2.1 Voting as kingdom citizens -- unconditional loyalty

A few days ago I started a new series on the question, "What Would Jesus Vote?" (WWJV). The first post asked if Jesus even would vote: 

1. Would Jesus Even Vote?

I thought he would in our world, although it wasn't an option in the first century. 

We now begin to answer the question. The first answer is that Jesus would vote as a kingdom citizen.

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Unconditional Loyalty
1. I've given words as a minister at several burials for individuals who were once soldiers. To honor them, a team of veterans came to give a gun salute, and a flag was presented to the family. These were very meaningful ceremonies, and the flags the families keep are precious.

From time to time, I have gotten an uneasy feeling when the "Christian" part of the ceremony felt like a formality, and the American part seemed to be the truly important part to those present. That is to say, there have been times when it felt like the "religious fervor" for the American part was far stronger than the fervor for prayer to God or the reading of the Scripture. The feeling was something like, "Hurry up, preacher, so we can get to the good stuff." 

The feeling is a little like when the person who has died was a Freemason. Pastors are instructed to make sure that the Freemason ceremony is distinct from the Christian part of the burial. Those ceremonies can also take on a kind of religious flavor that, at least at times, feels like it is in competition with Christian Scripture and prayer. 

Some things are so deeply ingrained in our minds that it's hard to explain them -- or show that they're not quite right. There is absolutely nothing wrong with patriotism. July 4th is a wonderful day of celebration for us as Americans. Veteran's Day and Memorial Day appropriately remember those who have fought and sacrificed to preserve our freedoms.

These events can also take on a kind of religious-level fervor. It is very common in America for these holidays and devotions to find their way into our churches. We have a flag on the platform next to where the word of God is preached. These days become religious holidays on Sundays alongside Christmas and Easter. It can be hard to see why some of these dynamics are a little odd -- especially to individuals who worship with us from other countries.

2. It has taken me a long time to figure out how to express why these practices seem a little off. I think I am finally finding some words by using what I'm calling a "fervor scale." It is how we feel toward something special. First, there is respect (1). I'm calling this the lowest level of fervor. You respect a policeman. You might respect a teacher or a pastor.

Then there is devotion (2). You might be devoted to someone or something. Some people are very devoted to exercise. Others are devoted to various causes. Someone might be devoted to being a vegan.

Some people are devoted enough that we might speak of reverence (3). Some Roman Catholics revere their priests. I would say that much American devotion to the flag and to soldiers is certainly at the level of reverence. Soldiers killed in action can take on the flavor of Christian martyrs in terms of how much we revere them. Roman Catholics would argue that they do not worship the Virgin Mary. They would say they venerate her.

You can see what the highest level of devotion is. It is worship (4). According to Scripture, there is only one thing that Christians can worship, and that is God. "You will have no other gods before me" (Exod. 20:3) is the first of the Ten Commandments. It is really another form of the greatest commandment: "Love the LORD your God with all your heart, life, and strength" (Deut. 6:5). Jesus says that this love of God -- along with love of others -- sums up all of God's law (Matt. 22:36-40). 

Textbox: "You will love the LORD your God will all your heart and will all your life and with all your mind." Matt. 22:37

This is worship. We are also talking about holiness here. The more we set something aside as special, the more holy it is to us. God is ultimate holiness because he is the most special and "set apart" thing in all existence. He is in a category by himself.

The problem is that some may feel more devotion to things American than to the things of God. Even feeling the same devotion to God and country suggests either that our devotion to God is too little or our devotion to country is too much. There really is no debate about which must have our supreme allegiance. God says, "I am Yahweh. That is my name. I give my glory to no other" (Isa. 42:8). 

Textbox: If we have the same feeling about our country that we have about God, then either our devotion to God is too little or our devotion to country is too great.

In the movie National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation with Chevy Chase, as the elderly aunt begins to pray for the Christmas meal, she blurs into the Pledge of Allegiance. [1] It's funny because it is something that we could see happen. And the reason it could happen is because the feeling many Americans have toward their country is virtually religious, similar to the feeling someone might have in prayer. It fits.

But it is also inappropriate. In the case of Aunt Bethany, we might suggest that her devotion to God is too little. Is it possible that, in some cases, our devotion to country approaches the level of a devotion that should be reserved for God alone? [2]

If our devotion to anything other than God gets to the level of what our devotion to God should be, that is an idol. This is the sin above all sins -- to worship something instead of or alongside God.  

3. There is a sentence in a recent book that really clicked with me on this topic. Here it is: "Loyalty to the Kingdom must be unconditional, while loyalty to the country must be conditional." [3] This should be an obvious statement because to do otherwise puts country on the level of God, which is blasphemy. However, I have found that it doesn't feel obvious to everyone. In fact, this statement might almost seem offensive to some. This is a serious problem from a biblical and Christian standpoint.

There's a lot of talk about Christian nationalism these days. It has proven very hard to express what is being warned about here or why it is wrong. These things go so deep into our psyche that it can be incredibly difficult to see what's going on inside ourselves on a deep level. Here's how I might describe it. Christian nationalism is when the fervor for our country reaches a level where it is on par with our loyalty to God. In effect, we begin to worship our country. [4]

I recently processed this concept with someone. First, I suggested that virtually everyone feels free to disagree with the American government. Indeed, those who would most likely fall in the category of Christian nationalism are some of the most likely to strongly disagree with the current government. For example, many strongly opposed mandates for churches not to meet during the COVID pandemic. Some of the strongest language today against the government -- some of the strongest since the Civil War -- comes from individuals who might be categorized as Christian nationalists.

So how does that work? Those whose devotion to the United States falls somewhere near or in the worship category are most vehemently opposed to the United States? 

It's because their devotion is not to the real US. The real US consists of the real people who are its citizens, including individuals who immigrated here and became citizens. The real US is the real US government and the real people who are in office. It is the real Constitution and the real laws of the land as they stand.

The real America is far from perfect. The real America needs a lot of work. It is a beautiful dream but a work in progress. Pretty much everyone agrees with this.

Here is the big AHA moment. The America that some worship is not the real America. It is an ideal of America. It is their ideal of America. It is an America that some want to make by force -- which of course is not something the real America allows for at all. It is a vision for what they want to make America become based on their ideal of what it used to be at some point. (By the way, most American historians think this is a skewed picture of what it used to be.)

4. In the conversation I had, the respondent suggested that it is not the concrete America that should get our unconditional loyalty -- any more than any church denomination should. Rather, he argued, it is the ideal of America that is worthy of our unconditional loyalty alongside our unconditional loyalty to God. This response threw me for a bit of a loop because, again, it seems obvious to me that God must be on a level by himself. "My glory I give to no other" (Isa. 42:8).

But here's why that is idolatry and, ultimately, blasphemy. Even an ideal version of the US Constitution involves a President, a Congress, a Supreme Court, and a people who are human. This side of eternity, humans will always be susceptible to sin. In fact, any form of government this side of eternity involves fallen humans who are susceptible to sin and temptation.

What this means is that no matter how ideal a version of the United States you can imagine, it will always involve sinful humanity or at least humanity that is susceptible to temptation and sin. That means that even the most ideal form of America cannot have our unconditional loyalty. Any government run by humans will eventually involve sin. I shouldn't even have to make this argument, but it kiboshes any pretense that a human government of any sort could merit our unconditional loyalty. 

In fact, to say so is really a trick of the Devil to substitute something for God and his kingdom.

A related reason why even an ideal America could not be on the level of the kingdom of God is the fact that what actually makes the American system of government so good is that it involves thorough checks and balances against sinful humanity. The President does not have absolute power. The Congress does not have absolute power. The Supreme Court does not have absolute power. It was designed in full recognition of the human thirst for power and tendency to get into conflict over it. Given the uncertainty of men, it works better, I think, than any other system of government.  

Western representational democracies (call them republics, if you want) are thus quite possibly the best possible form of human government. They are so because they take into account humanity's nature as selfish and bound to try to seize power to itself no matter the effect on others. In other words, it is the best because humanity is sinful. 

