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RECLAIMING THE TEXT IN METHODIST-HOLINESS AND PENTECOSTAL SPIRITUALITY

by
Charles Edwin Jones

 

In the first decades of the century, the Holiness and Pentecostal movements were close neighbors on the ideological landscape. Although of late excluded from Methodist power structures,1 the unstudied attitude of both movements remained identical, in most respects, to that of late nineteenth-century Methodism.2 Both professed post-conversion experiences of purity and power which they identified as the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Both were convinced of the present activity of the Holy Spirit and were looking for the Lord's return. Many in each group had personal and family ties with members of the other. Sermons and testimonies of each abounded with allusions to biblical events and each sang from a repertoire reminiscent of the camp meeting and every-night mission of the recent past. Each sought to reenact the text of Scripture and had distinctive expectations about the manner in which reenactment should occur.

 

The Real Divide

Differences in typology created the impasse which throughout the common history of the two movements has characterized communication between them. Because Scripture is for each the infallible indicator of the witness and guidance of the Holy Spirit, the incompatibility of divergent means of approaching the biblical text has remained an unbridgeable chasm between them. Archetypal symbolism explains why each movement defines itself as Pentecostal3 and regards the other as decidedly not so. It lies at the heart of the self-definition of each. Removal of "Pentecost" and "Pentecostal" from Holiness church names in the second decade of this century was regarded by Holiness people as a necessary defense against a false definition of Pentecost and was accompanied by a sense of deprivation and loss. The commitment of glossolalic Pentecostals to literal reenactment of the text, on the other hand, prevented them from seeing the name changes as other than a sign of rejection of biblical truth.

Estranged not only from their spiritual mother but from one another, they quickly came to a stalemate. Both thought it was tongues-speaking more than any other characteristic which set converts to Pentecostalism apart from onetime Methodist-Holiness people. Focus on this assumption blinded both camps to the underlying cause of the impasse, namely that the real confusion lay in differences in the manner Scripture was to be appropriated.

The impossibility of the coexistence of both metaphorical and phenomenological reenactment of the text4 is placed in stark relief by examination of the biblical analogies used by the two movements: the Exodus typology of Wesleyan Holiness and the Pentecost typology of the Apostolic Faith.5 This disparity lay at the root of Holiness rejection of physical signs and of Pentecostal focus on healing and tongues.

Methodist-Holiness people reclaimed the text by means of metaphor. What they desired to epitomize was the experience of entire sanctification, which they said freed the believer from the "bent to sinning"6 and from fascination with worldly things. Christian perfection, which John Wesley regarded as the "grand depositum of the people called Method"7 was that aspect of the work of Christ which made possible freedom not only from acts of sin, but from the compulsion to sin. They believed that sanctifying grace, imparted initially in response to repentance and faith, was brought to fruition in the fully consecrated believer in a second experience of grace.

Because, however, Holiness advocates held that this crisis, variously known as entire sanctification, heart holiness, perfect love, the baptism of the Holy Spirit, and the rest of faith, was "the central idea of Christianity,"8 they did not contend for exclusive use of Methodist terminology in proclaiming it. Instead, they entwined vernacular idiom and doctrinal metaphor in sermon, song,9 and testimony10 in such a manner as to make the biblical event and personal experience synonymous. They combined biblical, literary, and commonplace images in such a way as to differentiate infancy and adulthood in the Christian life11 and to make "second blessing" holiness comprehensible to multitudes both inside and outside the denomination.

The literalism of early Pentecostalism dictated a different type of reenactment. Pioneers of the Apostolic Faith believed they had entered a dimension of spiritual power subsequent to and even more glorious than entire sanctification. They said that this latter-day "baptism of the Holy Spirit" was identical in every way to that experienced by the disciples on the Day of Pentecost, and thus they felt impelled to spread everywhere the good news of its transforming power. The providential means to this end, they believed, was literal appropriation of the text of Scripture. This they set out to do by welding elements of the soteriology of Methodist holiness12 and the dispensationalism13 of some in the Reformed tradition14 into a new amalgam, the Pentecost of the latter days.

 

Different Metaphors

Methodist-Holiness people from Phoebe Palmer on had regarded the experience of the disciples at Pentecost as an archetype of the baptism of the Holy Spirit. To this, proponents of the Apostolic Faith added the typology of the early and latter rain. They read Peter's exposition of Joel 2:28-32 on the Day of Pentecost as a prophecy of the revival of the phenomenon of Pentecost in their own times (Acts 2:16-21). This interpretation caused the fathers and mothers of the Apostolic Faith movement to regard themselves as eyewitnesses to the fulfillment of Joel 2:28 (AV): "And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions."

The Pentecost of the first-century, they said, was the "former" or "early" rain of autumn and winter. Its twentieth-century counterpart was the "latter" rain of springtime described in Joel 2:23.15 This rain symbolized the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Study of Acts showed that the "former" rain had been signaled by tongues. The "latter" rain would be also. Tongues as the sign, they said, was the unbreakable link between the two.

