Thinking in the Spirit 鵷鵸
Thinking in the Spirit T H E OLO G I E S of the
E A R L Y P E N T E C O S TA L MOV EMEN T
鵷鵸 DOUGL A S JACOBSEN
Publication of this book is made possible in part with the assistance of a Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a federal agency that supports research, education, and public programming in the humanities. This book is a publication of Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, IN 47404-3797 USA http://iupress.indiana.edu Telephone orders 800-842-6796 Fax orders 812-855-7931 Orders by e-mail
[email protected] © 2003 by Douglas Jacobsen All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. manufactured in the united states of america Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jacobsen, Douglas G. (Douglas Gordon), date Thinking in the Spirit : theologies of the early Pentecostal movement / Douglas Jacobsen. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-253-34320-8 (alk. paper) — ISBN 0-253-21603-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Pentecostalism—United States—History—20th century. 2. Theology, Doctrinal— History—20th century. I. Title. BR1644.5.U6J33 2003 230′.994—dc21 2003005879 1 2 3 4 5 08 07 06 05 04 03
in memory of Oliver Jacobsen, 1896–1968 Andrea Jacobsen, 1899–1973 and Albert Jacobsen, 1925–2000
CON T EN TS
preface ix acknowledgments xv
Introduction: What Is Pentecostal Theology? 1 1 Original Visions 16 2 Theologies of the Azusa Era 57 3 Holiness and Finished-Work Options 134 4 Oneness Options 194 5 Theology and Race 260 6 Theology at the Boundaries of the Pentecostal Movement 286 Conclusion 353 Notes 365 Bibliography 405 Index 409
PR EFACE This book is about the early years of the American pentecostal movement, beginning about 1900 and ending around 1925. It is about the ideas that de¤ned that movement during these formative years and how a variety of creative pentecostal leaders rethought the Christian faith in light of their new experience of God. While these pentecostal theologians were relatively well known within their own religious spheres of in®uence, they were almost entirely unknown beyond those narrow con¤nes. If you weren’t searching for them, pentecostals could easily be overlooked. This is understandable, given the size and social location of the movement. The early pentecostal movement involved only a tiny percentage of the Christian population in the United States: In 1925, that meant something like 100,000 believers in a nation of 100 million. Pentecostals were, for the most part, solid working-class folks, though some poorer and some wealthier individuals were mixed in. Geographically, they came from all over the nation. But virtually none came from the ranks of the blue-blooded East Coast intellectual elite. If pentecostals were going to make their voice heard in the larger society during the early years of the twentieth century, they were going to have to do it on their own. They had no high-culture coattails to ride to prominence. But pentecostalism is no longer either small or socially invisible. It is the fastest-growing version of Christianity in the world, and the raw numbers are huge. Current estimates range from 300 to 500 million adherents worldwide. That means that as much as one-quarter of the world’s Christians are now pentecostal—almost 10 percent of the earth’s total population.1 In North America, the number of people who can be identi¤ed as pentecostal or charismatic is roughly 80 million out of a Christian population of 260 million and a total population of about 310 million. As for public visibility, well-known ¤gures such as Pat Robertson and John Ashcroft seem proof enough that pentecostals now rank among the power brokers of the nation (though it should be pointed out that not all pentecostals are conservative Republicans). In short, while intelligent observers
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of the American scene might justi¤ably have been able to ignore the pentecostal movement seventy-¤ve years ago, that is not an option today. Because of its sheer size and in®uence, pentecostalism now demands attention and, like any other religious movement, it needs to be understood from its intellectual roots. This book focuses on the individuals who formed the original brain trust of this now gigantic religious movement. In a 25-year burst of creative energy at the beginning of the twentieth century, these leaders articulated almost all the basic theological ideas that continue to de¤ne the pentecostal message in the United States and around the world. Theology is only one part of any religious movement, however, so it would be wrong to claim too much. The pentecostal movement would never have succeeded if it had not been for the hard work of many institutional leaders and for the generous activism of the faithful. But the way a movement articulates its vision of the world, the way a religious tradition de¤nes its theology, is critical. Ideas have consequences, and the theological ideas of the key ¤gures discussed in this volume have had more consequential impact than most. The heritage of early pentecostal theology is not neat and tidy. Early pentecostal thinkers sometimes disagreed vehemently with each other; as a result, they bequeathed to their followers a pluriform tradition of faith. Internal diversity, which still de¤nes the movement as it begins its second century of existence, is part of what makes pentecostalism different from other theological traditions. To borrow a notion from Ann Swidler, pentecostal theology is much more like a mixed tool kit of ideas than it is a tightly-reasoned doctrinal system.2 And it is precisely this sense of theological adaptability—that is, if one idea doesn’t work, use another—that has allowed the movement to span the globe so quickly. The ideas studied here have frequently been borrowed and appropriated in ways that were not necessarily foreseen or fully intended by the theologians who ¤rst proposed them. They have often been handed on without any theologian’s name attached to them. They have been eclectically integrated into the thinking of a wide variety of pentecostal communities in North America and around the world. This book examines those migrating ideas in their original forms of expression, and, in those original forms, they have a certain appeal and interest all their own. Early-twentieth-century pentecostal thinkers were creative thinkers who knew how to turn a theological phrase. Most had little or no training and were thus not beholden to what any theologian might or might not have said in years past; like many earlier American
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religious innovators, they were intent on doing their own thing in their own way. So when they took up the task of thinking in the Spirit—of rereading the Bible in the light of their own experience of God and the spiritual needs of the world—they wrote down exactly what they thought with whatever words seemed to work the best. The one thing that mattered was that the whole thing rang true to their own lived experience of faith and to the lived faith of others. This was not abstract speculation; it was theological re®ection grounded in real life. In contemporary terms, we might say that pentecostals came to understand quicker than most twentieth-century Christians that there is a difference between being religious and being spiritual, and pentecostals generally opted for the more spiritual side of that divide. As de¤ned today, “religion” is associated with organized institutionalized faith while “spirituality” focuses on personal values and practices. Religion is seen as promoting norms of belief and behavior that are codi¤ed and standardized for an entire group. By contrast, spirituality is more individualistic, discovered from within rather than learned from the outside. Religion is embodied in doctrines, creeds, and formal liturgies, while spirituality ¤nds better outlet in poetry, song, and dramatic performance. This distinction is helpful, but if argued too forcefully it deconstructs itself. Ultimately there is no such thing as pure spirituality or pure religion; they need each other. Spirituality needs religion to keep it from simply dissipating into thin air, and religion needs spirituality to keep it from becoming hollow. Religious forms and structures provide containers that help preserve spirituality through time and help spark spirituality in others. The pentecostal theologians discussed in this book seemed to intuitively understand this relationship, and they were trying to devise new forms and formulations of religious belief that would preserve as much of the crackling lightening of ¤rst-hand spirituality as possible. In that task, their lack of formal training helped. It gave them the freedom to create new vocabularies of faith that more traditionally educated theologians might have avoided. More than just religion and spirituality were addressed, however. In their own ways, most of the thinkers examined in this volume were also folksy philosophers. They wondered about the world’s origins and mused about its future. They pondered the problem of evil. They speculated about the dynamics of human history. They analyzed the psychology of belief. And they developed their own new understandings of epistemology. In doing so, they sometimes came up with some ideas, interpretations, and theories that will strike some readers as strange, even weird, but this pentecostal peculiarity needs to be understood in historical context.
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Anyone who has skimmed the pages of Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America knows that pentecostals had no monopoly on strange ideas in late-nineteenth- and early-twentiethcentury America. Menand describes the views of four of the nation’s most acclaimed intellectuals—Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James, Charles S. Peirce, and John Dewey—with the sometimes peculiar logic of their original forms fully intact. In most accounts of these ¤gures, the rough edges of their thoughts have been almost entirely sanded off, but Menand has restored those ideas to their original shape and has situated them in the life histories of each thinker. Once that is done, the differences between the philosophies of these mainstream thinkers and the ideas of the leaders of the pentecostal movement become much harder to separate along the lines of intelligent surmise versus fanatical ranting. These turn-of-thecentury mainstream intellectuals were sometimes as idiosyncratic and outlandish in their views as any of their pentecostal theological peers. Given that there are currently at least as many pentecostal believers in the world as there are followers of the philosophies of Holmes, James, Peirce, and Dewey, it seems only reasonable to explore the views of these early pentecostal theologians with as much care, respect, and effort as Menand has shed on his subjects.3 And that is what I have tried to do in the pages that follow. I have been thinking about these pentecostal theologians for a good many years (I say six or seven; my wife says ten), reading them and rereading them, trying to get inside their minds, trying to place myself in their spiritual shoes. While I am not myself a pentecostal Christian, I must admit that in the course of my researching and writing I have come to think of each of these theologians, in turn, as an old friend. They all have their rough spots, but they are all likeable in their own ways, too. They cared deeply not only about God but also about humanity, and they were usually especially concerned about the poor and the sick. Perhaps most important, they were honest in what they wrote, rarely if ever putting on airs or striking a pose they did not fully endorse. While I surely do not agree with all they wrote, I hope this book does each of them justice. My goal throughout is twofold: ¤rst, to provide scholars and general readers who know little or nothing about pentecostalism with an enjoyable introduction to the ideas of the movement’s most articulate early spokespersons; second, to give persons involved in the pentecostal movement a nonjudgmental historical sourcebook to help them in their own important ongoing theological re®ections regarding Christian faith and practice.
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In terms of structure, the book begins with an introduction that discusses both the general character of pentecostal theology and the dif¤culties of de¤ning with precision what it is that makes someone’s theology “pentecostal” in the ¤rst place. The chapters that follow examine the theological worldviews of the twelve people I have selected as the most interesting and articulate theologians of the early era. The main body of the book is arranged in roughly chronological order, but each chapter stands on its own and can be read as an independent essay. The theological spokespersons of the ¤rst generation were a de¤ant and creative lot. They were convinced that their new views were superior to the dead and/or mistaken teachings of the “orthodox” Christianity they had experienced before becoming pentecostal, and they were quite vocal about the need for believers to leave that Christian past behind and move ahead into pentecostal light—which, of course, different pentecostal theologians de¤ned differently. The tenor of the movement as a whole was feisty, argumentative, and to some degree still ®uid. By the mid-1920s things had changed, and so this book ends around 1925. After that date, theological arguments between pentecostal subgroups tended to harden into rote formulas of doctrine, and the main task of theology became the defense of one’s own denominationally distinctive beliefs. Pentecostal theology became much less inventive and, to some degree, simply less interesting. This book, however, is about the early years when pentecostal theology was still fresh, raw, and undomesticated. It is about the boisterous beginnings of a religious movement that, while it started small, was born with a desire to circle the globe. And it is about the ways in which a group of creative theologians felt compelled to improvise language, bending the meanings of old words and inventing new phrases, to help their readers— and perhaps us—better understand the elusive yet powerful ways in which God’s Spirit may be present in the world.
ACK NOW LEDGMEN TS Scholars are dependent on a host of people—family, associates, friends, and sometimes strangers—to help them complete their work. This book is no exception. Over the years when I was researching and writing this book I accumulated enormous debts of gratitude to a host of individuals and organizations. Without that network of support and encouragement, this book would never have been written or, if written, it would have had many more ®aws than those that still remain. I would know hardly anything about pentecostalism without the help of the many scholars who have done research and writing in this ¤eld. My knowledge of this ¤eld in general has been enriched by numerous conversations with Edith Blumhofer, Anthea Butler, David Daniels, Don Dayton, Bill Faupel, Harold Hunter, Cheryl Johns, Steve Land, Frank Macchia, David Reed, Mel Robeck, David Roebuck, Dale Simmons, Russ Spittler, Vinson Synan, Chris Thomas, Grant Wacker, and Wayne Warner. Other scholars who helped me speci¤cally with this project include Kimberly Alexander, Bernie Gillespie, Alexander Stewart, and Dan Woods. I am especially grateful to several friends who took the time to read the entire manuscript and to give me detailed feedback: Mel Robeck, Vinson Synan, Bill Trollinger, and Grant Wacker. They have my deepest appreciation, and I hope they can see their suggestions re®ected in the text. Any remaining errors of fact or judgment are obviously mine alone. The archivists, librarians, and individuals who collect and care for the books and material culture of pentecostal history deserve hearty thanks. Wayne Warner, Glen Gohr, and Joyce Lee from the Flower Pentecostal Heritage Center of the Assemblies of God Church in Spring¤eld, Missouri, have my special thanks. They are always helpful and always upbeat. David Roebuck, who directs the Hal Bernard Dixon Jr. Pentecostal Research Center at Lee University in Cleveland, Tennessee, deserves similar praise. I value his input, even if I don’t always take his advice. He argued strongly that A. J. Tomlinson should be included in this book, and he almost convinced me. The staff at the Holy Spirit Research Center of Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma, also were unfailingly hospi-
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Acknowledgments
table. Almost all of the primary source documents cited in this book can be found at one or another of these three locations. Perhaps the rarest publication discussed in this book is R. C. Lawson’s The Anthropology of Jesus Christ Our Kinsman. I would never have known about this book had David Daniels not pointed it out to me, and I might never have seen it had he not been willing to share his copy with me. His behavior exempli¤es what scholarly friendship and generosity is all about. I am blessed to be associated with a college that values the kind of research and writing that went into this book and to be surrounded by colleagues who care about both my academic work and me as a person. Rodney Sawatsky, the president of Messiah College, and Kim Phipps, the provost, are scholars in their own ¤elds and they have encouraged this work in many ways. The library staff at Messiah College, particularly the Interlibrary Loan staff, were fantastic about tracking down hard-to-¤nd publications and convincing other institutions to share their treasures with me via FedEx and the U.S. mail service. The librarian most interested in this work, Reg Wagner, who was an absolute gem of a human being, unfortunately passed away before this book was completed. I am very sorry he is not here to read it. My faculty friends are too numerous to mention by name. Two former students, Matt Mardis and Sara Pike, served as assistants at different points along the way. It has been wonderful to work with Indiana University Press. Bob Sloan was more than patient as this book grew in length and various deadlines were missed, but he never seemed put out by the process. Kate Babbitt, who served as copy editor for the book, was superb when it came to questions of both style and content. She has saved me from more awkward grammatical constructions, unclear prose, and poorly articulated emphases than I like to admit. Finally, my last and most important word of thanks and appreciation goes, as always, to my wife, Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen, and our children, Kate, Anna, and Grant, My kids are a never-ending source of joy and energy for me, and now they are all becoming ¤ne scholars themselves. My wife, in addition to being married to me for twenty-seven years, is also an academic colleague at Messiah College, where she is professor of psychology and assistant dean for faculty development. She is the ¤rst and best critic of everything I write and my most consistent supporter. I would be lost without her. Even though I did the writing, a good deal of this book, and everything else in my life, really belongs to her.
Thinking in the Spirit 鵷鵸
I N T RODUC T ION
What Is Pentecostal Theology?
鵷鵸 The pentecostal movement began in the ¤rst decade of the twentieth century, and it entered the American religious scene with explosive power. When the Spirit fell on a pentecostal mission or country tent-meeting, people found themselves thrown to the ®oor by a force so strong, yet so wonderful, that after the fact they could only stammer inadequate partial descriptions of what had happened to them. The early pentecostal leader William Durham recounted his own baptism of the Spirit as follows: “I was overcome by the mighty fulness of power and went down under it. For three hours He wrought wonderfully in me. My body was worked in sections, a section at a time. And even the skin on my face was jerked and shaken, and ¤nally I felt my lower jaw begin to quiver in a strange way. This continued for some little time, when ¤nally my throat began to enlarge and I felt my vocal organs being, as it were, drawn into a different shape. O how strange and wonderful it was! and how blessed it was to be thus in the hands of God. And last of all I felt my tongue begin to move and my lips to produce strange sounds which did not originate in my mind.”1 Another early pentecostal, David Wesley Myland, found ®uid imagery to be the best means of communicating the essence of the pentecostal experience. He said that when the Spirit entered one’s life, it was like swallowing “God liquidized.” Having drunk deeply from that divine potion, one suddenly found oneself “®owing” away from one’s prideridden ego and “into the goodness of the Lord.” Myland warned that brains could sometimes get in the way of this process. He said that when people stopped to think about what was going on they often held back. Trying to maintain control of themselves—trying to keep their bearings while being drawn into the whirlpool of God’s love—they forfeited their opportunity to receive God’s pentecostal blessing. Myland’s prayer was
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Thinking in the Spirit
that God would turn the minds of these overly cautious seekers “soft” so their intellectual concerns would not get in the Spirit’s way. He cried out: “Oh God make our heads soft . . . give us softness of the brain! That is a good disease in Pentecostal times. Hard-headed fellows cannot get it.”2 Accounts like these have fueled the popular perception that pentecostalism is about experience as opposed to theology—that pentecostalism is an emotional rather than a cognitive faith. Many would consider the phrase “pentecostal theology” an oxymoron. They would say that pentecostals don’t really have any theology at all; what pentecostal Christians have is experience, pure and simple. That response is understandable. High-voltage religious experience has been an important aspect of pentecostal faith from the beginning, and many contemporary pentecostal television broadcasts, publications, and Web sites seem intent on reinforcing that stereotype every day. But experience is only half the picture of pentecostal faith. From the very earliest days of the movement experience and theology have been wedded together, and the relationship has always been reciprocal. Pentecostal experience has been circumscribed by theology, and pentecostal theology has been grounded in experience. When the power of Pentecost fell on people and knocked them to the ground, few rose in silence. Instead, most struggled to their feet trying to talk about what had happened. Some wanted merely to testify to their experience—they’d gotten “the baptism” and were happy in the Lord— but others were intent on explaining what had happened to them, trying to describe the experience in ways that made sense to themselves and to others as well. Pentecostal theology was born out of that need to bring words and experience together—to connect thought with the experience of the Spirit in ways that fostered God’s work in the world. Most leaders of the early pentecostal movement were, of course, suspicious of theology done in the traditional way. Too often, they thought, theology had lost touch with the Spirit and become dry and brittle, incapable of conveying the living truth of God’s love to anyone. William Seymour, for example, cautioned the members of his Azusa Street Mission against getting caught up in merely “talking thought” lest the power of God decline in their midst. The pentecostal theologians discussed in this book all took that warning seriously. At the same time, however, each was convinced that thought was a necessary part of pentecostal faith— theology was necessary and unavoidable. Even more, each was convinced that his own divinely inspired thinking in the Spirit held the key to the success and vitality of the pentecostal movement as a whole.3
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Theology and Experience Within early pentecostalism, theology and experience went hand in hand. There is no doubt that experience was a crucial dimension of the early pentecostal movement, but it was experience guided by theological truth that really mattered. Experience alone was considered dangerous. Every pentecostal leader worth his or her salt knew that. Experiences needed to be examined and evaluated. They needed to be properly labeled and categorized so believers could know where they stood in their relationship with God and to what they should aspire. As a result, ¤rstgeneration pentecostals were constantly arguing with each other about how best to describe their faith in and fellowship with God. The early movement was literally awash in a sea of theological debate. The very act of becoming a pentecostal was in a certain sense a function of the theological labels one used to describe one’s religious experiences. Experience alone did not make one a pentecostal. It was experience interpreted in a pentecostal way that made one a pentecostal. The life of Lewi Pethrus, a Swedish pentecostal leader, illustrates the point. He had had a mystical experience accompanied by speaking in tongues while on a ferry trip from Norway to Sweden in 1902, but Donald Dayton tells us that “it was not until ¤ve years later, after reports from the Azusa Street Revival in America reached him, that Pethrus received the categories that he would use to interpret his experience of speaking in tongues as an outward sign of having received the baptism of the Holy Spirit.” Before that time, Pethrus considered himself merely a Spirit-¤lled Baptist preacher who had encountered God in an unusual and powerful way; after interpreting his experience in the light of the revival in Los Angeles, he began to call himself a pentecostal.4 Pethrus stepped over the theological line from being a Baptist to being a pentecostal fairly easily, but many others would ¤nd that transition dif¤cult. Most holiness Christians in particular determinedly resisted any kind of pentecostalist reformulation of their theology. The result was a bitter and protracted dispute over the boundary line where radical holiness faith and pentecostalism met. Differences of raw experience may well have contributed to this ¤ght—pentecostals claimed a new relationship with the Holy Spirit that holiness and other higher-life Christians supposedly lacked—but the war itself was largely about words and how they were theologically used. One outcome of this fracas was that both groups soon began to de¤ne themselves against each other with more verbal rigidity
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Thinking in the Spirit
and precision than was either helpful or warranted. As a result, relations between these two very closely related movements were marred for decades to come. Words have social consequences.5 Words also have creative power. For Pethrus, theological language played an ex post facto role that helped him reinterpret his experience after it had occurred. In other cases, theology played a much more proactive role, shaping experience in advance by providing seekers with detailed descriptions of what a truly pentecostal experience should look like. Perhaps the most famous example comes from Charles Parham and his Bethel Bible College in Topeka, Kansas. The year was 1900, and based on his reading of the Bible Parham had come to the conclusion that whenever the baptism of the Holy Spirit was truly received, that event would be con¤rmed by the physical evidence of speaking in tongues. Even though he himself had not yet received the baptism of the Spirit in this manner, Parham made this theological doctrine a centerpiece of the curriculum at his school, and he encouraged his students to seek linguistic con¤rmation of the Spirit’s baptism as promised by the biblical text. His students took up the challenge, and soon their hopes were ful¤lled. During the ¤rst few days of 1901, twelve students claimed the baptism of the Holy Spirit with the con¤rming sign of foreign speech. Parham interpreted his students’ experience as direct proof of the truth of his theology.6 There are at least two ways to understand what was happening with Parham and his students. On the one hand, Parham’s theology could be seen as having a merely instrumental in®uence on his students—his theology pointed them in the right direction so they could successfully seek and receive the baptism of the Spirit. On the other hand, one could argue that his theology had a more causal impact, even to the point of, in essence, creating the experience: Wanting the baptism of the Spirit badly enough, and skipping meals and sleep to seek it, his students ¤nally generated an experience of their own based on the vivid description Parham had given them. Both of these dynamics could have been, and probably were, at work at the same time. Thus, one can accept at face value the students’ perception that Parham’s advice had merely helped them know how to seek the baptism of the Spirit more effectively and at the same time agree that certain facets of their experience may have been selfproduced to match Parham’s expectations. One particular aspect of the experience of Parham’s students stands out as almost certainly produced by theological expectation. Parham believed that the speech gift associated with baptism in the Spirit was the
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5
miraculous ability to converse in human languages one had never been taught. This conviction derived from Parham’s larger concern for world evangelism. The pentecostal gift of tongues was a way of short-circuiting the need for lengthy language study before heading off on any new missionary initiative. The pentecostal movement as a whole (and virtually every scholar who studied the phenomenon) would later reject this missionistic interpretation that those who spoke in tongues were actually speaking other languages, but Parham’s students were convinced that they had spoken in “foreign” tongues because they knew that that was what was supposed to happen.7 They were so convinced of the truth of Parham’s view that they lost all awareness of the fact that they were actually interpreting their experience to make it ¤t Parham’s prede¤ned theological ideal. When they said they spoke in “foreign” tongues, they thought they were providing a raw and uninterpreted description of what had taken place. In reality, their theological expectations had de¤nitively shaped their perceptions. Whether experience preceded theology (as was the case with Lewi Pethrus) or theology preceded experience (as was the case with Parham’s students at Bethel Bible College), the basic point is the same: Theology and experience deeply in®uenced each other within the pentecostal movement. Myer Pearlman, the dean of mid-twentieth-century pentecostal theology, would later summarize the relationship between these two concerns in the introduction to his famous theological textbook, Knowing the Doctrines of the Bible, by saying: “Certainly it is more important to live the Christian life than to merely know Christian doctrine, but there would be no Christian experience if there were no Christian doctrine.”8 Pentecostal Theological Style Pentecostal theology has not necessarily looked like the theology of other Christian traditions. Of course, there is no such thing as a normative model that applies to all theology. Different churches at different times have adopted notably different ways of expressing their faith in written systematic form. Even within a single church tradition, modes of theology have sometimes varied considerably. One thinks, for example, of the differences in the Catholic tradition represented by the scholastic theology of Thomas Aquinas and the mystical theology of Teresa of Avila. It seems only reasonable to assume that as the pentecostal movement matured it would create its own style of theological expression, and to a large degree that is what happened.