But this comes nowhere near to being as good as the kingdom of God, where the monarch -- God -- is not only all knowing but all good. The kingdom is already inaugurated with Christ's resurrection, but it will not fully be here until Christ returns. This side of eternity, humanity will never be perfect citizens of the kingdom of God... but they will be when the kingdom fully arrives. That means that the kingdom of God truly will be a perfect kingdom in a way that no earthly kingdom can ever be.

No earthly kingdom can come close. Actually, it would be a joke even to suggest such a thing except that it is blasphemy, idolatry, and thus quite serious. Let us dismiss without any further thought that our loyalty to any earthly kingdom -- including some ideal United States -- can be unconditional. Our unconditional loyalty must be reserved alone for God and his kingdom. 

[1] I take this illustration from Miranda Cruz's new book, Faithful Politics: Ten Approaches to Christian Citizenship and Why It Matters (InterVarsity, 2024), 11-12.

[2] Let me be very serious for a moment. There was a philosopher in the early twentieth century (Wittgenstein) who argued that talk about God wasn't really about some Being out there. Rather, he argued it was just a type of language game that we play in certain religious settings. I don't agree with him. I think God actually exists out there and not merely in games we play with ourselves and others.

BUT, I wonder if he is right about many Christians. Could there be many people who call themselves Christians who really aren't in conversation with the real God? Their prayers are really talking to themselves. When they pray in church, they are really talking to those around them. Their devotion is really a game they don't even know they're playing. They enjoy the music. It gives them a buzz. It makes them feel good. They enjoy fellowship with the other people as they play the church game. They say God and the Bible, but they really mean the values and identity of their tribe. They read the Bible like a mirror for what they already believe.

If the worship of the real God isn't real for many Christians, then it would be no wonder if they feel the same or greater fervor for other things.

[3] Cruz, Faithful Politics, 12.

[4] Some people roll their eyes when you begin to make comparisons with Nazi Germany. But those who effectively worship America would be in that same fourth category as those who came to worship Germany, even though the fever is not as intense or empowered at this time. In the case of Germany, they did not worship the real Germany, but an idea of Germany that they then forced on Germany with a religious fervor. Christian faith in Germany also got intertwined with German nationalism with such a force that cautionary voices like Bonhoeffer's and others seemed like nothing next to it. 

This is called "syncretism," the blending of faith with cultural forces that are actually contrary to faith. While nation worship is very serious in the sight of God, in the past it has been mild and innocuous enough. However, since human nature has not changed, we should never say never. Hannah Arendt pointed out in the aftermath of WW2 that the main actors in Germany's evil were just ordinary people. She called it the "banality of evil," in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Viking, 1963).

3.2 Modernism on the Outskirts

The history of the ideology of The Wesleyan Church continues. This entry is on the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy of the mid-twentieth century. The picture to the left is Stephen Paine, president of Houghton College (1937-1972). 

Previous posts have been:

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

3.1 The Holiness Revivals of the Fin de Siècle

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1. The Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy -- what was it? It was when the clash between the forces of theological liberalism coming out of the late 1800s finally came to a head with the forces of conservative, orthodox Christianity. The word liberal today is often used as a broad term of derision. But in the late 1800s and early 1900s, it referred to a somewhat clearly defined movement and group of Christians who were "free" from the moorings of historic Christianity and Scripture. (The word liberal comes from the Latin word that means "free.")

Following the Enlightenment of the 1700s, the late 1800s saw the rise of evolution in science and the rise of higher criticism in biblical studies. Many thinkers who came from the Christian tradition not only abandoned any sense of Scripture as the word of God, but they also ceased to believe in the divinity of Christ, miracles, and any sense of a need for atonement. They used frameworks from the latest thought of the time to restructure their religion. 

In the early 1800s, Friedrich Schleiermacher in Germany saved theology for the German university by making religion about subjective feeling and a sense of absolute dependence on something greater than oneself. But one of the results was that Christianity ceased to be about something that was real "out there," something that was objectively real. Instead, it came to be about something going in "in here," inside me as a human being. Christianity began to lose any need to be grounded in history or external reality. It was now about inner feeling.

The pain of these trends first began to impinge upon the broader Methodist church in the late 1800s. Because the Methodists did not initially have any graduate schools or seminaries, their academics were often trained overseas in Germany or at schools that were not Wesleyan in theology. When they returned, they taught little about anything truly Wesleyan. Instead, they taught the trendy and more respectable ideas of the time.

(As a side note, when Bud Bence applied to do his doctorate at Chandler at Emory University in the late 1960s, he was told in no uncertain terms that he would need to do so in the field of church history. He wanted to study the theology of John Wesley, and the theology department at Chandler made it clear that he could only study Wesley as a historical artifact. But they would not tolerate any foolishness that might suggest Wesley's theology was actually still viable for today.)

Charles Sheldon's celebrated WWJD -- "What would Jesus do?" -- is a great example of early twentieth century liberal theology. WWJD is a noble concept. But did you know that Sheldon did not believe that Jesus was divine or that Jesus performed miracles? Rather, Sheldon believed that Jesus was a supreme ethical example, a model human. Sheldon was half right... and also quite wrong on the other half.

In the early 1900s, some of these individuals had reduced Christianity to a "social gospel." Mind you, there was nothing wrong with their concern to help people. This is a classic mistake that some orthodox Christians made in that era. Seeing that many of those who were concerned for the poor did not believe in the divinity of Christ or the Virgin Birth, they mistakenly acted like concern for the poor itself was wrong. They threw out the good with the bad.

Both parties only have half a gospel. Those who had reduced Christianity to a social gospel only had half a gospel. And those who were orthodox in belief but rejected any concern for redeeming society also only had half a gospel. I am extremely grateful that, at least in this period, Wesleyans, Pilgrims, Nazarenes, Free Methodists, and Salvationists all had a whole gospel -- they believed in the essentials of faith, personal salvation, and the importance of the church addressing those in need.

2. In response to "modernism," from 1910 to 1915 various scholars wrote in defense of orthodox Christian positions like belief in the Virgin Birth. The series was known as The Fundamentals. This was an attempt to push back against the teaching that was increasingly finding its way into the most prestigious American seminaries. In 1923, Asbury Seminary was founded for the Methodists as a ballast against the teaching coming out of Boston University. In 1929, Westminster Theological Seminary was founded as pull-out group from what was increasingly being taught at Princeton Seminary.

But the ultimate flash point was the Scopes Trial of 1925, in which a Tennessee teacher was fired for teaching the theory of evolution. In a nationally publicized circus, Clarence Darrow humiliated William Jennings Bryan before the nation for his literal interpretations of Genesis. The trial was so stressful that Bryan would die five days after it ended. Fundamentalism had lost its first main battle. It would lose a second in 1933 when Prohibition was revoked. 

Then again, liberalism would face its own crushing blow with World War II. One of the core features of theological liberalism was an optimistic view of human nature and human progress. It had the flavor of a postmillennial outlook and expected the world to get better and better. WW2 and the Holocaust rather confirmed that humanity was just as depraved as it had ever been. And, as astute as German scholarship may have been, it went right along with the immense darkness of Nazi Germany.  

The "prophecies" of Nietzsche had come true. A world without God is not a dreamy world of human goodness and progress. It is rather a world in which anything is permissible, and humans are free to pursue whatever they can get away with. It was a world without any objective meaning. 

3. So, what did these controversies have to do with the Pilgrims and Wesleyan Methodists? Almost nothing. Don't get me wrong. My Pilgrim grandparents made jokes about the idea that we evolved from monkeys. But these weren't hot issues in Wesleyan circles. No statements or actions were taken about any of these things in the first half of the twentieth century by Wesleyans. They were not part of any General Conference resolution. They were largely irrelevant to the forebears of The Wesleyan Church.

Why? Because no Pilgrims and Wesleyans believed these things. They largely weren't going off to seminary. They didn't have teachers at their Bible colleges who had gone off to Germany to study with F. C. Baur or Julius Wellhausen. Houghton, Central, and Marion College didn't have any professors who had studied with Bordon Parker Bowne at Boston University. The issues of modernism just weren't their issues. They were concerned about whether you kept the Sabbath or wore jewelry. They were concerned about whether you testified to an experience of entire sanctification.