Proponents believed the movement in which they united to be the divinely-commissioned instrument of the latter-day Pentecost. It was, they said, initiated, empowered, and directed by the Spirit. As such, it transcended every human tradition. Unlike many in the Holiness camp, however, few in the Apostolic Faith looked upon the reformation of Methodism as a worthwhile goal. Methodism, they believed, had been a forerunner of the latter-day Pentecost. It would flourish or wither as it embraced or rejected the new move of the Holy Spirit. They regarded themselves as the end-time counterpart of the apostles at Pentecost and considered the interval between the first and the twentieth centuries as a period of drought.16

The Methodist-Holiness movement, which had risen before the Civil War as an instrument of the revival of Christian perfection in the church, did not look upon perfect love as a grace for Methodists alone. Holiness, it said, was the birthright of all Christians. E. W. Pierce, sanctified in 1864 during a parsonage prayer-meeting in Wisconsin, articulated this widely-held conviction: "I ardently pray for the time to draw near when scriptural life-holiness shall be the accepted belief and practical experience in every denominational branch of the Christian Church."17 Champions agreed with John Freeman Owen who declared: "Holiness is God's choice and plan for us even if John Wesley had been a horse jockey and Hester Ann Rogers had been a fortune teller."18

Allegiance to the universality of Methodism's "peculiar" doctrine fueled Holiness desire to establish forums for its propagation outside the church. The most influential of these were the Tuesday Meeting for the Promotion of Holiness in New York and encampments of the National Camp Meeting Association for the Promotion of Holiness.19 So successful were these efforts that by 1886 more than two hundred cottage meetings, modeled after the one led by Sarah Lankford20 and Phoebe Palmer in New York, were being held weekly. That year the cumulative total of National Association tabernacle and camp meetings stood at seventy-six. Through them, the Holiness message spread throughout the English-speaking world.

Among those seeking entire sanctification in these meetings were wives of business and professional men and clergy of the established denominations on the eastern seaboard. None were recent converts. Most were first and second generation city dwellers far enough removed from the rigors of country life to idealize it and well enough grounded in the Scriptures and belles-lettres to internalize metaphors based on them. While other less spiritually-minded members of the "leisure class"21 devoted themselves to club life, earnest Methodists pursued the "interior life"22 in the parlors of like-minded city neighbors in winter and in mountain meadow and seaside23 encampments in summer. Holiness camp meetings were remembered as occasions of great blessing. Many had received the blessing of entire sanctification during a camp meeting and forever after regarded its precincts as an emblem of the experience. In a letter "To the Conference of the Friends of Holiness, to be held in Wesley Chapel, Cincinnati, Nov.27, 1877," Sheridan Baker described the connection in his own thinking between the grace of entire sanctification and the Holiness camp meeting:

By a case of obstinate Rheumatism, I have been almost entirely disabled for nearly all of the three past years. Though my sufferings have been very great at times, I have enjoyed a continuous and uninterrupted feast-a kind of "National Camp Meeting" in my soul all the time.24

The camp meeting, "a little heaven on the road to heaven,"25 was regarded by many Holiness saints as a glorious place from which to make one's departure for the better world. In 1918 an instance of such was reported by George N. Buell:

Brother Dick Albright went to glory at 10:30 o'clock this morning from the Wilmington, N.Y., camp, where he and his wife were laboring. We were singing "Lovelight All the Way." While we were singing the chorus, his head fell back, and in a moment he was gone. The "lovelight" had gone with him all the way. He had often said he wanted to go to glory from a camp meeting, and God gave him his wish.26

It was in these miheux that Victorian metaphors of Wesleyan doctrine and experience, such as Beulah Land, the Exodus, and the Altar of Sacrifice,27 were to be integrated into the hermeneutic of full salvation.

 

Images of Full Salvation

Wesleyan-Holiness apologists do not rely on metaphor in establishing doctrine. They, however, make extensive use of it pastorally.28 They dress the quest for sanctity in the cultural garments of the age, recalling the journey from sin to full salvation in a composite of images drawn from the Exodus, Isaiah's prophecy of the end of exile in the Land of Beulah,29 and John Bunyan's allegory of the "progress" of Christian from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City.30

They portray the entirely sanctified as modern-day Children of Israel who upon arrival in the Promised Land recount their flight from sinful bondage. Each stage is symbolic. The Red Sea crossing signifies forgiveness of sins ~ustification);31 the forty years in the Sinai wilderness, struggle with the disposition to sin (the carnal mind);32 the Jordan crossing,33 heart cleansing (entire sanctification); and the conquest of Canaan (the life of holiness). The Land of Beulah, a place from which Bunyan's pilgrim can see over into heaven, represents the rest of faith characteristic of the sanctified.34 Sojourn there gives one heaven-in-the-heart35 even in adverse circumstances.36 Holiness shines in the faces and marks the actions and ethics of all who reside in Beulah.37 They vote for prohibition and inscribe "Holiness unto the Lord" on the walls of their chapels to remind themselves of the fact.