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Thinking in the Spirit
In the abstract, the creation of a new pentecostal style of theology should have been a matter of mere addition—one more voice added to the plethora of other theological voices already competing for attention. However, things have not necessarily been that simple. In modern Protestantism, one particular style of theology has tended to dominate the ¤eld, and that “standard” model has generally judged pentecostal theology to be lacking in theological rigor and ¤nesse. That is, when the existence of pentecostal theology has been acknowledged and not merely overlooked, it has typically been judged de¤cient. This predominant model of Protestant theology is derived from the Reformed tradition and highlights the systematic, philosophically oriented discussion of the classical themes of Christian theology (the doctrine of God, the doctrine of Christ, the doctrine of humanity, the doctrine of salvation, the doctrine of the church, etc.). Theologians from many different traditions—Reformed and non-Reformed alike—have found this format quite helpful, and many have used it to articulate their own views. However, some have raised cautions. For example, a number of Anabaptist scholars have argued that the standard style of Protestant theology inevitably displaces the Anabaptist conviction that ethics is the foundation of all other dimensions of theology. They suggest that the inner logic of the standard approach simply does not allow ethics to be included except as an addendum to doctrine proper. In a similar manner, it has been argued that the standard Protestant model may inevitably distort pentecostal theology. Steven Land, in particular, has argued that pentecostal theology ought to be more spiritualistic and less rationalistic than the standard model allows. He says that pentecostal theology properly understood will value orthopathy (right experience) just as much as it values orthodoxy (right belief ) and orthopraxy (right behavior).9 Writing from outside the pentecostal community, Harvey Cox has argued much the same thing. In Fire from Heaven, Cox explains that he had to jettison his old approach to theology when he began his study of global pentecostalism: As a theologian I had grown accustomed to studying religious movements by reading what their theologians wrote and trying to grasp the central ideas and the most salient doctrines. But I soon found out that with pentecostalism this approach does not help much. As one pentecostal scholar put it, in his faith “the experience of God has absolute primacy over dogma and doctrine.” Therefore the only theology that can give an account of this experience, he says, is “a narrative theology whose central expression is the testimony.” I think he is right.10
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7
Cox’s own de¤nition of pentecostal theology stresses general worldview over systematic comprehension and tightness of logic. He includes moral and emotional values alongside cognitive matters and suggests that pentecostal theology ought to be conceived of in terms of “the symbolic cosmos of the pentecostal movement,” rather than as the propositional foundation of pentecostal faith. He argues further that pentecostal theology is best presented in song, prayer, sermon, and testimony, not in the format of lengthy treatises laced with philosophical concern.11 As a corrective to older, often negative assessments of the pentecostal theology, Cox has an important point to make. Pentecostal theology does indeed cover a terrain of faith and dogma that is different from many other forms of Christian faith, and that terrain may be more amenable to the looser, more subjective style of theology Cox proposes. At the same time, however, it would be a mistake to take Cox’s rede¤nition as suf¤cient to describe the whole of pentecostal theology. There is no question that pentecostals have used songs, sermons, prayers, and testimonies to express their theological convictions, but that predilection does not mark pentecostal theology as unique. All Christian traditions have used those forms of communication for theological purposes. The converse is also true. All Christian traditions, including pentecostalism, have at times felt compelled to move beyond the realm of song, sermon, prayer, and testimony and to employ rational and systematic argument in their attempts to explain their faith to themselves and others. The point is that while pentecostal theology does indeed have a different center of gravity than many other kinds of theology, Pentecostal theology does not exist in a class by itself. The stylistic difference between pentecostal theology and other forms of theology is one of degree, not of radical disjuncture. From the beginning of the movement, pentecostal thinkers have been producing theological treatises alongside their songs, sermons, prayers, and testimonies. These authors never implied that they had to give up part of their pentecostal faith to write in a systematic and logical manner, and there is no evidence that their relatively systematic style of writing forced them to set aside certain pentecostal topics simply because they didn’t logically ¤t with everything else. They were writing as pentecostals to pentecostals for pentecostal theological purposes while trying to be just as thorough and systematic as their non-pentecostal theological peers. It is these works that provide the focus of this study. The main goal of these systematic presentations of pentecostal faith was not personal transformation but truth-telling. The primary purpose was explanation, not testimony. The motivating impulse was not neces-
8
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Thinking in the Spirit
sarily to lead the reader into one or another spiritual experience (e.g., conversion, sancti¤cation, the baptism of the Holy Spirit)—though I am sure virtually every pentecostal theologian discussed in this book would have rejoiced at that occurrence—but to explore the theological signi¤cance of those experiences. This did not mean that these pentecostal treatises were wiped clean of any and all personal references—in fact, many authors included autobiography and testimony as part of the mix—but almost without exception, this personal material was bracketed off from the main text and was relegated to some kind of preface or appendix. While many of these pentecostal theologians could exhort and testify with the best of them, they were intent on keeping their preaching separate from their lecturing in their explicitly theological publications. It is also worth remembering that although they tried their best to be serious theologians, virtually all of these early pentecostal theologians were amateurs at their task, and that amateur status is evident on almost every page they wrote. By “amateur” I mean both the best and worst of what that term implies. On the positive side, these early pentecostal theologians were amateurs in the sense that they wrote for the sheer love of their subject and not because of any professional pressure to do so. They wrote because they had to get their thoughts on paper or they would burst. They wrote because they felt compelled by God to do so. In perhaps a more negative sense, these theologians as amateurs were not welltrained writers, and most of them made up their own folksy rules of grammar and style as they went along. But there was an up side here, as well. None of these pentecostal writers felt fettered by the dictates of scholarly convention or literary rules; they wrote exactly what they wanted to write in the way they wanted to write it. Because of that there is a freshness to early pentecostal theology that is missing in most published theology. This is theology without all the kinks worked out, theology still in the process of formation. This is also eminently quotable theology— most pentecostal theologians knew how to turn a good phrase—and because of that the following exposition of their writings allows these writers to speak for themselves as much as possible. The Pentecostal Identity of Pentecostal Theology A critical issue in understanding pentecostal theology is just what makes this theology “pentecostal” in the ¤rst place. In one sense, the answer to that question seems blatantly obvious: Pentecostal theology is theology written by and for pentecostals. But that answer begs the question of precisely what it is that makes someone pentecostal. To be a
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9
pentecostal is not a simple fact of life. As we have already seen in the life of Lewi Pethrus, to call oneself a pentecostal is an act of theological selfinterpretation. Which then comes ¤rst, pentecostal theology or pentecostal identity? Historically most pentecostals have said that identity comes ¤rst. They have said that it is the experience of the baptism of the Spirit (which requires only minimal instruction to recognize) that makes one a pentecostal believer. Understood in this sense, theology has nothing to do with becoming a pentecostal believer. Instead, pentecostal theology is something that comes later when a person begins to re®ect more intentionally upon what he or she has experienced. That answer makes sense as long as the initiating experience of the baptism of the Spirit seems suf¤ciently distinctive and dramatic for everyone to recognize it without any special training. But what if that ceases to be the case? What if the notion of the baptism of the Spirit becomes a bit less distinctive and less dramatic? At some point, the issue of just who is and who is not a pentecostal will become rather more complicated. This is precisely the situation in which many pentecostals have found themselves during the last three or four decades. Since the emergence of the charismatic renewal movement in the 1960s in mainline Protestantism and the Catholic Church, the question of who is and who is not a “pentecostal” has become considerably more dif¤cult to answer. With the rise of newer “third wave” pentecostal groups and the adaptation of pentecostal styles of worship by churches all across the theological spectrum, the line between pentecostal and non-pentecostal Christianity has become so blurred that now some people talk about being quasi-pentecostal or partly pentecostal and others react as if that kind of self-designation makes perfect sense. Actually, the situation was fairly similar in the early years of the movement. First-generation pentecostals were divided by a host of practical and doctrinal differences, and the boundaries of the pentecostal movement as a whole were still ragged and to some degree ®exible. Even the core idea of the baptism of the Spirit was debated. Many early pentecostal theologians did use that term in their writings, but different pentecostals de¤ned the baptism of the Spirit in different ways. Perhaps even more important, the language of the baptism of the Spirit was not the distinctive property of pentecostals—a good number of evangelical/fundamentalist spokespersons who explicitly located themselves outside the emerging pentecostal movement used the phrase quite freely in their own theological writings. The line between who was and who was not a pentecostal
10
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Thinking in the Spirit
was fuzziest at the point where pentecostalism touched the variety of holiness and higher-life movements that ®ourished within late-nineteenthand early-twentieth-century radical evangelicalism. Speaking in tongues is often cited as the speci¤c behavior that set pentecostals apart from these other groups, but not all pentecostals treated tongues in the same way, and some pentecostals actually denied that tongues were a necessary aspect of the baptism of the Spirit. All in all, the question of precisely who was and who was not a pentecostal Christian was at least as dif¤cult to answer in the early years of the twentieth century as it is today. Different emerging “species” of pentecostalism (holiness versus ¤nished-work, Trinitarian versus Oneness, etc.) competed with each other, each claiming that they were the best example of what the movement as a whole should look like. This diversity of early pentecostalism is often described as the “fragmentation” of the movement, a term that implies some kind of original unity that was destroyed by subsequent developments. I ¤nd that term both inaccurate and unhelpful. The origins of the pentecostal movement are too scattered and ®uid to support the ideal of original unity that the term “fragmentation” implies. Pentecostalism seems to have popped up in a number of places at roughly the same time instead of emanating from any single uni¤ed center. Even if one identi¤es the revival at the Azusa Street Mission in Los Angeles as the epicenter of the movement, unity is not what one ¤nds. There is no doubt that the Azusa Street Mission played the role of Grand Central Station for the pentecostal movement. Almost everyone who was anybody in the early pentecostal movement had some connection with the revival, and it was in Los Angeles that pentecostals ¤rst began to build the national and international networks of acquaintance that would de¤ne the movement—but those connections should not be misconstrued as unity. People moved in and out of the Azusa orbit carrying different concerns and convictions into that arena with them and taking different lessons away from the meetings. Pentecostals may have had a common point of contact in the Azusa revival, but that did not mean that they all experienced the Azusa revival in the same way or saw eye to eye on all the details (or even all the core beliefs) of pentecostal faith. The term “fragmentation” almost automatically encourages one to look for the causes (or causers) of the rancor and division that supposedly tore the movement apart, but those enemies of unity are very hard to ¤nd. Most early pentecostal leaders were committed to Christian unity. They believed that if Christians would faithfully follow the leading of the
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11
Spirit, love and unity would be the result. When divisions arose or when con®icts broke out, they mourned the lack of unity. There is no doubt that most of those con®icts were generated by the same people who later mourned their existence—pentecostals were doggedly committed to their own views of truth and were willing to confront anyone who differed from them—but very few (if any) pentecostal leaders set out to purposely divide the movement. Most pentecostals leaders felt caught between their need to stand up for truth and their desire to maintain the ties of love that ought ideally to bind all Christians—especially all Spirit¤lled Christians—together. A better way to understand the pluralizing dynamics of early pentecostalism might be to identify the original impetus behind the pentecostal movement as a relatively undeveloped spiritual impulse pushing those involved in the movement to seek a deeper and fuller understanding of the Spirit. As pentecostal believers struggled to comprehend the breadth and detail of precisely what God was doing in their lives and in the world as a whole, their developing views naturally crystallized into different concrete forms of belief and practice. Seen in this light, the process was one of simple differentiation rather than declension from unity. This interpretation seems to ring true to the historical record. The internal pluralization of the movement was inevitable; it was there in seed form from the very beginning. So what is it that makes pentecostal theology pentecostal? The answer seems to be that the competition to de¤ne the term “pentecostal” is itself the factor that makes pentecostal theology pentecostal. The notion of pentecostalism is what political philosopher William Gallie would call an “essentially contested concept”—a idea or ideal that is clear to everyone with regard to its general meaning but impossible to de¤ne in detail in a way that will satisfy everyone.12 One of the examples Gallie uses is the idea/ideal of justice. Everyone would agree that justice means treating people equitably and with fairness, but the moment anyone asks a more precise question (e.g., Is it just that children and adults are treated in exactly the same manner by the courts? Is it just to tax the more wealthy at a higher rate than the less wealthy? Is it just to require 18-year-old American males to register for the selective service and not females?), opinions about what justice requires in any speci¤c instance begin to diverge dramatically. Persons who hold strong opinions on these kinds of matters generally tend to see their own views as not only right but also as the most obvious and reasonable position. They also tend to see the views of their oppo-
12
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Thinking in the Spirit
nents as irrational, in addition to being simply wrong. Even if one can see the merits of both views, it is often impossible to work out any viable compromise. Ultimately one has to choose between options and live as best one can with the diversity that results. And that is exactly what Gallie means when he says the notion of justice is “essentially contested.” There simply is no way to adjudicate all the different views that are buried in the concept. Differences of opinion regarding notions such as justice will never disappear, even if they slowly evolve into different kinds of arguments and disputes as the public conversation moves along. The idea/ideal of pentecostalism seems to behave in much the same way. In a general sense, being pentecostal means that one is committed to a Spirit-centered, miracle-af¤rming, praise-oriented version of Christian faith, but as soon as one begins to ask more speci¤c questions (e.g., How exactly does one receive the Spirit? What are the relationships between the baptism of the Spirit, justi¤cation, and sancti¤cation? How is the Spirit related to or identi¤ed with the godhead as a whole?) Pentecostal opinion begins to diverge, sometimes in rather marked ways. Different schools of opinion naturally arise from this kind of debate, and each of these schools tends almost automatically to see its own position on any issue as the best possible answer. Differing schools of opinion can usually muster fairly good hermeneutical and theological arguments for their divergent opinions, and ordinary believers are left to choose as best they can between the diversity of contested visions of pentecostal faith available to them. All of this means that there is no meta-model of pentecostalism—no essence of pentecostalism or normative archetype—that can provide an infallible rule against which to judge all the various particular renditions of pentecostal faith and theology to determine precisely which is the most pentecostal and/or the least pentecostal. Instead, all the diverse versions of pentecostalism stand to some degree on their own, mutually criticizing each other and con¤rming each other in complex ways. They are held together by their overlapping (but not necessarily identical) concerns, practices, and experiences, which, as each separate pentecostal subtradition illustrates, can be theologically explained in a number of different relatively coherent and consistent ways. Within the tradition as a whole, different groups have championed different ways of making sense of pentecostalism, each vying with the other to see which articulation of pentecostal theology might make the most sense to the most people. That debate began in the ¤rst generation of the movement, and it continues in quite lively form today.
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13
Theologians of the Early Pentecostal Movement The purpose of this book is to describe as clearly as possible the different theological visions of pentecostal faith that were produced during the very ¤rst generation of the movement—the ¤rst twenty-¤ve years or so. The goal is not to exhaustively catalog every published pentecostal idea but to concentrate instead on those pentecostal thinkers who were the most systematic and comprehensive in their views—that is, those writers who were doing their utmost to present and promote their views as the best possible expression of the contested ideal of pentecostalism. Some of these theologians were prominent institutional organizers of the movement, but many were not. Some were loyal denominationalists—or at least they became so as the pentecostal movement slowly organized itself into formal denominations in the later 1910s and the 1920s—but many were not. Each of these authors was trying to sketch out the broadest and most accurate description of pentecostal faith they could muster. They saw themselves as champions of truth locked in battle with other theologians (some pentecostal, some non-pentecostal) who were spreading erroneous views among the faithful. The publications of these authors do not tell us what the average pentecostal man or woman on the street may have believed about any speci¤c doctrinal issues. Nor are they, for the most part, careful expositions of any speci¤c church’s confession of faith. Rather, these publications provide what theology has always provided: different maps of how Christian faith as a whole can be analyzed, divided into subject areas, and articulated in a logical and systematic manner. Almost without exception these theologians were also committed to the task of writing theological textbooks as opposed to merely jotting off short articles for publication. That book format forced them to develop their ideas in a more comprehensive manner than would have been necessary or possible had they chosen to write only short articles for publication in one of the many pentecostal periodicals that ®ourished during the early years of the movement. In addition, the material durability of these books (in contrast to journals, newspapers, and magazines) allowed these works to circulate longer and more broadly within the pentecostal community than articles printed only in periodical form. Of the many early-twentieth-century pentecostal believers who dabbled brie®y or at length in theological matters, twelve authors stand out as signi¤cantly more re®ective and comprehensive in their thinking than the
14
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Thinking in the Spirit
rest. These twelve form a varied group that includes both institutional leaders and freelance pentecostal preachers, northerners and southerners, African Americans and white folks. However, one obvious similarity among the twelve is that all are males. Even though the pentecostal movement did allow women certain positions of leadership, women were not for the most part looked to for guidance in the realm of doctrine. This did not prevent some women from doing theology on their own and announcing their results in the form of sermons, letters, and journal articles—and many of those women were creative and insightful—but no women composed book-length theological treatises. That is true even of the renowned Aimee Semple McPherson. She was a formidable presence in the early movement and was a great expositor of pentecostal faith. Her writings are always interesting and often insightful, but for the most part McPherson’s publications are a unique mix of travel narrative, autobiography, and sermon. One could perhaps construct a systematic theology out of that material, but McPherson herself never made that a priority. I hope someone will soon write a history of the theological re®ections of pentecostal women, but I am not equipped to do that here. The twelve selected theologians are discussed in roughly chronological order. Charles Parham has often been identi¤ed as the ¤rst theologian of the movement, and he obviously deserves to be included here. Richard Spurling wrote a brief theological tract that actually predates Parham’s publications so he is included too as one of the original theological visionaries of the movement. During the heyday of the Azusa revival (1906– 1910), three more individuals put their pens to paper with special theological skill: William Seymour, who led the Azusa Street meetings; George F. Taylor, a southern holiness preacher turned pentecostal; and David Wesley Myland from Chicago. In the 1910s and 1920s, as the pentecostal movement crystallized into a variety of concrete subtraditions, a number of other theological spokespersons came to the fore, including William H. Durham (representing the ¤nished-work position), Joseph H. King (representing holiness pentecostalism), Gar¤eld T. Haywood and Andrew Urshan (representing rather different styles of Oneness pentecostalism), and Bishop Robert C. Lawson, who spoke self-consciously as an African American. Finally, Fred Francis Bosworth and Esek W. Kenyon, each in his own way, raised important theological questions about precisely how the boundaries and distinctiveness of pentecostal faith were to be understood. Of course, as soon as a list like this is composed, questions arise about who else might have been included and who should have been eliminated
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15
to make room for them. No doubt other scholars would end up with slightly different lists of names. That is fully understandable. However, let me make just a few comments concerning some prime candidates I chose not to include. Ambrose Jessup Tomlinson heads the list. He was one of the most powerful leaders of the movement. He had a sharp mind and is often quite quotable, but Tomlinson was not a particularly systematic thinker and most of his writing was devoted to practical and/or organizational issues related to his own Church of God. Other prominent leaders, such as Charles H. Mason, J. Roswell Flower or Howard Goss, were left out simply because they never produced much of anything in the way of theology proper. Their strengths were in preaching and organizing. Frank J. Ewart was excluded as well—even though he was in some sense the original founder of Oneness pentecostalism—because his book-length writings all date from the 1930s or later. He was a ¤rst-generation pentecostal leader, but his theology textbooks were not composed until the second generation of the movement. My goal is to summarize the thinking of the twelve selected theologians as fairly and as positively as possible, employing outside references only as they help clarify what an author himself was trying to say. I explicitly chose not to speculate about who may have in®uenced whom in my analysis of these works (which is always an iffy exercise). Rather than being concerned with where these authors may have picked up their ideas, I have been much more interested in how these authors tried to tie their sometimes divergent ideas together in an overarching vision of pentecostal faith. As much as possible, I have tried to structure each chapter to re®ect the priorities and vocabulary of the authors themselves instead of using external categories (e.g., Christology, soteriology, eschatology, etc.) which might have made the chapters themselves more parallel in format. In all of this, my main concern has been to preserve the separate and distinct voices of these twelve theologians with as much purity as possible. I have consistently tried to keep my own voice to a minimum.
1 Original Visions
鵷鵸 It is impossible to trace the modern pentecostal movement to any one individual or event. Instead pentecostalism began like a rain shower with a drop of Spirit-¤lled faith here and a dribble of Holy Ghost fervor there scattered around the world. Those sprinkles would not converge into a steady downpour until the summer of 1906 when the revival at the Azusa Street Mission in Los Angeles began, but well before the Azusa revival burst on the scene some pentecostal believers had already begun the task of trying to make theological sense of their pentecostal experiences. This chapter examines two theologies of pentecostal faith that emerged in these earliest years before pentecostalism had coalesced into a movement, when what would eventually become pentecostalism was still the faith of only a handful of believers in Kansas, Texas, Tennessee, and a smattering of other places across the United States. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, a number of these protopentecostal Christians had haltingly begun the task of trying to describe and then label what seemed to them a new and different experience of God’s Spirit. Itinerant evangelist Maria Woodworth-Etter was one of the ¤rst. As early as 1880, she noted that some people had begun speaking in unknown languages in her meetings, but she said, “I did not understand it, and as I was the only leader I did not have much time to investigate and explain it, but I knew it was from God.” By 1890, she had become somewhat more articulate, saying that “many were baptized with the Holy Ghost” at her meetings and “many received gifts of healing; the casting out of devils; some of miracles; of visions; of the gift of the Holy Ghost by the laying on of hands; some received the gift of new tongues, and spake very intelligently in other languages, as the Spirit gave them utterance.” About this same time, Methodist preacher David Wesley Myland reported that he had received a special “anointing of the Spirit and said and sang things in a way [he] didn’t understand.” A decade and a half later
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17
he had another wonderful experience of the Spirit, and when he tried to make sense of these two special events in his life he ended up calling one “the beginning of [his] Pentecost” and the other the completion, or “residue,” of his pentecostal ¤lling of the Spirit. Woodworth-Etter and Myland were not alone. Others were groping their way toward different interpretations of these developments. In Shiloh, Maine, at his Holy Ghost and Us Bible School, Frank Sanford was describing the times as a “journey back to apostolic life and power.” In Zion City, Illinois, John Alexander Dowie, the Australian-born revivalist and founder of the Christian Catholic Church, was preaching a message of healing and was prophesying the full restoration of the apostolic of¤ce within the church to thousands of his followers in the upper Midwest. In the South and lower Midwest, Benjamin Hardin Irwin was promoting a new experience that he called the “baptism of ¤re.” This baptism was a third spiritual blessing that followed conversion and sancti¤cation, Irwin said. Different people in different places were developing different theological vocabularies in their attempts to make sense of this new work of God’s Spirit in the world.1 Each participant brought his or her own set of perceptions and theological insights to the work of theologically making sense of pentecostalism, adding new ideas to the overall mix and trying to convince others of the errors of their ways. This was so much the case that Aimee Semple McPherson would later compare the early pentecostal movement to a pot of stew boiling away over the cook¤re of the Spirit. McPherson noted that there was “not another movement on earth made up of such a varied assortment of teachings, creeds and organizations.” She said that everyone who entered the pentecostal movement seemed to bring something of their former faith into it with them. Methodists, Baptists, Salvationists (i.e., the Salvation Army), Presbyterians, holiness folks, Adventists, and Quakers each added their own ®avors to the mix. McPherson herself hoped that these varied perspectives would ultimately “all melt and blend into one when put into the WATER of the Word, and boiled over the ¤re of the Holy Spirit,” but at the time she was writing (around 1920), she knew that that process was still far from complete.2 This book explores pentecostal theology as it existed in the ¤rst generation of the movement, and during these years (roughly 1900 to 1925), the lumpiness of that movement’s theological stew was actually increasing, rather than decreasing as McPherson had hoped. In addition to the external diversity pentecostalism had inherited from other Christian traditions, the pentecostal movement itself was generating a new range of theological subtraditions within itself that signi¤cantly diverged from
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Thinking in the Spirit
each other. This ¤rst chapter examines the two earliest variants of pentecostalism’s emerging theologies: Charles Fox Parham’s dramatic end-time theology of the baptism of the Spirit and Richard G. Spurling’s rather more subdued theology of the restoration of divine love. These two thinkers make an interesting pair. Parham was quite selfconscious about the newness of his theology and of his own pentecostal identity; Spurling, at least at the time he penned his theological tract The Lost Link, was still a backhills Baptist preacher only beginning to inch his way toward pentecostal faith. The theologies they produced were as different as the men themselves. Parham’s theology was built around a grand view of God’s dramatic interactions with the world from the beginning of creation to the imminent return of Christ. His religious worldview was one that focused on spiritual power, signs and wonders, and dramatic turns of events. Spurling’s theological picture of the world was, by contrast, much simpler and more ordinary. His theme was Christian love— speci¤cally, how the church had gradually lost its original emphasis on love and how God was slowly restoring the gospel’s message of love in his own day. Placed side by side, the theologies of Parham and Spurling demonstrate something of the range of difference that existed within the pentecostal movement from its very earliest days. The Historical-Apocalyptic Theology of Charles Fox Parham Charles Parham rightly deserves to be called the founder of pentecostal theology. His Kol Kare Bomidbar: A Voice Crying in the Wilderness, the ¤rst book-length theological discussion of pentecostal faith and experience to appear in print, was published in early 1902. The somewhat strange phrase in the title of this work—“kol kare bomidbar”—is Parham’s transliteration of the Hebrew phrase meaning “a voice crying in the wilderness,” taken from Isaiah 40:3. That phrase was associated with John the Baptist, who paved the way for the ministry of Jesus, and, in many prophecy-minded Christian circles in turn-of-the-century America, it was also associated with the prophet Elijah. Parham and many others believed that some kind of Elijah ¤gure would soon appear to prepare the world for the return of Christ in much the same way as John the Baptist had done in the ¤rst century. By titling his book this way, Parham may have been implying that he was that Elijah ¤gure, but he never explicitly made that claim either in this book or anywhere else. He wrote this work so early that the word “pentecostal” had not yet become the common label for the movement. Parham himself preferred the term “Apostolic Faith” as
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19
the best way of referring to his views and the movement he was trying to foster.3 Parham was far from being a typical American theologian. He never received any formal religious schooling and was clearly idiosyncratic in many of his views. He was an amateur who followed his own meandering line of reason as he tried to make sense of Christian faith and practice. But it was not just his amateur status that set him apart; Parham also advocated a number of fairly radical views that distinguished his theology from the mainstream. His attitude toward the historic creeds of Christendom is a case in point. At one point, Parham called those creeds nothing but “the sawdust of men’s opinions,” and he felt no need for his own theology to be bound by them. Parham could be equally radical about social concerns, sounding prophetic and sometimes almost Marxist in his denunciations of economic injustice. He wrote: “How long can this nation go unpunished, when the principle support of the city government is blood money, drawn from the saloons and the brothels, winepresses, where the blood of your sons and daughters is ruthlessly trodden out. . . . Ere long Justice with ®aming sword will step from behind the pleading form of Mercy to punish a nation which has mingled the blood of thousands of human sacri¤ces upon the altar of her commercial and imperialistic expansion.”4 Parham was the ¤rst person to formulate the pentecostal doctrine of necessary, or evidential, tongues—that is, the assertion that speaking in tongues must be part of any experience of the baptism of the Holy Spirit for it to be deemed genuine. Parham was blunt about this point, saying that “speaking in tongues as the Spirit gives utterance is God’s witness to the Baptism.” Parham’s view, which he advocated throughout his career, was that the act of speaking in tongues was the ability to converse in other human languages by the miraculous power of the Spirit. The movement as a whole ultimately rejected his claim and instead came to interpret tongues as a gift of speech that involved the humanly unintelligible language(s) of heaven. Parham never tired of denouncing the larger pentecostal movement for its apostasy on this issue.5 The theme that held Parham’s theology together, however, was not tongues but his understanding of history—the grand narrative of time from the original creation to the ¤nal consummation. Parham believed that while there had been a number of critical episodes in that long ®ow of history, he was living at the cusp of the most signi¤cant turning point in all of time. God was revealing the message of apostolic faith at this particular moment because the world was teetering on the brink of eter-
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nity. To Parham, the age of grace was about to end and the long-predicted events of the end times were about to begin. Soon Christ would return to earth. Before that would happen, however, God had promised that a great worldwide revival would take place and, in Parham’s eyes, the baptism of the Holy Spirit with the gift of tongues was preparation for that great campaign of evangelism. It was this apocalyptic vision, deeply rooted in his longer view of history and his hopes for the future, that set the context for Parham’s theology as a whole. This theme did not bring all the rough edges of Parham’s theology into a neat and uni¤ed system of thought— nothing could accomplish that—but it did provide a center of gravity around which almost all his other ideas rotated. Spiritual Biography Charles Parham was born in Muscatine, Iowa, in 1873, and for most of his childhood years he was quite sickly. A vicious viral infection, contracted while he was still an infant, hampered his growth from the start. His family moved to Cheney, Kansas, in 1878, and shortly thereafter he was struck down with rheumatic fever. Some time later he had to be treated for tapeworms, and the side effects of the medication were almost as bad as the malady itself. His health problems became so severe that he actually stopped growing for a period of three years. In light of this history of illness, it is not surprising that Parham was generally given only light tasks on the family farm, though he did help tend the cattle when he was well.6 Parham said his childhood education was thin, at best. Like many others on the prairie, his family owned only a few books, and these were his primary sources of knowledge about the world. According to Parham, his family’s library consisted of a book entitled “‘The letters of Hell,’ a natural history; a few antiquated school books; a dictionary; a history of all nations, recording facts from early historic times until 1878; and last but not least the Bible.” Parham was actually proud of his lack of formal training, especially in religious matters. He said that because of the way he was raised, he grew up “with no preconceived ideas, with no knowledge of what creeds and doctrines meant, not having any traditional spectacles upon the eyes to see through.” Parham said that precisely because he lacked any educational preconditioning, he could read the Bible in an “entirely unbiased” manner. He was convinced that he, unlike many of his peers, brought no interpretive scheme to the Bible at all. He simply believed what the scriptures actually said, and later in life he mused that his naive ability to read the Bible fairly and accurately without any warped