As interpreters, the Pilgrims especially were what we might call "pre-modern" interpreters of the Bible. Like the Pentecostal movement that came out of the holiness movement, they were not wired to read the Bible in its historical context. Rather, they heard words directly from the Lord in the words of the Bible.

Let me give you an example from 1970. My family was trying to decide whether the Lord wanted us to move to Florida with my father's job. We prayed. We read the Bible, asking the Lord to show us what we should do. Judges 1:15 in the King James jumped out at one of my sisters, "Thou hast given me a south land." She felt like the Lord was saying, "I want you to move to Florida."

I would be careful about being too critical of this kind of interpretation. It is not unlike some of the exegesis used in the New Testament. For example, in Acts 1:20, Peter hears God saying to replace Judas as a disciple based on the words of Psalm 109:8, an imprecatory psalm originally about the enemies of the psalmist, calling for their demise. Peter lifts the words out of context and applies them directly to his situation in a way that was not part of the psalm's first meaning.

My point is that the Pilgrims heavily interpreted the Bible in a non-contextual or "spiritual" way. They had a largely "pre-modern" hermeneutic or paradigm of interpretation. They were open to allegory while high Protestants had tried to shut it down back in the days of Martin Luther. They tried to hear fresh words from the Spirit every day in their daily devotions. They did not try or really know how to read the Bible in its historical-cultural context.

The Wesleyan Methodists in general were more scholarly than the Pilgrims, but these issues still were not the issues they were focused on in the 1920s and 30s. Perhaps if there had been a General Conference in 1925, something might have been said about evolution. But since the Scope's Trial happened in the middle of the stretch between 1924 and 1928, the controversy had died down by the next General Conference. 

By contrast, those who had actually been fighting these battles largely stopped fighting in the public sphere. They had lost the war for the public imagination.

3. But that would not last long. After WW2, some new kids on the block chastised their predecessors for giving up. Harold Ockenga would start a new movement he called "neo" evangelicalism. Public activism would be a key feature of this movement. But the movement would have a different flavor. It would be good news rather than having the flavor of a war against evil.

Soon a young preacher named Billy Graham would become associated with this movement. He might very well have gone unknown except that, in a spur-of-the-moment decision, William Randolph Hearst put his money and newspapers behind him. Suddenly, a relatively insignificant rally in LA became national news, and a movement was born. Hearst would pay for every pastor in America to regularly receive a copy of a new magazine, Christianity Today, having an immense impact on American Christianity. C. F. H. Henry would be the editor.

I have a bit of a bone to pick with the way the history of this stretch is often told by people like George Marsden and Mark Noll. I can't blame them entirely because they built their reading of the history in part out of the way the leaders of the movement told the story, people like Harold Ockenga. When Noll identifies who the "fundamentalists" were before the neo-evangelicals rose, he identifies "dispensationalists, holiness folk, and Pentecostals." 

Wrong. We were never in that game. The "fundamentalists" these new evangelicals should have criticized for retreating were intellectuals of the early 1900s like J. Gresham Machen, and they were overwhelmingly Calvinist. (This telling of the history of evangelicalism is similar to the skew Donald Dayton faced in relation to the 1800s. The Princeton Calvinists of the 1800s were not evangelicals in the sense of Wesley or Whitefield. Finney and Moody were.) Holiness folk and Pentecostals were never in the modernist war such that they might retreat. 

The neo-evangelicals had a different post-war flavor from the real fundamentalist fighters before them. But they were in direct continuity ideologically with the "fundamentalists" they were now being condescending about. The difference is that they were riding a wave of post-WW2 optimism -- fertile soil for revival and the return of God and hope to American culture. It was the context that changed, not their ideology.

Get our name out of your mouth. We were never fighting that battle. Your "parents" were.  

4. What is fundamentalism? Let's bring some clarity here. The Pilgrims and Wesleyans were largely "pre-modern." That is, they read the words of Scripture without a strong view to its historical context. They read the Bible devotionally. When we talk about lectio divina today, it is essentially a return to reading the Bible this way. You read the words. You chew on them. You meditate on them. You let the Spirit speak to you however he wants to.

Modernism promoted reading the Bible in its historical context. There's nothing wrong with this. After all, the Bible says it was written to people who've been dead for thousands of years. If you want to know what the Bible first meant, you have to read it the way its first readers read it. And that means you have to read it in its literary and historical context.

The problem is that these two readings are completely different hermeneutics. When Augustine and those throughout Christian history affirmed the truthfulness of the Bible, they felt a freedom to hear the words in accordance with Christian tradition. Similarly, when the Pilgrims and Wesleyans read the Bible, they could hear whatever they thought the Spirit was telling them in the words.

Modernism changed the ball game. Now, the words of the Bible took on a more fixed and definite meaning. Context locked down the possibilities to a much larger extent. Now, for the Bible to be truthful, its original meaning had to be true, not just its words. Before, only the words had to be true. Now, after studying the literary and historical context, the resulting interpretation had to be true. This is a significant paradigm shift. [1]

Similarly, we now have the rise of archaeology and science to contend with. What if someone excavates Jericho and argues that there is no evidence for an Israelite invasion in the years 1500-1200, as happened with Kathleen Kenyon in the 1950s? The game has wildly changed from believing the words are true to coordinating the discoveries and evidence of the modern world with the words of the Bible.

Further, the criteria of truthfulness have subtly changed in the meantime. The truth of Scripture is no longer a matter of whether it is theologically true. Ironically, accepting the standards of modernism, fundamentalism now insists that the Bible can only be true if it reasonably matches modern understandings of history and science. Ironically, fundamentalism has adopted the paradigm of the modern world in its way of approaching Scripture.

Again, the Pilgrims and Wesleyans were blissfully making their way along with their "Pentecostal" modes of interpretation. These debates were largely taking place on the side, bypassing us. We were not the original fundamentalists. The forebears of the neo-evangelicals were.

So a fundamentalist is not simply someone who believes in the essentials of Christian faith. Fundamentalism has a flavor. It is combative. It is in a fight against modernism. It is anti-modernist while, ironically, using the very tools of modernism to fight against it. 

Pilgrims and Wesleyans of the early twentieth century largely were not fundamentalists. We were revivalists, trying to get people saved and sanctified. We weren't in that debate.

5. The neo-evangelicals of the late 1940s were a mixture of elements. There is what I might call the intellectual half, and there is what I might call the evangelistic half. Billy Graham was the face of the evangelistic half. He was the one in continuity with the evangelicals of the past. John Wesley, George Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards, Charles Finney, D. L. Moody, and Billy Graham. These all go together. Let's get as many people saved as possible.

I might add that, although the General Board of the Pilgrim church stopped to pray when they heard about Billy Graham's LA revival, he was always "other" in my family. He was that Baptist preacher who thought it was enough to get those people to pray a sinner's prayer and then, because of eternal security, never do anything more with them. We criticized him for, at least in the early days, not having any real system for discipleship to plug new converts into churches.

It was the same with Jerry Falwell in the 1980s. He was always "other." He had nothing to do with us. (He had a lot to do with the culture, as we will argue in a later post.)

The other half of neo-evangelicalism was the intellectual part. It was heavily Calvinist and was in the ideological tradition of A. A. Hodge, B. B. Warfield, and J. Gresham Machen. They drew a word straight from the Princeton Calvinists of the 1800s: inerrancy. Again, although it sounds like you're saying the same thing as all the prior Christians who affirmed the truthfulness of Scripture, the word now has a distinctly new connotation. The word now assumes the fundamentalist side in all the debates of the previous century against modernism. Its use assumes the standards of history and science that were on the playing field of previous debates.

Again, these debates were largely foreign to Pilgrims and Wesleyans. We simply weren't fighting these battles. At least most of us weren't. There was one Wesleyan who was deeply involved in these things. He was a Wheaton grad. When Houghton hired him as a professor in the 1930s, some wondered if he was Wesleyan enough. His name was Stephen Paine.