The Exodus typology38 held endless fascination for Methodist Holiness song writers. In the course of a half century they explored every aspect of it. Stanzas which entwine several facets of the image, Scripture, doctrine, Pilgrim's Progress, camp meeting, and natural setting, are linked by a refrain of testimony or shouting. M. J. Harris' song "I've Pitched My Tent in Beulah," written in 1908 during a camp meeting at Hollow Rock near Toronto, Ohio, is representative:

I long ago left Egypt for the Promised Land,

I trusted in my Savior and to His guiding hand,

If fellowship here with my Lord can be So inexpressibly sweet,

O what will it be when his face we see,

When 'round the white throne we meet?

Usage in Holiness circles varied. At times Beulah simply meant marriage. On her third wedding anniversary, November 20, 1903, the Texas Methodist farm wife Elizabeth Woolsey Spruce wrote in her journal: "Another year of Beulah life for us has closed. How soon will we be in eternity!" See her Steps of a Good Man: a Personal Sketch of Elmer Spruce (Oklahoma City, 1986), 17.

He led me out to victory thro' the great red sea,39

I sang a song of triumph, and shouted, "I am free."

Refrain: You need not look for me down in Egypt's sand,

For I have pitched my tent far up in Beulah land;

You need not look for me down in Egypt's sand,

For I have pitched my tent far up in Beulah land.

I followed close beside Him and the land soon found,

I did not halt or tremble, for Canaan I was bound,

My Guide I fully trusted and He led me in,

I shouted, "Hallelujah, my heart is free from sin.

I started for the highlands where the fruits abound,

I pitched my tent near Hebron, there grapes of eschol found.

With milk and honey flowing, and new wine so free,

I have no love for Egypt. It has no charms for me.

Mrs. Harris' singer is no utopian as she sets out for the eternal city. Outwardly, the way for the sanctified is the same as for others. The difference, she believes, is an undivided heart symbolized by Beulah, the place of constancy in the internal terrain from which the sanctified can see over into heaven.

My heart is so enraptured as I press along.

Each day I find new blessings, which fill my heart with song.

I'm ever marching onward to that land on high.

Some day I'll reach my mansion that's builded in the sky.

She is in fact remarkably like Bunyan's Christian, who, late in his "progress,"40 passes through Vanity Fair, a place identical in every particular to the City of Destruction from whence he had come. Vanity Fair and the City of Destruction are in fact the same place. It is Christian who has changed. Metaphorically the entirely sanctified have heaven-in-the-heart as they wander the wilderness of this world.41

 

Pentecost Reenacted

For their part, the fathers and mothers of the Apostolic Faith were caught up in what they believed to be the fulfillment of biblical prophecies. In particular, the relationship between the Pentecosts of the first and' twentieth centuries dominated the thinking of disciples of Charles Fox Parham and William J. Seymour. Drawn from the fringes of society,42 these step-children of the Methodist-Holiness movement focused on spiritual power. Workers all in every-night missions, healing homes and training schools attached to them in Topeka, Houston, Los Angeles and elsewhere, these devotees expected to see Pentecost reenacted in every service. "The Comforter has Come!" (c1890), a Methodist-Holiness song with a didactic text by Francis Bottome (1823-1894) and a repetitive setting by William J. Kirkpatrick (1838-1921), is reputed to have been sung at every service during the Azusa Street revival in Los Angeles.43 Seekers received the baptism of the Holy Spirit after the manner of Acts 2. They "tarried" for the enduement of power in an "upper" room. They sang in the heavenly choir. They were "slain by the Spirit." Some thought they spoke in foreign languages unknown to them. Some abandoned medical treatment and took the Lord alone as healer. Some were rebaptized by immersion in order to be "buried with Christ in baptism."

Focus on this tie was characteristic of their defenders as well. Reliance on it prompted D. Wesley Myland in 1910 to append a chart showing rainfall in Palestine from 1861 to 1907 to his work on the typology of the latter rain,44 and led B. F. Lawrence in 1916 to excuse modern "abusers of the gift" by citing those "in the Corinthian Church." He explained:

There are abuses of the gift among us; there were in the Corinthian Church. If ours are therefore false, so were theirs. We are sometimes condemned as heretical, but we are the only body of Christians on earth to whom the 12th and 14th chapters of 1st Cor. are applicable; we are the only body of Christians on earth who do not forbid to speak with tongues.45

For both the individual believer and the movement, tongues had become the talisman of Apostolic authenticity and Pentecostal power, the seal of the Holy Spirit which could never be taken away.

