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.