6. Paine brought all these issues to Houghton College and the Wesleyan Methodist Church. Paine had been in the swirl of all these movements. In fact, in 1960 he ran as the presidential candidate for the Prohibition Party. From 1966-68, Paine served as president of the National Association of Evangelicals, one of the organizations formed by the neo-evangelicals in the late 1940s. After retirement, he was the lead editor of the New International Version, which finally came out fully in 1984. Paine was a neo-evangelical's evangelical.

As a former Pilgrim, I suppose it is no surprise that Houghton always seemed to be on the edges of the Wesleyan Church to me. But I think that was also true of the Wesleyan Methodist Church too. For example, Paine expressed near the end of his presidency that he wished he had not spent so much time trying to appease the Allegheny district on matters like dress and standards. It was all for naught anyway, since that group didn't even end up going with the merger. 

But note the contrast. Paine wanted to be in the center of evangelical debates. The WMs were arguing over dress and standards.

In 1955, Paine brought a motion to the Wesleyan Methodist Church that the statement on Scripture be revised. He proposed that the phrase, "inerrant in the original manuscripts" be added to the Articles of Religion. Of course, the WMs had no problem with this addition. Certainly they believed the Bible was without error.

Similarly, when the Wesleyans and Pilgrims merged, the Pilgrims gladly voted for inerrancy to be in the new denomination's Discipline. The term had not been in their Manual. But of course, who wouldn't agree that the Bible is without error?

My historical point is that what was going on in Stephen Paine's mind was not the same as what was going on in the minds of the Wesleyan Methodists and Pilgrims. He was in a war, and the word carried immense assumptions for him. It had a history for him that it did not really have for the rest of the church. For him, it was ensconced in decades' long debates.

Note also his addition of "in the original manuscripts." As a Greek scholar, Paine did not think that the King James Version was accurate to the original manuscripts of the New Testament at a number of points. (Note: he would be quite different from the Wesleyans and Pilgrims at this point too, since everyone used the KJV at that time.) Neo-evangelicalism rejected "higher criticism" like Wellhausen's JEDP, but it did not reject what they called "lower criticism" to determine what the original text might have said.

7. When Bud Bence tells the history of The Wesleyan Church, he talks about forks in the road where the trends of the time led the church to pick between options. [2] For example, Orange Scott and Luther Lee picked abolition at that fork in the road. Coming mainly from a Wesleyan Methodist perspective, Bence identifies the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy as one of those forks where the Wesleyans picked fundamentalism.

I would say that was true of a few intellectuals in the WM church at the time. And it has had some ripple effects on the church. But I would argue that most of those debates happened in parallel to us. 

They did bring a polarization in some circles. Asbury Seminary had been founded by Henry Clay Morrison in 1923 largely to provide the Methodists with an orthodox option to the other Methodist seminaries of the time. (As a side note, my mother once heard Morrison preach in Kentucky in the 1930s during the year her family spent at Kingswood.) That means Asbury was founded in the wake of that battle. But Morrison was also wanting to promote holiness revivalism, which respectable Methodism had rejected.

There is almost always collateral damage in battle. Asbury's was Professor Claude Thompson. [3] Thompson was no modernist. He was in fact a strong supporter of Wesley's theology, and he had studied with a strong supporter of Wesleyan theology at Drew University -- although he had his own set of accusations. Thompson joined the faculty of Asbury Seminary in 1947.

But this was also the moment when neo-evangelicalism was on the rise. Although no one could point to any clear point where Thompson was teaching heresy, he smelled fishy to the new kids on the block. He was not a dispensationalist. He did not use the new term inerrancy with all that it now implied. Although he had the support of the trustees and the faculty, six faculty threatened to resign if he was not fired. Stephen Paine caught wind and also sought reassurances of Thompson's bona fides -- which he received -- from President McPheeters.

Initially, McPheeters tried repeatedly to assure all these internal and external voices that Thompson was not a modernist. But eventually, Thompson did the Christ-like thing and -- for the good of the school -- resigned in 1950. It was a wound he carried for the rest of his life because teaching at Asbury was his dream. Asbury would lose its accreditation with the Association of Theological Schools over the debacle as well as its status as a Methodist-approved seminary. Only when McPheeters resigned in 1962 did Asbury regain its accreditation.

You could argue that, in this moment, Asbury shifted for a time from being a Wesleyan-holiness seminary to being a neo-evangelical seminary. The neo-evangelical movement had a strong Calvinist-fundamentalist flavor to it. At its founding, Asbury had more of a holiness, revivalist flavor. 

When I came to Asbury in the late 1980s, David McKenna was president of the seminary. Asbury's statement of faith read that the Bible was "without error in all it affirms," as it still does. Beyond that, McKenna refused for Asbury to get embroiled in debates over inerrancy. Ken Collins has recently presented the ongoing flavor of Asbury on this issue in a recent issue of Firebrand. [4] He suggests that Asbury's statement has more in common with the Lausanne Covenant rather than the Chicago Statement of 1978.

I once argued that the Wesleyans have never really defined the term, which I think is wise. Asbury's sense that the Bible is "without error in all it affirms" is nice because it both affirms the truthfulness of Scripture and yet allows us to do the hard work of determining what Scripture affirms. Stephen Paine and those who went after Claude Thompson had very specific ideas about what the Bible affirms, and they insisted everyone else must agree with their conclusions. 

I had Harold Kuhn for a class at Asbury in the late 80s. He seemed like a nice guy. I enjoyed the class on biblical theology. He was the ringleader of those who went after Thompson in 1950. I'd like to think that, four decades later, he had some remorse for crucifying someone who, by most accounts, was more Christlike than he was. I suspect McPheeters would rather have taken his resignation.

[1] For more on pre-modern hermeneutics, see Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (Yale University, 1980).

[2] Elesha Coffman takes a similar approach in Turning Points in American Church History: How Pivotal Events Shaped a Nation and a Faith (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2024).

[3] I take some of this information from Darius Salter's work, The Demise of the American Holiness Movement: A Historical, Theological, Biblical, and Cultural Exploration (First Fruits, 2020), 212-15.

[4] Kenneth Collins, "Should Wesleyans Embrace a Doctrine of Inerrancy?" Firebrand. June 4, 2024.

What would Jesus vote? (1)

For the last couple months, I've debated whether to try to write something along the lines of "What would Jesus vote?" (WWJV). I just haven't been able to come up with an outline or approach that felt good or engaging enough to be worth it. For whatever reason, I feel like I'm on a better track today. Here's a tentative outline (work in progress):

Preface: Would Jesus Even Vote?
1. As a Kingdom Citizen
2. For the Greater Good
3. To Protect the Individual
4. To Restrain Evil
5. To Empower the Edges
6. For Life
7. For Peace
8. For the World
9. For the Earth
10. For Truth

1. Would Jesus Even Vote?

1. In Philippians 3:20, Paul reminds the church at Philippi that they are, first and foremost, citizens of heaven and the kingdom of God:

"For our citizenship exists in heaven, from where also we await a Savior: the Lord Jesus Christ."

It would be easy to miss the scandalous, controversial dimension to what Paul is saying here. Philippi was a Roman colony. That meant that the citizens of the city had the status of being citizens of Rome. It was like they lived in a suburb of the capital city. The vast majority of people in the Roman Empire were not citizens of Rome, and the vast majority of cities were not Roman colonies. Frankly, the vast majority of people living in Philippi were not citizens of the city.

Paul says this to the Philippians because it was especially relevant to them. If anyone there was tempted to boast in their Roman citizenship, Paul dashed their pretense to pieces. If someone thought their citizenship gave them special status or significance, Paul shuts that thought down. Who are the truly "important" people? It's those who are citizens of heaven, not any particular country or city on earth. Any privilege a Roman citizen in the city might have, Paul has already spoken to that thought earlier in the chapter: "Whatever gain I had... I consider it dung that I might gain Christ" (3:7-8).

There is nothing wrong with being proud of the country in which you live -- at least with a healthy pride. There is nothing wrong with being proud of your ethnic heritage. However, Paul sets down the principle very clearly here. It's dung when you put it next to Christ. We are not putting any heritage down here. Rather, we are putting Christ in his properly exalted place.