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preconceptions had helped him “weather the theological gales” that had driven so many others into error.7 Parham’s mother, who was a devoutly religious Christian, died when he was only twelve, and the fear that he might not see her again in heaven seems to have helped prompt his conversion shortly after her death. His actual experience of conversion was, at least in its ¤rst moments, undramatic and somewhat unconvincing. Responding to the invitation of an evangelistic itinerant minister holding meetings in his town, Parham said he stood up at the end of the service and “was immediately marked down as a convert,” despite the fact that virtually no interest was shown in whether he had really been converted or not. Parham said that it was only later, on his walk home, that “the Holy Spirit wrought [a] deep and pungent conviction on our heart.” He fell under conviction for his sins and vowed that he would make restitution for the wrongs he had done to others. This was a formative event, and Parham would later teach that restitution for sin was a necessary part of any genuine Christian conversion, arguing that “the blood of Jesus never blots out any sin between man and man that can be righted; but if this is impossible, the blood of Jesus Christ graciously covers.” Parham always considered this experience on the way home from church his “real conversion,” and he said that as soon as it happened, “there ®ashed from the Heaven, a light above the brightness of the sun; like a stroke of lightening it penetrated, thrilling every tissue and ¤bre of our being.” Later in life he said that “though the devil has accused and thrown many doubts and fears into our mind . . . and the per¤dy and indifference of many so-called Christians has nearly thrown us into in¤delity; yet the experience of that night years ago, has ever been, ‘an anchor to the soul both sure and steadfast.’”8 Parham received a divine call to preach even before he was converted. He was only nine years old at the time and sick with rheumatic fever, but from that moment forward, Parham took his call to the ministry seriously. To prepare for his future life work, he spent much of his free time studying the Bible. He also practiced preaching while he was out tending cattle. He said he would round up a bovine congregation on some hilltop and then “give them a rousing sermon upon the realities of a future life.” As an adult, Parham said that these years of preaching to unresponsive cattle, “which indifferently munched away, while we described, with the intensity of youthful imagination, the condition of futurity,” prepared him well for the lack of response he sometimes felt from his human audiences.9 At age sixteen Parham left home for Southwest Kansas College, where by his own confession he quickly became a “backslider” in his faith. His
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religious affections grew cold and his Christian practice became mediocre. What’s more, Parham decided to set his ministerial calling aside and pursue a career in medicine—a profession he believed would allow him both to feel good about helping others and to have “a nice home and some ease and comfort in this world.” Before he progressed very far in his medical studies, however, he was struck down by a relapse of rheumatic fever. Parham said that the disease caused him so much suffering that eventually both his friends and his physician gave him up for dead. Thrust back on his own resources, he decided that his illness was a chastisement from God and that his health would be restored only if and when he repented from his wandering ways and gave up his medical aspirations. When he ¤nally yielded his life to God again, he was healed almost immediately. Partly as a result of this experience, Parham would later scoff at the idea that one “could be a physician and a Christian too.” For him the choice had been a matter of either one or the other.10 A nagging problem remained, however; his recovery was not quite complete. The illness had left his ankles so swollen and in®amed that he could barely walk. He carried on this way for months until God ¤nally fully healed him while he was in the act of praying for God to make him a more effective and energetic minister. He testi¤ed: “Our impotent ankles were instantly healed, we leaped upon them and have never felt a tremor in them since.” From that point on, healing would be a key element in Parham’s preaching, even though he did not develop an articulate theology of healing until 1897.11 Overall, the 1890s were a whirlwind of activity for Parham. He quit college soon after being healed and took a position with the Methodist Church as a supply preacher. For a while he served the parish at Tonganoxie, Kansas, where he was befriended by David Baker, who was a holiness-oriented Quaker. Baker was an in®uential force in Parham’s life, helping him deepen his commitment to the holiness vision of Christian faith and causing him to alter his views regarding the plight of the unsaved. In particular, Parham adopted Baker’s belief that the wicked were simply annihilated after death and did not suffer eternally in hell. Nonetheless, when another pulpit came open, Parham was quick to move on. His new charge was Eudora, Kansas, and he worked hard to make it a success, preaching in both his own congregation and others in the area. But he never became a dyed-in-the-wool Methodist; in fact, quite the opposite took place—he became more radical in his holiness perspectives and decidedly more nondenominational in his ecclesiology. In Parham’s own words, he was beginning to chaff at “the narrowness of sectarian
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churchism,” and it is not surprising that he soon “left denominationalism forever.” Severing his Methodist ties, he launched his own independent ministry in 1895. The next two years brought more changes to his life. In December 1896, Parham married Sarah Thistlethwaite (David Baker’s granddaughter), and ten months later their ¤rst child was born.12 In 1898, Parham was twenty-¤ve years old and ready to make his mark on the world. That summer, he moved his family to Topeka, Kansas, and opened up the Beth-el Healing Home. This institution was set up as a religious resort of sorts where individuals seeking healing could book a room (the cost varied from four to seven dollars a week; special arrangements were available for the poor) and attend lectures and prayer sessions designed to strengthen their faith so they would have the power to request and obtain healing from God. Parham designed the home as an ecumenical center, and he hoped people from all of Topeka’s churches would feel welcome. The response was not great, however, and soon Parham inaugurated a journal and began to offer Bible-study classes in an effort to attract guests. When that did not help, Parham began to shift the programs of the healing home more and more toward the needs of the poor and the marginalized. Parham’s overriding concern was to connect spirituality with people’s practical needs, and to that end he added a range of new initiatives to the mission’s program of ministries, including an orphanage, a rescue mission aimed at the town’s prostitutes, a soup kitchen, and a shelter for the homeless. Parham’s varied ministries took enormous amounts of time and energy. He pushed himself harder and harder, and he burned out in the fall of 1899.13 By mid-1900, Parham had recovered to some degree from the physical and emotional exhaustion that had interrupted his work, but he was not yet ready to jump back into the thick of things and he was still looking for a vision that would help him de¤ne the precise contours of his ministry. With those concerns in mind, he turned the operation of the healing home over to two local holiness ministers, helped his family move in with friends, and headed off on a cross-country trip to see what he could learn from the efforts of other Christian leaders who seemed to be on the cutting edge of the Spirit’s work in the world. His ¤nal destination was Frank W. Sanford’s Holy Ghost and Us Bible School in Shiloh, Maine, which Parham saw as a possible model for his own efforts in Kansas. On the way to Maine, Parham stopped in Chicago to observe Alexander Dowie’s healing ministry and in Nyack, New York, to see what A. B. Simpson was doing at his Christian and Missionary Alliance Bible School. Once in Maine, Parham spent six weeks with Sanford and his
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students and then accompanied Sanford to Winnipeg for revival services. He ¤nally returned home to Topeka in late September.14 At about this same time Parham received an unexpected visit from an individual who told him that God wanted Parham to be an “apostle of unity” within the Christian community. As Parham related the event: “A very pious man came into our of¤ce; a man we had never seen or known before . . . [who] declared that God had caused him to leave his team hitched to the plow in the ¤eld for his wife to care for; being led of God, had walked thirty miles, ¤nding the way to our door, the Lord having sent him with the express mission to anoint us an apostle of unity.” Parham was impressed by this encounter and thereafter added a concern for Christian unity to his thinking, even though he was never quite sure how such unity was to be achieved. Parham knew that the solution was not merely to gather people into spiritual “concentration camps where unity [would] be established by the minority yielding to the majority in the interpretation of the Scriptures.” He knew that true Christian unity would be the result of a more natural and voluntary process than that, but all he could suggest was that unity was somehow linked to the ability of Christians to fully consecrate their lives to Jesus, including “laying all our creeds, doctrines and teachings at Jesus’s feet, asking Him to cleanse them . . . from all error and false teaching.”15 While Parham was deeply impressed by his various encounters with other Christian leaders, ultimately he was not convinced that any of them had fully and properly understood either the Bible or God’s plans and purposes for the present age. He wrote: “We visited institutions of deep religious thought, which were reported as having the power of the Holy Ghost; yet these all failed to tally with the account in Acts.” He ¤rmly believed that many of these leaders “were anointed above measure,” but none of them were “really enjoying the power of a personal Pentecost.” In the end, he deemed his own experience as equal or superior to that of anyone else. Parham said that he had “known the power of the Holy Ghost in our lives to a wonderful degree for many years, and had such wonderful anointings that we were carried far beyond ourselves, many times.” Parham was not willing to say that his own experience set the standard for everyone else, but his own experience did seem to be a reasonable jumping-off point in the search for whatever else God might have in store for believers—and Parham was convinced that God had more in store. That anticipation drove Parham’s next ministerial venture: Bethel Bible School, which was housed in the Stone mansion on the outskirts of Topeka. The school was a venture of faith supported only by the gifts of
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friends. Parham said the “only text-book was the Bible [and] its only object [was] utter abandonment in obedience to the commandments of Jesus, however unconventional and impractical this might seem to the world today.” Parham’s goal was for the Bethel School to become a pathway for God’s fullest blessings to descend on himself, on his students, and eventually on the whole world.16 By this point, Parham had moved to the very edge of the holiness movement and even beyond it. He was struggling to bring together a number of fairly radical convictions that he had embraced but did not yet know how to combine into a coherent system of theology. He was deeply immersed in apocalyptic speculation regarding the end of the world. He was convinced that healing was an integral part of Christian ministry. He believed that all Christians should experience a special baptism of the Holy Ghost. He was sure that a new wave of world evangelism was about to commence, and he believed that at least some people were being specially gifted by God with the miraculous ability to speak foreign languages without training to help them in that task. All of these issues were brought together awkwardly in his teaching at the Bethel Bible School, creating a context in which Parham and his students alike came to expect some kind of breakthrough that would tie everything together. Parham said that they were all trying “to sink deeper into the things of God, and to obtain a more comprehensive view of the heights and depths, lengths and breadths of God’s eternal purpose.”17 That breakthrough ¤nally came on the evening of either December 31, 1900, or January 1, 1901, when one of the school’s students, Agnes Ozman, received her experience of the baptism of the Spirit accompanied by speaking in tongues. The precise details of what happened that evening are unclear; even the exact day when it happened is not certain. Parham was not there at the time, and his account does not fully square with Ozman’s report, but clearly everyone involved believed that Ozman had received the baptism of the Holy Ghost and had simultaneously been granted the miraculous power to speak in a number of foreign languages. Soon Parham and the other students at the school experienced the same thing. Together they became convinced that these events signaled the beginning of the anticipated end-time revival; it was beginning with them. Parham explained: “In the close of the age, God proposes to send forth men and women preaching in languages they know not a word of, which when interpreted the hearers will know is truly a message from God. . . . This is truly the Acme of inspiration, prayed for every Sabbath and desired by all true ministers of God.” Parham further argued that this power
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was given to believers through the “Pentecostal Baptism of the Holy Spirit” which he said was “a different thing entirely” from anything Christians had experienced before. Finally, he noted that “the presence of God was more wonderfully manifested” at Bethel Bible School during the early days of 1901 than had been the case “among any other people since the apostles.” Clearly Parham believed that he and his students were involved in something big.18 Parham soon dubbed his new work the Apostolic Faith movement, and very quickly he began to make grand plans for how his new message would be announced to the world. One of his ¤rst ideas was to build a huge auditorium in Topeka to handle the crowds he believed would be ®ocking there to obtain the baptism of the Spirit with the gift of tongues that would allow them to join in the effort to evangelize the entire world before Christ’s return. Voluntary contributions were insuf¤cient to fund the operation, however, and soon that plan needed to be scrapped. About this same time, personal tragedy struck Parham when his young son became ill and suddenly died. Parham was dazed and sorrowful, but he tried to keep going. He announced a summer camp-meeting in Topeka where the Spirit-baptized evangelism of the world was supposed to begin, but hardly anyone showed up for that meeting. Parham must have wondered why his new venture, rather than forging ahead in the power of God, seemed to be crashing to the ground. By July 1901, Parham was in such serious ¤nancial straits that he had to sell the Stone mansion. A scant half-year after Agnes Ozman’s baptism in the Spirit, the Apostolic Faith movement seemed on the verge of collapse. It was in that context that Parham composed his ¤rst theological textbook, Kol Kare Bomidbar: A Voice Crying in the Wilderness, which came off the press in January 1902. It was a sign that despite all his disappointments, he was not yet ready to call it quits.19 Parham plodded on, and eventually things seemed to turn around. Perhaps the single most important event was the revival he led in Galena, Kansas, in 1903 which helped him reconstitute his Midwestern base of support. Another factor was his work in Houston, Texas, where he started a Bible school and organized a number of congregations in early 1905. By 1906, Parham felt that his work in Kansas and Texas was going well enough that it seemed feasible to try to expand the Apostolic Faith network of churches and missions into a national movement. His idea was to take over and then transform a number of efforts that had been started by others. Thus he launched what can only be called an attempted hostile takeover of John Alexander Dowie’s Zion City on the shores of Lake
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Michigan in the late summer of 1906. Dowie had had a stroke the year before, and his religious empire was in serious ¤nancial trouble. Dowie himself was on an evangelistic trim to Mexico when Parham visited, and Dowie’s assistant, Wilbur Glenn Voliva, had been left in charge. It looked like a good time to try to commandeer the operation. In the fall of that same year, Parham also visited the Azusa Street Mission in Los Angeles, where an Apostolic Faith revival had broken out under the leadership of his former student William Seymour, and he tried to bring that new initiative more tightly into his orbit of control as well.20 Unfortunately for Parham, both of these initiatives failed. At Zion City, Wilbur Glenn Viola (Dowie’s heir apparent) was able to hold on to the reins of power, and in Los Angeles, Seymour remained in charge of the Azusa Street Mission. In 1907, the roof caved in on Parham when he was arrested on a charge of having committed sodomy with a person named J. J. Jourdan in San Antonio, Texas. Evidence related to this case was somewhat murky, and the case was later dropped. At this point it is obviously impossible to make any pronouncement regarding what really took place. What is clear is that Parham’s ministry was irreparably damaged by this alleged homosexual affair. Thereafter he became a marginal presence, at best, in the larger pentecostal movement.21 He lingered on, trying to start new initiatives here and there, but was never able to muster signi¤cant support for his work. Parham published a second book of theological essays around 1920, entitled The Everlasting Gospel, which was intended to resurrect his ideas within pentecostalism, but that work was quite bitter at points and it was largely ignored. The more Parham felt pushed aside by his fellow pentecostals, the more he sniped back at them. At one point he opined that “two-thirds of this tongues stuff over the country [was] not Pentecostal.” Elsewhere he upped his estimate, saying that fully “three-fourths of the so-called Pentecosts in the world are counterfeits, the devil’s imitation to deceive the poor and earnest souls.” He denounced his pentecostal colleagues with language that practically spits off the page. He wrote: “By the Baptism with the Holy Spirit I do not mean all the chattering and jabbering, wind-sucking, holy-dancing-rollerism, going on all over the country, which is the result of hypnotic spiritualistic and ®eshly controls, but a real sane reception of the Holy Spirit in baptismal power, ¤lling you with glory unspeakable.” Parham denounced other pentecostal leaders as “Holy Roller freaks,” as deluded “spook-driven” frauds, and as people lost in “the devil-mists of fanaticism and false doctrine.”22 Needless to say, such tirades did not help to resuscitate his reputation
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or stature within the movement. His biographer, James Goff, describes Parham’s later years as follows: “Marred by scandal, he spent the ¤nal two decades of his life alienated from the bulk of the movement he had begun. From a base in Baxter Springs, Kansas, he retained a core of only several thousand followers. . . . At the time of his death in 1929, he was almost unknown among the developing second generation of the Pentecostal denominations.”23 Goff ’s assessment seems fair, if not ®attering; Parham’s later career was not impressive. But this biographical fact should not distract from the insight and creativity Parham displayed in his earlier theological writings. The Saga of Human History Parham’s theology never did gel into a fully coherent and systematic articulation of pentecostal doctrine, but that is not necessarily a sign of failure. Parham did not intend to describe Christian faith and doctrine in the abstract. He was not interested in eternal philosophical truth; he was interested in Christian faith in historical context. That was certainly the case with regard to his apocalyptic interpretation of the events of his own lifetime, but it applied to the past as well. Parham’s whole theology was grounded in a narrative understanding of the human story. His vision of history was both unique and innovative. His view of creation, in particular, was different from the traditional exposition, and Parham seemed to enjoy rubbing the noses of his fundamentalist colleagues in what he took to be his own more insightful and up-to-date perceptions. This attitude is evident in Parham’s very ¤rst comments regarding the nature of creation, where he took a quick swipe at his ultraconservative colleagues who insisted that the days mentioned in the Genesis creation account had to be understood as 24-hour segments of time. Parham said bluntly that “the day of creation spoken of in Genesis 2–4 [was] not a twenty-four hour day,” and he suggested that the literal 24-hour theory had been given up long ago by everyone except for those with narrow “moss-covered” minds. Parham himself advocated the alternative view that each day of creation referred to an extended period of time. He said “these were God’s days, reckoned from the standpoint of eternity, computed by the Mind . . . with whom ‘a day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as a day.’” Parham was hardly a scientist, but he tried not to be antiscienti¤c, and on the matter of creation speci¤cally he believed that for the most part “the Bible and science beautifully agree.”24 All of this sounds rather open-minded, almost liberal, but Parham’s willingness to break with the stodgy views of the past could also lead him
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into some rather interesting speculation. Nowhere was this more evident than in his views of human creation. Parham believed that, taken literally, the biblical account of human origins indicated that God had engaged in two separate acts of creation resulting in two distinctly different species of human beings. God brought one kind of humanity into existence on the sixth day of creation and then fashioned another entirely different race of humankind (the Adamic race) on the eighth day. Parham believed that this two-species theory of human creation was the only way of reconciling the disparate accounts of creation found in the ¤rst and second chapters of Genesis.25 He was not at all shy about the novelty of his interpretation; in fact, he was proud of his theological ingenuity. To his way of thinking, the manner in which the “orthodox theologians” of his day typically suggested that “the second chapter of Genesis [was] explanatory of the ¤rst” was an error of major proportions. In their attempts to exegetically harmonize the ¤rst two chapters of Genesis, these orthodox theologians opened the way for in¤dels to play up other seeming discrepancies in the biblical text and to call the truth of the Bible in general into question. Parham believed that his own two-race interpretation of human origins preserved the integrity of the biblical text much better than the apologetics of his orthodox competitors.26 As Parham explained things, the ¤rst human species—the “sixth day” people—started out with great promise. They were created in God’s image and were endowed with “everlasting human life” (unlike the later Adamic race, which would be created mortal but capable of receiving eternal life). God then gave the sixth-day people “dominion and authority” over the world and told them to “increase, multiply and replenish the earth.” For a while this seemed to work well. Parham argued that during the seventh day of creation, when God was resting, the sixth-day people did, indeed, obey God’s commandments as they multiplied and extended their dominion over the earth.27 Then, on the eighth day of creation, God realized that there was no one to till the ground. To remedy that situation God brought a second species of humanity into existence, the Adamic race. Parham said that God made these new humans from the ground (as opposed to being created in a heavenly fashion after the image of God) and gave them the task of tending the earth as a garden (they were not to dominate the natural world). At ¤rst, this second race looked distinctly inferior to the sixth-day people. They did not possess the same gifts, talents, and powers as the sixth-day people and, much worse, they were disloyal and unstable, dis-
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obeying God’s commands almost immediately after they were given. Parham did not, however, stress these negative elements. He did not include a description of the fall in his theological history of the race. Instead, Parham’s main concern was to underscore the positive: that in response to Adam’s sin, God had offered the Adamic race “the promise of a Redeemer, which the [sixth-day] race never obtained.”28 According to Parham, God had originally intended to keep the two species apart. The Garden of Eden was far removed from the areas of the planet inhabited by the sixth-day humans, and it had a distinctly different ecology. Parham said that God had created a whole new “class of beasts and fowls” for the Adamic race to domesticate and breed in the Garden that were quite different from the winged serpents and lizards and “quadrupeds . . . of gigantic proportions” that had been created on the sixth day and occupied other parts of the globe. But then something awful happened. Cain killed his brother Abel and, in fear for his life, he ®ed Eden, traveling all the way to the land of Nod where the sixth-day people lived. Never intending to return home, Cain settled down and took a wife from among the people of the ¤rst creation, and thus began what Parham bemoaned as “the woeful inter-marriage of the races.” Apparently the effect was more dramatic on the sixth-day people than on the descendants of Adam. Parham said that they went wild with lust for the new Adamic race, explaining that when “the sons of God (the sixth day creation), saw the daughters of men (the Adamic race), they took . . . wives of all that they chose” and then gave “themselves over to the grati¤cation of every ®eshly pleasure.” Parham said it grieved the heart of God “to see creatures of such exalted origin and purpose” (the sixth-day people) debase themselves in this manner. Parham also implied that God was troubled by the strength of the children that resulted from these mixed marriages. He said “the offsprings became giants, mighty men of renown” and they possessed eternal life. This new hybrid species seem poised to take over the entire planet.29 In the end, Parham said, divine intervention was required. God issued a warning that everyone with any sixth-day human blood in their veins was at risk of being destroyed because of their debauched lives, but as an act of “in¤nite mercy” God allowed “a respite of one hundred and twenty years” for people to repent. When that did not happen—when the sixthday people and all their descendants did not repent—God had to act, because without divine intervention “none of these people would ever die.” God had to “destroy those people whom he had created with such mighty attributes and advantages but whose self-selected sensual habits”
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had condemned them or they would live on eternally as a blight to the rest of creation. Thus God sent the ®ood to destroy these creatures who “were no longer worthy of an existence.” All of the sixth-day creatures, both human and animal, was destroyed by God. The only evidence they had ever existed was fossil remains of dinosaurs and other odd creatures displayed in museums.30 When God destroyed all the sixth-day people and their half-breed descendants, Noah was spared for one simple reason, according to Parham: Of all the people in the world, Noah and his family were the only human beings with pure Adamic blood in their veins. Parham said that Noah “was perfect in his generation; a pedigree without mixed blood in it, a lineal descendent of Adam.” As a pure descendant of Adam, Noah and his family could not be destroyed because of the promise of future redemption that God had given to Adam. According to Parham, this explanation of the ®ood was also important in terms of apologetics, in a way missed by most orthodox or fundamentalist Christians believers. Parham argued that “if the orthodox catechisms and creeds were true that the Adamic race were the ¤rst and only people then existing, God could be charged with the most gigantic piece of folly, and would certainly be a creature of most extraordinary diabolical qualities, for while utterly destroying the great mass of the human race, [God] let slip through His ¤ngers a few seed which soon propagated and became as devilish as any of their ancestors.” But God had, in actuality, destroyed all who deserved to be destroyed, and God had done an absolutely thorough job. Noah and his descendants had not slipped through God’s ¤ngers; they were spared because they were members of an entirely different race of humanity.31 Parham also believed that God was not as hard-hearted as might at ¤rst appear. The sixth-day people and their half-breed descendants had not been utterly annihilated; instead, they were currently “reserved under the everlasting chains of darkness unto the great day.” He thought that it was precisely to these people that Jesus had gone when he descended into hell after being put to death on the cross and “preached unto the spirits in prison.” Parham explained that “these spirits having never had the promise of a Savior [and] not ever having heard of Him” were hearing the gospel for the very ¤rst time, and he hoped that many would respond favorably and be redeemed. Parham was also adamant that the descendants of Adam would receive no such opportunity for salvation after death. He denounced various theories that posited a postmortem “second chance” at salvation as “damnable heresies,” and he explicitly condemned the Catholic teaching of “future or purgatorial salvation.”32
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There are many gaps in Parham’s historical narrative, and one of these comes after his discussion of the ®ood. Aside from a few brief references to God’s promise that Abraham would be a “father of many nations,” we hear virtually nothing about the patriarchs of Israel, we hear nothing of Moses and the Exodus, and we hear nothing of Joshua and the conquest of Canaan. Parham’s text is relatively short, and he obviously had to make choices about what to include and what to ignore. Given that fact, his failure to discuss these portions of the Old Testament narrative should, perhaps, not be overstressed. Nonetheless, these Old Testament stories were the stock in trade of many holiness preachers, who interpreted them metaphorically to refer to the stages and progress of the Christian life. Parham’s decision not to appeal to these passages in any way is thus notable. The reason seems to be that Parham was more interested in the historical reading of these texts than he was in the allegorical or typological interpretation of the Bible which typically focused on the meaning of the text for the individual. Parham’s understanding of the gospel was timely, but not timeless. It focused on God’s ongoing involvement in the human saga as a whole— including both the church and the world. The biblical text preserved some of that history, but other historical sources also needed to be consulted if one wanted to understand the full picture of what was going on. Thus Parham appealed from time to time to extrabiblical sources to augment his biblical view of history. This pattern is clearly evident in his discussion of the history of Israel. Rather than focusing on the biblical stories of the patriarchs and their immediate descendants, Parham felt it was more important to share with his readers the less-well-known extra-biblical history of the so-called lost tribes of Israel which had been dispersed from Palestine at the time of the conquest of Israel by Babylon. According to Parham, these lost descendants of Israel were the primogenitors of most of the great civilizations of world history. He argued that one of the lost Jewish tribes captured India and became the founders of Hindu civilization. Another tribe circuitously made its way to Japan and eventually established its rule over that island nation. A third group of Jews headed north to Germany where, Parham said, their name was “coupled with Caesar’s title” to produce the hyphenated designation “Anglo-Saxon.” Parham said the Saxon part of that phrase was etymologically “a derivation of ISA AC’S SONS.”33 At least part of Parham’s concern in linking the history of Israel with Europe was to preserve the truth of the Bible in the face of the criticisms
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of unbelievers. This was a recurring theme in Parham’s writings. The particular question in this case was what had happened to “the sceptre of David.” The biblical text promised that the throne of David “would never want for an heir” to sit upon it. However, Parham said that, in the light of the fact that David’s heir “Zedikiah [sic] was carried away into Babylon, his eyes put out, and [he] died there,” in¤dels felt free to declare that God had lied because the actual line of David ended in captivity. Parham said most orthodox theologians had tried to answer this critique by declaring “that Jesus took the sceptre of David,” but that response made no sense to Parham. He argued that even if one granted “the fact that Jesus came as a King and not as a Priest and Savior nineteen hundred years ago, there would be yet left a spacious lie of over Five Hundred years between the death of Zedikiah and the coming of Jesus,” and that fact by itself would render the divine prophecy erroneous, for it said that the throne of David would be continuously occupied.34 Parham’s own version of what had happened was that the throne of David had actually secretly been maintained and been transferred from Israel to Great Britain. It happened this way. While King Zedekiah was still on the throne, Jeremiah (Zedekiah’s father-in-law) predicted that the King of Babylon would capture the land of Israel and take Zedekiah captive. Zedekiah was angered by this prophecy and threw Jeremiah in prison, but “when this prophecy came true, [ Jeremiah] was granted permission by the King of Babylon to take his family [and] go whitherso-ever he would.” Jeremiah took his daughter Hamutal (who was King Zedekiah’s wife) and his granddaughter Tea-Tephi and headed off. Eventually they arrived in Ireland. Parham wrote that “Tea-Tephi, holding the sceptre of David became the Queen of Herman,” and eventually all the kings and queens of Ireland, Scotland, and England would descend from her. Parham thus concluded that even though it looked like the line of David had ended with the Babylonian defeat of Zedekiah, in reality, David’s rule had continued literally and politically in an uninterrupted fashion in the royal histories of the Celtic and Anglo-Saxon nations.35 This version of history allowed Parham to both answer the criticisms of in¤dels and, once again, correct the mistaken notions of his more orthodox contemporaries. When those orthodox apologists had tried to defend the truth of Scripture by arguing that Jesus had somehow inherited the scepter of David, Parham scoffed at their reasoning because quite obviously Jesus’s earthly career had not involved political rule. Parham was a literalist and an empiricist and as such he had to ask how one could even
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suggest that Jesus inherited the throne of David when Jesus had obviously never been a political king. Had orthodox theologians paid even the slightest attention to this simple fact of history, they would have seen how mistaken their views were, according to Parham. Parham believed that history was actually a source of many truths that were not directly revealed in the Bible, and one of these historical insights focused on the manner in which racial identity was linked with spiritual acuity. According to Parham, humanity could be divided into three large racial categories—Jews, Gentiles, and the heathen—and each of these groups had special spiritual abilities and/or liabilities that had been revealed through their divergent histories. He wrote: Today the descendants of Abraham are the Hindus, the Japanese, the high Germans, the Danes (tribe of Dan) the Scandinavians, the Anglo-Saxon and their descendants in all parts of the world. These are the nations who have acquired and retained experimental salvation and deep spiritual truths; while the Gentiles—the Russians, the Greeks, the Italians, the low German, the French, the Spanish and their descendants in all parts are formalists, scarce ever obtaining the knowledge and truth discovered by Luther,—that of justi¤cation by faith or of the truth taught by Wesley, sancti¤cation by faith; while the heathen,—the Black race, the Brown race, the Red race, the Yellow race, in spite of missionary zeal and effort are nearly all heathen still.36
For Parham, race and faith were invariably linked. To his way of thinking, history proved that certain races had more spiritual insight and ability than others. In both the church and the world at large, it was thus clear that the better races were to rule and the lesser races were to follow. This was a simple “fact” of history and, like numerous other extra-biblical facts of history, Parham wove it into his developing theology. Parham wrote almost nothing about the earthly life of Jesus and virtually nothing about the disciples except to note that their “unity of faith was marvelous.” In a similar fashion, Parham glossed over all the years of church history except for a few brief allusions to the importance of Luther and Wesley. It was only when re®ecting on his own age that he once again picked up the long narrative of human history. His main contention regarding his own epoch was that this was a time of contradictory developments. On the one hand, the world was seeing a marvelous outpouring of God’s Spirit—“a mighty wave of spiritual power” was washing over the church. On the other hand, many were rejecting this new work of God and were turning away from God altogether. In light of these antithetical trends, Parham saw his own day as one of increasing division between the
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forces of light and the forces of darkness—a division that was paving the way for the promised return of Christ.37 The Future If Parham’s historical theorizing formed the backdrop of his theology, eschatological concerns—re®ections on the future—provided the more immediate context of his thinking. Parham clearly believed that the close of the age was near. Signs of the end abounded everywhere. Political developments as varied as the Franco-Prussian War, the struggle between England and Ireland, and tensions over the Suez Canal were all taken as proof that the end was near. So was the growing popularity of Christian Science, spiritualism, hypnotism, and occultism. The moral decline of America was another eschatological sign. Finally, the increasing numbers of Jews returning to Israel indicated that the present phase of human history was drawing to a close. This last item was perhaps the most critical for Parham. He believed that with every Jew who returned to Palestine, the return of Christ drew closer. For the most part, Parham was not one to indulge in detailed speculation about the future—in fact he said he would “make no dates, as many prophetic teachers do”—but on this one issue he made an exception. He said “when the Jewish Congress meets in Jerusalem and by proclamation declare themselves a restored nation seven years from that day, the feet of Jesus Christ shall touch [the] Mount [of ] Olives.”38 The main lines of Parham’s eschatological vision were borrowed from the larger prophecy movement that was popular in many Christian circles around the turn of the century. During the later years of the nineteenth century, Dwight Moody held yearly prophecy conferences where evangelical Protestant leaders from across the country would ponder the future together in the light of biblical teaching. These meetings continued in the early years of the twentieth century and as the word spread, thousands of ordinary folks in America’s cities, towns, and villages joined the effort to try to ¤gure out all the chronological intricacies of the last days. It was almost like a contest to see who would get the most details right. While opinions differed, most of the people involved in this effort assumed that the present phase of human history would end with a ¤nal seven-year period of warfare, sickness, and death called the tribulation or the great tribulation. After that, the earth would enjoy a 1,000-year epoch of godly rule aptly labeled the millennium. At some point subsequent to this 1,000-year rule of God, the great white throne judgment would take place, and this judgment would determine the eternal fate of every
