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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at Northwest Nazarene University
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