The use of the word Savior was also particularly powerful. The Romans often considered their emperors to be saviors. A famous inscription about the first Roman emperor, Augustus, calls him, "savior of the whole race of humanity." [1] It is very plausible that when Paul tells the Philippians that believers are awaiting a Savior from heaven, he is implying that they have no political savior on earth.

Finally, Paul is in prison as he writes. I along with many other scholars think he was in jail at Ephesus at the time of writing. The traditional view, of course, is that he was under house arrest in Rome (see Acts 28). Wherever he was, he was under the thumb of the Romans at the time of writing. That makes his identification of their true citizenship and true Savior even more powerful. After all, Paul himself was a Roman citizen. But that mattered nothing next to his heavenly citizenship.

2. Jesus did not come to earth as an angel. He came to earth as fully human. That means he had DNA. That means he had to choose whether to come as a man or a woman. He had an eye color. He either had ear lobes or he didn't. In that sense, he did not come as a universal human. He came as a particular human even though he represented all humanity, all genders, all body types, and all personalities.

He also came to a particular time and place. He came to an obscure part of the Roman Empire, the Galilee. He didn't even come to the "important part" of Israel but the backwater hill country to the north. Nazareth was not an important village. Maybe 200-500 people lived there. They probably did not have a synagogue building at the time but rather probably met in the open air in some central part of the village.

They primarily spoke Aramaic, although many may have known enough Greek to do business in nearby marketplaces. Jesus was born into a culture. They had ways of looking at the world like people born in specific places everywhere. They were not the ways we grow up with in twenty-first century America. Reading the Gospels -- in fact reading anywhere in the Bible -- is going to be a cross-cultural experience if we're reading it in context.

Why am I saying all this? Because we will not understand what Jesus' words and actions really meant if we do not know something about the context. The Spirit no doubt broadened Jesus' words for a more universal audience as God inspired the Gospel writers, but any study of the Gospels in depth reveals that they also had specific contexts and audiences that shaped their words. 

3. So, Jesus did not address a modern democracy or republic when he taught the Galilean crowds on the countryside. He did not speak to people in Jerusalem who would have a chance to vote in November. He spoke primarily to Jews who were under the thumb of Roman rule. There was no voting of Pilate out of office. 

There were three general options. First, if you were in a particular place of power, you could become complicit with the Romans. Many Sadducees and chief priests seem to have done this. You could argue that the toll collectors took this course. They collected money from local people and passed it on to the powers that be. You could assimilate and accommodate.

Second, you could become a revolutionary and fight. This never ended well. Whether you were Judas the Galilean, Theudas, or the many revolutionaries who fought in the Jewish War (AD66-72), this path led to almost certain death. Although Jesus wasn't a revolutionary, he was likely crucified under the charge of being one.

The third approach was the one that Jesus took. It was the approach that Paul and Peter seem to advocate as well in the rest of the New Testament. That is to live in an adjacent kingdom, namely, the inaugurated kingdom of God. You pray for the empire. You pray for your rulers. But you only engage them when you need to. Most of the time, you ignore them as something foreign and alien to the true kingdom.

4. We'll explore what it might mean to live as a kingdom citizen in a foreign land in the first chapter. For now, we just want to point out that Jesus did not "vote" in the political world he came to. He treated the kingdoms of the earth as something separate from the kingdom of God.

No where is this clearer than in his well known answer to the question of whether Jews should pay taxes or not. He asks for a coin in Mark 12:15. He asks whose image is on it. "Caesar's," they say. Then Jesus effectively says, "Well, give his coin back to him then." In other words, the world of Roman coinage and money, the world of the Roman Empire itself, has nothing to do with the kingdom of God.

In the terms of Richard Niehbur's famous 1951 book, Christ and Culture, Jesus expressed a "Christ against culture" perspective. [2] In this approach, the broader culture is seen as something foreign and greatly distinct from the world of the church or the kingdom. The Amish are often mentioned as a great example of this approach. As we will see in the first chapter, this perspective appears throughout the New Testament.

5. But that is not the end of the story. Every book of the New Testament including Revelation was written to address an audience in the first century under the Roman Empire. It doesn't exactly tell us how to play out its principles in a different time and place under different circumstances. As a human being, Jesus couldn't vote in the first century. But he could if he came as a human today. 

All the political instruction in the New Testament was written to individuals under a dictatorship. To apply the Scriptures faithfully, we have to wrestle together to apply its teaching to a world where we do get a say in the way society proceeds. Most of you reading this book do get to vote. The Bible does not tell us the specifics of what that looks like because none of its books were written to twenty-first century Americans or people in any modern nation.

Would Jesus vote? I suspect he would most of the time. Who and what would he vote for? That's where it gets more complicated. It gets complicated not only because different Christians picture Jesus differently but because our minds are so heavily clouded on matters of politics. So many of us are so sure of ourselves while, at the same time, being incredibly blinded to the historical and cultural forces at work on us.

It is with great fear and trembling that I step into this fray. I jump into the fray, for one, because I am a New Testament scholar and there actually would be substantial agreement among biblical experts on many of these issues. I therefore jump secondly because I'm not sure that this community of experts has done a good job of conveying these broad agreements on a popular or even ministerial level. 

The voices clouding our judgment are many. The ingenuity of the opposition to biblical principles is at times astounding. Sometimes such voices are sincere. Sometimes they are devilish.

Richard Mouw once affirmed with approval the sentiment of C. F. H. Henry on this topic, one of the shapers of modern evangelicalism. [3] Henry suggested that pastors should stick to the big principles of Scripture and the faith rather than tell congregations who or what to vote for specifically. While I may see things a little differently than Henry (and Mouw) in that article, I continue to agree substantially with them for the following reasons.

For one, you are likely to have individuals in your congregation of different political stripes. You need to be the pastor of the whole congregation and, indeed, a missionary to everyone in your context. If you pick sides too vehemently, you may very well be quenching the Spirit in terms of having an effective ministry.

For another, as a minister, you probably lack expertise in many of the relevant areas needed to make informed, concrete decisions on specific issues. One of the problems with American politics right now is that everyone thinks they are an expert at everything. Meanwhile, we feel free to ignore the people who actually are experts. We may agree that Jesus valued those on the margins. But how to play out that principle best effectively will require a whole lot of expertise most of us don't have. We can agree that the Bible commands us to value strangers in our midst. How to do that practically is complicated.

Finally, we are often unaware of our own biases. Forcing ourselves to stay more neutral helps us keep ourselves honest. It helps force us to see the positives and negatives on both sides. As we will strongly argue in the first chapter, God is neither a Democrat nor a Republican. Rather, kingdom concerns overlap with the stereotypical interests of both parties at various points.

However, I do believe there are exceptional moments in history. In retrospect, the rise of Nazi Germany immediately comes to mind. However, even in such times that seem so clear in hindsight, I guarantee you that the cloud of politics was in play, where Bible-believing Christians did not see what now seems to be obvious. Evidence emerged after the death of the famous conservative Bible scholar Otto Michel that he had perhaps been sympathetic to the Nazi movement at first, although he spent his entire life after the war vigorously working toward Jewish-Christian reconciliation. 

Even now, many Christians believe we are in a similar time without ambiguity as to what a Christian should support. The problem is that there are vehement proponents on both sides. One hopes that, looking back one day, the correct moral choices will be clear. But they are not clear at all at the moment, given the extreme polarization.

It is with such a cloud hanging over our heads that we begin this journey. Can we discern clearly what the core Jesus principles are? Can we pierce the darkness of our blinders and at least get some strong impressions of what Jesus would urge us to do if he were to speak to us directly in this moment?

[1] In Myra, located in modern day Turkey. The Gospel of Luke is probably deliberately contrasting Jesus with Augustus when the shepherds are told that a "Savior" was born that day in Bethlehem (Luke 2:11). Jesus was born during the reign of Augustus, who is explicitly mentioned in the same chapter (Luke 1:1).

[2] H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (Harper & Brothers, 1951).

[3] Richard J. Mouw, "Carl Henry Was Right" Christianity Today. January, 2010.

[4] R. Braun, "Conformation or resistance?" On the discussion about Otto Michel and National Socialism, 2012.