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human being. Within that broad-brush scenario there was lots of room to rearrange things, and Parham was one of the many who proposed various adjustments. One of Parham’s modi¤cations had to do with the “rapture,” an event in which God would suddenly remove Christians (or at least some Christians) from earth and miraculously transport them to heaven. Many prophecy-minded Christians assumed that God would rapture all true Christians out of the world before the tribulation began, but Parham maintained that most Christians would remain on earth throughout this entire seven-year period and that Christians should be prepared to suffer. In Parham’s basic end-time script, Israel was front and center.39 He predicted that Jerusalem would soon become “the hub of the world intellectually, politically and religiously” and would also become the commercial capital of the world because Jews would control “three-fourths of the coined wealth of the world.” Outside Israel, three large-scale political entities would dominate the landscape: an enlarged Russian empire, a united Western Europe, and the United States. According to Parham’s futuristic scenario, Russia would soon invade India and from that beachhead would slowly extend her rule over all of Asia. This expanded Russian state would then turn west and overrun Eastern Europe. In response, the ten kings of Europe would unite in a political and military alliance with each other and then with a soon-to-be-restored kingdom of Babylon to shore up their defenses against Russia. This European-Babylonian coalition would eventually assume control of Africa. Parham believed that ¤nally the United States would come to dominate the entire Western hemisphere and would thus become the third great end-time global power.40 Parham thought that the seven-year sequence that would conclude the present age would begin the moment Israel declared itself a free and independent state. The ruler of the newly restored nation of Israel would be a charismatic ¤gure whom many, both within Israel and outside, would come to consider the long promised Messiah, “the Most Holy, Christ, the King of Kings.” According to Parham, this person would be “an exact imitator and promulgator of the life and teachings of Jesus” and his government would be “so nearly . . . fashioned after the teachings of Jesus that he [would] become the very idol of the people.” This king would rule for about three and a half years and then, at an international gala held in Jerusalem, he would be attacked and mortally wounded. Suddenly and miraculously he would seem to recover. Rather than actually being healed, however, what would take place would be that the king’s physical body would be taken over and revivi¤ed by the spirit of Judas Iscariot
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come back from the dead. For the next three and a half years, Judas, unrecognized as such by the general populace, would rule in the king’s body and in the king’s place as the predicted antichrist. According to Parham, his deception would be so complete that even the pope (for whom Parham seemed to have some respect) would be fooled to the point of yielding “all ecclesiastical power” to this false king. Judas, as the antichrist, would eventually take over leadership of the European-Babylonian coalition and would build a new capital for his empire on the site of ancient Babylon. From that city he would launch a campaign to extend his rule over the entire world and would make war on all true followers of God.41 Parham did not believe that God intended to spare Christians (at least, not most Christians) from the woes of this period. He warned his readers that they would likely have to face the wrath of the antichrist in the days ahead. He said that there was an “awful period [of ] plagues and wraths” coming when “starvation and martyrdom [would] become the daily experience of the saints.” However, Parham also said there was a way for Christians to protect themselves from the worst of these horrors. If they would receive the “sealing” of the Holy Spirit before the tribulation began, they would come under the shelter of God’s power and be protected from most of the attacks of the antichrist. Parham believed that this sealing would be given to individual Christians through the experience of the baptism of the Spirit. He was quite straightforward about what was involved. “The Pentecostal endowment,” he said, was “the life insurance of the universe.” Everyone needed it; it would be the only way to survive. The very fact that God was beginning to dole out this experience in his own lifetime was proof to Parham that the end of the age was very near.42 As an American, Parham was specially interested in the role the United States might play in the future scheme of events. He was quite sure that one of the antichrist’s major offensives would be an all-out attack on the nation. How could that not be the case given the antichrist’s desire to dominate the entire globe? His goal in the United States would be the same as elsewhere: to subjugate the country and to brand all inhabitants with the “mark of the Beast.” Parham believed that in this endeavor the antichrist would almost succeed, but at the point of the almost-total collapse of the United States, God would intervene and send angelic troops to ¤ght for the nation. Describing his vision, Parham wrote: “The angel upon whose head . . . shone the word ‘Union’ and who bore our national ®ag in one hand and a sword in the other, descended from Heaven attended by legions of bright spirits. These immediately joined the inhabi-
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tants of America, who . . . were well-nigh overcome, but who immediately taking courage again closed up their broken ranks and renewed the battle.” After this, Parham said, “the shadowy angel . . . dipped water from the ocean and sprinkled it upon America. Instantly the dark cloud rolled back, together with the armies it had brought leaving the inhabitants of the land victorious.”43 Parham said this vision of America’s future was drawn from three sources: the biblical book of Daniel, the apocryphal book of II Esdras, and a vision that George Washington had supposedly had while camped out at Valley Forge.44 Parham creatively wove these sources together into a futuristic scenario that gave full voice to his own rather ambivalent attitude toward the nation. Parham was proud of the United States for being “the ¤rst nation to establish religious liberty, and the common brotherhood of mankind, as the fundamental principles of Civil Government,” and he believed that God would ultimately protect the nation precisely because of that trait. However, Parham also thought that the nation deserved punishment for its sins—and America’s sins were many. Parham said that trouble would come to any nation that forgot God, and America had done that and more. Quoting from II Esdras, he told Americans to “weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments moth eaten. Your gold is cankered. . . . Ye have lived in pleasure upon the earth, and been wanton. . . . Ye have condemned and killed the just. . . . Thou hast af®icted the meek, thou hast hurt the peaceable. Thou has loved liars.” He warned that the attacks of the antichrist would continue “until the whole body of the eagle [the United States] was burnt.” God would allow the antichrist to punish America until the full penalty for her sins had been exacted; only at that point would God ¤nally intervene and spare the nation because of its longstanding commitment to liberty and equality.45 Parham said that once the antichrist had been expelled from the United States, he would return to Jerusalem to prepare for the last great battle of human history—the confrontation between the EuropeanBabylonian forces of the antichrist and the Russian “King of the North” at the famous battle of Armageddon. In the midst of that battle, Christ himself would enter the fray and wage war against both armies. The Russian troops would be scattered and the forces of the antichrist would be crushed. The carnage would be so great that it would take the inhabitants of Israel seven months to bury all the bodies. With the evil antichrist defeated, the millennial reign of Christ would begin. Parham said that “the ¤rst event [would] be the resurrection of the martyred dead” and these
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newly revived souls would join together with all the still-living Spirit-¤lled Christians to rule the world with Christ for 1,000 years. As in most standard dispensational accounts, Parham’s narrative also included the release of Satan for a short time at the end of the millennium for the purpose of testing the saints to see if their faith was real, for as Parham explained, “No person is worthy of reward who has not ¤rst been proved.” Parham indicated that Satan would deceive many and would gather a formidable army from the “disgruntled forces from Gog and Magog.” As this demoninspired horde surrounded Jerusalem, God would intervene in human history one last time, sending down ¤re from heaven to destroy Satan and all his followers forever.46 After this ¤nal revolt had been crushed, the saga of human history would conclude with the “White Throne Judgement Day” when God would make a ¤nal “separation of the sheep from the goats.” This ¤nal judgment would not involve Spirit-¤lled Christians but would be directed toward others. Parham said that in the white throne judgment, individuals would not be judged on the basis of whether they were converted or not, but on the way they had treated others, using the gospel standard of whether they had fed the hungry, clothed the naked, and visited those in prison. The outcome of this most ultimate of trials would be either the granting of eternal life to the righteous (the sheep) or the absolute extinction of life for the unworthy (the goats). With regard to the righteous, Parham’s comments are short and relatively traditional. He said that the righteous would be “restored to the position of innocency [sic]” that Adam and Eve had enjoyed in the Garden of Eden, and that they would then take their place alongside Christ, their brother, and enjoy God’s blessing “through the countless cycles of eternity.”47 With regard to the future of the unworthy, however, Parham was considerably more original. In a jibe at the fallacies of traditional Christian theology, Parham said that most orthodox believers wanted God to throw all these people in hell forever. But Parham said that the God that Christians loved and served was incapable of eternally tormenting the unsaved. Warming to the subject, he explained: If eternal torment is the wages of sin, then Christ has never paid the penalty, and we are still lost, but if death is the wages of sin, Christ has made full and complete propitiation for our sins. If all men have eternal life, whether in Heaven or Hell, it would be impossible to receive it as a gift through Jesus Christ, our Lord. . . . If a man possess inherent immortality, Christ’s life and sacri¤cial death were entirely unnecessary. If God so loved the world that He desired all men to enjoy Heaven with Him in Eternity, He need not have
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given His only begotten Son, but sent them godly or moralizing teachers, who could have instructed them, how to be too good to go to hell, so that God would be compelled to take them to Heaven. At the judgment, God could have simply separated the good ones from the bad ones, taken part to Heaven and sent part to hell. In a word, the teaching that everyone has an immortal soul denies Christ and makes Him an unnecessary factor in the plan of Salvation.48
Against those who accused him of holding “no-Hellite” views because of his opinions on this matter, Parham retorted: “I believe in a Hell hotter than orthodoxy teaches. One that utterly destroys the wicked. Destruction would satisfy all that justice demands, and God, if He be a God of Love, Justice, and Mercy, could ask no more than the wages of sin, which is death.”49 Parham believed that when God’s ¤nal judgment had been rendered and the wicked had been fully destroyed, the era of endless eternity would begin, and the site of redeemed humanity’s endless life with God would be the earth itself. Poking fun of his orthodox opponents one last time, he said: “Orthodoxy no doubt, at this point, would teach that the Lord with all His saints would ®y away to some sky-blue heaven,” but Parham believed that precisely the opposite would happen. Instead of humanity ascending to God, God would descend to humanity and would “walk among the people of the new earth, [wiping] all the tears from their eyes.” Christ, too, would descend in a sense, giving up his special status and taking his place as an equal among the redeemed. Parham explained that Christ would turn “the scepter over to the Father [and take] His place with His joint heirs, the elect who have as much as He has, and He no more than they.” Once all this had happened, Parham said that forever after “all of God’s creation [would be] symphonizing in the hymn of praise before the Eternal Throne.” “In tune with the in¤nite,” the ages would roll on in endless procession.50 A Taxonomy of End-Time Christians Like many pentecostals who followed him, Parham was deeply interested in categorizing Christians according to spiritual status. As part of his theological speculation, he developed a taxonomy of the various kinds of Christians that would coinhabit the earth in the closing years of the age. The old division between the merely converted and those who were fully sancti¤ed would endure, the ranks of formalists and fanatics would increase, and, in terms of new eschatological divisions, three categories of extraordinary saints would emerge.
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The Merely Converted and the Fully Sancti¤ed: Parham did not discuss the nature of conversion in great depth, but his few remarks on the subject are interesting. Parham equated conversion with entry into the church, but he de¤ned the church noninstitutionally as consisting of all believers in God throughout all time: Membership in the church was not limited to followers of Jesus alone but included all who truly believed in God. He wrote that “when people say that the church was inaugurated at Pentecost, it is false. When people say that Jesus founded a church, it is not true. . . . Adam belonged to the church, Abraham belonged to the church, and every saint of God that has found spiritual life and has been born again belongs to the church, in this age and in every age.” Christians who were merely converted belonged to this large class of people, extending throughout all of time, who had somehow come to know God in a personal way. In Parham’s scheme of things, conversion was a step in the right direction, but it was by itself only one small and tentative step toward God. He explained that persons who were merely converted were in a certain sense still “on probation” with God and would not come into full fellowship until they were wholly sancti¤ed.51 Parham likened the relationship between conversion and sancti¤cation to conception and birth, writing that “you are conceived in conversion [but] born in sancti¤cation.” Elsewhere Parham used the more traditional language of the holiness movement, arguing that while conversion (or justi¤cation) provided forgiveness for various speci¤c sins a person may have committed, sancti¤cation dealt with the underlying impulse to sin (i.e., original sin) that had been inherited from Adam after the fall. Regardless of the precise manner of explanation (and Parham himself once said “I may differ a little bit in my explanations from what people are accustomed to, but this is simply the way I have learned God”), Parham believed that the goal of sancti¤cation was clear. Sancti¤cation was given to make the believer “one with Christ as He is One with the Father” and to take away all “the inherited appetites, passions and lusts that rise in the ®esh and are of the ®esh.” Understood in this way, the act of being sancti¤ed obviously involved both the spirit and the body. Parham said it “begins with the inner man and reaches out until the soul is sancti¤ed entirely’ then comes the sancti¤cation of the body from all inbred disease, and from the inbred principle of disease.” He further explained the process as follows: “Sancti¤cation goes out to the physical through the spiritual man; it deals with the physical brain, with the physical body and turns the ®esh of that man over to the spiritual man, and the spiritual man gains supremacy within.”52
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But while sancti¤cation could, in one sense, be de¤ned as an accomplished act of divine healing and holiness in the believer’s life, Parham also spoke of sancti¤cation as an ongoing and ever-expanding dimension of the Christian life. He argued that sancti¤cation had “no bounds, no limits to its growth and development.” He declared: “Holiness is growth.” He likened the experience to being taken in a boat “out into the immensity of the ocean of [God’s] love,” where it would slowly become evident that “there is no end to the vastness of our privileges in God.” He said sancti¤cation was merely “the dawn” of the Christian experience. It was the beginning of a new and dynamic level of existence that not only transformed the sancti¤ed individual but that radiated out to impact everyone around that person. Parham argued that the sancti¤ed “spirit in®uence” of a single individual had the potential to affect his or her whole family for the better. Indeed, Parham said that whole neighborhoods and eventually the whole world could be in®uenced by the sancti¤cation of one individual.53 Parham based this last claim—the ever-expanding social in®uence of sancti¤cation—on his own unique understanding of the psychic nature of reality. Parham said that he derived his views on this matter from the seventeenth-century Catholic mystic Madam Guyon, who claimed that her husband could actually see the radiating aura of holiness ®owing out from the bodies of some sancti¤ed people. Parham extended that notion to argue that virtually everyone produced “psychic waves of in®uence” in the course of their normal living. These spirit in®uences could be quite strong, and Parham believed that once they were released into the atmosphere, they ®oated eternally “upon the waves of ether” where they could be picked up by others who were sensitive to the spiritual realm. Parham called this an “occultic” phenomenon, by which he meant that “the mind of the spirit in you becomes the receptacle for the thought waves of wisdom that have been let loose . . . [in] past ages.” The way this all relates to sancti¤cation, according to Parham, was that Christians could become “a sancti¤ed in®uence, a sancti¤ed spirit, so that the people with whom we come in contact with will feel a benign, a bene¤cial in®uence ®owing out from us to them. The others will feel and know the power of that spirit life, because out from our inward parts will ®ow streams of living water to our fellow men, imperceptibly, and which cannot be resisted.”54 Parham believed that as wonderful and as powerful as the experience of sancti¤cation could be, more would be required of Christians in the last days than mere sancti¤cation—and he worried that many sancti¤ed Christians were blind to that fact. Parham said that the reality of Christ’s
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return never even crossed the minds of many sancti¤ed Christians. These folks had by and large imbibed the notion of “the Post Millennial theory of Christ’s coming” which suggested that “the world was getting better and better, and that in a short time they would enter a golden Age.” Parham said that Christians who accepted this rosy view of the future had been sold “Gospelene in shining quantities by the yard.” They had been deceived by “false shepherds”—clergy who, through their “most optimistic phrases, of balmy days yet to come,” were leading their ®ocks into “all manner of religious and agnostic organizations” that had nothing to do with the true gospel. Since these Christians were not looking for Christ’s return, they could not possibly be prepared for it or for the crisis that would precede it, and many people in this category would miss the opportunity to be sealed by the Holy Spirit. Inevitably they would end up among the ranks of the “foolish virgins” in the Gospel parable, and they would have no special protection from the fury of the antichrist. Nonetheless, Parham believed that if these sancti¤ed Christians remained faithful unto martyrdom during the last seven-year period of the earth’s premillennial history, they could earn the right to take “part in the ¤rst resurrection” and might even have the honor of “ruling over ¤ve or ten cities” during the millennium.55 Formalists and Fanatics: In Parham’s taxonomy of end-time Christians, there were other people who were clearly in much worse shape than these sancti¤ed believers who mistakenly believed in the postmillennial return of Christ. The two groups that were most at risk were formalists and fanatics. These two groups represented opposite trajectories of error. According to Parham, “formalistic Christians” were Christians in name only. They might be church members in good standing and might even af¤rm the traditional doctrines of Christian faith, but their religiosity was ultimately a matter of belief alone and not of real spiritual experience. At best, their faith was brittle and thin, and in the trials of the end of the age, that faith would be easily crushed by the antichrist. Parham believed that in contrast to formalistic Christians, fanatical Christians were overly immersed in their own spiritual experience of faith, so much so that they had lost touch with objective truth and had drifted off into subjective error. Parham could wax eloquent on this subject, undoubtedly re®ecting the many personal con®icts he had had with various overzealous pentecostal colleagues and competitors. Fanatics, he wrote, perverted the “Word of God . . . to suit their own convenience.” Their musings re®ected the “seething religious volcanic disturbances” of the day. He was particularly incensed by the manner in which fanatics misled others. He
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thundered against them: “God’s sheep are today led by goats into many arid pastures; starved, bleating ®ocks are eating the wool off each other, proselyting [sic], denouncing all others who do not feed in the same pasture as themselves, while they feed upon the cacti and sage brush of wildest fanaticism, led by men whose so-called ‘divine revelations’ are vain as mad-man’s dreams, the unction of over-wrought imaginations of selfexaltation and esteem.” Parham believed that in the most extreme cases, fanatics of this kind were capable of giving themselves over to a wholly counterfeit religion, even to the point of aping the gifts of the Spirit in order to justify their erroneous teachings.56 The Redemption, the Bride, and the Man-Child: Only those who had already been sealed through the baptism of the Holy Spirit could belong to one of these three categories of end-time Christians in Parham’s eschatology. The distinctions between these groups were distinctions among those who were already members of the Christian elite. Parham’s explanation of the different roles these three groups would play in the events of the last days was a bit haphazard, and sometimes his comments even seem a bit inconsistent. Nonetheless, he believed it was vitally important for Christians to understand the differences that existed among these three groups if they were to attain the full measure of God’s favor. The group of believers Parham called “the Redemption” (which he also referred to as “the Church” and “the Body”) was a group of Christians specially gifted and set apart for the work of world evangelism. This group was in a sense God’s missionary shock troops. They would be charged to “go forth with the Everlasting gospel, preaching in all languages, clothed with power.” Parham said that to aid them in their evangelistic work, members of the redemption would be given “the same kind of body Jesus had when he came out of the grave.” They would have “the power to appear and disappear [and] the power to move through space at will.” Members of the redemption would also be immune to the extremes of weather that characterized different regions of the world. Parham explained that “under present circumstances, it [was] a physical impossibility to carry the Gospel to many tropical and frigid points,” but with the special powers of the redemption, Christians would become “as angels,” feeling neither hot nor cold. Wherever they went, “signs, wonders and mighty deeds” would accompany them. Gifted with these new abilities and led by “the true Elijah,” whom Parham predicted would return to earth “to the utter confusion of all imitators,” the end-time members of the redemption would lead a global revival in which “multitudes will be saved and healed.” Parham said that all of this would be accomplished
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almost entirely within the ¤rst half of the seven-year period of the tribulation.57 The next group in Parham’s Christian taxonomy was called “the bride,” an image taken from the New Testament book of Revelation. The distinctions between “the bride” and “the redemption” are not always clear or consistent in Parham’s writings. At some points Parham seems to have con®ated the two, such as when he wrote: “Consecrate your life, fully obtain the Holy Spirit, the sealing of the Bride, become worthy to be baptized by one spirit into one body thereby reaching Redemption, which is our birth-right.” At other points, however, he made a sharp distinction between the two, saying, for example, that “the Bride is a distinct company from the Church, Christ does not marry his own Body [i.e., the Redemption] as many teachers would have you believe.” Regardless of precisely how membership in the bride might or might not have overlapped with the redemption, it is clear that Parham understood the bride to be a specially protected group of believers with a special mission: They were to live among the Jews who had returned to Palestine and organized the reconstituted state of Israel. Parham wrote that “all through the Scriptures we are taught that a remnant, or small company of people, will go with the Jews to Palestine. By a careful study of all the passages relative to this company, they constitute the Bride.” Parham felt so strongly on this point that he declared that anyone who rejected this interpretation of scripture was most “certainly a false teacher.”58 While in Jerusalem, the bride would give birth to “the Man-Child” (discussed below) and the bride would then immediately be forced to ®ee “into the Wilderness” to avoid the attacks of the antichrist. Where exactly this wilderness might be had baf®ed many biblical scholars, but Parham believed that he knew the answer. Under the emboldened title, “THE MARVEL OF HISTORY,” he described an archeological site in the land of Bashan where sixty uninhabited walled cities had recently been discovered. He declared that these cities, which had been built by giants over 4,000 years ago, were in perfect shape, having been “preserved and protected by the God Almighty since the days of Moses.” The bride, Parham said, would tarry in this safe location until its members would ¤nally “swing up” to meet Christ in the air as he descended to intervene in the battle of Armageddon. After these events, Christ and the bride would marry and, with “His Queen,” Christ would rule the world through the millennium.59 The mysterious Man-Child (a group Parham also sometimes called “the overcomers”) completed Parham’s end-time Christian taxonomy. This
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was the most elite group of all, numbering only 144,000. Parham wrote: “The people who compose this company reach the highest perfection attainable for human beings planned by God through the atonement of Jesus Christ.” Their most obvious special privilege was to be “the only company of people who take part in the Rapture.” Rather than having to endure all the tribulations associated with life on earth during the sevenyear period that would conclude the age, the Man-Child would be “born” out of the bride at the midpoint and would be taken up to heaven to be with Christ for the last three and a half years of the tribulation. In the years to come, members of the Man-Child would have power and status in the millennial age second only to Christ himself and the twelve apostles.60 The Baptism of the Holy Spirit in Eschatological Perspective Parham’s pentecostal theology of the baptism of the Holy Spirit was predicated on and situated within this distinctive vision of history and eschatology. Parham understood the “Baptism of the Holy Ghost” largely as an eschatological charism—a special experience of God that provided end-time Christians with new power and protection to be witnesses for God in an age of unprecedented turmoil and violence. The baptism of the Spirit served multiple purposes. First, it provided a defensive “sealing” to protect recipients from the attacks Satan would soon unleash during the tribulation. Second, it empowered Christians to be energetic and effective agents in the ¤nal worldwide revival. Third, it served as a qualifying experience that made it possible for recipients to move beyond the ranks of ordinary Christians and enter into one or another of the three elite orders of end-time saints. In Parham’s own words, the baptism of the Holy Ghost was given both “as a power to witness” and as a “sealing power, escaping plagues, and putting you in the position to become a part of the Body, the Bride or the Man-Child.”61 Parham believed there was a distinct difference between the baptism of the Spirit and all other Christian experiences regardless of how dramatic and powerful those other experiences might be. Parham said there were “many phases of the Holy Spirit’s operation.” All were to be honored and desired. All were wonderful, and many could be experienced before one received the baptism of the Spirit. But Parham insisted that none of these other experiences of God’s presence and power in the believer’s life should be mistaken for the baptism of the Spirit.62 The most important distinction Parham wanted to make was the dif-
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ference between the baptism of the Spirit and various powerful anointings of the Spirit. Any Christian could receive a special anointing of the Spirit, even those who were not sancti¤ed. An anointing of the Spirit was a partial temporary ¤lling of the Spirit that gave the recipient special courage and/or abilities to face a speci¤c situation. This kind of intermittent ¤lling of the Spirit had been happening throughout history; there was nothing uniquely apocalyptic or eschatological about it. Parham said “many Christians, preachers, and people have had the experience for years. God comes to them from time to time in what we may call occasional anointings.” The primary purpose of this kind of anointing was divine illumination. Parham explained: “The anointing of the Holy Spirit opens and illuminates for us the Word of God, and understanding of the Scriptures comes, divine light and revelation from the throne comes, and a well of living water springs up in your being.” Elsewhere he said that the anointing of the Spirit places “the spiritual man in direct communication with the mind of God.”63 Parham argued that in addition to this intermittent or occasional ¤lling of the Spirit, some Christians enjoyed a more enduring kind of anointing. He called this “the anointing that abideth.” The “anointing that abideth” was not only more long lasting than others, it was also of a different order, gifting the recipient with special powers not given to others. Parham said that it was this kind of anointing that the disciples possessed during the time between the resurrection of Christ and the day of Pentecost, and he said that as a result of this anointing, “The disciples obtained all that modern Holy Ghost people have.” The Holy Spirit became their inner teacher. They received the power to heal the sick and to cast out demons. They had fantastic visions of God in glory and were carried outside themselves in rapture and wonder. Since the time of the apostles, other Christians had also experienced the “anointing that abideth,” and Parham included himself within that prestigious group. He said he had often been carried away by the Spirit, he had been given glorious glimpses of the godhead, and he had been given the gift of healing, but none of that was equal to the baptism of the Spirit.64 Two things distinguished the baptism of the Spirit from these other powerful anointings of God’s Spirit. The ¤rst distinction had to do with the purpose and effect of the experience. The real purpose for the baptism of the Spirit was “to take that life of yours and pour it out in service to your fellowmen.” Parham said: “It is . . . not an in®ux of spiritual sensuality or lustful enjoyment of some supposed spiritual blessing; it is to take that life of yours without any thought or consideration for yourself or
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preparation to make life easy and comfortable” and to give your life fully in service to others. The baptism of the Spirit compelled believers to share their spiritual gifts and powers with those around them. Parham repeatedly emphasized that there was little, if any, “increase of healing power, nor power to cast out demons” in the baptism of the Spirit. Instead, the primary effect of the baptism of the Spirit was to redirect the orientation of the recipient. There is no doubt that Parham believed that the baptism of the Spirit provided certain personal bene¤ts to the recipient and that some new powers and abilities accrued to the recipient as well. But the primary purpose of the baptism of the Spirit was to dissolve away the normal human focus on one’s own needs and comforts and to make the believer truly other-directed. Parham said, “Anything short of this in your pentecostal experience is of false origin.”65 The second mark that set the baptism of the Spirit apart from all other spiritual blessings or anointings was the special “BIBLE EVIDENCE” (Parham liked to write it in bold caps) of speaking in tongues as the Spirit gave utterance. This was nonnegotiable for Parham. He said that speaking in tongues was “the only Bible sign given as evidence of the Baptism of the Holy Ghost.” No other supposed evidence meant anything, and Parham castigated various “modern leaders and Holy Ghost teachers” for trumpeting their own “private evidence of their so-called gift of the Holy Ghost” as if the gift of tongues was only one sign of the baptism among others.66 Parham was not naive about the issue of tongues. He knew that speaking in tongues could be faked, and he knew that some manifestations of tongues were the result of ®eshly desire and did not come from the Spirit. There was clearly need for discernment in this matter, but the need for discernment did not mean that the sign of tongues was somehow optional. Parham argued that the necessity of tongues was not only biblically grounded, it had also been empirically con¤rmed in his own ministry. He wrote: “No one in our school or in our work or meetings since, who protested that they had received the Baptism of the Holy Spirit [without tongues], have ever received it; while those who have freely acknowledged and given glory to God for all His wonderful anointings, manifestations and gifts of the Spirit, humbly surrendering the claim to this Baptism, have obtained the power desired, and gone forth speaking in tongues as the authoritative evidence.” Summing up his view, Parham said: “Speaking in other tongues is an inseparable part of the Baptism of the Holy Spirit distinguishing it from all previous works; and no one has
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received Baptism of the Holy Spirit who has not a Bible evidence to show for it.”67 To some, a physical sign such as speaking in tongues could be interpreted as an arbitrary signi¤er—a simple sign that one had received the baptism. It was possible for them to assert that while God had selected tongues as the approved symbol of the baptism, God could have chosen some other sign. That is not what Parham believed. Parham believed that the sign of tongues was intimately connected with the deeper purpose of the baptism of the Spirit. The ability to speak in other tongues was a special empowerment for end-time service, especially the end-time work of evangelism. Parham said: “Pentecost is given as power to witness.” The power of Pentecost was the power to communicate the gospel effectively to others: “the power for witnessing in your own or any language of the world.” At one point, Parham actually said that “the ¤rst feature of Pentecostal blessing is prophesying—speaking in your own language and making you capable for world-wide ministry; to speak in your own tongue in exhortation, edi¤cation, and comfort.” But of course, Parham ultimately believed that the ability to speak in other tongues was precisely the same gift: Tongues was prophecy expressed in a foreign language rather than in one’s own native speech. In both cases it was God speaking directly through the lips of Spirit-¤lled believers, and Parham assured his readers that “the Holy Spirit . . . is able to speak through us [in] any language of the world, for he knows them all.”68 For Parham, the gift of tongues was an eschatological empowerment for mission. It was the ability to allow God to speak through you in whatever language God chose to speak. Everyone received this ability in a small dose at the moment of their baptism in the Spirit. But while everyone should expect to receive this “initial gift of tongues” at the time of their baptism in the Spirit, Parham taught that this would “develop into a real gift of language” only in those who were specially called by God into the end-time work of world evangelism (those who were called to be part of the redemption). Parham put himself in that category, claming he had been specially gifted in Yiddish and hoping that he would soon have “a wonderful ministry among the Jews in Jerusalem.” He also suggested that the whole missionary enterprise should be recon¤gured to have missionaries abstain from language study and instead base their mission plans on the language gifts they received as part of their baptism in the Spirit. This would be both more spiritual and more cost effective. He exclaimed: “How much better it would be for our modern missionaries to obey the
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injunction of Jesus to tarry for the same power; instead of wasting thousands of dollars, and often their lives in the vain attempt to become conversant in almost impossible tongues which the Holy Ghost could so freely speak. Knowing all languages, He could as easily speak through us one language as another were our tongues and vocal chords fully surrendered to His domination.”69 Parham believed that scripture and experience combined to demonstrate that speaking in a foreign language under the power of the Holy Spirit was the one and only infallible sign that a person had received the baptism of the Spirit. This power was given for the sake of others—for the purpose of global evangelism—but it was also given to the individual believer as a source of eschatological assurance and comfort. Parham wrote: “Speaking in tongues as the Spirit gives utterance is God’s witness to the Baptism, and is your assurance that you have been sealed unto the day of redemption; all doubts and fears are vanished, and you are enabled to tread through the darkness of these last days, smiling triumphantly at the gathering shadows, while waves are rolling and the lightening ®ashing amidst the conclave of planets, the falling of nations, and the crashing of inanimate nature.” For Parham, the baptism of the Spirit, validated by the divinely inspired act of speaking in tongues, was a special end-time gift of God.70 The Restorationist Theology of Richard G. Spurling Parham was not the only person to re®ect theologically on pentecostal faith prior to the time of the Azusa revival. Others were also groping their way toward an understanding of what they perceived as God’s new work of the Spirit in the world. One person who deserves special notice is Richard G. Spurling. Spurling was one of the early leaders of the movement that would eventually evolve into the Church of God headquartered in Cleveland, Tennessee. He penned a little work entitled The Lost Link in 1897, and this book serves as an interesting counterpoint to Parham’s vision of pentecostal faith. Not much is known about the life of Richard G. Spurling. Like his father, Richard Spurling, the younger Spurling had been a minister in the Missionary Baptist Church of eastern Tennessee before he began to move in a more pentecostal direction. With his father he left the Baptist church in 1884, apparently because the church was trying to enforce doctrinal conformity within the group in a manner that the Spurlings felt was unscriptural. After praying for two years about what they should do, father
