Leslie Parrott. 1993. The Olivet Story: An Anecdotal History' of Olivet Nazarene University. 1907-1990. Newberg: Barclay Press. viii, 189 pp. ISBN 0-913342-76-9.

Ronald E. Kirkemo. 1992. For Zion'& Sake: A History of Pasadena/ Point Loma College. San Diego: Point Loma Press. xxii, 414 pp. No ISBN.

Barry L. Callen. 1992. Guide of Soul and Mind: The Story of Anderson University. Anderson: Anderson University and Warner Press. xiv, 472 pp. ISBN 0-87162-605-5.

Reviewed by David Bundy, Christian Theological Seminary, Indianapolis, Indiana.

The genre of college/university histories has rarely moved beyond the wistful accounts written for alumni by development departments. The three volumes reviewed together here, although quite different from each other, are exceptions to that generalization. They provide important vistas on the history and culture of the Wesleyan/Holiness tradition, in addition to documenting the history of three of the most influential Wesleyan/Holiness universities. They will also function as both primary and secondary literature for any eventual comprehensive analysis of educational structures, philosophies, and goals of the Holiness movement of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Two of the volumes deal with institutions of the Church of the Nazarene-Olivet Nazarene University and Point Loma College. The Olivet Story is authored by Leslie Parrott who served as president of this school from 1975-1991. As the second generation president (his father A. L. Parrott served from 1938-1949), Parrott, long related to the school, is nonetheless remarkably unsentimental in presenting the narrative, including the tale of the fifteen presidents in the decade 1910-1919. Among those hired and fired by a micro-managing board was A. M. Hills who was forced to resign on 14 March 1910 after less than seven months on the job. The reason was his post-millennial view.

This objectivity is buttressed by continuous reference to the national and regional economic and social developments, both within the nation as a whole and in the Church of the Nazarene. In some ways the volume is also a memoir of the two Parrotts, and provides insight into the rationales and motives of many decisions made during their presidencies. The volume reflects careful scholarly research and a disciplined analysis of published and archival resources. Unfortunately, perhaps because of the intent to use the volume as an institutional promotional instrument, it is undocumented. One also laments the lack of attention given to theological developments at the University (granted that is a delicate subject!).

Kirkemo's analysis of Point Loma Nazarene College, San Diego, California, is a carefully and skillfully crafted history of the institution with which the author has had a long association as student and professor (since 1969) of political science. The volume traces the development of the college from its founding in 1902 by Phineas Bresee, through its stages in Pasadena as Pacific Bible College and Pasadena College, and the move to Point Loma.

In addition to Bresee, among the presidents were formative theologians in the Church of the Nazarene, including E. P. Ellyson (1911 - 1913), H. 0. Wiley (1913-1916, 1933-1949), and W. T. Purkiser (1949-1957). Other prominent Holiness persons, including C. W. Ruth and Seth Rees, influenced the early development of the college. At each point the interaction of the college with the trends of American religious culture is carefully documented, including the early conflict with famous Holiness revivalists for control, the efforts of wealthy businessman George Pepper-dine to purchase an institution to name after himself, and the move toward Fundamentalist attitudes and doctrinal positions after World War II.

Apart from being a model of the genre, this volume has implications for the history and present experience of both the Church of the Nazarene and the larger Holiness movement. For historians of American religious culture, it constitutes a diachronic analysis of the evolution of a precisely delimited corporate entity through the first nine decades of its existence. For fans of Nixon trivia, Pasadena College won the 1934 Southern California Public Speaking Conference debating championship, beating among others a team from Whittier which included the future President. The volume contains the requisite academic apparatus of index, bibliography, and scholarly references.

The third volume deals with the first seventy-five years of the history of Anderson University. The author, Barry L. Callen, also has had a long association with his subject, having served as Dean of the School of Theology from 1974-1983 (also, acting Dean, 1973-74, 1988-90) and Dean of the College from 1983-1988. He has been a member of the faculty since 1966 and has established himself through a series of earlier books as a prolific author and scholar of Church of God (Anderson) theology and educational history. Callen presents a carefully crafted and detailed history of the institution, setting its story within the framework of higher education history in the United States, as well as within the social, theological, and educational development of the Church of God (Anderson). Indeed, one could do far worse in choosing an introduction to the history of this movement! The volume is also very sensitive to the changing scholarly and theological perspectives of both the University and the Church of God (Anderson).