3.1 The Holiness Revivals of the Fin de Siècle

My exploration of the history of the ideology of The Wesleyan Church continues. In this next set of installments, we explore the twentieth century up to the 1968 merger. The picture to the left is Seth Cook Rees, one of the founders of the Pilgrim Holiness Church. 

Previous posts have been:

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.

Next: the Fundamentalist/Modernist Controversy

2.3 The Birth of the American Holiness Movement

We continue our exploration of the history of Wesleyan ideology with a look at the holiness movement and Wesleyan Methodist Church in the late 1800s. The picture to the left is Phoebe Palmer, the one primarily responsible for how entire sanctification was preached for well over a century.

The previous posts have been:

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

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1. After the Civil War, Luther Lee viewed the purpose of the Wesleyan Methodist Connection (WMC) as accomplished. In 1867 he returned to the Methodist Episcopal Church North (MECN) along with Lucius Matlack. All of the founders were now gone. Orange Scott had died of tuberculosis in 1847. Jotham Horton had returned as early as 1851. Why should the Wesleyan Methodist church continue when its primary reason to exist is gone?

There were still reasons to stay separate. In 1860, B. T. Roberts had been pushed out for his sustained critique of Methodism's increasing worldliness. He founded the Free Methodist Church, whose name opposes the way Methodism was increasingly adopting the "pay for your pew" fundraising method. In the more "modern" Methodist churches, you could tell who had money by where they sat. Just like the seats at a concert, you paid more to get closer to the front.

When you look at the cultural forces at work here, Methodism is becoming less and less a church for the common person and more and more a middle-upper class church. More than anyone else, Bishop Matthew Simpson was responsible for this change. He was proud of the increasing affluence of Methodists and he was a spiritual advisor Abraham Lincoln. The old story about the Pope who shows the grandeur of a church and says, "No longer do we have to say, 'Silver and gold have I none.'" The response of course was, "But can we still say then 'Rise up and walk'?"

Statements about avoiding showiness in adornment were toned down. Kevin Watson tells a story about how proud Bishop Simpson was that his wife and home were praised for their obvious culture and sophistication by polite society (Doctrine 215). Methodism had finally arrived.

Roberts was thus being countercultural when he insisted on the values of the roots of Methodism as a church that lived with the poor and did not just minister to the poor. In a couple posts, we will see that the notion that social programs are "liberal" or helping the poor is somehow unevangelical is completely foreign to the Wesleyan tradition. Those sentiments are an infection from twentieth century cultural forces. B. T. Roberts critiqued the "New School" Methodism of Simpson and others. 

In the contemporary landscape of evangelical Christianity, it is common to associate a concern for the poor with liberalism. This is deeply ironic since it is a pervasive, core biblical value. For the Wesleyan tradition it is deeply ironic because it is such a pervasive and core value of Wesley and Wesleyan history. How did we get here? I can think of three primary cultural forces that have led us to this place:

1. Remnants of the fight against a social gospel in the early twentieth century (more to come).
2. Reaction to the fight against communism in the twentieth century and the virtual enshrinement of capitalism as a Christian value.
3. The fusion of evangelicalism with Republicanism. Since FDR and LBJ were Democrats, their initiatives must be evil.

The Salvation Army itself is a Wesleyan church that started in England in the 1800s and transplanted to America in the 1880s. These examples should suffice to prompt reflection on the way our tradition may have been tossed around by Christian cultural forces that are not only thoroughly unbiblical but also quite unwesleyan. We can debate how best to implement that value in society, but the value itself is uncontestable.  

2. What kept the Wesleyan Methodists together in the late 1800s? No doubt its presbyterian church organization was still a plus -- versus the episcopal structure of the MEC. I might add that from where I sit, it was the bishops of the Methodist church of the 1800s that steadily led it off course. The WMC had lay representation while the Methodist church did not. Adam Crooks would take the lead moving forward after Lee and others had left.

Some of the values that we might put in the category of social justice (really biblical justice) continued in the WMC in the late 1800s.

The WMC ordained its first woman preacher in 1861, Mary Wills in the Illinois conference. Nevertheless, cultural forces would prevail for a brief period from 1879-91 when women were limited to the role of liscensed minister -- a secondary level of ordination. After 1891, however, the church returned to its core "Pentecostal" values and women were allowed to be ordained on any level to which God might call her. 

The church has never looked back sense. It has been counter-cultural -- including counter American church culture -- in its full support of women in ministry. This is an important point. There are cultural forces in the American church pushing us away from women in ministry right now. For the first 100+ years of our existence, we were countercultural in terms of the broader culture and American church culture. It is easy to be deceived into thinking our support of women in ministry is liberal, but we were ordaining women 100 years before the modern feminist movement.  

Of course, even though the ordination of women is on the books and taking place regularly, women find a hard time finding a church. Because a local church ultimately gets to decide, grass roots prejudices can ultimately trump the church's official values and they often do. The smaller the unit of the church, the easier it is for whachadoodle to prevail. The more of the church represented, the more likely it is for the Spirit to prevail.

Wesleyans stood for the empowerment of former slaves in the Reconstruction period. They opposed Andrew Johnson's support of Black Codes in the south and his veto of a federal Civil Rights bill. They opposed the newly formed KKK. The Indiana Conference opposed segregation. 

But culture would eventually impinge on the church in this area. In 1891, African-American Wesleyans were segregated into their own districts. This was done primarily for pragmatic reasons, but it fit the decade when Plessy vs. Ferguson would enshrine "separate but equal" in the broader American culture (1896). 

3. One social issue that played a prominent role in this period is the temperance movement. The WMs required abstinence of all its members, the first American denomination to do so. Interestingly, one of the founders of the WM church, Orange Scott, had a patent for an engine that ran on alcohol, which is how the statement that alcohol could be used for mechanical purposes got into the Discipline.

I might add that membership from Wesley through this period was understood to require a certain lifestyle. You committed to that lifestyle from the very beginning of becoming a member and a person was regularly held accountable. The recent shift in Wesleyan membership philosophy to "say yes and aspire to change later" is a fundamental change in Wesleyan ecclesiology. It's another example of American church culture changing our ecclesiology without us even knowing it. We say it's the Bible, but it's really culture. 

Our opposition to drinking was no doubt heavily influenced by the havoc that drinking often brought to families. In particular, an alcoholic husband might drink away a pay check, get involved in a relationship he shouldn't, or become abusive at home. Wesley himself had given warnings about the dangers of drinking.

At the same time, there were cultural factors hiding here too. Waves of immigrants from Ireland and Italy -- Catholics, no less -- made it easy to hide prejudice under the guise of morality. This is a constant trick of the Devil. I say I am against x, a clear moral issue. But what I am hiding -- perhaps even from myself -- is y, an underlying group dynamic, prejudice, or hateful attitude.

4. As the 1800s waned, a focus on personal holiness would steadily replace social concern as a focus of the Wesleyan Methodists. This was not conscious. We are seldom conscious of shifts like these. But the holiness preaching that was the core of my childhood, was shaped in the holiness movement of the late 1800s/early 1900s.

More than anyone else, the heart of this shift lands at the door of Phoebe Palmer (1807-74). What is funny is that I never heard her name until seminary or even later. This person who shaped the holiness preaching of my youth was unknown to a century of preachers who thought they were simply preaching the Bible.

What Palmer taught was a kind of "name-it-claim-it" version of entire sanctification. Christ has already done the work. You just need to claim it. Testify to it even if you don't feel like anything has happened. She wrote her book, The Way of Holiness, in 1843.

Now I did not grow up with that exact formula, although it seems similar to the way the Nazarene Church currently understands entire sanctification, where the event is largely reduced to a consecration of yourself to God. The part that I grew up with is the event focus. Keith Drury called it "two-tripism" in his Holiness for Ordinary People. You go to the altar to get saved. Then you go back to get sanctified.

Palmer called this approach to entire sanctification a "shorter way." In some respects, she was reclaiming Wesley's approach to sanctification in his sermon, "The Scripture Way of Salvation." Wesley waivered throughout his life on the timing of sanctification. In his more pessimistic moments, he thought a few might be sanctified around the time of death. But as this sermon indicates, there were times when he thought it might happen sooner.