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and son ¤nally joined with a group of local Christians in 1886 to form the Christian Union. The stated purpose of this new organization was “to restore primitive Christianity and bring about a union of all denominations.” The elder Spurling died shortly after the inaugural meeting and leadership fell naturally to his son.71 For years, the younger Spurling ministered alone and the group remained very small, but in 1892 the Christian Union joined with another nearby fellowship led by the holiness preacher W. F. Bryant, and the work slowly began to grow. One of the most signi¤cant events in the history of this merged fellowship took place in 1896 at a series of revival meetings where some participants experienced the power of God in a way that caused them to break forth in undecipherable speech. No one knew quite what to make of this at the time, but later the Church of God would look back on this event as the beginning of the church’s journey into pentecostalism. In was in this context, immediately following this unusual revival that Spurling wrote the original manuscript draft of The Lost Link.72 At that point the text was literally a handwritten manuscript, and it is hard to know how widely it may have circulated within the limited membership of the Christian Union. The Lost Link would not be published in print form until 1920. By that time many of the egalitarian ideals championed in The Lost Link had been pushed aside by the leadership of the Church of God, and its publication may re®ect a mild protest of sorts against that development. This textual history makes it hard to know exactly how to interpret the meaning and signi¤cance of this little book. Because The Lost Link was not widely circulated at the time of its ¤rst drafting, it could be construed as a kind of private re®ection on faith that should perhaps be ignored when discussing the history of published pentecostal theology. But I think that would be a misconstrual of the real importance of this work. Spurling’s musings give us a tremendously helpful glimpse of the very earliest attempts of southern pentecostals (or perhaps proto-pentecostals is the better designation) to articulate their own homespun vision of faith. What we ¤nd is something considerably different from Parham’s point of view. Spurling’s neighborly egalitarian perspective stands in sharp contrast to Parham’s cosmic and eschatological vision of pentecostal faith. While differing in tone, Spurling’s theology and Parham’s were similar in methodology: Both used history as their favorite vehicle for discussing Christian faith and values. However, Spurling’s historical narrative was strongest precisely where Parham’s was weakest. Spurling paid no atten-
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tion whatsoever to the creation of the world and provided not even the slimmest description of future events. He also avoided any and all discussion of the history of Israel, whether ¤ctional or factual. Where Spurling did focus his attention was on the history of the church, most notably on what he saw as the historic fall of the church into the error of creedalism and on the hopeful restoration of a pure and uni¤ed form of post-creedal Christianity in his own day. The organizing theme of Spurling’s theology was love—love as “the infallible rule [by which] to know a man’s religion.” He wrote: “Many preachers preach about love and dwell on charity and think it no more than the natural element of religion, but fail to see it to be the law of the new covenant by which to infallibly know each other as member’s of God’s church, it is the law by which God will judge the world.” According to Spurling, when love was present true faith existed, but when love was diminished, or when it was destroyed altogether through hatred or sectarian strife, true faith ceased to exist.73 The Lost Link in its published form uses the analogy of a railroad to tell the story of the Christian church. Spurling wrote that the gospel railroad was built by God to carry redeemed sinners safely from this “wilderness full of reptiles” to the “fair and happy land” of heaven “where no death bells ring.” As the ¤rst step in the process of construction, God had sent John the Baptist as “His civil engineer to survey out and locate the best route.” After that was done, Christ himself came to earth to oversee the actual construction. The ¤rst thing Christ did was collect a group of men—the disciples—to assist in the work. Then together they “began to blow down the bluffs of Judaism and ¤ll the valleys of idolatry and to bridge the rivers of in¤delity” so the railroad to heaven could be laid straight and level. After the bed had been graded, the two “golden rails” were laid in place: One rail was love of God, the other was love of neighbor. As soon as these rails were secured in place, the gospel train itself was assembled and set on the tracks. Its “great drive wheels . . . [were] liberty and equality,” and its engine was fueled by Holy Ghost ¤re. Everything was ready to begin transporting sinners to heaven.74 Spurling said that “three thousand boarded the train on the ¤rst day” and the Gospel transportation company was in business. Satan was dismayed by this development and immediately began to plot how to derail the gospel train. The devil focused his main efforts on the train’s “engineers, ¤remen and porters (of¤cers of the church),” trying to convince them, ¤rst, that there were better fuels than Holy Ghost ¤re and, second, that “other rails would be lighter and easier managed than the golden rails.” Eventually they were convinced. They tore out the golden rails and
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replaced them with wooden rails of “men-made creeds” and tried to run the train on human energy, but soon the cars derailed and a great crash followed. Spurling said this crash took place “about the year 325 A.D.” at the Council of Nicea. The moment this council’s creed was formally adopted, the church became “organically fallen” and lost its grip on the golden gospel of love.75 Dropping his railroad metaphor, Spurling described the history of the church in more straightforward language. He said that the church had begun as a fellowship of equals bound together by love and had lasted in that form for several centuries. But in the early fourth century, the emperor Constantine decided to Christianize the Roman Empire and the result was disastrous. As the church became more institutionalized and the lines between church and state became more dif¤cult to discern, the interpersonal rule of love was slowly replaced by the impersonal rule of creeds. Division within the church was the inevitable result. Spurling placed some of the blame for this development on heretics such as Arius (who taught that Christ was a lesser being than God the Creator), but he thought the real problem was heresy-hunting emperors. He wrote: “Constantine caused them to make the Nicean Creed by which Arius was condemned as a heretic, and expelled him and his followers from their fellowship and communion regardless of their love for God and one another.” Spurling commented that “this change gave birth to creeds and every creed has made a sect or denomination.”76 Spurling said that the next thousand years were bleak. Christians began to persecute each other and even to kill each other in the name of pure doctrine. The bond between church and state which deepened during the medieval period reinforced this pattern of divisive and coercive behavior. Spurling portrayed the popes of the Catholic Church as the chief protagonists in this story of persecution and murder, and he variously labeled the papacy “the beast,” “the mother of harlots,” “the mystery of iniquity,” and “the man of sin.” He described the papal system as the opposite of God’s way of love because it substituted law and hierarchy for love and equality; it was the negative mirror image of what the church was supposed to be. While the Catholic Church was the main target of Spurling’s criticism, he recognized that many Protestant churches displayed the same violent and legalistic propensities. This was true of the larger Protestant denominations, and it unfortunately was also true of many local congregations where a “little preacher in the stand” would sometimes tout his own hobby-horse gospel, “branding all others as heretics or devils . . . [bringing] division instead of unity, hatred instead of
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love.” Spurling argued that this kind of negative church-dividing preaching was the “greatest hindrance to the cause of Christ.” He said it had done more harm to the faith than all the attacks of all the world’s greatest atheists combined.77 Spurling thought that ¤nally, during his own lifetime, God was beginning to rebuild the original railroad to heaven. Christians were beginning “to hew down the walls of prejudice and cut asunder the lines of separation, to shake off the bonds of men-made creeds and laws, to come into the unity of the Spirit in the bonds of peace unto the faith that sweetly works by love.” Despite their many good accomplishments, the great reformers of the past had never done this. According to Spurling, neither “Luther, Wesley, Campbell, Calvin, Wyckliffe [nor] Huss” had found “the lost link.” None had supported “reform from creeds to God’s law.” Instead they had merely “tried to reform the creeds to a purer standard.” But now something new was taking place. “The Lord [was] sending forth the Spirit of His mouth or the Word of God accompanied with an outpouring of the Holy Ghost as never seen since the apostolic days,” and love was being reborn in the church.78 Spurling did not think that this great work of restoring the church was anywhere close to being completed and he knew the work would be hard, but he was glad it was ¤nally underway. He employed a biblical metaphor to prepare his readers for the opposition they would face. He wrote: “As we return from our captivity in Babylon to rebuild the temple of God, to crown it with the chief cornerstone of Christ and His law, they will persecute us, they will mock and say that we are a band of cranks and are fanatic.” He also predicted that “many of the preachers and leaders of the various denominations [would] shake their gray heads and wave their palsied hands and cry heresy and latitudinarianism,” but Spurling believed that the cause of love and unity was worth the struggle. The slow return of the church to the rule of love was a sign of God’s promise ultimately to restore the church to its original character and standing before the end of the age, and Spurling welcomed that restoration with open arms.79 Based on this summary of The Lost Link, one might well ask what makes this particular piece of writing pentecostal? Why examine it here? My answer is threefold. First, this short text is one of the only things written by any leader of a pentecostal church besides Parham before the Azusa revival. That alone makes it deserving of note. One could answer, of course, that the Christian Union which Spurling helped lead (and which later became the Church of God) would not become formally, in-
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tentionally, and self-consciously pentecostal until after the Azusa revival broke out. That is true. But the Church of God has traced its deepest pentecostal roots back to the 1896 revival, and that claim should not be overlooked. In a sense, the Church of God “evolved” into its pentecostal identity—it wasn’t instantaneously transformed into a pentecostal denomination—and Spurling was an important ¤gure in that process.80 Second, I would argue that not all pentecostal theology must focus explicitly on the distinctive beliefs that set pentecostal faith apart from other Christian traditions. In particular, I would assert that not all pentecostal theology has to focus on the primacy of the baptism of the Spirit. Pentecostals have said many things about many theological topics, emphasizing different issues at different times. The fact that Spurling thought the law of love ought to top that list tells us something important about his brand of pentecostal faith. Rather than ignoring Spurling’s text because it is not suf¤ciently pentecostal—as if we already know in advance what pentecostal theology has to look like—we should pay special heed to The Lost Link for the insights it can give us into the multiplicity of early (and perhaps all) pentecostal theology. My third point deals precisely with that multiplicity. Spurling’s vision of pentecostal faith is distinctly different from that of Parham, and neither one is necessarily better or worse. Parham’s theological narrative focuses on the grand scale. While there is a personal side to his theology— the baptism of the Spirit is presented as a wonderful experience for the individual believer—the main emphasis is on the baptism of the Spirit as a form of eschatological empowerment and protection in the cosmic clash of spiritual forces. Spurling’s vision was quite different. His focus was neither cosmic nor individualistic but communal. Perfection in Christian faith came through loving others—through the development of a “Christlike, self-denying, brother-loving Spirit.” This was Spurling’s “infallible rule” by which “to know a man’s religion,” and he immediately added, in a paraphrase of scripture, that “St. Paul says though I have a gift of tongues, even to speak the language of angels, and have not charity, it is a failure.” Clearly Spurling thought that love was more important than any other spiritual gift. According to Spurling, Christian perfection also necessarily involved suffering. He said that every true Christian would suffer. Christianity did not provide an escape from pain—it was not a cosmic insurance policy. Instead, Christian faith helped people deal with their pain. Spurling’s pentecostal vision was radically egalitarian. He said that all Christians had “equal rights and privileges to read, believe and practice for themselves in all matters of religion.” Any Parhamesque hope
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of ruling over others in the millennium is entirely foreign to Spurling’s text. His goal was for everyone to live peaceably side by side as equal neighbors with no one in charge except God alone.81 Some of the differences between the views of these two men can be accounted for on the basis of their previous church connections. Spurling had been a Baptist minister, and many of the ideas expressed in The Lost Link re®ect that past. Most notable in this regard is Spurling’s strong emphasis on the spiritual freedom of the individual and his stinging criticism of all creeds. These notions had been present within the Baptist churches of Tennessee for quite some time and had been especially emphasized during the latter part of the nineteenth century by the “landmark” movement that stressed localism and autonomy in Baptist life.82 In a similar way, many of Parham’s beliefs re®ect Methodist and holiness ideas inherited from his prior contacts with those communities. It would be wrong, however, to reduce the ideas and concerns of either of these theologians merely to the religious roots they brought with them into their newfound pentecostal faith. Both were struggling to make sense of what they saw as a new work of God in the world, and they added their own views to the body of beliefs they had inherited from others. For Parham, the cosmic story of God’s intervention in history provided the organizing scheme for his thought. For Spurling, the personal and interpersonal concerns of love provided the ultimate glue for his theological re®ections.
2 Theologies of the Azusa Era
鵷鵸 A new phase of pentecostal history began in the summer of 1906, when the Apostolic Faith Mission on Azusa Street in Los Angeles erupted into a Spirit-¤lled revival different from anything that had happened before. Led by William J. Seymour, who was ably assisted by a host of others, the Azusa Street revival boiled away at a red-hot level of spirituality for more than two years before slowly cooling off, and during that time virtually everyone who was anyone within the emerging pentecostal movement felt its impact. For some the experience was ¤rst hand. Many traveled hundreds or thousands of miles to attend the meetings so they could see what was going on and hopefully be touched by the Spirit. Others who could not make the journey kept close tabs on the revival through accounts from friends or the published reports issued by the mission. Very quickly the Azusa revival became the Grand Central Station of global pentecostalism. People came and went. As they crossed paths, they formed new friendships and renewed old ones. While at the mission, they spawned dreams together of how they could turn the world upside down for Jesus through the power of the Spirit. They came to the Azusa Street Mission as scattered individuals seeking God’s power, but they usually left as members of a self-conscious community of pentecostal believers and co-workers. In essence, the pentecostal movement was born at the Los Angeles revival. Before the Azusa meetings, Pentecostalism had been a small regional religious phenomenon limited mostly to the Midwest. At Azusa, pentecostalism became a national and global movement of faith. The Azusa revival was a complex affair.1 It was not a planned event; it was a surprising eruption of spiritual energy and ferment. Meetings often continued around the clock with people wandering in and out at different times for different reasons and purposes. Devout Christians came by the hundreds, seeking their own “personal Pentecost.” Holiness folks stopped by to try to discern if the meetings were inspired by God
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or Satan. Skeptical ministers from the older established churches showed up to express their displeasure with the new fanatics that had invaded their town. News reporters and tourists stopped by to gawk, jeer, and simply observe. Sometimes religious experimenters worked their way into the crowd to try out their latest hypnotic techniques, hone their spiritualist sensibilities, or pick up a few new tidbits of wisdom they could add to their own eclectic collages of faith. The buzzing clamor of the meetings and the diversity of participants cried out for interpretation; the Azusa revival was not a self-explanatory event. In the fervor of the moment, of course, the experience was suf¤cient. But with time the joy of the moment gave rise to theological re®ection; at some point, the Azusa faithful had to stop and ask themselves exactly what was happening. What was God doing? How was one to make sense of this explosion of spiritual piety and power? How could pentecostals with different church backgrounds and divergent theological orientations talk to each other about the new Spirit-¤lled movement in which they were corporately caught up? What language best captured the Azusa vision of God, the pentecostal experience of the Spirit, and the church’s mission in the world? These questions demanded attention. The point is not that the Azusa revival itself was overwhelmingly driven by theological concerns or dominated by theological re®ection; that was not the case. The point is that the diversity of experiences at the Azusa meetings and the diversity of participants (each with their own pre-Azusa understandings of Christian faith) created a situation where theological re®ection became necessary whether it was desired or not. Throughout the two or three years when the Azusa revival was at its peak, different leaders tried either to impose an external sense of meaning and order on the meetings or to discover an internal sense of meaning and order beneath the roiling surface of the event. Charles Parham took the ¤rst approach when he visited Los Angeles in late 1906. William Seymour had been his student in Texas, and Parham came to the mission intent on playing the teacher—grading his student’s performance, pointing out errors, and trying to impose his own sense of dignity and doctrinal decorum on the meetings. His external theological perspectives were not appreciated, and he was quickly thrown out of the mission. A number of other pentecostal leaders took a more sympathetic approach to the revival and its spreading in®uence, constructively trying to articulate the theology that was implicitly present in this new work of the Spirit. This chapter examines three theological spokespersons who were especially ar-
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ticulate in their views and who packaged those views for easy dissemination to the growing pentecostal community scattered across the nation. The ¤rst person who needs to be heard is, of course, William Seymour himself. He was the pastor of the Azusa Street Mission, and he had the responsibility of trying to manage and make sense of the unruly spirituality of the Azusa meetings. Seymour was not the only leader of the mission. Others helped run things, and Clara Lum deserves special mention for her role in keeping the mission’s semi-monthly newspaper (The Apostolic Faith) up and running.2 Without that publication, the work of the mission would have been much less well known. But ultimately Seymour was the main spokesperson for the mission, and from the very beginning he was concerned that the work of the mission be grounded in sound doctrine. He saw it as part of his pastoral calling to provide participants in the revival with theological categories that would help them make proper sense of their pentecostal experience. And this pastoraltheological responsibility extended well beyond the walls of the mission itself: Seymour wanted to be a teacher for the whole movement. During the heyday of activity from 1906 to 1908, this extended teaching mission was accomplished largely through The Apostolic Faith, which was mailed out to supporters across the nation and around the world. Later, as the ¤res of revival cooled and the Azusa Mission settled into a more ordinary existence as one pentecostal congregation among others in the Los Angeles area, Seymour would codify the theology and pastoral practices of the mission in a 95-page book entitled The Doctrines and Discipline of the Azusa Street Apostolic Mission of Los Angeles. Much of this text is borrowed verbatim from the Book of Discipline of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, but various sections written by Seymour have been inserted throughout the volume.3 Within the wider circle of faith that was inspired or affected by the Azusa revival, others were also taking up the challenge of developing a theology that would ring true to the Los Angeles revival and to the different experiences people were having in the rapidly growing pentecostal movement. Perhaps the most systematic thinker in this regard was George F. Taylor of North Carolina. Taylor had not been to Los Angeles, but he had become a pentecostal believer through the efforts of G. B. Cashwell, who had attended the Azusa meetings, and he considered himself a “close observer of the movement.” In late 1907, he wrote a book called The Spirit and the Bride, which represented a quantum leap forward in the articulation of pentecostal theology. While Taylor repeatedly
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claimed that his theology was nothing more than a careful explanation of the Bible, he was also convinced that God was revealing a host of new truths in and through the pentecostal revival and he was quite creative in his attempts to bring old biblical ideas into line with these new revelations (and vice versa). Taylor later published two other books which helped ¤ll out his vision of God and human history: The Second Coming of Jesus (1916) and The Rainbow (1924). These two books expanded his work in a number of directions, but neither fundamentally changed the ideas he developed in The Spirit and the Bride.4 The third person who needs to be discussed in this chapter is David Wesley Myland. Myland was originally a Christian and Missionary Alliance minister, but he later became a peripatetic pentecostal preacher who helped launch several pentecostal denominations. His ¤rst book, The Latter Rain Covenant, published in 1910, interpreted the pentecostal revival in light of Old Testament prophecy and typology. In 1911, Myland published a second book, a commentary on the New Testament book of Revelation, which enlarged some of the themes from The Latter Rain Covenant and added others. In contrast to the systematically inclined Taylor, Myland was a symbolic or metaphorical thinker. Today his writings would likely be called spiritual theology. He envisioned the life of faith as a never-ending journey toward God. Rather than sorting out and separating different facets of Christian belief and practice as subjects for independent commentary, Myland was much more likely to merge things together—to explore the connections between the various dimensions of faith rather than the differences. For Myland, each and every Christian experience was part of the progressive movement of the believer deeper and deeper into the fullness of God.5 These three do not exhaust the list of folks who were engaged in theological re®ection on pentecostal faith during the Azusa era, but they were the most comprehensive in their published views. The theologies developed by Seymour, Taylor, and Myland are quite different from each other, but it would be wrong to think of them as developed in opposition to each other. During these earliest years of pentecostalism, the movement was not yet organized enough to promote head-to-head competition. In a sense, Seymour, Taylor, and Myland were all writing in a theological vacuum. They were trying to ¤ll in a void, not to compete with each other for in®uence or prestige. They were trying to make the best sense they could of the new eruption of pentecostal faith with the almost naive hope that others would simply take their advice at face value. In this regard, they were all quite different from Charles Parham, who had been an origi-
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nal visionary trying to create a new movement from the ground up. These theologians were not originators; they were codi¤ers and carriers-on. They saw their task as one of offering theological guidance to a movement that was already underway, but in the process of doing that they each nudged the movement in slightly different directions. The Pastoral Theology of William J. Seymour and the Azusa Street Mission It is dif¤cult to separate the particular voice of William Seymour from the voices of the other folks who helped run the Azusa Street Mission. Especially with regard to articles published in the mission’s Apostolic Faith paper, it is almost impossible to say who wrote what. The policy of the mission was to publish articles anonymously so that “no human writer [would] receive any honor but that it all might be to the glory of God.” That policy was never followed in a fully consistent manner, however, so some articles did appear with authorial attribution, and a good number bore the initials W. J. S., indicating that Seymour was the author. But many other articles and brief theological comments were published in the paper without any attribution and it now seems clear that other Azusa leaders, especially Clara Lum, were responsible for these unsigned articles. In the ¤nal analysis, however, the issue of authorial credit may be relatively unimportant. The theology articulated during the heyday of the revival seems for the most part to have re®ected the general consensus of the leadership of the mission. Understood in this way, to speak of Seymour’s theology is to speak of the theology of the mission as a whole. Only later, as the revival died down and Seymour became the sole leader of the Azusa Street congregation, did his voice begin to stand out in clear pro¤le from those of his former associates.6 Seymour and the Azusa Street Mission William Joseph Seymour was born in 1870 in Centerville, Louisiana, in the bayou region about seventy-¤ve miles southwest of New Orleans. His parents were former slaves and they were also Catholics. William Seymour and his siblings were all baptized in the Catholic Church, but the family also attended the local Baptist church that was close to their home. As a child William was apparently known for having spiritual dreams and visions, but we know few details about his early years. When he was twenty-¤ve, Seymour moved north to Indianapolis. While there he became associated with Daniel Warner’s wing of the Church of God movement known as the Evening Light Saints—an intentionally multiracial
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holiness Christian organization. He relocated to Cincinnati in 1900, where he intermittently attended God’s Bible School. While in Cincinnati, Seymour also contracted smallpox, and the residual effects of the disease left him permanently blind in his left eye. Around 1903, Seymour moved south and took up the role of an itinerant revivalist in Texas and Louisiana. In 1905, he settled in Houston, where he attended a holiness church pastored by Lucy Farrow. When Farrow left town to become governess for Charles Parham’s family in Kansas, Seymour was asked to take charge of the work. Farrow was actually gone only a short time. She returned to Houston in late 1905, and the Parham family soon settled there as well. It was through Farrow that Seymour met Parham, who introduced him to pentecostal faith.7 In December 1905, Parham opened a new Bible school in Houston, and Seymour asked if he could attend. In deference to the racial mores of the Jim Crow South, Parham would not allow Seymour to sit in the classroom with the other students, but he did let him linger at the door to glean what he could of the teaching that was going on inside. Seymour heard enough to be convinced that Parham’s understanding of the baptism of the Spirit as evidenced by speaking in tongues was the proper interpretation of the New Testament, but Seymour did not have that experience while at Parham’s school. In a certain sense, then, he was still just an ordinary holiness believer when Lucy Farrow’s friend Neeley Terry invited him to come to Los Angeles to assume the pastorate of her holiness church. But whether Terry knew it or not, Seymour had already passed beyond the bounds of mere holiness theology. Under Parham’s tutelage, he had become a pentecostal believer in gestation, waiting for the day when God would grant him the true and full baptism of the Spirit. Seymour accepted the invitation to Los Angeles as a call from God and almost immediately headed west. Within a week, Seymour had shocked his new congregation by proclaiming that speaking in tongues was the one and only sign that indicated that a person had genuinely received the baptism of the Spirit. Church members were outraged and locked the doors against him. Supported by just a few of the more radical members of the group (i.e., Edward Lee, Richard and Ruth Asberry, and a handful of others) Seymour attempted to carry on. He held prayer meetings at the Asberrys’ house, and those gatherings soon began to attract a crowd of sympathetic seekers. Feeling a need for assistance, Seymour wrote and asked Lucy Farrow and J. A. Warren to come out to California to help him. Within a few weeks they were at his side. Soon the pace of the meetings picked up, and in the early spring a
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dramatic breakthrough took place. On April 9, 1906, Seymour and several others were struck down by the Spirit and began speaking in tongues. The word went out that the Spirit had begun to fall on Los Angeles. In the following days, larger and larger crowds gathered at the Asberrys’ house on Bonnie Brae Street, and many received the baptism of the Spirit accompanied by speaking in tongues. The crush of people became so great that the porch of the Asberry home collapsed one evening under the sheer weight of human bodies, and the masses of people sometimes blocked the road our front. Clearly a new venue was needed. A quick search led to a run-down building at 312 Azusa Street. The structure had originally housed an African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) congregation, but since then it had been used as both a stable and a warehouse. Seymour and his associates gave the place a quick cleaning, set up a makeshift pulpit in the very center of the room, and constructed cheap benches by placing planks on old nail kegs. On April 14, 1906, the mission opened its doors, and the Azusa Street revival was underway. The revival at the Azusa Street Mission burned hot until the middle of 1908, after which the meetings carried on for two years in more subdued form. The revival burst forth in power once again for a short while in 1911 but then languished permanently. At its peak, 300 or more persons would crowd into the forty-by-sixty-foot structure on an almost daily basis, while others would mill around outside. Some said you could feel the spiritual fervor of the place from blocks away. Services often extended around the clock, and even when services were not formally in session, seekers could often be found tarrying for the baptism in one of the upper rooms where Seymour and the rest of the mission’s staff lived. In addition to its spiritual exuberance, one of the most frequently noted aspects of the revival was that it transcended racial, ethnic, and economic divisions. Whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians all worshiped together around Azusa’s makeshift altar. Rich and poor lay side by side on the ®oor, slain by the same Spirit. During the height of the revival, the crowd was often predominantly white, but the leadership core was fairly well balanced between Caucasians and African Americans. Seymour was ultimately in charge, but he gave a relatively free hand to his associates and the visiting ministers who exhorted the crowd and invited people to experience the baptism of the Spirit for themselves. Seymour had a reputation for being a humble leader who could easily step aside to let others bask in the Holy Spirit’s limelight. That did not mean that Seymour could be walked on, however. At least twice he had to confront powerful pentecostal leaders who wanted to wrest control of the
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mission from his hands. The ¤rst time it was Charles Parham who tried to take over the work; the second time it was William Durham. Both times Seymour came out on top. He was a gentle leader, but he was nobody’s pushover. Most of the people associated with the mission believed it marked a critical turning point in the history of the Christian church. This revival was the culmination of all previous revivals, completing the restoration of gospel truth that had begun with the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century. The Apostolic Faith put it this way: All along the ages men have been preaching a partial Gospel. A part of the Gospel remained when the world went into the dark ages. God has from time to time raised up men to bring back the truth to the church. He raised up Luther to bring back to the world the doctrine of justi¤cation by faith. He raised up another reformer in John Wesley to establish Bible holiness in the church. Then he raised up Dr. Cullis who brought back to the world the wonderful doctrine of divine healing. Now He is bringing back the Pentecostal Baptism to the church.8
This was not just one more revival of faith and trust in God; this was the beginning of the great end-time revival that would usher in the return of Christ. Seymour himself described the goal of the revival to be the full restoration of the church so that it would, once again, look “just like the one [Christ] started when He left the earth and organized it on the day of Pentecost.” Many people believed that the ragtag mission on Azusa Street was at the very center of God’s effort to restore the whole “church back to light and power and glory . . . [to become] a burning and shining light to this world again.” This was the time to reclaim all that had been lost to the church through neglect in previous ages. The Apostolic Faith declared bluntly that the Los Angeles revival was “the real Pentecost that has been hidden for all these centuries.” The paper said that God was giving Pentecost “back to earth through some real humble people that have no better sense than to believe God. . . . If you have this faith, you can claim every promise of God, every foot of land in Christ Jesus.” In the minds of many, the Azusa revival was a foretaste of “heaven below.”9 Despite that original self-understanding, the Azusa revival ultimately sputtered to a halt. By 1914 or 1915, the pentecostal movement had progressed to the point where the revivalistic energy of Azusa was, in a certain sense, no longer needed. Pentecostals were beginning to hunker down into separate groups and organizations, and the free-®owing mix of people
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that de¤ned the Azusa revival was beginning to be seen as more of a threat than an opportunity. As the crowds drifted away from the mission, the handful of faithful supporters that remained was almost entirely African American. The Azusa Mission slowly became only one among many pentecostal congregations in the Los Angeles area, and it became known primarily as the “colored” congregation. The traditional American divisions of race had been reasserted within the movement. After years of strife, Seymour himself ¤nally accepted the predominantly black character of his congregation as inevitable, and in light of that fact he decided it was proper to limit leadership to African Americans. Seymour’s book of Doctrines and Discipline prescribed that only a “colored man” could be either bishop or vice bishop. The reasons given were that this policy would ensure that African American members of the mission would have their full “liberty and freedom in the Holy Spirit” and that it would also “keep down race war in the Churches.”10 Seymour was single when he arrived in Los Angeles; he married Jenny Moore two years later in May 1908. The marriage sparked some controversy within the mission’s staff. In particular, two white women—Clara Lum and Florence Crawford—were opposed to the wedding. Their stated reason was the nearness of Christ’s return, but romantic imaginations or intimations may also have been involved. The details are unclear. Eventually these two women left the mission and moved to Oregon. When they departed, they took the mailing list for The Apostolic Faith with them. There was later a dispute over which mailing lists were taken and who owned them, but Lum and Crawford ultimately maintained possession of the addresses and soon launched a new version of The Apostolic Faith from Oregon. After losing the paper’s subscription list and, more important, the editorial expertise of Lum, the Los Angeles–based Apostolic Faith ceased publication, and with its demise the larger in®uence of the Azusa Mission waned.11 Despite this chain of events, Seymour seemed happy with his decision to marry and, with time, Jenny became his most helpful partner in ministry. During the later 1910s, Seymour was often on the road doing evangelistic work. While he was gone, Jenny ran the church. After Seymour’s death in 1922, Jenny became the full-time pastor of the congregation. When she died in 1931, the mission building was sold for back taxes and was eventually torn down to make room for a parking lot—a sad end for the place where pentecostalism had ¤rst become a self-conscious transnational movement of faith, but perhaps in keeping with a faith tra-
