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Preface to Wesleyan Ideological History
1.1 Wesley and High Protestantism
1.2 An Archaeology of Wesley's Thinking
2.1 Methodist Ideology in the Early 1800s
2.2 Founding Perspectives of the Wesleyan Methodist Connection
2.3 The Birth of the American Holiness Movement
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1. The turn of the century (1900) was a time of conflicting eschatologies. The Wesleyan Methodists were postmillennial in their founding. They were activists who believed in changing society to look more and more like the kingdom of God. Slavery was wrong so needed to be ended. Similarly, women should be empowered to preach and vote like men. At the end of the 1800s, there was a spirit of inevitable progress in the world.
Accompanying this progress was the acceleration of foreign missions. The Methodist movement had always been evangelistic. The young Wesley himself had come to Georgia as a missionary. Now, as "manifest destiny" held that the United States should take over the entire continent, Methodism followed closely to the west with missions. And as the US increasingly forced open trade overseas in places like Japan and Korea, missions soon followed. Foreign missions fit the spirit of manifest destiny.
Interestingly, women played a crucial role in much of this mission work. Some of the most important mission organizations of the late 1800s were run by women. This was true for the Methodists, for the Free Methodists, and for a century, Wesleyan missions were heavily powered by the "Women's Missionary Society." One wonders if men were less worried about what went on overseas, so this was an area where women could have more freedom to lead. So lead they often did.
At first, the eschatology in play was postmillenial. Christianity should spread throughout the whole world as part of the world getting ready for the arrival of the kingdom of God. The flavor was one of taking over the world, in religion as in politics -- colonialization, in other words.
There's little question but that the participants in these missions genuinely wanted to see the world come to Christ and be saved. At the same time, we exported American Christian culture as well. Brainerd "Indian" School in South Dakota had Native American women in buns and skirts without make-up or jewelry -- looking just like the holiness women missionaries. If there were African or Native American dances that were part of those cultures, they were prohibited because dancing was not allowed in American holiness circles.
That is to say, there was a lack of understanding of culture -- both the missionary's own and that of the target countries -- among these early missionaries. Indeed, these missionaries generally received no training at all. The "faith principle" expected them also to go overseas immediately without having raised any support. Many died from diseases their bodies had never encountered.
2. But there was a new eschatology on the block too in the late 1800s, one that would increasingly capture much of the American church. From its very beginning, the Pilgrim movement would be premillennial and dispensational. The cultural influence at play was the arrival of John Nelson Darby on the scene in the late 1800s.
Darby had stitched together a new and ingenious system of end-times preaching, weaving together passages from Daniel, Revelation, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, Mark 13, Ezekiel 37, and beyond. This was a new eschatological brew that had never existed in the history of Christianity. But it was ingenious and had the enticing flavor of secret knowledge.
Things would get worse and worse until there would be a rapture of all Christians. Then a seven-year Tribulation would ensue with an Antichrist. During this time, God would finish up his business with Israel, playing out the seventieth "week" of Daniel 9. The temple would be rebuilt. Sacrifices would resume. There would be a final battle between Magog and Israel. The scheme was modified in 1948 when Israel was reconstituted as a nation ahead of schedule.
This eschatology had a completely different flavor than the postmillennialism that had preceded it. Most significantly, it entailed a pessimism about the direction of the world. The return of Christ had always been part of Christian expectation, but pre-millennialism expected Christ to return very, very soon. It hyped up a vigilant eye on current events, expecting the worst, and seeing every earthquake or rumor of war as a sign that it was about to happen.
This paradigm permeated my childhood in the Pilgrim Holiness Church and my strand of the Wesleyan Church. Even today, you will regularly see posts about us being in the end times. Of course, we could be, but people somehow don't notice that we've been seeing the end times in the bushes for 150 years. People have set dates over and over again with a 100% failure rate. There was a famous book, Eighty-Eight Reasons Why the Lord Is Coming Back in 1988.
My family wondered if FDR could be the Antichrist. They wondered if JFK could be the Antichrist. People wondered if Obama could be the Antichrist, and this recent election cycle has seen any number of people saying that the signs make it clear that we are in the end times. But we've been saying these things over and over for well over a century. Somehow, we haven't noticed the pattern of our culture. (I've evaluated these biblical interpretations in this book.)
We may be in the end times. But I also won't be surprised if I live past 100. Jesus will return. But let's work till Jesus comes.
One revivalist of the late 1800s who particularly spread this "dispensationalist" view was D. L. Moody, who evangelized in parallel with the holiness movement, at one point even testifying to entire sanctification. His theology might be summarized as a "lifeboat" theology. The world is like a sinking ship. There's nothing you can do to save the ship. We just need to get as many people into the lifeboats as possible.
These sorts of cultural forces have an effect on our thinking of which we probably aren't aware. And, if we grow up with them, they make us unthinkingly behave in a certain way. We may not realize that there is even another way to think. We may automatically assume that those who think differently are heretical or perverse. Meanwhile, we are being tossed along without knowing it.
For example, this line of thinking tends to shut down any focus on changing the world for the better. As we'll see in the next installment, our engagement with the world becomes almost entirely limited to evangelism of the soul. Possible social dimensions of the good news are eliminated and even demonized. That is seen as a "social gospel" rather than a true gospel.