This mind-set was to be reflected in the titles of Pentecostal apologetical works for over half a century. These include: The Phenomenon of Pentecost (1916), by Frank Ewart; The Apostolic Faith Restored (1916), by B. E Lawrence; How "Pentecost" Came to Los Angeles (1925), by Frank Bartleman; With Signs Following (1926), by Stanley H. Frodsham; The Promise Fulfilled (1961), by Klaude Kendrick; and Suddenly from Heaven (1961), by Carl Brumback.46 In the new movement the phenomenological supplanted the metaphorical. In it tongues became both sign47 and symbol of the baptism of the Holy Spirit.

 

Recent Times of Testing

For inhabitants of the Beulah Land and the Upper Room, the first four decades of the new century were both the best and the worst of times. For mature Wesleyan-Holiness people, the example of flesh-and-blood saints and the impact of internalized symbols were at the height of their power. The elders had been nurtured directly or indirectly by the National Holiness evangelists-preachers immensely skilled in the use of "tropes, figures, comparisons, metaphors, similes, and other figures which have captured the imagination of the masses from time immemorial"48-and could still be moved to the depths by the dying words of Alfred Cookman: "Sweeping through the gates washed in the blood of the Lamb," and of John S. Inskip: "I am, O Lord, wholly and forever Thine," declarations of high-mindedness at the time of utterance and well within the canon of plausibility.

For their children, however, the situation had vastly changed. Increasingly isolated devotees of the piety and culture of the Methodist-Holiness golden age, they eagerly shouldered the responsibility of perpetuating the doctrine and experience of entire sanctification, but found the decade-after-decade maintenance of a vocabulary of obscure hyperbole ever-more confining. They faced the prospect of rearing children in a Rousseauist environment devoid of appeal to sentiment, moral certainty, and sacred metaphor. Distrustful of current pedagogical trends and sensing that children taught to read by "Dick and Jane" found figurative aspects of the Exodus and of the saga of Bunyan's pilgrim incomprehensible, holiness advocates turned to other facets of the example of Methodism in the previous century.

Safety, they believed, lay in building defenses about both message and ministry. To this end, the new Holiness churches replaced the age-old declaration required of Methodist ordinands, that they expected to be made "perfect" in this life, with one attesting to present enjoyment of the grace of entire sanctification. The churches also restated and expanded the Methodist General Rules to cover vicissitudes of the new age. In this framework, ethical rigorism characterized much of the preaching. Sons and daughters of the saints replaced outsiders as the focus of evangelism.

Introspection now became the hallmark of Holiness youth. Reacting to the death-knell warnings which interfaced with allusions to the Shekinah glory of times now past and passing,49 Holiness children at times recounted experiences of guilt not unlike that of Epenetus Owen (1815-1890), who "when quite young" fell under "deep conviction of sin."

One night he could not rest, his sins so troubled him; and not having succeeded in carrying out his resolves to do better, he called his mother and said to her, "I am so wicked I cannot sleep. I did not mind you, and was naughty to the children. What shall I do? I am afraid I shall be lost.50

Heart searching was not confined to the unconverted. Those seeking after entire sanctification were driven to introspection as well, and the rugged terrain traversed by seekers on the "death route" to the "second blessing" nearly eclipsed the vistas of the promised land of perfect love. Heavy reliance was placed on Mrs. Palmer's altar covenant, which likened entire consecration to ritual sacrifice in the Old Testament. Seekers after entire sanctification were instructed to "lay on the altar" time, talents, ambitions, even the "unknown bundle," and to "take the way with the Lord's despised few."51 Thorough-going consecration, they thought, would bring one into union with God, the church, and God-fearing parents.52 For some, this concerted and prolonged crusade to save from worldly conformity the children of the Holiness faithful had quite the opposite actual effect from that intended. Simple acts of adolescent rebellion in this era foreshadowed wholesale rejection of many of the convictions and standards of the elders in the decades following World War II.

For the Apostolic Faith, these decades were a time of testing when miracles of healing and charismatic personalities would share center stage. Differences over the prospect and process of sanctification, the nature of the Godhead and the formula used in baptism, the replacement of tongues with healing as the primary focus, and the excesses of some of its leaders would shake the very foundations of the new movement.