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dition that refuses to anchor the Spirit of God to any single place, creed, or ritual practice. Theology in General The leaders of the Azusa Mission were not, at ¤rst, particularly enamored of the idea of producing any kind of theology for the movement. Theology was suspect: It was seen as a potential block to the free ®ow of pentecostal faith. Theology was something to overcome, not to be embraced. As one anonymous author wrote in The Apostolic Faith: “There was a time when we were fed upon theological chips, shavings and wind, but now the long, long night is past.” One can almost hear the hallelujahs and amens shout off the page in response. Elsewhere The Apostolic Faith reported that “there have been those who have sought for the baptism and could not get it, because they did not come humbly as a little babe. They did not give up their doctrines and opinions; they did not empty out so they could get the ¤lling.” Then the paper explained that the new pentecostal message had explicitly not been “revealed to our great theologians.” The pentecostal gospel came as a word straight from God that was accessible to even the most ordinary and uneducated seeker.12 It was not just that theology didn’t help bring Pentecost to people; there was great fear that theological re®ection could actually quench the Spirit. A column in one of the mid-1907 editions of the Apostolic Faith warned: “When we received the baptism of the Holy Ghost the power came down in such a mighty way, and after a time people began to consider and got us to talking thought . . . [which] put straps and bands on the Holy Ghost.” The paper exhorted its readers to throw off those straps and bands of theology, however, and “be free in the Holy Ghost and let Him have right of way.” At least at ¤rst, the leaders of the Azusa revival didn’t want anyone “talking thought” about what was happening and potentially squelching the work of the Spirit in their midst. They wanted the Spirit to keep moving, and the way to do that was simply to focus on “the Word.” As The Apostolic Faith put it: “We are feeding upon the Word which is revealed by the Holy Ghost—the whole Word and nothing but the Word.” The Word was good, but human words of theology were seen as dangerous and unhelpful.13 As negative as some of the above comments seem, the Azusa Mission was not, at the end of the day, as opposed to theology as might ¤rst seem the case. The mission’s public denigrations of theology need to be set side by side with the mission’s frequent calls for “sound doctrine.” While the Azusa Mission had pledged itself to “not ¤ghting men or churches” and
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to encouraging love and respect among all Christians (revealing a strong similarity to Spurling’s vision of Christian unity), the leaders of the mission were not averse to making agreement on sound doctrine a condition of fellowship. Seymour and his colleagues thought that some theological ¤ghts were worth having. They were convinced that maintaining sound doctrine would inevitably result in some splits and divisions in the Christian community. Seymour knew that many within the pentecostal movement wanted simply to ignore theological differences and luxuriate in the nebulous unity of the Spirit. He quoted such persons as saying: “Let us all come together; if we are not one in doctrine, we can [still] be one in spirit.” But his response to such sentiments was unequivocally negative. He declared “we cannot all be one, except through the word of God,” and he reminded his readers that views contrary to scripture had to be expunged from the community. Seymour believed that failure to do this would necessarily lead to “spiritual fornication.” The only way to remain pure was to “fortify the walls”—to build clear boundaries of sound theology around the community of the faithful. This was “the only way to keep foul and false hellish spirits out of the church of Christ.”14 For all their emphasis on sound doctrine and the need for theological boundaries, however, the leaders of the Azusa Street Mission remained committed to Christian tolerance. Thus The Apostolic Faith declared that the Spirit was not going to consign everyone who disagreed with the mission’s theological emphases to hell. Some differences of doctrine were mere differences (as opposed to being heretical differences), and Christians had to learn how to live alongside each other nonjudgmentally with regard to those kinds of differences. The mission’s monthly paper said: “We [have] to recognize every man that honors the Blood. So let us seek peace and not confusion. We that have the truth should handle it very carefully. The moment we feel we have all the truth or more than anyone else, we will drop. We must deal patiently with the Lord’s people.” The trick, of course, was getting the balance right. That kind of juggling act is never easy, but the mission tried its best to hold its contradictory impulses of theological purity and Christian unity in creative tension. The Apostolic Faith explained: “We recognize every man that honors the blood of Jesus Christ to be our brother, regardless of denomination, creed, or doctrine. But we are not willing to accept any errors, it matters not how charming and sweet they may seem to be.”15 The very ¤rst issue of The Apostolic Faith included a creed of sorts for the mission. This creed said that the Apostolic Faith movement focused ¤rst of all on “the restoration of the faith once delivered unto the saints—
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the old time religion, camp meetings, revivals, missions, street and prison work and Christian Unity everywhere.” The mission listed the following doctrines as essential: repentance (including godly sorrow, confession of sins, forsaking sinful ways, and restitution); faith in Jesus Christ; sancti¤cation as a second work of grace; the baptism with the Holy Ghost, including the evidence of speaking in new tongues; and healing. The editor then went on to clarify two points where some confusion might exist regarding the precise stance of the mission. The ¤rst clari¤cation underscored the fact that baptism with the Holy Ghost was quite different from having received “the anointing that abideth.” Like Parham, the leaders of the Azusa Mission believed that anyone who stopped short of the baptism and was content with the mere anointing of the Holy Spirit would surely “fail to reach the glory and power of a true Pentecost.” Second, and again following Parham, the paper asserted that “the blood of Jesus will never blot out any sin between man and man they can make right; but if we can’t make wrongs right the Blood graciously covers.” Azusa was not a center for cheap grace. Restitution for past sins was part of the message, but in those cases where restitution was impossible, God’s grace was suf¤cient to cleanse the offense and set things right.16 This list of doctrines, especially when we include the two clari¤cations, tells us something important about the basic theological orientation of the Azusa Mission. The theology of the mission centered on the life of faith as lived within the community of believers—where “godly sorrow for sins” was expected and where “sins between man and man” were dealt with directly. The theology of leaders at the Azusa Mission was neither particularly speculative (as Parham’s theology had been) nor was it especially informed by the longer history of the church (as Spurling’s theology had been). Rather, the theology of the mission focused on pastoral concerns, the most important of which was helping people receive and retain “a true Pentecost.” In Doctrines and Discipline, Seymour wrote, “We must remember that every man that is born in the world is lame in his intellect, will and affections.” The purpose of sound doctrine was to help heal the individual’s lame mind so that the will and affections could then be healed by the Spirit. This was a limited role for theology, but a necessary one.17 Within that pastoral frame of reference, two themes formed the core of both Seymour’s theology and that of the Azusa Street Mission as a whole. The ¤rst was a three-step view of the progression of the Christian life moving from justi¤cation through sancti¤cation to the baptism of the Holy Spirit. The second major concern was how best to understand the identifying marks and manifestations that should accompany and/or fol-
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low any true reception of the baptism of the Spirit. The issue of tongues was critical here. In addition to these two major theological themes, the return of Christ was a third concern that received considerable mention in The Apostolic Faith. While eschatology was prominent, it was not developed in a particularly theological manner. The discussion of future events was also usually quite pastoral in approach, in contrast to Parham’s focus on the cosmic and political aspects of end-time prophecy. The Stages and Character of the Christian Life Seymour, like many other Christians who joined the early pentecostal movement, had become a pentecostal after having traveled through the holiness movement to get there. Holiness teaching was not uniform, but one of the movement’s central assertions was that the mature Christian life involved two separate steps or stages of experience. Conversion represented a ¤rst step toward full salvation, while sancti¤cation was understood as a subsequent and second work of grace that completed the “double cure” that human sin required. The ¤rst work of grace in a person’s life that took place in conversion was called justi¤cation. The focus of justi¤cation was on sins in the plural; that is, with speci¤c actions that transgressed God’s law. In justi¤cation, God offered the individual forgiveness for those sins and exemption from punishment because of those sins. Justi¤cation took place at a speci¤c point in time and was experienced by the individual as conversion. In the experience of conversion, penitent sinners acknowledged their sins to God and asked God to forgive their sins on the basis of Christ’s redemptive death on the cross. In response, God wiped away the guilt of sin and welcomed repentant sinners into the kingdom of God, making them ready to enter heaven and sparing them from eternal damnation in hell. Conversion involved a conscious act on the part of the sinner and was usually accompanied by a palpable sense of God’s forgiveness. To use a biblical metaphor, the person was “born again” at that moment, and most holiness Christians believed that one should be able to identify the date and time when this ¤rst work of grace took place. The second work of grace (sancti¤cation) was an act of cleansing rather than forgiveness. It dealt with sin in the singular, which was also called the “sin nature” or “original sin.” Here the focus was on the general impulse to sin, not on sins as distinct acts. In the act of sancti¤cation, God miraculously removed this underlying impulse to sin from the human heart. According to most holiness theologians, this cleansing did not mean that the compulsion to sin, which humanity had inherited from
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Adam, was no longer operative in one’s life. Sancti¤cation made it possible for Christians not to sin, and mature Christians, if they were disciplined and wholly committed to God, could live lives free from sin. (Some individuals at the radical edge of the holiness movement believed that sancti¤cation completely eradicated the sin nature from human beings, but this was never the majority view.) As was the case with justi¤cation, holiness theologians taught that sancti¤cation was received at a speci¤c point in time. The justi¤ed but not-yet-sancti¤ed believer had to petition God for the grace of sancti¤cation, and when God answered that prayer, the recipient would normally feel a heightened sense of god’s presence in his or her life as well as a marked decline in the propensity to sin. Seymour, and the circle around him at the Azusa Mission, agreed with this two-stage view of how grace was experienced in the Christian life, and they had no intention whatsoever of either rejecting or reformulating their theological understanding of these two experiences when they added the third pentecostal blessing of the Spirit to the sequence. Justi¤cation and sancti¤cation remained God’s two (and only two) works of grace. The third event, the baptism of the Holy Spirit, was different kind of experience. It was not a work of grace that corrected something wrong in the recipient, it was a “gift of power” to aid the fully saved and sancti¤ed believer in the ministry of the gospel to others. Throughout the two-year run of The Apostolic Faith, the paper routinely reported on persons who had been “converted and sancti¤ed and ¤lled with the Holy Spirit.” It was those three experiences that mattered, and they had to take place in that standard order. A succinct summary in the April 1907 issue of the paper said: “Before you can receive the baptism with the Holy Ghost, you must have a thorough, de¤nite experience of justi¤cation and sancti¤cation, which are through the Blood of Jesus, and they are two distinct acts of grace. First, what God has done for you, second what God has wrought within you. Then and only then are you prepared to receive your baptism from the Father, by Jesus Christ His Son.” In a later issue of the paper, Seymour himself explained the progression as follows: “The ¤rst thing in order to receive this precious and wonderful baptism with the Holy Spirit [is] to have a clear knowledge of justi¤cation by faith according to the Bible . . . the second step is to have a real knowledge of sancti¤cation, which frees us from original sin . . . then after we [are] clearly sancti¤ed, we pray . . . for the baptism with the Holy Spirit.” This three-step understanding of the progression of the Christian life was at the core of the theology of the Azusa Mission all through the revival. It was the central message.18
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The publications of the Azusa Mission did not develop the logic of this three-stage pattern of Christian maturation in any great detail, but in his later writings Seymour provided at least some explanation of why he believed the pattern of justi¤cation, sancti¤cation, and the baptism of the Spirit had to take place in that order. The Doctrines and Discipline said that justi¤cation was the foundation for everything that followed because justi¤cation provided the assurance of God’s favor which was the necessary prerequisite for any further progress in the Christian life. The assurance that God had fully forgiven one’s sins was what allowed the love of God to blossom in the heart, and it was that unfeigned love of God that opened the path to sancti¤cation. While a certain degree of “outward holiness” could be achieved as a result of one’s fear of or respect for God, true holiness was rooted in the much more positive spiritual soil of gratitude and affection: “The abiding love of God cannot spring but from a faith in a pardoning God. And no true Christian holiness can exist without that love of God for its foundation.” The third experience of faith (the baptism of the Spirit) was seen as yet one more quantum leap into the love of God. Seymour said: “The baptism in the Holy Ghost and ¤re means to be ®ooded with the love of God and Power for Service.” The Apostolic Faith Mission declared that “Pentecostal power, when you sum it all up, is just more of God’s love. If it does not bring more love, it is simply a counterfeit.” With the experience of the baptism of the Spirit, the love of God that had been grasped in justi¤cation and fully internalized in sancti¤cation became so overwhelming that it had to ®ow out from the individual to others. For Seymour, the three stages of the Christian life were three separate steps of faith moving the believer deeper and deeper into the love of God.19 While Seymour and the Azusa Mission never deviated from this three-stage understanding of how the Christian life was supposed to be experienced, Seymour was not one to be overly dogmatic. He knew that God worked with different people in different ways, and he was adamant that no one dismiss the work of God in a person’s life simply because of where that person was located on the three-step path of faith. He even went so far as to incorporate into the Doctrines and Discipline some sections that were critical of the way in which many holiness-oriented preachers tended to “[depreciate] justi¤cation, in order to exalt the state of Holy sancti¤cation.” By contrast, the Azusa Street Mission’s church manual said that the proper way “to speak of entire sancti¤cation . . . [was] ¤rst [to] describe the bless [sic] of a justi¤ed state, as strongly as possible.” This included the admission that “the immediate fruits of jus-
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tifying faith [were] peace, joy, love, power over all outward sin, and power to keep down inward sin.” In traditional holiness theology, the last two items on this list had usually been reserved for sancti¤cation as distinct from justi¤cation. The fact that Seymour retained these passages in the material he borrowed from the A.M.E. Book of Discipline indicates a certain ®exibility and open-mindedness in his own thinking. In fact, the last lines of that particular subsection in the mission’s book of Doctrines and Discipline drove the point home. The text asks: “Is every man as soon as he believes a new creature, sancti¤ed, pure in heart? Has he then a new heart? Does Christ dwell therein? And is he a temple of the Holy Ghost? . . . All these things may be af¤rmed of every believer in a true sense. Let us not, therefore, contradict those who maintain it. Why should we contend about words?”20 Seymour’s practice, and that of the Azusa Mission as a whole, had been fully consistent with this tolerant attitude from the beginning. As early as December 1906, The Apostolic Faith had explicitly declared that all Christians were welcomed as equals at the mission—including the merely justi¤ed and the merely sancti¤ed alongside those who were fully baptized in the Spirit. The paper said: “We do not say that we do not need the justi¤ed or the sancti¤ed brother simply because he does not speak in tongues or does not prophesy; but we realize that it takes the justi¤ed, the sancti¤ed and the Pentecost brother all to make the body of Christ.” Elsewhere the paper stated that “if a man is saved and living according to the word of God, he is our brother, [even] if he has not got the baptism with the Holy Spirit with tongues.” The Azusa Mission was a place for all Christians; anyone who trusted in the blood of Jesus for salvation was welcome. The leaders of the mission went so far as to say: “There is no difference in quality between the baptism with the Holy Ghost and sancti¤cation. They are both holiness. Sancti¤cation is the Lord Jesus Christ crowned in your heart and the baptism with the Holy Spirit is His power upon you. It is all holiness. It makes you more like Jesus. It is Jesus in justi¤cation, Jesus in sancti¤cation and Jesus in the baptism with the Holy Ghost.”21 In addition to adopting a pentecostally expanded, but still essentially Wesleyan theory of how maturation should proceed in the Christian life, the Azusa Mission also imbibed from the holiness movement a fundamentally Arminian understanding of the human aspects of Christian faith. That is, the leaders of the Azusa Mission indicated that one needed to cooperate with God’s grace in order to obtain either justi¤cation, sancti¤-
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cation, or the baptism in the Spirit. One needed to actively seek those experiences if one wanted to receive them. Perhaps even more, the leaders at the Azusa Mission believed that human effort was necessary for one to maintain salvation, sancti¤cation, or any other blessing from God. The mission’s book of Doctrines and Discipline posed the question “Are works necessary to the continuance of faith?” and answered “Without doubt; for many forfeit the free gift of God by sins of omission or commission.” The ground rules were simple. Seymour and the mission taught that if persons became ensnared in sin, they could lose their baptism and sancti¤cation and might even lose their salvation. But if those same persons would turn back to God and would “repent and do the ¤rst works, and consecrate to receive sancti¤cation, and wait for the baptism, they can get it again.” Following John Wesley’s own standard, the Azusa Mission taught “that if you had it [i.e., salvation or any other particular Christian experience] you would know it, and if you lost it, you could get it again.” The assumption was, of course, that this pattern of lost and regained Christian experience applied only to those who fell unwillingly into sin as a result of Satan’s snares. Those who sinned willfully were in a much worse position, because willing sin was de¤ned as a denial of the blood of Christ and an insult to the Holy Spirit. For people in that condition, there was “no more remission of sin.” But the general tone of the policies of the Azusa Mission was toward leniency—toward the interpretation that most sins were the result of unwitting and unwilling ensnarement. Only Christians who had entirely “sinned away their day of grace” would be damned forever. For everyone else, the theology of the Azusa Mission leaders promised that if there was even “one particle of desire in [one’s] heart to look to God,” that person could be restored to full fellowship with God.22 Parham had held similar views regarding both this three-stage model of the Christian life and the need to continue in good works in order to maintain one’s justi¤ed, sancti¤ed, or Spirit-baptized status, and there is little doubt that Seymour’s thinking and that of the mission had been in®uenced by Parham on these issues. In Parham’s vision, however, these personal aspects of faith were often overshadowed by his eschatological focus on God’s unfolding plans for humanity as a whole. The cosmic narrative overwhelmed the personal. By contrast, the theology of the Azusa Mission leaders made personal concerns of faith central. The folks at Azusa were no less convinced than Parham that Jesus was coming back soon, but eschatological speculation never dominated. For Seymour and the other leaders of the Los Angeles revival, it was the immediate personal
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and pastoral concerns of pentecostal faith that occupied their time and de¤ned their theology. Tongues as the Sign of the Baptism of the Spirit Of all the pastoral concerns at the Azusa Mission, none was of greater importance than the issue of precisely how to know if one had truly received the sought-after baptism with the Holy Ghost and ¤re. In many ways this was the pentecostal question. Of all the wonderful experiences of the Holy Spirit one might have, how was the baptism of the Spirit to be distinguished from the others? The idea of the baptism of the Spirit had originally been developed within the holiness movement during the second half of the nineteenth century. It had then spread through various sectors of broader American evangelical Protestantism and had been interpreted in a number of different ways. The problem had always been how to know what precisely marked this experience as unique. Parham’s great contribution in this regard—which was also the ¤rst and most signi¤cant pentecostal answer to the question—had been to suggest that speaking in other tongues was the sign that infallibly distinguished the baptism of the Spirit from all other works of God in the human heart. Parham asserted quite bluntly that if one did not have the biblical evidence of speaking in tongues, one had not received a true baptism of the Spirit.23 At ¤rst, Seymour and the Azusa Mission followed this same Parhamite standard, proclaiming that “when people get the baptism with the Holy Ghost and ¤re, they will speak in tongues and magnify God.” In the early years of the revival, this seemed like one of the clearest teachings of scripture. Jesus had promised that signs would follow those who believed. Of the nine signs speci¤cally mentioned in the Bible, seven had been evident in the church prior to the day of Pentecost; only tongues and the power to interpret tongues were missing. It seemed obvious to the leaders at Azusa that the new sign of tongues (and interpretation of tongues) that was added to the church on Pentecost was, in fact, the sign of the baptism of the Spirit. Following Parham’s theology, the folks at Azusa understood the sign of tongues to be the ability miraculously “to speak in the languages of the nations.” It was not merely a sign that one had been baptized by the Spirit; it was an empowering gift allowing the recipient to be “a witness unto the uttermost parts of the earth.” For the people wandering in and out of the Azusa revival, then, speaking in tongues was understood to be both the necessary biblical marker that one had received the baptism with the Holy Ghost and an empowering gift of God that
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readied one to take part in evangelism to the rest of the world. The leaders of the revival unambiguously declared: “We can truly say that we believe that everyone that receives their personal Pentecost has a witness in speaking in tongues as the Spirit gives them utterance.”24 While speaking in tongues as the sign of the baptism of the Spirit was a major plank in the Azusa Mission leaders’ theological worldview, they were careful to maintain a sense of priority in the matter. It was always clear that the goal was the baptism of the Spirit and that tongues was simply part of that larger experience. The gift of tongues was never to be sought as an end in itself. If someone was seeking tongues for his own sake, that was prima facie evidence that that person had misunderstood both tongues and the baptism of the Spirit. Seymour was adamant on this point: “Beloved . . . we are not seeking for tongues, but we are seeking the baptism with the Holy Ghost and ¤re. And when we receive it, we shall be so ¤lled with the Holy Ghost, that He Himself will speak in the power of the Spirit.” The Apostolic Faith gave further instructions along these lines: “In seeking the baptism with the Holy Spirit do not ask the Lord for tongues. Just pray the Lord to give you the baptism with the Holy Ghost . . . and wait before Him till the Lord veri¤es His promise in your precious soul.” The baptism was what mattered, not tongues in and of themselves. The bottom line was that tongues was an important part of the experience, but not the main thing—“a gift that God throws in with the baptism with the Holy Ghost” as an extra blessing.25 The leaders of the Azusa mission recognized that the experience of tongues differed from individual to individual. Some received the ability to speak in tongues at the time of their baptism and continued to exercise that gift for the rest of their lives. Other recipients of the baptism of the Spirit spoke in tongues at the moment of their baptism and then never spoke a word in tongues again. The leaders of the mission explained this phenomenon by saying that there was a difference between tongues as a witness to the baptism of the Spirit and tongues as a continuing gift of the Spirit. Finally, some other devout seekers experienced an awkward delay between their seeming reception of the Spirit and their ability to speak in tongues. The leaders of the mission had no simple explanation for why this sometimes happened, but they knew from past precedent that as much as a week’s gap or more could separate the baptism of the Spirit from the ¤rst time the recipient spoke in tongues. Their advice to people in this predicament was simply to “get to praying or praising God in the liberty of the Spirit” and eventually tongues would follow. Seymour and the other leaders of the mission were convinced that speaking in tongues
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was an essential part of the pentecostal experience, but they never limited themselves to a single rigid pattern of how that should happen.26 While Seymour and his associates at the Azusa Mission were ®exible on the matter of tongues, they clearly believed that true glossolalia was a wonderful experience. Speaking in tongues was more than just a sign of one’s baptism in the Spirit. It was also a miraculous gift for world evangelism, and it was the very God of the universe speaking through the vocal chords of a mere human being. The Apostolic Faith said: “Whenever the Lord wants to play His piano, He tunes up the harp and plays with His own ¤ngers, speaking or singing any languages he wishes. The man that hears you speak a message right from the throne falls down and seeks God.” The leaders of the Azusa revival believed, like Parham, that tongues involved speech in foreign human languages, and those who attended the Azusa revival told story after story of how non-English-speaking strangers had come into the meeting and had supposedly heard someone speaking their own mother tongue. In those cases it seemed obvious to people in the meeting which language was being spoken. Often, however, individuals at Azusa had no idea which language they were speaking. In such instances, Seymour advised his parishioners “not [to] puzzle yourself about it, for the Lord did not promise us He would tell us what language we were speaking, but He promised us the interpretation of what we speak.” Readers of the mission’s Apostolic Faith paper were assured that even if “people may tell you it is some kind of gibberish you are speaking . . . you know that it means something because the Holy Ghost gave it to you.”27 Despite the importance that was assigned to tongues properly received and carefully exercised, the attitudes of the leaders of the Azusa Mission, and especially of Seymour himself, slowly became more cautious and even critical with regard to overemphasis on tongues and/or the misuse of tongues. While the mission never denied that tongues were a sign of the baptism of the Spirit, speaking in tongues was increasingly identi¤ed as only “one of the signs that follow every Spirit-¤lled man and woman” and then it marginalized the practice even further by saying that tongues was “not the real evidence of the baptism in the every day life.” The real evidence was whether or not one’s life “[measured] with the fruits of the Spirit.” An editorial comment in The Apostolic Faith explained that “if you get angry, or speak evil, or backbite, I care not how many tongues you may have, you have not the baptism with the Holy Spirit.” While tongues was still taken as an important sign that one had received the baptism of the Spirit, the mission said it was “another thing to keep
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the anointing” of one’s baptism—another thing with another sign. Thus The Apostolic Faith ¤nally began to identify “the real Bible evidence” of the baptism of the Spirit with the simple notion of “divine love, which is charity.” The ¤nal edition of the Apostolic Faith concluded: “If you ¤nd people that get a harsh spirit, and even talk in tongues in a harsh spirit, it is not the Holy Ghost talking. His utterances are in power and glory and with blessing and sweetness. . . . He is a meek and humble Spirit—not a harsh Spirit.” The sign of tongues was seen as a valid sign of the baptism of the Spirit only if recipients showed other evidence of God’s loving and redemptive in®uence in their lives.28 The mission’s shift in attitude regarding tongues was almost surely prompted initially by Parham’s visit to Los Angeles in the fall of 1906. Rather than join in the work and throw his support behind Seymour, Parham harshly criticized the mission and Seymour as its leader. Not surprisingly, Parham was ushered out of the meetings after he had completed only two or three sermons. Having been banned from Azusa, Parham opened a rival mission just a few blocks away where he continued to rail against the behavioral excesses and theological errors of Seymour and his colleagues. This turn of events must have stunned Seymour. The ¤rst issue of the Apostolic Faith had touted Parham as the founder of the pentecostal movement and the October issue that was distributed only a few days before Parham’s arrival said “he was surely raised up of God to be an apostle of the doctrine of Pentecost.” Parham’s negative reaction to the mission must have shaken the very foundations of Seymour’s faith and with it the faith of the mission. In the end, the response of the leaders of the Azusa Mission was not to reject the pentecostal faith they had inherited from Parham but to modify their understanding of the Spirit-¤lled life, especially as it was related to tongues. Actually, the Azusa Mission had already begun to lean in this direction before Parham’s visit. As early as the October 1906 issue of the Apostolic Faith, the leadership of the mission had identi¤ed “harshness with those who do not fall in line with them” as a mark of fanaticism and, conversely, “divine love to all” as a mark of the Spirit’s presence. While the basic structure of the pentecostal message at Azusa was very similar to Parham’s, the tone was different from the very beginning.29 Seymour’s own maturing theology of tongues, as distinct from the views of the leaders of the Azusa Mission in general, tended to become ever more negative. In the doctrinal text he published in 1915, Seymour criticized tongues on the very ¤rst page of the preface, saying that whenever the baptism of the Holy Spirit was identi¤ed by the sign of tongues
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alone, “that work will be an open door for witches and spiritualists.” He said that “grievious [sic] wolves” could enter any fellowship “through the sign gift of speaking in tongues . . . if God’s children did not know anything more than that to be the evidence” of the Spirit’s baptism. Seymour’s fundamental concern was with the increasing reliance he saw within the pentecostal movement on outward signs as opposed to inward realities—the substitution of mere experience for the word of God—and tongues was the main problem. He wrote: “Some people to-day cannot believe they have the Holy Ghost without some outward signs: that is Heathenism. The witness of the Holy Spirit inward is the greatest knowledge of knowing God, for he is invisible. . . . It is all right to have signs following, but not to pin our faith to outward manifestations. We are to go by the word of God . . . or else we will have a strange religion.” Thus Seymour declared that within his circle of in®uence no one would “be known as a preacher because he or she speaks in tongues; no one in our work shall be known as receiving the Holy Ghost simply because he or she speaks in tongues alone.”30 Seymour never denied that tongues should follow any genuine experience of the baptism of the Spirit, but he was deeply concerned that tongues be kept in their place. He said that his church’s caution about tongues was the primary way “our doctrine [differs] with the other Pentecostal brethren.” He explained: “We believe that all God’s children that have Faith in God can pray to God for an out pouring of the Holy Spirit upon the Holy sancti¤ed life and receive a great ¤lling of the Holy Spirit and speak in new tongues, as the spirit gives utterance.” But he said it was wrong to “base our Faith on [tongues] as essential to our salvation.” He said that some might ask how a person would know when they had truly received the Holy Spirit if tongues was not the witness, and his answer was that “He, the spirit of truth, will guide you into all truth.” For Seymour, the bottom line was that “the gift of the Holy Ghost is more than speaking in the tongues.” Ultimately the gift of the Holy Spirit was the gift of the divine person coming to inhabit one’s life. Seymour explained: “He comes and blesses your soul and sings through you and preaches through you.” His conclusion was that “if we would base our faith on tongues being the evidence of the gift of the Holy Ghost, it would knock our faith in the blood of Christ, and the inward witness of the Holy Spirit bearing witness with our spirit.” Tongues were good when properly understood and rightly used, but they were a terrible problem when overemphasized. Using the practices of the mission as an example, Seymour said: “When we were [¤rst] receiving this blessed Pentecost, we all used to
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break out in tongues; but we have learned to be quieter with the gift . . . for we want to be obedient to the Word, that everything may be done decently and in order without confusion.”31 This reference to the orderliness of the Azusa community as a whole underscores an important point. Perhaps the ultimate sign of the presence of the Spirit at the Azusa Mission—the ultimate sign of the baptism of the Spirit—was communal rather than individual. If the real sign of the baptism of the Spirit was more love for others, the communal manifestation of that love was the ability to care for and respect each other across the lines of race, class, gender, and age that normally separated people. And that is what Seymour and others claimed happened at the Azusa revival. The Apostolic Faith paper reported that “all classes and nationalities meet on a common ground.” People from all nationalities and races felt free to be themselves. The paper said that “if a Mexican or German cannot speak English, he gets up and speaks in his own tongue and feels quite at home for the Spirit interprets through the face and people say amen. No instrument that God can use is rejected on account of color or dress or lack of education. This is why God has so built up the work.” Seymour and the others believed that God was actually “melting all races and nations together,” blending “all races and nations into one common family in the Lord.” This was not merely a social phenomenon but an expression of Christ’s own character and being. Seymour said that Christ was “neither black, nor white, nor Chinaman, nor Hindoo, nor Japanese, but God.” The God that was worshiped at the Azusa Mission was the God of all the people of the earth—a God whose church needed similarly to transcend all the divisions of human culture and ethnicity.32 The leaders of the Azusa Mission also believed that gender roles had been washed away by the Spirit. The Apostolic Faith declared that “in Christ Jesus there is neither male nor female” and therefore it was “contrary to Scriptures that woman should not have her part in the salvation work to which God has called her.” In keeping with this sentiment, the leaders of the mission declared: “We have no right to even lay a straw in her way. . . . It is the same Holy Spirit in the woman as in the man.” Equality was also to be observed in Christian marriage. Seymour wrote: “God does not make the husband the tyrant or cruel sovereign over the wife, neither does He make the wife to exercise tyranny over the husband, but He makes them both one.” Finally, differences of respect and authority based on age were also suspended from time to time at the mission. The Apostolic Faith claimed that “little children from eight years to twelve” were sometimes allowed to “stand up on the altar bench and tes-
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tify to the baptism with the Holy Ghost and speak in tongues.” All in all, the leaders of the Azusa Mission believed that God was unfettered and could freely speak through anyone regardless of age, gender, race, or class. The Azusa revival belonged to God, and no one had the right to silence those through whom God chose to speak.33 The leaders of the Azusa Mission noted that the leveling effects of the Spirit were sometimes very visibly demonstrated through the experience of the baptism of the Spirit. Social equality in the Spirit was not an option at Azusa; it was a requirement. The ¤rst issue of The Apostolic Faith reported that “proud, well-dressed preachers come in to ‘investigate.’ Soon their high looks are replaced with wonder, then conviction comes, and very often you will ¤nd them in a short time wallowing on the dirty ®oor, asking God to forgive them and make them as little children.” The equalizing power of the Spirit evident in the work of conviction of the Spirit was often completed by the experience of the baptism of the Spirit. In particular, the leaders of the Azusa Mission claimed that the Spirit often used the gift of tongues to raise up the despised and humble the proud, explaining: “There are 50,000 languages in the world. Some of them sound like jabber. The Eskimo can hardly be distinguished from a dog bark. The Lord lets smart people talk in these jabber-like languages. Then He has some child talk in the most beautiful Latin and Greek, just to confound professors and learned people.” At Azusa, everyone was on equal ground, and the glue that held them all together was Spirit-inspired love. The ability to speak in tongues was one sign of the baptism of the Spirit, but the leaders of the Azusa Mission always claimed that the real sign—the essential marker of the baptism of the Spirit—was humble love for every other brother and sister in the Lord and, indeed, for every person in the world.34 The Return of Jesus and the End Times The expectation of Jesus’s return ran high at the Azusa Mission. The Apostolic Faith paper said that “Jesus is coming soon” is “the message that the Holy Ghost is speaking today through nearly everyone that receives the baptism with the Holy Ghost.” Many had received visions of end-time events, and the paper even reported that two saints had been “caught up to Heaven and [had seen] the New Jerusalem.” These two eyewitnesses to heaven declared that the table was already spread for the marriage feast of the Lamb and that many of the saints had already gathered for the celebration. The end was near. In his own somewhat subdued way, Seymour commented simply: “We are living in the eventide of this dispensation.”