Once again, the history of the institution is integrally linked to major figures of the sponsoring movement. Among the leadership and faculty of the university discussed here who have had crucial roles in the development of the Church of God, and influence beyond its boundaries, are Boyce W. Blackwelder, Russell R. Byrum, James Earl Massey, John A. Morrison, Robert A. Nicholson, George Russell Olt, Robert H. Reardon, John W.V. Smith, and Joseph T. Wilson. This well-written and attractive volume is enhanced by many excellently reproduced photographs, numerous appendices, careful documentation, and a bibliography (pp.454-458) which is comprehensive with regard to Anderson University and Church of God (Anderson) educational issues.

All three university histories will be essential for any library with a collection purporting to document the role of religion in American culture or with an Evangelical and/or Holiness constituency. They provide case studies in the understudied field of the development of private Holiness and Evangelical higher education. It is to be hoped that these and other case studies will be the basis for broadly conceived examinations of Wesleyan/Holiness educational history and development in the context of American higher education.

Rob L. Staples. 1991. Outward Sign and Inward Grace: The Place of Sacraments in Wesleyan Spirituality. Kansas City, MO: Beacon Hill. 304 pp. ISBN 083-411-3783.

Reviewed by Randy L. Maddox, Sioux Falls College, Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

A proper appreciation of this work is dependent on recognizing Its context and agenda. Staples writes specifically from (and to) the Holiness branch of the broader Wesleyan tradition. In this context his work is innovative and provocative. As he makes very clear, the Holiness movement has been characterized by a reactionary "low" theology and a correspondingly marginal practice of the sacraments. Against this setting, Staples' rather courageous goal is to challenge his colleagues to recover the more vital sacramental theology and practice of their forefathers-John and Charles Wesley.

Significantly, this purpose could not be achieved simply by expositing the Wesleys' sacramental theology and practice, because their precedent is not accepted as an unquestioned norm in many Holiness circles (witness the debate concerning the Baptism of the Spirit mentioned on pp. 153-4). This explains the time devoted to placing the Wesleys within the broader Christian sacramental tradition, particularly that of the magisterial Reformers. Staples wants his audience to see that those who would reject the Wesleys reject Luther and Calvin too!

Of course, there are Protestant traditions besides the magisterial. Not only is Staples aware of this, he uses it to explain why the Holiness movement strayed from its Wesleyan sacramental roots. He repeatedly attributes this departure to the mixing of "Anabaptist" currents into the original Wesleyan stream. This point needs to be made more precisely. Staples notes that John Wesley's teachings on sacramental theology affirm both the primacy of the Spirit and the role of mediating structures or agencies (pp.24-S). While Wesley strove to hold these two principles in tension, other streams of Western sacramental theology tended to place them in opposition. Staples uses the term "Anabaptist" to denote those streams that placed one-sided emphasis on the Spirit (apart from mediating structures). He then argues that it was cooperation with such "Anabaptists" that led early Wesleyan-Holiness folk to dissolve the tension in Wesley's sacramental teachings by rejecting mediating structures. His plea, in response, is a recovered view of the sacraments as conveying the work of the Spirit via structure.

While the general outlines of this argument are on track, the specific identification of the culprit is open to some question. The distinctive nature of the historically specific Anabaptist tradition is its call for uncompromising voluntary obedience to the model of Christ. While it indeed emphasizes the primacy of the Spirit in empowering such obedience, it was not necessarily at the expense of all "structure." For example, those Anabaptists gave great prominence to the mediating structure of community life. Theirs was not a religion of 'just the Spirit and me"! Meanwhile, the one more likely to deny explicitly the need for any structure to convey the Spirit-Ulrich Zwingli-was not an Anabaptist.

I would suggest that it was actually the rationalist tendency to confine the Spirit to only "intellectual" means of grace (e.g., preaching, prayer, and praise), a tendency that Zwingli exemplified and that has spread in Western Christianity ever since the Reformation and Enlightenment, that has distanced Wesley's descendants from their founder. This tendency is not confined to Anabaptists (nor uniquely characteristic of them). It was prominent among American Methodists long before the Holiness Movement. Moreover, hints of it remain in Staples' depiction of the sacraments more as forms of proclamation to "accomplish spiritual ends" than as material means that truly convey spiritual grace (cf. 76ff, 97ff). Until the intellectualist reduction of the means of grace is identified and contested more explicitly, it seems unlikely to me that Staples' laudable goal of recovering a more vital role for the sacraments in the spirituality of the Holiness movement will be achieved.