Tongues and prophecy posed unanticipated practical and theological problems. Some at the Azusa Street Mission in Los Angeles declared the banishment by the Spirit of race discrimination, only to see within months its reappearance in a split along racial lines, the result being a competing fellowship then formed by departing w~ites a few blocks away. Until they tested it, a few, including the former "Burning Bush" evangelist A. G. Garr, believed that the tongue they had been given was a foreign language usable in evangelism. They set out posthaste as missionaries to distant lands, trusting providence alone for sustenance. Others, upon discovering that in Acts baptism always was "in the name of Jesus," insisted on being re-baptized by that formula. Many gave up belief in the Trinity as well.53

For Methodist-Holiness observers, who from the beginning viewed the newer movement with a jaundiced eye, developments of the intervening decades served only to confirm suspicions concerning it. Few converts to the tongues-speaking group ever returned and Holiness people for the most part shunned even casual contact with it. Believing that the gift of the Holy Spirit always results in holiness of life, they wondered why moral failure was so frequent among recipients of the "baptism" evidenced by tongues. They believed the new Pentecost to be a ciude caricature of the original and pursuit of the phenomenon of the latter rain a tragic sidetrack from the quest for sanctity.54

Spectacles of the miraculous had become commonplace. The command to "heal" of tent evangelist and radio preacher had long ago drowned out the groans in "tarrying" meetings of seekers after the "baptism." Tongues as the initial sign to all of the baptism of the Holy Spirit was now thought to be distinct from tongues as a gift to some for the edification of the church. Speaking in tongues both as evidence and gift was now held to be the sine qua non of ministry,55 a prerequisite which Pentecostal adjudicatories monitoring preparation for ordination steadfastly refused to compromise. The gift of tongues and a winsome personality now appeared to take precedence over blameless conduct or solid preparation as prerequisites for leadership. Evangelists and faith healers were preferred over settled pastors, the charismatic over the ordered ministry. Both preparation and organization were ad hoc. The Pentecostal minister was first and foremost a pragmatic leader.

Pentecostals, for their part, regarded Holiness rebuffs to their aggressiveness as resistance to the Spirit Himself. They gloried in bridge-burning responses to their invitation of "there's more" by some entirely sanctified brothers and sisters and treasured the presence of former Holiness people in high places among them as a validation of the new movement. Increasingly, Pentecostal compatriots viewed the behavioral standards of the entirely sanctified as puritanical and regarded focus on such as works-righteousness. Yet tongues-speaking groups relied almost solely on the musical repertoire of the Methodist-Holiness parent and sang with unabated zeal of the Land of Beulah and the Altar of Sacrifice56 until past mid-century. Had they been so inclined, they could have noted how the out-of-fashion mind-set and the introspective bent of the older group seemed in fact to have saved it from full participation in the literalist tide which, during these years, swept over both conservative Protestantism and glossolalic Pentecostalism.

In future years, materialism, worldliness, and the pressures of modern life would chip away at the distinctives of both groups. Reenactment of the text of Scripture, metaphorically or literally, would no longer be in the realm of expectation for either. Yet, as at the beginning, the gulf created by tongues-speaking as the initial physical evidence of the baptism of the Holy Spirit remained. It is the conviction of all in the Upper Room that this was that foretold by the Prophet Joel which enabled them to weather the storms that repeatedly have swept the Pentecostal landscape. It is the proclamation of this corollary of phenomenological reenactment which continues to mute communication between the hosts of Beulah Land and those of the Upper Room.

 


Notes

1Future Pentecostals stood outside the established structures of the Holiness movement as well. Many had expected the General Holiness Assembly of 1901 to result in a distinctively Holiness church. Nearly all elements of the Methodist-inspired movement in North America were represented. Of the 123 endorsing and 229 attending the meeting, however, only three were destined to have ties with Pentecostalism. They were Abbie C. Morrow (Brown), evangelist and editor of the Sunday School Illustrator, New York [endorsed]; M. L. Ryan, editor of Light, Salem, Oregon [endorsed]; and Mrs. E. R. Wheaton, prison evangelist, Tabor, Iowa [attended]. See S. B. Shaw, ed., Echoes of the General Holiness Assembly Held in Chicago, May 3-]3, ]90] (Chicago, 1901), 12-14, 23-27.

2See Donald G. Mathews, "Evangelical America-the Methodist Ideology" in R. E. Richey and K. E. Rowe, eds., Rethinking Methodist History: A Bicentennial Historical Consultation (Nashville: Kingswood Books, 1985), 91-99.

3"Pentecostal" was continued in the title of the Louisville paper edited by the Methodist-Holiness evangelist Henry Clay Morrison (1857-1942) until his death.

4Stanley Johannesen of the University of Waterloo believes that Pentecostalism destroys metaphor. See his "Remembering and Observing: Modes of Interpreting Pentecostal Experience and Language," a paper given at the 20th annual meeting of the Society for Pentecostal Studies, Dallas, 1990.

5Apostolic Faith, the name first preferred by both proponents and opponents of glossolalic Pentecostalism, also was the title of early Pentecostal papers published in Topeka, Houston, and Los Angeles. This designation is used here to distinguish glossolalic Pentecostals from Wesleyan-Holiness people who, from the 1 890s on, often used Pentecostal in theological discourse, nomenclature, and self-description.

6From Charles Wesley's hymn "Love Divine, All Loves Excelling" (1747).

7Letter of John Wesley to Robert Carr Brackenbury, September 15, 1790.