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In light of that fact, he encouraged all believers to get sancti¤ed and to seek the baptism of the Spirit so that they could be part of that great company that would soon rise up to meet Jesus in the clouds. One person who wrote in to The Apostolic Faith said: “I can feel the breath of heaven.” The merging of time and eternity was about to take place. Heaven was so close that some said they could occasionally hear angelic singing wafting down from on high.35 Despite this grassroots eschatological fervor, Seymour and the leaders of the Azusa Mission actually devoted very little time to theological speculation regarding the details of what might take place in the days and years ahead. Only a few articles in The Apostolic Faith explicitly addressed the topic at all. When Seymour later pieced together his book of Doctrines and Discipline for the mission, he remained absolutely silent on eschatological issues. How are we to make sense of this disparity between the Azusa leaders’ strong interest in the second coming of Christ and the relative lack of theological discussion of the topic in the mission’s paper? The most reasonable explanation seems to be that while eschatological expectations provided a ubiquitous backdrop for the revival, eschatology was never the main theme. Eschatology was everywhere—it was part of the religious air that early pentecostals breathed—but eschatology was not the core message. Measured by the amount of print given the subject, eschatology seems to have been, at best, a second-order theological concern at the mission. And even when eschatological concerns were discussed, the real point of those discussions was often much more practical, pastoral, and present-minded then it was futuristic and speculative; it focused on what individuals could do to get ready for the return of Christ rather than dwelling on the chronology of what might take place. A good example of the way Seymour handled future events is found in a short article entitled “Behold the Bridegroom Cometh” which appeared in the January 1907 issue of The Apostolic Faith. The article is a commentary on the story of the wise virgins found in the twenty-¤fth chapter of the gospel of Matthew. In the parable, ten bridesmaids are waiting at night for a bridegroom to appear. Five of them have trimmed their lamps and ¤lled them with oil; ¤ve have not. When the bridegroom ¤nally shows up only the ¤rst ¤ve get to go with him. The other ¤ve are left behind because they had to leave the meeting place temporarily to re¤ll their empty lamps with oil. Seymour explained this story as an eschatological parable, indicating how one should await the return of Christ. The wise virgins whose lamps were ¤lled with oil were pentecostal believers who were ¤lled with the Spirit and thus fully prepared for
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Christ’s coming; the unwise virgins represented those who had not yet received the baptism of the Spirit and who were thus not ready for Christ’s return. Translating the parable into nonsymbolic prose, Seymour wrote: “Many precious souls believe today that in sancti¤cation they have it all, that they already have the baptism with the Holy Ghost . . . but in that day, they will ¤nd they are mistaken. They say, Away with this third work. . . . God is warning [them] through His servants and handmaidens to get ready; but many are going to come back to get oil from others. Dear ones, we cannot get more than enough for ourselves. You can grasp the saints’ hands but you cannot squeeze any oil out. You have to get the vessel ¤lled yourself.” Continuing his commentary, Seymour said that Spirit-¤lled Christians—the wise virgins of the parable—would soon be whisked away by Jesus in the rapture. They would be taken up to heaven and would be spared from the suffering of the tribulation. Christians who were merely justi¤ed or sancti¤ed, however, would be left behind to face the violence of Satan’s attacks. The only way they could join the raptured saints in heaven would be through the path of martyrdom. The point of this article is clear: Get the baptism of the Spirit now so you will be ready for Christ’s return and be spared the horrors of the tribulation. That is, the point was pastoral and evangelistic much more than it was truly eschatological. The details of what might happen in the future were sketchy at best, but the present-day implications for believers who were not baptized by the Spirit were crystal clear: Get the baptism and get it now!36 One of the only other articles from The Apostolic Faith that was devoted to the theme of eschatology appeared in January 1908. No author is listed for this selection. The biblical point of contact for this essay was the mysterious company of 144,000 saints mentioned in the fourteenth chapter of the Apocalypse. The article said “these 144,000 are the highest overcomers” who had reached “the highest consecration in Jesus Christ.” This group was also identi¤ed as the “man child” who would soon be “caught up unto God and to His throne” in the rapture. The author explained that the woman from whom this man child had been born was a symbol of the church as a whole, indicating that only some, not all, Christians would qualify for the rapture. The author exhorted everyone to get ready for the rapture, saying “He is soon coming, and none will be ready but those that are washed in the Blood, made holy and sealed with the Holy Spirit. . . . If you keep living this salvation moment by moment, you are going to be ready for the rapture.” Once again, the real message of the article was not eschatological; it was present-minded. The real point was
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about receiving the baptism of the Holy Spirit and then living a life that was spiritually consistent with that baptism.37 Like many other prophecy-minded revivalists who came before them and after (some of whom were pentecostal and some not), the leaders of the Azusa Mission were not so much interested in the details of eschatology as they were concerned to use the future to encourage people to a deeper experience of faith in the present. In the articles discussed above, the main theme was holy living through the power of the indwelling Spirit of God. In a short article entitled “The Millennium,” the focus was much more on consolation. The article began by saying “all these 6,000 years we have been ¤ghting against sin and Satan. Soon we shall have a rest of 1,000 years.” These were surely welcome words of comfort and hope for the working-class folks who ¤lled the mission night after night and who were undoubtedly weary from both hard labor and the daily struggle to keep their lives pure in a world full of sin. The hope of future rest must have been a soothing thought. The author said it was nothing short of “wonderful how God sent His Son to take little worms of dust and to transform us into glory and immortality.” The article then concluded with the almost-requisite challenge for everyone to seek the full baptism of the Holy Spirit. Though the topic was eschatology, the message was once again personal. At Azusa, biblical prophecy was virtually always used for pastoral purposes.38 In Charles Parham’s theology, things were different. For him, eschatology itself had been key. The clock was running; the end of the world was drawing near. At that critical juncture in history, God had chosen to pour out the Spirit, creating a new kind of Christian (the redemption) which would evangelize the world through power, miracles, and the gift of tongues before the ¤nal return of Christ. The personal dimension of faith was there—Parham called on all to get the baptism of the Spirit for themselves so they would be sealed against the coming plagues of the devil—but Parham’s rhetoric always emphasized God’s grand cosmic plan for the ages more then it did the personal concerns of individual believers. There was a different emphasis at Azusa. While Seymour had surely imbibed many of his ideas about the future from Parham, he took those views and bent them to a rather different purpose. When he was done, there was little, if any, of Parham’s eschatological bravado left in the rhetoric of the Los Angeles mission. In its place was a humble sense of waiting for God and a determined commitment to persevere in holiness until Christ returned, whenever that might be. One author in The Apostolic
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Faith concluded a discussion of future events by saying: “We must go on to perfection and holiness, and get the baptism with the Holy Ghost, and not stop there, but go on to perfection and maturity. God has many things to teach us as we remain humble at His feet.” It was precisely that sense of humility that set the eschatology of the leaders at Azusa apart from Parham’s.39 The Precise Theology of George Floyd Taylor George Floyd Taylor never attended the Azusa meetings, but he was a child of the revival nonetheless. He was introduced to the Azusa version of pentecostalism through the efforts of Gaston B. Cashwell. Cashwell was a holiness preacher in North Carolina when the California revival broke out, and almost as soon as he heard the news he decided to ¤nd out what was happening. He boarded a train to Los Angeles and arrived at the mission in November 1906. Cashwell heard the message and responded quickly. He received the baptism of the Spirit and was back home in North Carolina spreading the word before the year was out. Taylor met Cashwell in January 1907 while the latter was holding revival services in Dunn, North Carolina. Taylor was at ¤rst skeptical about the new teaching that tongues was the sign of the baptism of the Spirit, but he was soon won over by Cashwell’s enthusiasm and his own rereading of the biblical text. With Taylor’s conversion to pentecostalism, the movement acquired one of its most energetic and articulate spokespersons. What marked Taylor’s theology as distinctive within the context of early pentecostalism was its sense of precision. His tendency was to dissect the Christian life as ¤nely as he could and then examine each separate dimension as carefully as possible. But Taylor was also precise in his understanding of the social rami¤cations of theology. Differences of doctrine necessitated differences of association. Truth and error were incompatible, so God required precise boundaries to be drawn around the community of the faithful. Taylor believed it was God himself who was drawing a line of truth in the spiritual sand of the world through the pentecostal revival. The pentecostal message required everyone to take a stand either for the movement or against it. There was no neutral middle ground, and Taylor had no aversion to drawing clear lines of demarcation between those whom he thought were true saints and the sinners who opposed them. He could occasionally sound a bit more ®exible. For example, at the very end of his book The Spirit and the Bride, Taylor warned his readers not to assume that anyone could ever “bring God down to any special form in any matter”—God could never be fully tamed by the lan-
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guage of theology—but this grudging admission did little to alter Taylor’s fundamentally feisty sense of theological precision. As he aged he mellowed to some degree, but Taylor remained a dogmatic idealist until the day he died. He was pugnacious by instinct, and the defense of truth often called him to battle.40 Taylor interpreted the pentecostal revival as the great reversal of the “apostasy of the early church” that would ultimate end the spiritual drought in which the church had languished since the middle ages. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had seen some signs of relief, but Taylor believed that the revival at the Azusa Street Mission signaled the real beginning of God’s “latter-rain” cloudburst of the Spirit. He said that within a scant year of its founding, the divine waters of revival from Azusa had already washed “half around the world.” No Christian movement had ever “spread so fast and so wide.” God was clearly doing something new, and Taylor’s interpretation was that God was using the Azusa revival to usher in the last great epoch in the history of the Church and, indeed, in the history of the world.41 For Taylor, this last epoch of history would be a “perilous time” when God would sift the church to see who was and who was not ready for the dawn of eternity. To fare well in this divine sorting process, every Christian needed to “know the truth and walk in it,” and Taylor believed he had been appointed by God to help Christians in that task. His ¤rst booklength publication, The Spirit and the Bride, came out in February 1908 (though the preface dates the work as 1907), and Taylor hoped it would provide Christians with the kind of detailed spiritual map they would need to guide them through the perilous, but glorious, days ahead. Taylor’s friend J. H. King said in a preface that The Spirit and the Bride was “of vast importance” because it showed Christians precisely how they should prepare themselves to face “these closing days of gospel history.” King noted that the book was “not an exhaustive treatise on this subject” and he cautioned readers to be discerning—to “accept all that is Scriptural [and] reject all that is erroneous”—but he believed it was a timely and much-needed volume.42 Two theological concerns form the backbone of this book. The ¤rst and most prominent theme of The Spirit and the Bride is a call to understand and receive the baptism of the Spirit on a personal and individual level. Taylor addressed this topic broadly, including discussions of both the experiences that preceded the baptism of the Spirit and the bene¤ts that ®owed from it. Taylor’s second and somewhat subservient concern was how to understand the pentecostal movement, and indeed the whole of
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human history, within the full sweep of God’s historical and eschatological plans for the world. This broader theme was developed only thinly in The Spirit and the Bride. Taylor gave considerably more attention to the topic in his later books The Second Coming of Jesus (1916) and The Rainbow (1924). Spiritual Biography George Floyd Taylor was born in Magnolia, North Carolina, in 1881, and at the time of his birth few if any thought he would live. Those in the birthing room ¤rst thought he had been stillborn, but after being rubbed with warm water for an hour he slowly began to show signs of life. It was clear to everyone that if the Taylor baby survived infancy, his life would be a challenge. Even as a newborn he was visibly crippled and he would suffer from a palsy-like condition for the rest of his life. He had dif¤culty walking and his ¤ne motor skills (such as those required for handwriting) were hard to control, but he became an incredibly productive minister, teacher, and businessperson in spite of his physical problems.43 We know little about Taylor’s family or his early years, but he seems to have been a religious seeker from youth. While he was acquainted with the Universalist Church in his home town, he opted to join the more spiritually vigorous Baptists as soon as they would allow him to do so. Then, at the age of thirteen, he switched denominations and became a Methodist. The Methodist congregation in his home town leaned in the direction of holiness theology, though only moderately so. Taylor appreciated the congregation and its balanced style of piety and hoped someday to become a Methodist preacher himself. He set off to the University of North Carolina in 1901 to begin his educational journey toward Methodist ordination. As things would turn out, however, Taylor never completed that journey. He dropped out of college after his ¤rst year, taking a huge step toward religious radicalism as he joined the newly created Holiness Church of North Carolina led by the ¤ery preacher Abner Blackmon Crumpler. Taylor met Crumpler at a revival meeting in Magnolia during his ¤rst semester in college and he became enthralled with both the man and his message. Crumpler was an advocate of extreme holiness theology, and he was a preacher who loved his independence. He would speak whenever and wherever he felt a spiritual need, and he would not abide the restrictions the Methodist Church tried to put in his way. After several run-ins
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with the Methodist hierarchy, he broke with the denomination in 1898 and started his own new denomination in 1901. Taylor was obviously impressed with Crumpler’s revivalistic preaching, for he was present at the organizational meeting of the new denomination, but he did not formally joint Crumpler’s church at that time. It was only later, after he had received the experience of full sancti¤cation in the summer of 1902, that Taylor ¤nally felt compelled to sever his own ties with the Methodist Church and to throw his lot fully with Crumpler and his new venture. Taylor joined the Holiness Church and was licensed to preach on the very same day: March 8, 1903. Never one to do anything halfway, Taylor helped launch a denominationally related holiness school in Rose Hill, North Carolina, the same year he started preaching. And whenever anything else needed to be done, he was always ready to volunteer. Because of that zeal and despite his youth, Taylor would soon become a leading ¤gure in the Holiness Church of North Carolina. In the fall of 1906, reports started to percolate through holiness circles in the South that a new movement of God was underway in Los Angeles. This new movement taught that a third experience of God was to be expected after conversion and sancti¤cation. Actually, a number of extreme holiness proponents had been suggesting a similar idea for several years. Benjamin Irwin Hardin was the most well known, and his talk about a baptism of the Holy Ghost and ¤re had helped raise expectations. The pentecostal movement added a novel element, however: the belief that speaking in unknown tongues was the sign that set the baptism of the Spirit apart from all other Christian experiences. Rumor had it that hundreds or even thousands of seekers had experienced the phenomenon at the Azusa Street Mission. One of Crumpler’s associates took it upon himself to investigate. Gaston B. Cashwell headed out to California in November and returned home in December preaching pentecostalism. Within just a few weeks many of the ministers in the Holiness Church had accepted the new pentecostal teaching, including Taylor, who received the baptism of the Holy Ghost on January 15, 1907. From that point on he would be a ¤rm believer in what he called “progressive” theology—a theology that af¤rmed that God was in the process of revealing new truths to humanity which would inevitably call the faithful beyond the con¤nes of their older theologies and worldviews. The message of the leaders at Azusa created a bitter split in the Holiness Church of North Carolina. Crumpler and a number of other ministers refused to accept the new teaching even though a majority of the
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people and preachers involved in the denomination did. Taylor was rapidly becoming the most outspoken proponent of the new view, and he penned his ¤rst theological work as a pentecostal in the heat of this internecine battle for control of the denomination. The Spirit and the Bride was both a plea for his non-pentecostal brothers and sisters in faith to embrace the pentecostal message and a diatribe against their unwillingness to do so. The rhetoric of the book ripples with tension between the old and the new. Images of friction, battle, con®ict, and war appear everywhere. Taylor argued that there was no neutral ground in the spiritual contest that confronted his own church. Everyone had to choose sides. They could either move forward with God and rule victorious with Christ or cling to the past and be lost. One of the reasons Taylor’s language might have been so hot is that those closest to him—his own congregation and the Rose Hill school—refused to make the transition from old-style holiness to new-style pentecostalism with him. Taylor was eventually kicked out of the Bethel School because of his new pentecostal views. For Taylor, being a pentecostal was a matter of soul-rending, friendship-ending commitment to truth. It was not a matter of merely personal experience and enrichment. When Taylor was forced out of Rose Hill, he moved to Falcon, North Carolina, where he took over the leadership of the Falcon Bible School, whose previous principal had, in a parallel development, been ¤red for not accepting the new pentecostal view of faith. Taylor would spend the next ten years of his life at this post (1907–1916), and his in®uence within the newly renamed Pentecostal Holiness Church would increase throughout that time. In 1911, Taylor’s prestige helped complete a merger between the Pentecostal Holiness Church and the Fire-Baptized Holiness Church headed by Joseph H. King. (The newly merged church was also called the Pentecostal Holiness Church.) Starting in 1913, Taylor’s Sunday school materials were used to educate virtually all the children in the denomination. That same year (1913), Taylor was elected general superintendent of the denomination, a position he held until 1917. It was also during these years that Taylor composed his second signi¤cant theological tome, The Second Coming of Jesus (1916), which was a textbook on prophecy and eschatology. The next ten-year period of Taylor’s life (1917–1926) was dominated by two new ventures. He was asked to begin a denominational paper, The Pentecostal Holiness Advocate, which was the ¤rst of¤cial publication of the Pentecostal Holiness Church, and he was tapped in 1918 to launch another Bible school for the denomination, the Franklin Springs Insti-
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tute in Georgia. While he was getting these two new operations off the ground, he was still producing his Sunday school materials; he was still writing books, most notably The Rainbow, which came out in 1924; and he was still a church bureaucrat, serving as treasurer and chief fund-raiser for the denomination’s missionary society. Needless to say, he was busy. He said that on a normal day, he taught from 7:20 in the morning until 1:00 in the afternoon. He then assigned work tasks to students and retired to his of¤ce to answer his mail, write his Sunday school literature, pay the bills, pray for the sick, prepare his sermons, and attend to whatever else needed his attention. After supper, he spent three more hours with his students in a required study hall, helping them work through their assignments. This would have been a taxing schedule for anyone. The fact that Taylor managed all this despite his serious physical challenges is nothing short of amazing. After more than two decades in which virtually every moment of his day was spent in service to the church, Taylor decided it was time for a break. In 1926, at the age of forty-¤ve, he resigned from the Franklin Springs Institute with the goal of ¤nally completing his own education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Taylor had always loved learning, and he was proud to earn his bachelor’s degree in history in 1928. In the early months of 1929, he decided to ful¤ll another lifelong dream, and he headed off to Palestine for a tour of the Holy Land. By the fall of that year, he was back at the university pursuing a master’s degree, which he received in May 1930. His thesis had a historical and theological focus, dealing with the similarities and differences of Calvinism, Lutheranism, and Zwinglianism in the sixteenth century. Taylor intended to return to his duties at the Franklin Springs Institute at this point, but the school was now in ¤nancial dif¤culty and actually had to close its doors in 1931 for lack of funds. Taylor was intent on teaching, however, and if the Franklin Springs school was defunct that simply meant he had to look elsewhere. Taylor opted for Milford, Texas, where he believed there was suf¤cient support to start a new Bible school. He was in the midst of organizing that new educational project when the Pentecostal Holiness Church decided to revive and rename the school at Franklin Springs. Taylor gladly accepted an invitation to join the faculty of what was now Emmanuel College when it reopened in the fall of 1933. Taylor was able to serve just one year at his new post before he died in November 1934. He was only ¤fty-three, and his untimely death robbed the Pentecostal Holiness Church of one of its most creative and articulate theologians.