The crucial element that was missing from Palmer's equation was waiting on the Lord. We cannot force the Holy Spirit to come on our lives by an act of our will. The movement of the Spirit is a matter of God's choosing. It is not that God plays games or doles out the Spirit whimsically -- we should assume that God wants to give us the fullness of the Spirit and in fact is the one leading us to seek it. Still, it is God's choice as to timing, not ours.

Watson talks about a similar shift that was taking place during this era from a sense of prevenient grace to a sense of "free will." In prevenient grace, the Spirit prepares the way for us to come to Christ. Although our wills are an essential element in the equation, the entire process is empowered by the Spirit. By contrast, the idea of free will suggests that I can come to Christ at any time because I have the power within me. This is a corruption of Wesleyan (and orthodox) understanding -- one that fits with American culture.

Chris Bounds has described the current Wesleyan view of sanctification as a "middle way" in Holiness. It is neither a "done deal at a time of my choosing" (Palmer) nor a "maybe a few lucky ones right before you die" (Wesley in his pessimistic moments and broader Methodism). It is rather a "give it all to the Lord and wait for his movement."

5. What Palmer facilitated was an event-focused entire sanctification. In broader Methodism, entire sanctification had come to be seen as a gradual process throughout one's Christian life. Wesley's sense that you could have an experience of the fullness of the Spirit had been lost to some extent. Palmer rekindled that flame.

One key element in this equation was the fusing of the idea of entire sanctification with the experience the disciples had on the Day of Pentecost in Acts 2. This is not the way that John Wesley had preached entire sanctification. This innovation in Wesleyan thinking comes rather from John Fletcher, an Anglican minister who was part of Wesley's movement in England in the 1700s. Larry Wood of Asbury Seminary has argued that Wesley knew of Fletcher's innovation.

This equation of the Spirit-fillings in Acts with entire sanctification would become a powerful preaching tool in the late 1800s and 1900s. Here was a clear biblical narrative that could be preached. The disciples were already saved but they needed to be sanctified, which happened at Pentecost. The believers at Samaria in Acts 8 had been baptized, but they needed to be entirely sanctified. The followers of John the Baptist had been saved in Acts 19, but they needed to be sanctified.

Unfortunately, this does not seem to be the meaning of the Spirit-fillings in Acts, and Bob Lyon of Asbury Seminary did the careful exegetical work to show it in 1979. Practically speaking, though, this was quite a blow to holiness preaching. Holiness is harder to conceptualize and preach without such a clear narrative framework. I personally think Acts 4 can still be used, but Melvin Dieter would blame Lyon for a sharp decline in holiness preaching, belief, and emphasis in the late 1900s.

6. The 1800s saw a hermeneutic in America that did not distinguish sharply between the laws and practices of ancient Israel and the way the New Testament teaches believers are not "under the law." Little distinction was made between what is sometimes called the "ceremonial law" of the Old Testament and what God expects of Christians today.

This sense was not applied consistently, of course. Christian groups did not practice animal sacrifice, for example. Most Christian groups did not give up eating pork or follow the Old Testament food laws. However, Seventh Day Adventists are a good example of an extreme version of this dynamic. They do not eat pork, and they do follow the Old Testament food laws. Similarly, they worship on Saturday, which is of course the biblical day of the Sabbath.

This was not Paul's hermeneutic, of course. He did not consider the Jewish Sabbath as binding on Gentile believers (Rom. 14:5-6; Col. 2:16). It was however a Puritan practice. Keeping the Sabbath was an important part of the Wesleyan tradition until the late 1900s. A person was not supposed to work, buy, or sell on Sunday. Even today, there is a strong emphasis on Sabbath in the Wesleyan Church, although the emphasis is on rest rather than a more rigid sense of a specific day with specific prohibitions. These are part of our cultural heritage more than a biblical mandate -- and of course it is a very helpful, beneficial, and hopefully spiritual practice as well. 

I grew up with a number of proof-texts from the Old Testament in use to justify certain practices. For example, women were not to wear pants or slacks because of Deuteronomy 22:5. Mustaches were inappropriate because of Leviticus 19:27. There was no sense that some of this legislation might have been directed at ancient Israel. There just wasn't that level of hermeneutical sophistication.

The tithe entered into Wesleyan practice as part of this hermeneutic in the 1920s and, of course, it helped solved the perennial problem of funding the church's activities. In 1923, the WM church made tithing its recommended approach to funding the church. At first, many were resistant to the tithe -- not because it asked too much but because they thought it might foster an attitude of "God gets 10% and I get the rest." Rather, as Ron Blue has put it, God owns it all. 

However, it would seem today that 10% gets Christians moving in the right direction from where they are. It all belongs to God, and there are offerings to be given beyond 10%. But even seeing 10% would be a dream for a lot of churches.

2.2 Founding Perspectives of the Wesleyan Methodist Connection

The series continues: "A History of Wesleyan Ideology." What ideological and cultural forces have converged to shape The Wesleyan Church as we know it today. The picture to the left is Orange Scott, one of the founders of the Wesleyan Methodist Connection.

The previous posts have been:

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

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1. It is difficult to know what you would have done or thought if you had lived at another point in time. I know that if the current me was transported back to the 1840s, I would leave the Methodist Episcopal Church to be part of the Wesleyan Methodist Connection (WMC) in 1843. Taking one step back, if you took my current values and transported them back to the 1840s in America, I would support the abolition of slavery. I'm not sure what I would have thought was the best method to go about it.

But so much of who we are is a product of our specific history that I'm not sure how much we can say about what we would do or be in a different time and place. If you were born in India 200 years ago, you would very likely be a Hindu, right? If I were born 180 years ago in Georgia, I would likely be pro-slavery. The bottom line is that, if I were born with the same body in a different time and place, I would just very likely be a significantly different person in terms of what I believed. 

I do think that Orange Scott, Luther Lee, LaRoy Sunderland, Jotham Horton, and Lucius Matlock were perfectly reasonable to withdraw from the Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC) in 1843.

2. Wesley had urged the abolition of slavery in England, although he didn't live to see it. He called American slavery "the vilest that ever saw the sun." The original MEC in the U.S. had opposed slavery. But in the intervening years, the leadership of the MEC had tried to keep the peace by softening its stance toward slaveholding. They also didn't want to put anything in the way of the phenomenal growth they were experiencing.

We've already mentioned that the MEC would split in 1844 into north and south when a southern bishop who owned slaves was asked to step down. Perhaps the WMC would not have happened if that event had happened sooner. In fact, Horton would quickly rejoin the northern MEC. After the Civil War, Lee and Matlock would too, feeling that the WMC had achieved its mission. 

But the 1840 General Conference was particularly offensive to these abolitionists. They were censured for sowing seeds of disunity in the church by speaking out against slavery (while conferences that explicitly stated that slavery was not a moral evil were not addressed). A gag rule was passed forbidding the topic from being discussed at any Annual Conference or General Conference. Black people were prohibited from testifying in church trials in states where they could not testify in state courts. The church officially supported the relocation of slaves to Africa.

There seemed little choice for these men who saw this as the moral issue of the moment but to withdraw and continue the movement elsewhere. One of the mottos of the new WMC was "first pure, then peaceable," and the paper they started was the True Wesleyan (as opposed to the "fake" ones in the MEC). Them's fighting words. This is familiar rhetoric from any group that separates over what they see as a matter of principle to be faithful to the essential values of their tradition. The same language could be used by the Global Methodist Church today.

Indeed, Kevin Watson (Doctrine, Spirit & Discipline 185) points out that the very name "Wesleyan Methodist" was a slam at the MEC. Up to that point, the name Methodist was equivalent to Wesleyan. By taking the name Wesleyan Methodists, they were suggesting that the mainstream Methodists were no longer Wesleyan because of their appeasement on the issue of slavery. 

3. I don't blame them for leaving. The 1840 General Conference more or less said, "If this is a concern to you, shut up or leave the church." By temperament, I think I would have leaned gradualist if I were transported back in time to the north. These were those who wanted to abolish slavery step by step over time. I would have wanted to keep the peace until it just wasn't feasible. 