8See Jesse T. Peck's much-reprinted, often-abridged The Central Idea of Christianity (Boston: Henry V. Degen, 1858).

9See, for example, William McDonald and Lewis Hartsough, eds., Beulah Songs (Philadelphia: National Publishing Association for the Promotion of Holiness, 1879).

105ee S. Olin Garrison, ed., Forty Witnesses, Covering the Whole Range of Christian Experience (New York: Eaton & Mains; Cincinnati: Curts & Jennings, 1888).

11William Taylor (1821-1902) created this paradigm of sanctification in Infancy and Manhood of Christian Life (New York: Phillips and Hunt, 1867).

12See Donald Dayton, Theological Roots of Pentecostalism (Metuchen, N. B.: Scarecrow Press, 1987), 87-113.

13See Ernest R. Sandeen, The Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American Millenarianism, 1800-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970); and Timothy P. Weber, Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming: American Premillennialism, 1875-1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).

14See Edith Lydia Waldvogel (Blumhofer), "The Overcoming Life': a Study in the Reformed Evangelical Origins of Pentecostalism," Ph.D. thesis, Harvard University, 1977. "Reformed" as used here is an extremely inclusive term. It includes dispensationalism and premillennialism and the teachings of John Nelson Darby (1800-1882), Charles Grandison Finney (1792-1875), Albert Benjamin Simpson (1843-1919), and John Alexander Dowie (1847-1907). "Non-Wesleyan" would probably be a more appropriate designation.

15"Be glad then, ye children of Zion, and rejoice in the Lord your God: for he hath given you the former rain moderately, and he will cause to come down for you the rain, the former rain, and the latter rain in the first month." See also Job 29:29; Proverbs 16:15; Jeremiah 3:3, 5:24; Hosea 6:3; Zechariah 10:1; James 5:7.

16B. F. Lawrence, The Apostolic Faith Restored (St. Louis, Mo.: Gospel Publishing House, 1916), 116-119; and F. W. Farrar, Darkness and Dawn; or, Scenes in the Days of Nero: an Historic Tale (New York: Longmans, Green, 1892, c1891), 162-169. In an appendix Lawrence reprinted "The Glossolalia in the Early Church: Historical [!J Description from the Writings of [F. W. Farrar] the Late Dean of Canterbury," by C. E. D. de L., which included a long excerpt from a novel by Dean Farrar set in the days of Nero. The author of the article expressed amazement that an Anglican, writing at such "long distance both of time and of spiritual power and experience" "from the Ancient Church," could portray with such accuracy that which he as a Pentecostal had seen in his own time.

17 See Phoebe Palmer, ed., Pioneer Experiences; or, The Gift of Power Received by Faith (New York: W. C. Palmer, Jr., 1868), 195.

18John Lakin Brasher, Glimpses (Cincinnati: Revivalist Press, c1954), 60.

19For history of the National Association, see Charles Edwin Jones, Perfectionist Persuasion: the Holiness Movement and American Methodism, 1867-1936 (Metuchen, N. I.: Scarecrow Press, 1974); and Delbert R. Rose, A Theology of Christian Experience (Wilmore, Ky.: Seminary Press, 1958): revised and reissued by the Bethany Fellowship, Minneapolis, in 1965 and 1975. The 1975 edition has the title Vital Holiness: a Theology of Christian Experience.

20Sarah Lankford (1806-1896) and Phoebe Palmer (1807-1874) were sisters. After Phoebe's death, Sarah married Walter Palmer.

21Thorstein Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class: an Economic Study of Institutions, published in 1899, describes the society created by sudden wealth and secularization. The shift of passion from piety to leisure can be traced easily in the careers of alumni of Wesleyan University, whose presidents Wilbur Fisk (1792-1839), Stephen Olin (1797-1851), and Cyrus David Foss (1834-1910) had been Holiness men. By the end of the century nine-tenths of its students were housed in fraternities. In 1907 the school severed its tie with the Methodist Episcopal Church. See David B. Potts, Wesleyan University, 1831-1910: Collegiate Enterprise in New England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).

22In 1846 Bowdoin College professor Thomas C. Upham (1799-1872) published his Principles of the Interior Life, which by reprinting and abridgment came to be regarded as a holiness classic. Congregationalist Upham first came into contact with the movement in 1839 through his wife's Methodist new-found friends Sarah Lankford and Phoebe Palmer in New York. See Timothy L. Smith, Revivalism and Social Reform in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Abingdon Press, 1957), 105.

23 The seaside locations of the Ocean Grove, New Jersey, and Old Orchard, Maine, camp meetings led song-writers to unique allusive connections. In all likelihood Phoebe Palmer was an early camper at Ocean Grove. Christian and Missionary Alliance founder A. B. Simpson was an evangelist long associated with Old Orchard Beach. In the refrain of Palmer's "The Cleansing Wave," surfing in the incoming tide appears to represent the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Mrs Palmer testifies:

The cleansing stream, I see, I see!