As one might expect, Staples' overall agenda leads him to some specific emphases that place him in considerable tension with his peers. One of these is his identification of the ironic loss of the eucharist as a "converting ordinance" in Holiness models of evangelism. More provocative is his call for making baptism more integral to conversion, conjoined with a defense of infant baptism (cf. 161ff)! This is not the place to debate the details of Staples' argument for accepting infant baptism more integrally into Holiness practice (most Holiness traditions technically allow it already). It is worth noting, however, that his driving concern is that the current dominance of believer's baptism fosters a model of conversion that calls into question the value of religious nurture of children in the church (cf. 193-4). Whether infant baptism provides the best way to address this concern surely remains open to debate (for an alternative, see Marlin Jeschke, Believer's Baptism for Children of the Church [Herald Press, 1983]). By now it should be obvious that Staples' work is likely to arouse internal debate within the Holiness movement. One of the benefits of the book is that it helps draw the broader Protestant discussion of sacraments into that debate. One of the unfortunate limitations of the book is that it does not interact with the concurrent debates over sacraments taking place in the larger Wesleyan family. For example, Staples hardly mentions the question of the connection between infant baptism and confirmation-a question at the heart of current United Methodist debate over baptism.

This first limitation might be explained by the very simultaneity of the debates. The more perplexing limitation lies in Staples' summaries of the Wesleys' own sacramental theology. Put briefly, Staples relies too heavily on a single secondary source: Ole Borgen, John Wesley on the Sacraments (Abingdon, 1972). Borgen's study is a standard in the field, but Staples' near exclusive reliance on it often gives the impression of more consistency in the Wesleys' views and practice (and more unanimity in Wesley Studies) than actually exists. To cite just one example, there is no interaction with the dramatically different analysis of infant baptism ill Bernard Holland, Baptism in Early Methodism (Epworth, 1970). What this means is that readers interested primarily in an up-to-date analysis of the Wesleys' sacramental theology (and scholarly debates over this topic) would be advised to look elsewhere (e.g., Henry Knight, The Presence of God in the Christian Life [Scarecrow, 1992]). Likewise, readers who assume from the subtitle that this book speaks from, and for, the broad Wesleyan tradition will be disappointed. But for outsiders seeking an introduction to the sacramental practices and debates in the Wesleyan/Holiness movement, there is no better source than this. And for those within the movement, this is an important book that demands to be taken into consideration, and may just help spark a recovery of a more truly Wesleyan experience of holiness-nurtured in and through the full range of the means of grace.

R. David Rightmire, Sacraments and the Salvation Army: Pneumatological Foundations. Metuchen, N. The Scarecrow Press, 1990, 327 pages. ISBN 0-8108-2396-9.

Reviewed by Barry L. Callen, Anderson University, Anderson, Indiana.

The fact is clear enough. The Salvation Army quickly evolved a spiritualized interpretation of sacramental reality in the church's life as the Army began its existence in the context of Victorian England. Right-mire's first two chapters review the Army's rise in the Victorian milieu and, in that intellectual frame of reference, the development of an essentially non-sacramental theology.

The primary question addressed by Rightmire involves why this type of theology evolved and soon became formalized. Sacraments and the Salvation Army is a published revision of Rightmire's doctoral dissertation on this subject and joins the "Studies in Evangelicalism" series of The Scarecrow Press. It is written clearly and includes an excellent bibliography.

The author offers a cogent and helpful explanation for why the Army has de-emphasized an understanding of the church as the locus of Word and sacrament. William Booth's 1883 decision to abandon sacramental practice "had a determinative effect on Salvation Army sacramental self-understanding" (205). The reason for the shift from traditional sacramental practice is said to lie primarily in the Army's "pneumatological priority and the practical orientation of its missiology" (ix). The Army "insisted that methods, organization, and institutions must be judged in relation to their ultimate effectiveness in reaching evangelical goals under the guidance of the Holy Spirit" (269). William Booth is pictured rightly as a theological pragmatist. Through him the Army saw its ministry as a ⁴'spiritual offensive" requiring "a theology of action rather than reflection" (71). The Army's postmillennial theology highlights holy living, sacramental existence and action, as a present eschatological sign of the future kingdom. In part, the Army's non-sacramental position also is said to rest on the precedent of the Society of Friends (explored in chapter four), where the inner is prior to the outer in religion.