Lincoln started off that way, but the situation forced his hand. Similarly, the MEC ended up splitting anyway. Sometimes an opposing side is never going to change its mind. Sometimes that ends up in war. Sometimes your opposition wins and you lose. Sometimes you have to make a decision and face whatever the fallout is. If your position is the one with the wind of history behind it, eventually the other side dies off (see Thomas Kuhn).

Gradualism failed. The South just wasn't going to budge on this issue, ever.

4. Orange Scott and later Luther Lee were the key leaders of the new "connection." (The best source of course for the founding of the Wesleyan Methodist Church is Bob Black and Keith Drury's, The Story of the Wesleyan Church.) It was called a "connection" at this point rather than a "church," although for all intents and purposes, it was a church. (It would not be called a church officially until 1891.) 

There were two main issues in its founding. We've already touched extensively on the main one -- opposition to slavery. The other was the Methodist episcopacy. The new church would neither have bishops nor be a purely congregational church. It would use a "middle" structure -- a presbyterian one.

Notice how all three of these structures fit variously well in different cultures. An episcopal structure mirrors cultures with kings and queens, where the leader is there for life and wields immense power. A congregational structure fits American individualism well, where each local church is its own king. The presbyterian model fits the US and Western democracies well, where we have elections for leaders and leaders have significant but not absolute power. 

From a philosophical standpoint, I would argue that this "representational democracy" pattern, with a Constitution to set up the system and appropriate boundaries, has been the most successful in all of history. It has the most checks and balances. It is most likely to play out and preserve Judeo-Christian values in my opinion. 

Those who say, "It's not mentioned in the Bible" are usually unreflective of how biblical structures also were incarnated for their times as well. The Bible gives us principles. It doesn't ever say, "And if you ever get to decide on a governmental or church structure in the 21st century, here's what it should look like." We have to take the principles and play them out in different times and places.

There is a generally unnoticed section in the Wesleyan Discipline called "Elementary Principles." They are an artifact of the founding of the WMC, borrowed directly from the Methodist Protestant Church that split off in 1830. I have never heard anyone refer to them in any significant way. In terms of usage, they are like an appendix or a coccyx that is there but doesn't really do anything. Historical documents sometimes have things like these in them that can suddenly become very important if they somehow come into play in a political moment. They were of great meaning at the time when these individuals were protesting the abuses of power in the MEC.

So the new church would have no bishops. Offices would be elected but would not be held for life. A local church would also vote on whether they wanted a proposed pastor. Church bodies would have a parity between ministerial and lay delegation. There would be the equivalent of a trust clause.

5. The late Donald Dayton wrote a book called, Rediscovering an Evangelical Heritage that should probably be required reading for anyone becoming a Wesleyan pastor. The title has a story of its own. In the mid-twentieth century, the word evangelical was largely taken over by a movement involving Billy Graham and forces like Christianity Today. It was and remains a heavily Calvinist-centered movement. More on that in three posts down the line.

When Dayton first wrote the book in 1976, he wanted to point out that the line of evangelicalism in the 1800s largely did not run through the academics of Princeton that I call the "Princeton Calvinists." These were individuals like Archibald Alexander, Charles Hodge, and B. B. Warfield. In fact, these individuals never referred to themselves as evangelicals.

The original "evangelicals" in anything like the modern sense were people like John Wesley, George Whitefield, and Jonathan Edwards in the 1700s. Two of these were Calvinists, but what made them evangelicals was the way that they preached widely that individuals needed to have conversion experiences. Wesley used the term in reference to individuals who believed you could have an experience of justification by faith. Bebbington's four-fold definition fails because he doesn't take into account the fact that the referents of language change over time (see earlier post).

In short, the line of evangelicalism ran through people like Asbury, Peter Cartwright, Charles Finney, and D. L. Moody -- the revivalists of the 1800s. In the late 1800s, many of them were holiness folk. The "respectable" founders of neo-evangelicalism in the mid-twentieth century weren't so keen on these "emotional" types. Indeed, George Marsden and Mark Noll basically snubbed them in their treatments, calling them "fundamentalists" rather than true evangelicals. I'll unravel that skew in a few posts.

6. The individuals that Dayton covers in his book -- including the early Wesleyan Methodists -- were radicals for the time. They were abolitionists and champions of women's rights. If they were transported back in time, many Wesleyans today would consider them "woke liberals." They were social activists, "social justice warriors," if you would. Orange Scott and Luther Lee would have supported the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s if they were brought forward in time. 

They were post-millennials. That is, they believed that the church age more or less was the millennium. They were optimistic about changing the world to become more and more like the kingdom before Christ returned. The idea of a rapture or a Tribulation as things get worse and worse didn't really exist yet. That comes onto the scene in the late 1800s in the next post.

Some of these Wesleyan Methodists went into the south before the Civil War and preached abolition. Adam Crooks responded to a call to pastor a church in North Carolina in the 1840s, a perilous time. His church was called "Freedom's Hill," which is currently on the campus of Southern Wesleyan University. What a privilege and responsibility SWU has to steward that heritage.

The story of Micajah McPherson is often told. During the Civil War he was lynched and left for dead. But those who lynched him wanted to lynch more people, so they came back for the rope before he was truly dead. He would survive and serve in that church for another thirty years. Daniel Worth would spend the winter of 1859 in a cold cell in North Carolina for preaching abolition. Talk about counter-cultural! Black and Drury point out that Lincoln was too gradualist for these radicals (63-64).

Mark Noll wrote a book on the hermeneutics of this period (Civil War as a Theological Crisis). It is very relevant to debates over complementarianism today. The Princeton Calvinists of this period argued from the household codes that slaves were to obey their masters. They argued that it was unbiblical to be an abolitionist, much as contemporary complementarians are arguing that it is unbiblical to be an egalitarian. 

The Wesleyan Methodists in effect argued that one had to consider first what the overarching principles of Scripture were. Meanwhile, you had to consider the historical context of passages like the household codes and weigh them in the light of the unchanging, overarching core principles of Scripture. The Wesleyan Methodists strongly argued that in Christ there was "neither slave nor free." They saw the trajectory of Philemon as pointing toward the liberation of Onesimus.  

This is an important point. It is common for the person arguing from a clobber verse to accuse others of being unbiblical. In reality, the conflict may be between a verse-oriented hermeneutic versus a whole-Bible hermeneutic. It may be an argument of the letter versus the Spirit. In the end, these are hard debates that various communities of faith just have to wrestle through.

7. Luther Lee would famously preach the sermon at the first official ordination of a woman in the United States in 1853 (although Richard Allen of the AME church had given permission to Jarina Lee to preach in 1819). Lee's sermon is just as relevant today as it was then. Wesleyans also remember that the organizing meeting of the women's rights movement in America took place in a Wesleyan Methodist Church in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848.

The rights in question were primarily the right to vote, something that wouldn't happen until 1920. What was counter-cultural then at the time? The movement for women to be able to vote clearly went strongly against the culture of the time. 

Did all Wesleyan Methodists agree? Almost certainly not. For example, the WM pastor at Seneca Falls did not unlock the church. Oversight? They had to crawl in a window to open it up.

But Lee and others saw the Pentecostal principle. Whether you are a slave or a free person, black or white, a woman or a man, the Holy Spirit fills each person equally. Each person has equal value in God's sight. Experience demonstrates that the Spirit can speak and lead equally through all types of individuals. Doesn't it quench the Spirit to box people in based on such externals? Why not let God decide whom he calls?

8. A couple other tidbits from these early days. Few people know that Wheaton College was actually founded by the Wesleyan Methodists, as was Adrian College. However, the WMs did not succeed with the financial aspects of those schools and so they were sold to other groups.

Another issue of some controversy had to do with membership in secret societies. This was a big deal in the mid-1800s. Such organizations had a strong cult-like flavor to them and expected a person's primary loyalty. It looked very fishy and seemed to conflict with the church being a person's primary allegiance. One of the founders of the WMC would leave (Sunderland) over this issue. I believe he eventually left the faith.