I plunge, and oh, it cleanseth me!

Oh! Praise the Lord, it cleanseth me,

It cleanseth me, yes, cleanseth me.

Simpson, on the other hand, seems to regard the ocean as a metaphor for the mystery and grandeur of God. In "Launch Out," he advises the spiritually minded to abandon human wisdom and to lay caution aside. He explains:

The mercy of God is an ocean divine,

A boundless and fathomless flood;

Launch out in the deep, cut away the shoreline

And be lost in the fullness of God.

24See Proceedings of Holiness Conferences Held at Cincinnati, November 26th, 1877, and at New York, December 17th, 1877 (Philadelphia: National Publishing Association for the Promotion of Holiness, 1878), 19-22.

25John L. Brasher on the Hollow Rock Camp Meeting near Toronto, Ohio. Quoted in I. Lawrence Brasher, The Sanctified South: John Lakin Brasher and the Holiness Movement (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, c1994), 95.

26See Herald of Holiness (Kansas City), 7 (Aug.14, 1918), 14.

27Phoebe Palmer's chief contribution to Methodist-Holiness pastoral theology was the so-called Altar Covenant. In an analogy based on Romans 12:1 ("I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service"), Mrs. Palmer likened the seeker to an offering placed on the altar of the Holy of Holies. As in the Old Testament where the sacrifice was sanctified when it touched the altar, so now the justified believer has the right to claim heart purity the moment consecration has fully been made, for the altar sanctifies the gift. The Altar Covenant was used with seekers after entire sanctification for more than a century. The struggle in the spiritual life of Mrs. Palmer which caused her to develop it is recorded in Thomas C. Oden, ed., Phoebe Palmer: Selected Writings (New York: Paulist Press, 1988), 107-130.

28Evangelists Beverly Carradine (1848-1931) and William B. Godbey (1833-1920) made extensive use of metaphor. See, for example, Carradine's The Second Blessing in Symbol (Columbia, S. C.: L. L. Pickett, ci 893). The scholarly, eccentric Godbey was one the harshest critics of Pentecostalism. See his Tongue Movement, Satanic (Zarephath, N.J.: Pillar of Fire, 1918).

29A figure of unwavering faithfulness in Isaiah 62:4 (AV): "Thou shalt no more be termed Forsaken; neither shall thy land any more be termed Desolate: but thou shalt be called Hephzibah, and thy land Beulah: for the Lord delighteth in thee, and thy land shall be married." The twentieth-century preference for the literal over the metaphorical is apparent in the Revised Standard Version of the Old Testament (c1952) which renders the Hebrew words Hephzibah and Beulah, "My delight is in her" and "married."

30Pilgrim's Progress had an immense readership in the United States in the nineteenth century. See David E. Smith, John Bunyan in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966).

31See Carradine, "The Two Crossings" in The Second Blessing in Symbol, 57-63.

32See G. A. McLaughlin, Inbred Sin (Boston: McDonald & Gill, 1887); and S. S. White, Eradication: Defined, Explained, Authenticated (Kansas City, Mo.: Beacon Hill Press, 1954).

33See Carradine, "The Two Crossings" in The Second Blessing in Symbol, 57-63. Celebrated by I. G. Martin (1862-1957) in "Out of Egypt into Canaan" (c1907):

I'm over the Jordan tide,

The waters did there divide; I'm in the land of Canaan, Abundantly satisfied.

34See Brasher, The Sanctified South, 99. In her song "'Tis Marvelous and Wonderful" (c1919), Mr. C. H. Morris (1862-1929) testifies to the euphoria which she as a sanctified pilgrim experienced and anticipated:

"Twas only a foretaste of joys divine

In Canaan waiting for me,

Where sweetest of honey and milk and wine

Were dripping from every tree.

35Heaven-in-the-heart motif is endemic to the Holiness message. Note Mrs. Palmer's use of it in "The-Cleansing Wave":

Amazing grace! 'Tis heaven below

To feel the blood applied,

And Jesus, only Jesus know, My Jesus crucified.

36All was not euphoria. See Mary Mabbette Anderson, Lights and Shadows of the Life in Canaan (Columbia, S. C.: I. M. Pike, 1906). In 1929 this work was reissued by the Pentecostal Holiness Church in Toronto.

37Brasher, The Sanctified South, 150.

38See Martin Wells Knapp, Out of Egypt into Canaan; or, Lessons in Spiritual Geography (Boston: McDonald, Gill & Co.; Albion, Mi.: Revivalist Publishing Co., 1889, c1887); Beverly Carradine, Beulah Land (Chicago: Christian Witness Co., 1904); and James Blame Chapman, The Terminology of Holiness (Kansas City, Mo.: Beacon Hill Press, 1947), 87-89, 91. For analysis, see Laurence W. Wood, Pentecostal Grace (Wilmore, Ky.: Francis Asbury Publishing Co., 1980), 37-100; and Jones, Perfectionist Persuasion, 35-46.

