project is structured to bring together representatives of the "ecumenical" church, prominent interpreters of "evangelicalism," Pentecostals, and others that have an interest in these questions. From one angle this project might be viewed as a "multilateral" ecumenical exercise while from another it might be viewed as a challenge to the reigning paradigms by which the "evangelical" tradition is interpreted. t any rate, I expect it to have a profound impact on the way in which our movement and witness is brought into dialogue with other parts of the Christian tradition. A few years ago Mel Robeck of Fuller Theological Seminary suggested in his presidential address before the Society for Pentecostal studies a joint meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society, the Society for Pentecostal Studies, and the Wesleyan Theological Society to facilitate communication across the theological lines of the ecclesiastical traditions represented in the National Association of Evangelicals. I have often wondered if this should not be taken up with more intentionality.

(6) I have wondered on occasion what "ecumenical" responsibility we have to our "right" in terms of the Interdenominational Holiness Convention which gathers together those churches and currents that have largely repudiated the "mainstream" holiness movement of the CHA, arguing that we have become "liberal" and abandoned traditional "holiness standards." I personally have tried over the years to maintain some contact with persons in this movement and am convinced that on some points their critique of us is on target-especially as they have opposed our rush to respectability and our tendency to repeat the nineteenth century embourgeoisement of Methodism. On other points (their accusation of "liberalism" as we reassert our independence from "neo-evangelicalism") I think they miss the point. But we need to think more seriously about this opposition to the course that the "mainstream" holiness movement is taking.

(7) We also need to think about our relationship to "mainstream" Methodism. On the one hand our history lies in this stream, and there remains a great deal of overlap in many parts of the country in the camp meeting traditions and elsewhere. On the other hand we have experienced a great deal of tension and alienation in the various periods of separation and new sect formation-and as the "holiness movement" has taken on more denominational identity and reorganized the CHA into an interdenominational coordinating agency, we have grown apart and in many cases with-drawn from the life of Methodism. The problem has been especially accentuated as we have tried to understand our relationship as the Methodistic "holiness movement" to the "neo-evangelical" wing of Methodism that has come together as the "Good News Movement." These questions are complex and laden with emotion, but we may not have noticed many of the steps that we have taken over the last few years. For over a decade there has been a self-conscious effort to incorporate our life and witness into the "Oxford institute of Methodist Theological Studies" under the auspices of the World Methodist Council (precisely at the time that some of our denominations. Like the Free Methodists, have wavered in their commitment to this organization, and others, like the Nazarenes especially, have felt their "inter-denominational" cllaracter has made it inappropriate). Professor Theodore Runyon of Candler School of Theology, Emory University, has been a major force behind this and has attended our meetings on various occasions as a way of building bridges between our movements. It was at his invitation that we went to Emory to celebrate the Methodist bicentennial and our own twentieth anniversary. And in the last few years we have moved toward inviting "outside speakers" to our meetings, most of whom have been Methodists: Albert Outler, David Watson, and now Mortimer Arias. Perhaps we need to stop and reflect on these developments. Perhaps we should take up these issues more intentionally.

(8) With some hesitation I would like to point to a sub-category of the above discussion that may need special attention and discussion. We have been profoundly shaped in our history by the splits at the turn of the century that led to the emergence of the "holiness heresy" of Pentecostalism. We have subjected no other part of the Christian movement to the level of harsh attack that we have launched in this direction-and our strongest theological and ecclesiastical barriers have been erected against the possible intrusion of this theology and piety into our midst. I have often wondered if the greatest test of our openness might be to raise the question of our relationship to this tradition-to gently reassert our criticism of the movement while recognizing the validity of the paternity suit that is brought against us for the fathering of this movement. I have tried to do some of this in my recent lD published Theological Roots of Pentecostalism. Those that read that book carefully will see it as a defense of the theological categories of the Wesleyan tradition, but it takes that position in rather direct exploration of the historical and theological continuities between the two traditions. Similarly our new president Howard Snyder has argued in The Divided Flame that our anti-Pentecostal polemic has distorted our reading of Scripture and °ur ecclesiology. I have wondered if such issues ought not to be taken up more directly in a form of "bilateral theological dialogue" either between representatives of the SPS and the WTS or perhaps within the structures of Our annual meetings. Some of you may be surprised to discover how far such discussions have progressed already. I remember that only a few years ago Pentecostals were prohibited from attending Asbury Theological Seminary and I remember the controversy when H. Vinson Synan, historian of the Pentecostal Holiness Church spoke on the campus-and when the WTs discovered to its horror that Synan was a member of our society. Synan withdrew his membership out of sensitivity to ur historical concerns even though it meant the endangering of his agenda to bring the holiness witness into a Pentecostalism increasingly inclined to suppress this aspect of its history. Some of you will know how far we have come in the last few years ir, that next year we look forward to a meeting of the SPS on the Asbury Seminary campus by invitation of the Board. Fewer of you may realize that in rather direct response to this the SPS elected me second vice-president last year so that I would be responsible for the planning of the program at Asbury and would in the normal course of affairs move on to be-the first non Pentecostal/non-Charismatic to occupy that office. The Asbury project will hold one of its meetings in conjunction with the fall meeting, and I am hoping to program into the meeting some direct "bilateral dialogue" between our two traditions. These are phenomenal "ecumenical" events, and I have wondered if we ought not to publicly debate and own these developments in a way that has not been possible up to now.

These suggestions are meant to be illustrative of what might be taken up by the society if it should become serious about its broader responsibility to support and articulate a "holiness witness in the ecumenical church." I commend such concerns and issues to your attention.

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