Why the evolution of a non-sacramental theology by the Army? Pneumatological priorities dominated ecclesiological ones. Rightmire, accepting the sacramental theology of John Wesley as the "operative standard" for this discussion, points out that the Army's case is not an isolated one in its virtual abandonment of a traditional sacramental theology in favor of a pneumatological focus. The nineteenth-century Holiness movement as a whole tended this way (see chapter five). The primary justification for the abandonment lies in the Army's holiness theology. In-depth experience of the Spirit, it was assumed, "eclipsed any need for sacramental practice" (271). Rather than an elimination of sacramental language and interest, the view shifted from its ritual practice to "the reality of new life in Christ, experienced spiritually" (196). This was seen as possible only in an experience of entire sanctification.

Rightmire concludes with the suggestion that the "regaining of a truly Wesleyan understanding of entire sanctification, involving both crisis and process, should lead to a re-evaluation of sacramental theology within the movement" (272). The challenge is to keep in balance both pneumatological and ecclesiological concerns, something that can be done without weakening the practical mission focus of the Army. Wesley is presented as the model available to all inheritors of the American holiness tradition, a model who champions what the Army has rightly emphasized, without weakening what the Army and many others have excessively de-emphasized. Rightmire points in a fruitful direction.

Such a re-balancing process can be seen, e.g., m the "Open Forum" dialogue proceeding at the national level in recent years between the Church of God (Anderson, Indiana) and the Independent Christian Churches/ Churches of Christ. The sacramental focus of the "restorationist" body (Christian Churches) is helping to rebalance a pneumatologically driven sacramental deemphasis by the holiness body (Church of God).

Randy L. Maddox, editor. 1990. Aldersgate Reconsidered. Nashville: Kingswood Books/Abingdon Press. 181 pp. ISBN 0-687-00984-7.

Reviewed by Richard B. Steele, Milwaukee Theological Institute, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Religious communities are notoriously prone to both hero worship and myth making. A group which venerates someone as its "founder" or eponymous "saint" is apt to regard certain spiritually transformative experiences through which he or she passed as definitive for their collective religious identity. They cherish it in memory, perhaps embroider it with legend, and yearn to undergo it for themselves. Surely this is how Methodists have long regarded John Wesley's famous "Aldersgate Experience" of May 24, 1738.

Someone was reading Luther's "Preface to Romans," in which "the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ" is described, when suddenly Wesley felt his own heart "strangely warmed" by the assurance that God's love had been personally extended to him. His followers ever since have tirelessly recited the record of that moment, and have often assumed that spiritual rebirth, which Wesley certainly advocated, depends on undergoing a similar experience. Aldersgate was an event in the life of Wesley that became a central myth in the religious consciousness of Methodism.

Of course, "Methodism" is no longer a single community, but a diverse clan of denominations that share certain distinctively Wesleyan characteristics (e.g., a broadly "Arminian" doctrinal position, a high view of sanctification, a fondness for "Christian conferencing," etc.), but differ over various matters of theology, polity, ethos, and morals. Naturally, each group wants to show that it is the true heir to the founder's spirit, and since that spirit is generally assumed to have descended mightily at Aldersgate, each group has tended to "interpret" that event in a manner which reflects and/or underwrites its own theological agenda and ecclesiastical program.

Aldersgate has proven to be a flexible, all-purpose myth which has been variously used to symbolize the centrality of conversion experiences in the Christian life, authorize the rejection of liturgical formalism and clerical pomp, validate the use of religious experience as a source for theological reflection, legitimize the retrieval of orthodox Reformation doctrine, illustrate the necessity for "entire sanctification," insist on commitment to the "liberation" of the poor, etc. After 250 years of being all things to all Methodists, Aldersgate the myth had become Aldersgate the cipher. The sheer diversity of incompatible interpretations, each corresponding to the party line of its promulgators, revealed that more was being brought to the event than taken from it. The time had come to "reconsider" Alders-gate-both the event itself and the history of its various interpretations and uses among Wesley's followers-from fresh perspectives.

That is the aim of this volume of seven essays. The authors understand that no final, definitive, and "objective" reading is possible. But they employ the critical tools of historical scholarship and constructive theology, rather than the weapons of denominational rivalry, in the task. The results are refreshing. They allow Aldersgate to retain its rightful role in the religious identity of Methodism, while preventing it from being used as everyone's ideological brickbat.