391t is possible that "red sea" is set in lower case to permit an alternative reading of "blood of Christ." Similar treatment of "eschol" in the third stanza would seem to indicate careless editing instead.

40Christopher Hill suggests that the pilgrimage of Christian, a member of the true royal priesthood, was inspired by the circuit "progress" of James I and Warden Woodward in Bunyan's time. A royal progress started and ended at the same point. See A Tinker and a Poor Man: John Bunyan and His Church, 1628-1688 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989, c1988), 222.

41 See Jones, Perfectionist Persuasion, 40-41. In 1882 R. Kelso Carter, a Holiness man, revised "Deliverance Will Come." In its final stanza the new song, "The Blood-washed Pilgrim," describes the sojourner's arrival in heaven, where upon passing over "the threshold," he discovers that

The Crown, the Throne, the Sceptre,

The Name, the Stone so White, Were his, who found in Jesus, The yoke and burden light.

425ee Robert Mapes Anderson, Vision of the Disinherited: the Making of American Pentecostalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).

43The song lent itself to double-entendre. The first two lines of the second stanza provide an example of potential readings available to singers of the two movements.

The long, long night is past,

The morning breaks at last;

And hush'd the dreadful wail

And fury of the blast.

To a Holiness singer, the night of sin and of double-mindedness is past. To a pentecostal singer, the long night of spiritual drought has ended and the latter-rain Pentecost has begun. It was not included in Songs of Pentecostal Fellowship (1924), the first song book published by the General Council of the Assemblies of God.

44For exposition see D. Wesley Myland, The Latter Rain Covenant and Pentecostal Power, with Testimony of Healings and Baptism (Chicago: Evangel Publishing House, 1910). The rainfall chart, pages 178-179, includes an explanatory letter from Jabob Eliahu of the American Colony dated Jan.12, 1909. See analysis in D. William Faupel, The Everlasting Gospel: the Significance of Eschatology in the Development of Pentecostal Thought (Ph.D. dissertation), University of Birmingham, 1989, 62-70; and Dayton, Theological Roots of Pentecostalism, 26-28, 32-33.

45Lawrence, The Apostolic Faith Restored, 29.

46For history of an attempt to recapture the typology, see Richard Michael Riss, The Latter Rain Movement of 1948 and the Mid-Twentieth Century Evangelical Awakening, M. A. thesis, Regent College, 1979.

47Mark 16:17-18 (AV): "And these signs shall follow them that believe: In my name they shall cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; they shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover." Note in the New International Version: "The two most reliable early manuscripts do not have Mark 16:9-20."

48Quoted in Brasher, The Sanctified South, 118, from an August 1897 article in, Telephone (Waco, Texas) concerning the recent session of a Holiness camp meeting there.

495ee B. S. Taylor's poem, "Forty Years Ago: the Old Camp-Meeting Times" [1914], in Jones, Pe~ecuonist Persuasion, 143.

50M. N. Downing, "Obituary [of] Rev. Epen[e]tus Owen," in Epenetus Owen, Sunshine: or Sermons, Poems and Sayings (Utica, N.Y.: 1890), 253.

51Phrase from "I'm Going Through, Jesus," by Herbert Buffum (1879-1939), a song often used in Holiness altar services. Ironically, the composer, successively a worker in the Volunteers of America and the Church of the Nazarene, spent the last three decades of his life working among Pentecostal groups. See Haldor Lillenas, Modern Gospel Song Stories (Kansas City, Mo.: Lillenas Publishing Co., 1952), 71

52Both George McGovern and Gary Hart were reared in the Holiness movement. McGovern, the son of a Wesleyan Methodist pastor in South Dakota, traces his reaction to it in Grassroots: the Autobiography of George McGovern (New York: Random House, 1977), 3-17. The impact of the Church of the Nazarene on Hart is charted perceptively (if at times inaccurately) by Garry Wills, a Roman Catholic, in his Under God: Religion and Modern Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), 29-50.

53W. J. Hollenweger, The Pentecostals: the Charismatic Movement in the Churches (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1972), 31-32.

54See W. T. Purkiser, "Sanctification and Signs," in his Conflicting Concepts of Holiness: Some Current Issues in the Doctrine of Sanctification (Kansas City, Mo., Beacon Hill Press, 1953), 63-81.

55The struggle over this issue by Wayne A. Robinson, son of a pioneer Pentecostal Holiness minister, is recounted in his I Once Spoke in Tongues (Atlanta: Forum Rouse Publishers, 1973), 35-45.

56Phoebe Palmer had almost been forgotten. Her Altar Covenant, however, was in universal use. "Is Your All on the Altar" (c1905), a popular invitation song by Elisha A. Hoffman (1839-1929), is representative of many in the Holiness repertoire based on it.



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