Missions also changes from conquering the world for Christ to trying to get as many people saved as possible before the Lord returns. Meanwhile, the corruption and pollution of governments and the world becomes expected. "Christ against culture" in Niebuhr's scheme becomes the name of the game. Our expectation that the world will get worse and worse can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
3. The Pilgrim Holiness Church was thoroughly founded in these waters. This was one of those minor tensions in the merger with the Wesleyan Methodists, although perhaps most Wesleyan Methodists had also become pre-millennial by that time. However, the merger had the wisdom not to specify a particular view on the end times in its founding Discipline. It simply affirmed that Christ is coming again.
The Pilgrim Holiness Church was officially founded in 1922, the coming together of several smaller groups that sometimes had come out of another church and sometimes were still in that other church but were meeting as a movement on the side. Older histories often point to 1897 and the founding of the International Holiness Union and Prayer League as the beginning. Perhaps more accurately, that was the beginning of the most prominent group that would become the Pilgrim church.
The beginning took place in the front room of the house of a man named Martin Wells Knapp. That house is now on the campus of God's Bible School in Cincinnati. Also in the room was Seth C. Rees, an "Earth Quaker" of a man who often brought controversy along with his many conversions and experiences of entire sanctification.
Rees had originally been a Quaker, although he did not have the temperament of a Quaker. It is sometimes forgotten that there was a fairly significant Quaker component to the early Pilgrim church. My own grandfather would be one example. When the Pilgrims officially organized, both of my grandfathers were there. Both had been involved with another small group in Indiana that joined the new denomination, the Holiness Christian Church.
Given this Quaker element, the Pilgrims did not emphasize baptism. Again, we have some of the minor tensions at merger. The Wesleyan Methodists brought forward infant baptism from their Methodist roots. The Pilgrims brought forward a nonchalant attitude toward baptism because of Quaker elements. Meanwhile, Baptistic influences on modern Wesleyans make it difficult to imagine that anyone would baptize a child or not baptize at all. All of them were/are simply riding the waves of Christian subcultures without realizing it.
3. Knapp would die in 1901, perhaps under suspicious circumstances. Rees would leave the Holiness Union in a huff and get into a mess in Pasadena, California with the Nazarenes. Keith Drury wrote a brilliant piece giving the Nazarene and the Rees side to the story. As I read the Nazarene side, Rees comes across as some of my Pilgrim relatives who were sometimes difficult -- always seeing "sin in the camp," always finding heresy in so and so's teaching or preaching. Difficult people who sometimes sowed dissension.
There was a highly charismatic flavor to Pilgrim worship. There was shouting, running the aisles -- some even did some "holy jumping." It was highly emotional preaching.
The Pentecostal movement actually came out of this soil. In fact, the holiness movement would struggle a little because the new tongues-speakers used a lot of the same language -- baptism in the Holy Spirit, for example. They would try to sharply distinguish themselves from the new Pentecostals, leading to some of the strong anti-tongues sentiment in the Wesleyan Church. It has only been in recent days that the Wesleyan Church has toned down what used to be a virulent anti-tongues posture.
Once again we see that our positions often have everything to do with historical circumstances. We forget the historical and cultural origins of these sentiments -- if we ever realized them. Then we pass strong sentiments on to the next generation, who thinks they are just reading the Bible and doing what it says.
The Pilgrim Holiness Church finally came together as much for practical reasons as any. The original groups had much more the flavor of a movement than a church. The first Manual was three pages long, the first of which was a title page. But in 1922, we organized not least so that Pilgrim ministers could qualify for a ministerial train discount.
Helping the poor and those in squalor remained a strong emphasis of Pilgrims and Wesleyans in this period. In Cincinnati, the Holiness Union addressed those in the slums, those in prison, and those in the hospital. There was no division between helping people spiritually and helping people economically or socially (see Rees' book, Miracles in the Slums).
Camp meetings were core events for the Pilgrims and the Wesleyan Methodists. At least once a year, families would meet at the appropriate camp meeting in their area for a week, hearing preachers morning, afternoon, and evening.
4. The flavor of the Wesleyan Methodists and Pilgrims in this period was quite different. The WMs were more structured and less emotional. The Pilgrims were revivalists and quite entrepreneurial. Both founded several colleges, but the Wesleyan Methodist ones were of a higher academic caliber and had a better survival rate. Several of the WM colleges became liberal arts institutions (e.g., Houghton, SWU, IWU), while the Pilgrim ones tended to be Bible colleges (Frankfort, Miltonvale). You can see which institutions survived better.
The origins of the Pilgrim Holiness Church fall in the same era as the founding of the Nazarene Church, and you can see above that Seth Rees danced with both. Phineas Bresee founded the first Nazarene church in LA, California in 1895. All the same marks were there as the founding of the WMs and Free Methodists -- clash with a ME bishop, insistence on preaching holiness "old school" rather than the "new school" respectability.
In Bresee's case, he had been appointed to a mission in LA and the bishop refused to reappoint him. Here again we see that helping the poor was an essential part of the holiness movement at this time. Bresee was also a vigorous supporter of women in full ministry, while the ME church would only let them be deacons at that time.
This quote from Rees captures the absolute support of women in ministry among the early Pilgrims: "Nothing but jealousy, prejudice and bigotry and a stingy love for bossing in men have prevented women’s public recognition by the church. No church that is acquainted with the Holy Ghost will object to the public ministry of women." The founders of the Free Methodist and Nazarene churches agreed.
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