The volume opens with an introductory essay by the editor, Randy Maddox, who describes the need for a "paradigm shift" in the interpretation of Aldersgate. Although Aldersgate has been read in so many ways, there is a common assumption that it brought an abrupt and total Volte face from something (bad) to something else (good . . . even "Perfect"). This obscures the important continuities between the pre- and Post-Aldersgate Wesley in matters of doctrine and discipline, as well as the Spiritual doubts and psychological struggles that persisted afterward. The new paradigm offered in this volume views Aldersgate - "as the decisive experience that marked the beginning of Wesley's authentic Christian life, but as an important further step in his spiritual development when his intellectual convictions about God's gracious acceptance were appropriated more deeply at an affectional level" (18).

In the second essay, Roberta Bondi shows that by hankering for the pure and simple faith that Wesley allegedly received at Aldersgate, we not only misread the record of the event itself, but Bondi ourselves to the rough-edged reality of human life and chase after a spiritual will-o-the-wisp. Next, David Lowes Watson compares Wesley's Aldersgate experience with his General Rules. These stand, respectively, for the "power" and the "form" of the Methodist brand of godliness. Watson argues that we today will be unable to achieve the vibrant spirituality of early Methodism unless we renew the practice of the disciplines stipulated in the Rules.

In these analyses we see keen pastoral insights that all Wesleyans should heed. But there is something logically fuzzy about Bondi's appeal to the destructive effects of the conversionist model of spirituality on us as evidence that it could not have been Wesley's own mature understanding. And while Watson's distinction between the power and the form of godliness is a useful heuristic device, it would be a mistake to assume that the everyday activities of actual congregations ever possess one without the other-though Watson himself does not assert this.

The longest and finest essay in the volume is Richard Heitzenrater's study of the events in Wesley's life from 1738 through 1740, and especially his relationship with the Moravians. Heitzenrater shows how Wesley's contacts with the Moravians infused his early theology with a "dynamic pneumatology." This new ingredient persisted and grew as Wesley matured, even though he subsequently abandoned or modified many of the very practices and doctrines that helped to precipitate his spiritual crisis of 1738 (e.g., the Moravians' notion that those who do not yet possess saving faith should refrain from using the "means of grace," - their denial that faith may come "by degrees"). This is why in his later writings Wesley did not "hearken back to Aldersgate as a model experience to the universalized" (91).

Heitzenrater's conclusions are buttressed from the side of systematic theology by Theodore Runyan's analysis of the mature Wesley's religious empiricism. Runyan argues that the spiritual growth and theological maturation which Aldersgate inaugurated led ultimately to an understanding of religious experience that was characterized by four factors: (1) God is its cause and content; (2) God has an aim (telos) in granting it to a person -authentic religious experience is not a random psychological event, but is part of God's grand plan to renew creation; (3) This telos is transformative, the progressive restoration of the divine image in the individual; and (4) This transformation is marked by distinctive religious "feelings," which are vehicles, but not conditions for God's action in our hearts and lives.

The last three essays, by Jean Miller Schmidt, Stephen Gunter, and Randy Maddox, provide a splendid overview of how Aldersgate has been variously read in the Methodist traditions and increasingly used as a talisman in our tribal festivals. They establish the need for the more nuanced and less ideologically freighted readings offered in the other articles.

Something like a consensus has emerged from these studies of Aldersgate. As Maddox writes: "At the moment, it appears that the most adequate reading of Aldersgate is that which focuses on the place of assurance in Christian life" (146). That is, Wesley was changed at Aldersgate, as the various older readings claimed. But this change consisted, not in his instantaneous transformation from a curmudgeonly Pharisee into a radiant Evangelical, or from a spiritual hypochondriac into an entirely sanctified superman. Aldersgate did not cause Wesley to repudiate the spiritual and intellectual disciplines that he had practiced earlier, nor exempt him from subsequent doubts and mistakes, nor tempt him to make similar emotionally charged experiences the litmus test for authentic regeneration. Rather, it enabled him to put aside his feverish effort to prove something (to himself? to his parents? to his neighbors? to God?) and take up the task of sharing what God had proven to him.

Of course, scholarly consensus is always fragile. Further historical study and the changing needs of the various Methodist churches may eventually alter the interpretation of Aldersgate that Maddox and company provide here. But this book will at least prevent later hero worshippers and myth makers from being mere exegetes and ideologies.

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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