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The Operations of the Holy Spirit in the Christian Life The baptism of the Spirit formed the core of Taylor’s faith and theology. He ended his book The Spirit and the Bride with a sentence of italicized print that drove the point home: “Get in the Spirit, stay in the Spirit, and follow the Spirit at any cost.” The key question, of course, was how to do that. How was the baptism of the Spirit to be recognized and how was one to keep that baptism and follow the Spirit? Taylor accepted without question the Parhamite insight that speaking in tongues was the initial physical evidence of the baptism of the Spirit, but he also believed this was only one example of how God used physical manifestations to con¤rm the inner work of the Spirit. The primary theological goal was to de¤ne the many different works of the Spirit in the believer’s life and then to isolate precisely what it was that made the baptism of the Spirit different. In the end, Taylor identi¤ed seven different “of¤ces, administrations, [or] operations” which the Holy Spirit could perform in the Christian’s life. He said that the Spirit (1) strives to convict of sin; (2) justi¤es and regenerates; (3) sancti¤es; (4) witnesses to the believer’s justi¤cation, sancti¤cation, healing, answers to prayer, and so forth; (5) teaches the faithful “to understand the Scriptures, to perceive spiritual things, to know God’s will, and to receive divine wisdom”; (6) anoints Christians for special acts of service or for unusual times of trial; and (7) baptizes seekers into the body of Christians known as the bride of Christ. Regarding the last experience, Taylor added: “The Baptism of the Spirit includes or implies all other operations of the Spirit mentioned above, ¤lls the spirit and soul and body of the recipient, and completely envelops the entire being with power and glory.”44 Taylor was not particularly interested in asserting that these seven actions were the only ways the Spirit could intervene in the Christian’s life— in fact, he admitted that the Spirit might act in other ways—but he did believe that these seven operations included all the most important activities of the Spirit. They were “symbols” that had been revealed by God as a kind of road map of the spiritual life. Others might include more than seven operations of the Spirit in their theological belief systems, or less, and that was ¤ne with Taylor. He said that “any theory [one] may wish to build, will not at all affect the main truth” that God operates in the believer’s life in a series of speci¤c and identi¤able operations. The Spirit entered into and/or in®uenced believers in many different ways for many different purposes.45
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In opposition to some other pentecostal leaders who were teaching that only those who had been baptized by the Spirit “had the Holy Ghost in them,” Taylor said that the Spirit was present in the Christian’s life from the very ¤rst stages of this sevenfold process. Taylor believed that Christians received the Spirit “always by measure”—a little at a time—and in each of the enumerated operations a different and additional dollop of the Spirit was given to the recipient. He argued that because “we receive the Spirit by measure, it is easy to see that not every one who knows the Holy Ghost has received the Baptism; and that not every one who has the Holy Ghost in him is ¤lled with the Spirit.” Using his own life as an example, Taylor explained: “I met the Holy Ghost in conviction, I learned to know Him in justi¤cation, and I have been acquainted with Him ever since.” Taylor even went so far as to suggest that salvation was in many ways more of a process than it was an event. Salvation was rooted in the past fact of having been made “a member of God’s kingdom,” but Christian experience was also a “pledge” of greater things to come. Salvation was not something that could ever be completed in this life; it was the ongoing process of striving to follow the Spirit ever deeper into the fullness of God. The process of salvation involved both death and life, pain and joy. One had to die to sin to live for righteousness and one had to die to self to be ¤lled with God’s Spirit. Taylor said that in the progress of the Christian life he was “persuaded that [Christians] must continue to pass through death after death” as they moved deeper and deeper into the unending fullness of God.46 Taylor’s discussion of the seven operations of the Spirit was part and parcel of this larger vision of salvation. The seven operations marked off key items that everyone needed to experience on the pathway from darkness to eternal light. Taylor’s understanding of the stages of faith as a process can also be seen as a more complicated version of the three-step model that prevailed at Azusa. The three major events of justi¤cation, sancti¤cation, and the baptism of the Spirit which formed the core of Taylor’s vision were the same as those of the Azusa leaders. These three big operations of the Spirit were the real milestones of the Christian life— major transitional experiences that moved the recipient from one spiritual status to another. Taylor believed, like the leaders of the Azusa Mission, that justi¤cation and sancti¤cation dealt with different aspects of human sin while the baptism of the Spirit conferred power for service rather than forgiveness for or cleansing from sin. In more precise terms, Taylor believed that the work of justi¤cation addressed the issue of “actual” sin (i.e., individual acts that transgressed God’s law) while sancti¤cation pro-
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vided the remedy for “inbred” sin (i.e., the inner inclination to commit sins). After justi¤cation and sancti¤cation had cleansed all sin from the life of the believer, the baptism of the Spirit could occur, but this experience had nothing to do with sin. By the time one was ready for the Spirit’s baptism, the issue of sin had been fully relegated to the past. Taylor explained the difference by saying that justi¤cation and sancti¤cation were “just as separate from the Baptism of the Holy Spirit as Calvary [was] from Passover—as subtraction [was] from addition.” He said: “At Calvary the old man dies; at Pentecost you are ¤lled with the Holy Spirit.”47 The other operations of the Spirit—especially the witnessing, teaching, and anointing functions of the Spirit—were of a different character than justi¤cation, sancti¤cation, and the baptism of the Spirit. They were, in a certain sense, lesser actions of the Spirit and they were both repeatable and reorderable. They did not need to occur in any special sequence; they could take place at any time. Taylor said quite clearly, for example, that persons could seek and receive several anointings of the Spirit during their lives and that these anointings could take place “either before or after our Baptism.” In the same way, the teaching and witnessing operations of the Spirit were ongoing, repetitive activities. This was all quite different from his perspective on regeneration, sancti¤cation, and the baptism of the Spirit, which he assumed should ideally be one-time, unrepeatable, sequential experiences.48 One of the most interesting points that Taylor raised in his discussion of the operations of the Spirit—and most especially with regard to the baptism of the Spirit—was that Jesus himself needed to experience the work of the Spirit in his own life. Taylor obviously believed that Jesus was without sin and had no need of forgiveness or sancti¤cation. When it came to empowerment for service, however, he thought that Jesus was in a position largely analogous to ordinary human believers. Taylor argued that while “Jesus had no sin” he still “had to receive the Baptism of the Holy Spirit before He entered upon his ministry.” According to Taylor, the baptism of the Spirit was a prerequisite for service of any kind and for perseverance in suffering, so “Jesus needed it [the baptism of the Spirit] to heal the sick, to raise the dead; He needed it in Gethsemane and at Calvary.” Taylor’s Christology came close to implying that Jesus was insuf¤ciently divine on his own to work miracles without the help of the Holy Spirit—or Taylor might have believed that, within the economy of the Trinity, the power to work miracles was explicitly delegated to the Spirit instead of to the Son. In either case, Taylor’s comments raised as
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many questions as they answered. Pentecostal theologians would later revisit those issues and come to different conclusions. At one extreme, Jesusonly or Oneness pentecostals would assert the absolute identity of Jesus and the Spirit as a means of relieving Taylor’s tension. At another extreme, the mid-century Assemblies of God theologian Frank Boyd would develop a complex Christology that included both a “kenosis” (emptying) of the divine attributes in the incarnation and a parallel “plerosis” (re¤lling) of those divine powers through the baptism of the Spirit which Jesus received at the time of his water baptism in the Jordan River.49 Taylor seemed to posit a rather close similarity between the Spirit¤lled powers of Jesus and the divine powers available to ordinary humans who had been baptized by the Spirit. Taylor said that qualitatively the experiences were essentially the same; the difference was quantitative. While Jesus enjoyed the power of the Spirit in all its fullness, Christians could only receive the Spirit by measure. The reason for this was that Jesus had a far greater “capacity” for the Spirit than anyone else who had ever lived. Taylor said that this superior capacity allowed Jesus to receive “the Holy Ghost in all of His operations, in all of His administrations, in all of His gifts, and in all of His power.” By contrast, the capacities of ordinary human beings were far too small to receive the Spirit “in His full embodiment,” so they could only receive the Spirit a little bit at a time. Perhaps even more troubling, many people did not even allow the Spirit to ¤ll their lives to the brim of their naturally limited capacities. Thus, two factors were involved in determining the actual fullness of the Spirit that anyone possessed. First, Taylor believed that different individuals had different natural abilities to contain the Spirit—some had “greater capacities for containing God” and others less. That maximum capacity for the Spirit was then further limited by the person’s overall openness to the Spirit. The ¤nal results could vary considerably. Taylor said it might even be possible for a person with less natural capacity for the Spirit to possess more of the Spirit than someone with greater capacity, if the person with greater capacity was less open to the Spirit. Having made all those distinctions, however, Taylor immediately reminded his readers that regardless of the degree to which one was ¤lled with the Spirit, any and all ¤llings of the Spirit involved God in all God’s fullness. Having more or less of God did not mean having only one aspect or another of God. Taylor explained: “Just as one drop of water contains all the fulness of water, and as much so as a barrel, and yet the barrel cannot contain all water; even so we may have all the fulness of God, or we may be ¤lled with all the fulness of
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God; and yet we can receive Him only by measure.” In this sense, at least, Taylor believed that ordinary humans possessed the fullness of God in exactly the same way as Jesus.50 Using a quite different analogy, Taylor once likened the individual Christian to a “small ancient clay hand lamp” in contrast to Jesus, who was the pure light of God shining all over the world. Focusing on the human mind as one of the main conduits through which the Spirit worked, Taylor said: “We can be a light to ourselves or others only as our intellectual powers ®oat on the Holy Ghost and the love of God burns in our hearts, and causes to shine forth the Holy Spirit through us. As the oil must impart itself to the ¤re through the wick, so the Holy Spirit must use our intellectual powers to shine through us.” While all sancti¤ed Christians possessed the Spirit in some way, only those who had been baptized in the Spirit had their lamps ¤lled to the point where they could burn brightly enough to light the way for others. No matter how brightly they might shine, however, Spirit-baptized Christians could never rival the brilliance or constancy of the white light that shone forth from Jesus. The problem was not the quality of the oil—the same Spirit existed in Christ and the believer—but the size and quality of the vessel. In particular, Taylor said that “unscriptural debris” was constantly getting clogged in the lamps of ordinary Christians. It could settle in the minds of Spirit¤lled Christian while they were working or even when they were asleep. Because that was the case, Spirit-baptized Christians needed to constantly be “trimming” their lamps—purifying their minds through the study of the Bible—so the light of the Spirit could shine through them. By contrast, the lamp of Jesus’s life never became clogged with sin and always blazed forth in full radiance.51 Tongues and Other Manifestations of the Spirit Taylor believed that even though the Spirit could perform many different kinds of actions in or on a person’s life, the Spirit’s basic mode of operation was always the same, and one of the most notable aspect of that standard mode of operation was that whenever the Spirit intervened in a person’s life the impact was felt both spiritually and physically. The work of the Spirit was empirically observable. Taylor argued that every operation of the Spirit included some public “manifestation” that marked the experience and validated it. His rule was that “there is a manifestation that follows each operation of the Spirit in our hearts.” He further stipulated that every manifestation of the Spirit was in a certain sense double-sided, involving both an internal dimension
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that could be felt only by the recipient and an external dimension that could be observed by anyone who was attentive. Taylor asserted that the Spirit’s work of convicting sinners produced the internal manifestation of “uneasiness in the soul” and the external manifestation of “a troubled look on the face.” He said that “justi¤cation [brought] the invisible manifestation of peace . . . and the visible manifestation of a new life.” Sancti¤cation was accompanied by “the invisible manifestation of joy . . . and the visible manifestation of fruit unto holiness.” The Spirit’s work of witness produced an internal sense of “con¤dence toward God” and an external manifestation of “testimony to the world.” The teaching activity of the Spirit produced both “insight” (the internal manifestation) and “wisdom” (the external manifestation). Various anointings by the Spirit provided the recipient with different kinds of inner insight and/or strength and simultaneously infused that person’s ministry with a new sense of publicly observable “boldness and liberty.” Finally, Taylor identi¤ed the inner manifestation of the baptism of the Spirit as “living water” and the external manifestation as speaking in tongues.52 While the human experience of the Spirit’s physical manifestations was important, Taylor also believed there was a divine logic—almost a divine need—that informed the physicality of the Spirit’s work. He argued that the activity of the Spirit needed to be manifested through the physical human body because God in the person of the Spirit, unlike God the Father and God the Son, did not naturally possess a body. The Spirit had to use the bodies of willing Christians to establish its own mediated physical presence in the world. Taylor’s speculation on this issue was creative, if a bit strained. He argued that God the Son quite clearly had a body, or at least obtained one at the time of the incarnation, “for He ‘was made ®esh and dwelt among us.’” The issue of God the Father’s body was a bit less clear, but Taylor said that when the Scriptures mentioned “different parts of the Father’s body” those comments had to be taken seriously and in some sense literally. Thus he interpreted biblical references to the feet, eyes, hands, and ears of God as accurate, albeit symbolic, references to God’s very real body. But with regard to the Spirit, Taylor could ¤nd no scriptural passage that taught “that the Holy Spirit has a body.” His conclusion was that “since the Holy Spirit has no body, God has to reveal Him and His work to us through material emblems” or manifestations. The Spirit’s relatively disembodied state had caused some to suggest that the Holy Ghost was really nothing more than a vague “vapor or an in®uence.” Taylor was appalled by such comments. For him, the physical manifestations of the Spirit proved beyond all doubt that the Spirit was
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both a person (as opposed to a mere in®uence) and a powerful divine presence in the world. The manifestations of the Spirit did double duty: They served as physical signs con¤rming the spiritual experiences of individual Christians and, just as important, they demonstrated that the Holy Spirit was “the Personal God, and as much so as God the Father or God the Son.”53 Taylor believed that the manifestation of speaking in tongues at the time of one’s baptism in the Spirit was the most clear-cut and signi¤cant manifestation a Christian could experience. He said that it was possible that he might have made some errors in describing the manifestations of the Spirit as they related to the other six operations of the Spirit; individual experiences might vary with regard to these six operations and his readers should feel at “liberty to rearrange these manifestations if they choose.” But, he said, “When we come to the manifestation following the Baptism of the Spirit, we have a ‘thus saith the Lord.’” The Bible was clear; the apostles were unambiguous; the correct interpretation was indisputable. “The manifestation following the Baptism is speaking with tongues!”54 Taylor asserted, perhaps more unconditionally than any other pentecostal theologian, that everyone who received the baptism of the Holy Ghost would speak with other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance. He allowed no room for dialogue on this matter, and he rejected the idea that any other corroborating criterion should be added to the mix. (William Seymour, it will be recalled, had suggested that the real proof of the baptism of the Spirit was tongues wedded to love. Taylor did not allow that kind of layering of evidence.) The extreme to which Taylor emphasized tongues was nowhere more evident than in his assertion that even “deaf mutes” had to speak in tongues for him to accept their claim of the Spirit’s baptism. How could he require speech from persons otherwise unable to speak at all? His rationale was simple. Speaking in tongues had nothing to do with any natural human ability. It was God miraculously speaking through the person; it was God “[manifesting] Himself with the tongue” in a foreign language previously unknown to the speaker. Taylor explained that glossolalia was “the Holy Ghost taking the tongue of that one whose entire being He has ¤lled and speaking with it in a language of which the recipient of the Holy Ghost knows nothing. If the Holy Ghost should use a person’s tongue to speak a language with which that person is familiar, it would appear to be the testimony of the recipient; but since the Spirit always does His talking in another language, we must admit that it is the testimony of the Comforter.”55
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Like both Parham and the leaders of the Azusa revival, Taylor quite obviously believed that speaking in tongues involved real human speech —the ability to converse in a language or languages previously unknown to the person. Speaking in tongues was thus a missionary sign. Taylor identi¤ed tongues with the power that Jesus said would be given to the disciples with the coming of the Spirit after his own ascension into heaven. He wrote: “It is clear that the ‘power’ which Jesus said would accompany the Baptism of the Spirit is the power to preach the gospel to every creature; and this power the one hundred and twenty received, not at college, but on the day of Pentecost” (a reference to Acts 1:12–2:12). He maintained this belief ¤rmly even in the face of some who said that glossolalia sounded like little more than ecstatic babbling that couldn’t possibly have any earthly linguistic meaning. Taylor’s response to such people was to say that they had forgotten that there were “about four thousand” languages in the world and that only a few of those languages sounded like the “re¤ned” languages of the West. He said there were “thousands of languages in the jungles of the dark lands, and upon the islands of the sea, which if you were to hear [them] would be only a babble to you; and yet these are languages spoken by branches of the human family.” Pentecostal papers and magazines carried story after story of how visitors from abroad had heard the gospel in their own languages while someone was speaking in tongues, and Taylor took those stories as fact, proof of his claim that glossolalia always involved foreign speech.56 While Taylor believed that physical manifestations were given to believers in order to con¤rm and validate their experiences of the Spirit, he did not claim that any manifestation was necessarily infallible in its symbolic signi¤cance. He even admitted that tongues could be mimicked to some degree by the devil—though he believed that genuine speech in foreign languages could never be faked and was “an unmistakable evidence that that person [had] received the Baptism of the Holy Ghost.” The devil was not the main problem, however; emotions were. Taylor said that people sometimes worked up manifestations for themselves to validate their spiritual claims or hopes. Such manifestations were generated by overheated human emotions, but they often seemed very real to the participants, and Taylor said they needed to be taken seriously. This was especially the case because true manifestations of the Spirit could also produce strong emotions. Taylor’s practical advice was to remind his readers that “a person may have emotions without ‘the manifestation,’ or may have ‘the manifestation’ without emotions.” What was critical was to distinguish between the two.57
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Taylor was not necessarily opposed to all emotional manifestations, but he wanted to be clear that manifestations rooted in the emotions—as harmless or edifying as they might be—should never be mistaken for “the manifestation” of the baptism of the Spirit, which was speaking in a foreign language. His discussion of “writing in tongues” is instructive. This behavior had been discouraged at the Azusa meetings because the leaders of the revival said they couldn’t ¤nd anything in the Bible to substantiate it. Taylor, however, allowed the practice as an emotional manifestation that sometimes followed the baptism of the Spirit. As long as it was not mistaken for real tongues, the behavior was ¤ne. He explained: “As the Holy Ghost ®ows out of our innermost being in rivers, He may ®ow directly from the spirit, from the mind, or from the body. He sometimes ®ows through the arm and manifests Himself by writing in another tongue. But this must not be confounded with the manifestation of tongues, which is the evidence of Pentecost.” The same principle applied to laughing in the Spirit. Taylor seems to have allowed the phenomenon as long as the person so affected did not try to claim that his or her laughter was proof of the Spirit’s baptism. Taylor’s main point was to caution people not to jump the gun on the Spirit’s own work—not to manufacture a merely human manifestation or to falsely claim some emotion or behavior as the manifestation of the baptism before the Spirit had had time to produce the real thing. Taylor advised seekers to “tarry” until the genuine manifestation was given, and he promised that when the baptism truly took place the recipient would without exception speak in tongues as the Spirit gave utterance.58 Spiritual Gifts and Human Abilities Taylor believed that the baptism of the Spirit was in one sense the culmination of what it meant to be a Christian, but in another sense he considered it to be merely the beginning of the full Christian life. Fullness of life in the Spirit included many dimensions and, in keeping with the precision that de¤ned all of his theology, Taylor tried to draw careful lines of distinction to help Christians better understand which facets of the pentecostal life represented new and extraordinary endowments of the Spirit and which re®ected either normal Christian traits or natural human abilities. Taylor used three biblical terms—the fruit of the Spirit, various God-given talents and abilities, and the gifts of the Spirit—to categorize and separate these various dimensions of the mature Christian life. Taylor understood the fruit of the Spirit, as articulated by the Apostle Paul in the ¤fth chapter of the Epistle to the Galatians, to include the
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character traits of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Taylor argued that these attitudes were not dependent upon the baptism of the Spirit; instead, these were personality traits that should be evident in “every Christian . . . whatever may be his degree of grace.” The fruit of the Spirit was not produced as the result of a miraculous transformation of the person from outside but was rather the natural ®owering of the person’s own attempt to follow God’s general will for all Christians. It was assumed that as individuals matured in their faith, these attributes would become more consistently visible and more deeply rooted in their lives.59 Taylor suggested that the various talents that different Christians might possess were natural abilities that functioned largely independently of one’s spiritual state. He wrote: “To possess a talent is to have the genius to do a certain thing; e.g., to sing, to speak in public, to write a theme or a song.” Such talents were not dependent upon any special infusion of the Spirit; in fact, sinners could exercise their talents with as much ease and freedom as Christians. If conversion produced any change at all with regard to one’s natural talents, it was a change of use. Instead of using one’s talents to serve Satan or advance one’s own base instincts, Christians used their gifts to glorify God and serve others. At one point Taylor suggested that human talents could in some way be “intensi¤ed by the Spirit,” but he did not elaborate. For the most part, talents were simply talents and had little if anything to do with the special work of the Spirit in the believer’s life.60 The gifts of the Spirit however, were of a rather different order. Spiritual gifts had nothing to do with either natural human abilities or the general personality traits that all Christians should manifest in their lives. The gifts were new, supernatural infusions of power that re®ected the extraordinary presence of the Spirit in the believer’s life. Taylor said that “people have been claiming these gifts for years,” but he believed that few of those claims were truly valid because almost all of them fell “far short of the Bible standard.” According to the Bible, the gifts of the Spirit were qualitatively different from all other human talents and abilities. Taylor explained that the gift of wisdom was not merely an extra infusion of insight that any Christian might experience from time to time; it was a special, extraordinary endowment of wisdom that would “far exceed Solomon’s.” Similarly, the gift of discerning spirits was not just an added dose of good sense; it was a miraculous infusion of discernment that rendered the recipient’s spiritual judgment infallible, putting that individual in a “place where neither men nor devils can deceive us.” As for healing, Taylor
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was persuaded that “a person to whom has been intrusted [sic] the gifts of healings, need never pray for the sick. The power is in him (not his own power, but the power of God imparted), and he simply bids the sick, ‘Be whole.’” Any Christian could pray for healing; a person gifted with healing powers could simply command diseases to ®ee.61 Taylor believed that these spiritual gifts were available only to those who had already received the baptism of the Spirit. The presence of the Spirit in one’s life was a prerequisite because the gifts were, in a certain sense, nothing more than the power of the Spirit ®owing out from the believer. Yet these gifts were not given automatically to Spirit-baptized believers. Individuals had to seek the gifts one at a time. Taylor wrote: “I do not believe that anyone has ever received any of these gifts in their normal state until he received the Baptism of the Holy Spirit; neither do I believe that all or any of them often come with the Baptism, but [they] must be sought for and obtained afterwards.” Nonetheless, he believed that it was “the will of God that each of us should have all these gifts” and he suggested that individuals lacked various gifts only because they were “unable to use all or any of them properly.” Taylor was awed by the gifts of the Spirit, saying that “much more is implied by these gifts than most sancti¤ed people ever dreamed of.” Like most pentecostals, he emphasized the priority of the nine gifts listed in the twelfth chapter of I Corinthians (the gifts of wisdom, knowledge, faith, healing, miracles, prophecy, discernment of spirits, tongues, and interpreting tongues), but Taylor also allowed that “there are many other gifts of the Spirit.” Gifts conferred miraculous powers on the recipients—powers that far exceeded the strengths and abilities of ordinary Christians.62 Based on this understanding of the gifts of the Spirit, Taylor made a much sharper distinction between the gift of tongues and tongues as the manifestation of the baptism of the Spirit than had been the case at the Azusa Mission. He proposed that “a person who has only the manifestation of tongues can speak in another language only as the Spirit gives utterance, but a person who has the gift of tongues can speak other languages at will.” The gift of tongues had nothing whatsoever to do with the normal means of acquiring ®uency in another language; it was a special power imparted to the individual wholly “independent of the human intellect.” Like many other early pentecostals, Taylor saw tongues as one of the greatest spiritual gifts because of its potential for use in evangelism. The gift of tongues was a miraculous reversal of the confusion of human languages that had been imposed at Babel and it was an incredible boon to world missions. He said that “for centuries we have been trying to
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preach the gospel in all nations and reach every creature with the glad proclamation of salvation,” but now God was miraculously assisting believers in that task “by bridging and enabling His children to cross at once the chasms [of language] which they hitherto have had to cross by years of study and practice.” For years, missionaries had been forced to learn the languages of the world through natural human effort, and the “progress [had] been slow.” The restoration of the miraculous gift of tongues was rendering older, slower methods of language study obsolete, and the missionary preaching of the gospel could now proceed at a pace previously unimaginable.63 Taylor believed that this Spirit-enabled evangelistic activity would be much more successful outside the already-Christian areas of the world than within those regions. He explicitly cautioned believers “not [to] expect many sinners [to be] saved in Christendom these days.” It was not in the Western Christianized lands but in the many “heathen ¤elds” around the world that millions would be saved, sancti¤ed, and ¤lled with the Holy Spirit as the age drew to a close. According to Taylor, the driving force behind this worldwide campaign of evangelism would be Christian enthusiasm mixed with massive persecutions of Spirit-¤lled Christians in the regions of Christendom. This persecution would spring directly from the powers associated with the pentecostal gifts of the Spirit. Non-pentecostal Christians would increasingly bridle at the second-class status that was being imposed on them by the restoration of the miraculous gifts of the Spirit among God’s pentecostal people. At ¤rst, they would merely resist the pentecostal movement, but with time that opposition would “ripen into Pentecostal persecution.” Taylor predicted that “as soon as many receive the gifts of the Spirit, persecutions will arise that will scatter us to every corner of the earth, and thus the gospel will be preached to every creature.” Pentecostalism did not promise a life of ease, but the baptism and gifts of the Holy Spirit did provide the power to spread the gospel and the grace to endure suffering as the return of Christ drew near.64 The Church in the End Times At the time Taylor was writing, he believed that the end of the age was near and the church was about to enter a period of dramatic sifting and sorting. This kind of thing had happened before. At crucial points in history, God had called out small vanguards of believers to become the carriers of the next revelation of spiritual truth. This was part of God’s grand plan of slowly bringing fallen humanity back into the full light of truth.
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The work had been long. Taylor told his reader never to “forget that the Spirit has always been in the world . . . [leading] the world by successive stages, through patriarch, law-giver, priest, judge, and prophet up to Christ.” In the post-biblical era, this pattern of incremental advance continued as Luther rediscovered the doctrine of justi¤cation by faith, Wesley recovered the experience of entire sancti¤cation, and a host of nineteenthcentury ¤gures reclaimed the doctrine of divine healing. In each case, the pattern had been the same: A few prophetic ¤gures announced God’s newly revealed truth, and the tradition-bound majority resisted God’s work. Taylor believed that that pattern was in the process of repeating itself as God was “turning on [even] more light” through the pentecostal movement. The new focus of revelation was “the Baptism of the Holy Spirit and the evidence of Pentecost” and the con®ict was immense, so much so that Taylor thought that this had to be the last and ¤nal contest for truth. He said that things in general seemed to be “coming to a head,” and he was convinced that this was “the ¤nal judgment set in.” Through the pentecostal renewal, God was “drawing a line among the saints,” a line that “[demanded] that all the house of God either receive it or reject it.” This was not the time for hesitation or doubt but for faithful obedience to God’s new revelation of truth.65 Taylor himself was more than primed for the battle. He thundered against his opponents: “I believe in progressive theology, in aggressive effort, in agitation, in con®ict, in conquest, and in crowns. There can be no movement without friction, no battle without issue, no issue without the drawing of lines.” He pointed out that new revelations from God had almost always been “fought by the professed church,” and he noted with sorrow that the worst opponents of new truth were often those who clung most dearly to the last thing God had revealed. Taylor believed that that pattern was repeating itself in his own day. He noted, in particular, that “very few great holiness leaders . . . have accepted this [pentecostal] revival.” Begging his holiness colleagues to “break away from this bondage” and to move forward into the new “apostolic light” of the pentecostal revival, he warned them that failure to do so would result in damnation. He said that “those who reject light must go down,” adding that “those who refuse to accept God’s highest will concerning them may have mercy continued to them for a while, and may have one opportunity of receiving God’s best after another; but the time will come when the fatal die will be cast, and their eternal destiny ¤xed.”66 Like many other early pentecostals, Taylor used the term “the Bride of Christ” to refer to the class of people who would fully accept God’s
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new truth for the present age, attain the full pentecostal blessing of the Spirit, and ultimately earn the right to rule with Christ in the coming kingdom of God. He summed up the main message of his book by saying simply that “the Spirit [was] seeking a bride for Jesus” and he asked his readers if they were ready to “yield and follow where He leads.” The rite of passage that allowed one entrance into the bridal company of the saints was the baptism of the Spirit. Taylor wrote: “To have the Baptism of the Spirit, is to hold God’s pledge of resurrection ‘out from among the dead’ and entrance into the full enjoyment of being the Bride of Christ.” He remarked elsewhere that “the Baptism of the Holy Ghost establishes a permanent relationship between the Spirit and the Bride. The same Spirit that [dwelt] in the body of Christ comes and dwells in our body. It is thus that we become bone of His bone and ®esh of His ®esh. We are united by the same Spirit; we are one.” As a result of this union, “The Spirit is ever active and operative in and through the Bride. And in all these gracious operations there is a direct and constant reference to the things to come . . . a yearning for the ful¤llment of what is . . . to come.”67 The baptism of the Spirit thus did double duty in Taylor’s theology: It was both the ¤nal step in the individual experience of the full Christian life and it was an eschatological experience that ushered the recipient into the end-times company of bridal saints. The actual marriage day when Christ and the bride would wed was still a future event in Taylor scheme of history, but the baptism of the Spirit, and especially the manifestation of speaking in tongues, served as a kind of “engagement ring” which visibly indicated that the bearer was betrothed to Christ. He said: “When we consent to become the bride of our Lord, He wants to put upon us His mark, [so] that all who meet us will recognize us as one set apart.” Taylor noted that, oddly, some bridal saints seemed embarrassed by this sign of engagement, embarrassed by speaking in tongues. They seemed reluctant to wear the Spirit’s engagement ring of tongues but instead wanted to “wrap it up in a napkin, put it in their pocket, or keep it in their bosom.” Taylor warned such people that they were treading on dangerous ground, saying that no one should ever be ashamed of the reality of the baptism or the manifestation of speaking in tongues. Without the visible evidence of tongues, it was questionable whether one really possessed “the seal of the spirit” or truly wanted to be part of the bride of Christ.68 Taylor believed that the bridal company of pentecostal believers would be raptured out of the world as the end of the age approached and would be miraculously brought up to heaven to be with Christ. Taylor said that
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as soon as that event took place, the “Great Tribulation” would commence, and once that period of tribulation was complete, the millennial reign of Christ would begin. The notion of a premillennial tribulation was one of the stock concepts of the prophecy movement that ®ourished both inside and outside pentecostalism during the early years of the twentieth century. Taylor adopted that general framework of ideas, but he reinterpreted the details in his own unique way. In particular, Taylor rejected the common belief that the great tribulation would last seven calendar years, asserting instead that no one knew how long the tribulation era would last. Taylor’s own position was that the starting date of the millennium had been determined by God long ago but that God had purposely left the timing of the tribulation ®exible. The tribulation might last seven years or it might last several thousand years. No one knew for sure. Taylor argued that the tribulation could have begun as early as the ¤rst century if Christ had returned to rapture the church at that time. He said that “if Jesus had come in Paul’s day, all these nineteen centuries would have been occupied by The Great Tribulation.” But the dawn of the tribulation had been delayed, and Taylor gave two somewhat inconsistent reasons for this delay. He attributed it, on the one hand, to the mercy of God, saying that “the human family could not have continued through” a lengthy period of tribulation and that Jesus was tarrying in heaven to shorten the time of troubles humanity would have to endure. On the other hand, Taylor also said that the reason the tribulation was delayed was because the church simply was not yet ready to welcome Christ in an appropriate manner. He said that “Jesus would have come long ago if His Bride had been ready for Him [but] God’s people have been too slow in getting themselves ready for the coming of the Lord. Hence, His coming has been delayed.”69 While Taylor was somewhat tentative regarding the exact timetable of the great tribulation, he was crystal clear about its purpose. The great tribulation was God’s ultimate instrument for convincing sinners to mend their ways and turn to Christ. It would rain God’s judgment on sinners, “not simply to punish men for their wrong deeds, but to punish them with the view of leading them to accept salvation.” Just as God sometimes sent troubles into an individual’s life to help turn that person toward salvation and/or maturation in the faith, the great tribulation was God’s way of trying to push an entire generation of sinners toward salvation. Taylor said that the great tribulation was “God’s last effort to lead this world to Jesus”—God’s last great attempt to evangelize the world and to persuade people to surrender their lives fully to God. Those who responded whole-
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heartedly to God’s call to evangelism (those who through the baptism of the Spirit became full members in the bride of Christ) would be spared the horrors of the tribulation. However, those who refused to fully surrender themselves to the Spirit, even if they were converted Christians, would be left behind to endure the pains of tribulation. These unraptured saints were not bereft of all hope—Taylor said there was a good chance they could still “reach the shores of everlasting bliss in other companies”—but they had forever lost their chance to be part of Christ’s bridal company of saints. Their only option was to tarry before God “until their vessels [were] ¤lled with the Holy Spirit,” and then they too would be miraculously, and in this case individually, raptured out of the world and brought up to heaven. Once in heaven, they would be granted the status of “guests” at the marriage of Christ and his bride—a worthy spiritual rank, but one that was clearly inferior to those who were full members of the bride.70 Taylor believed that there would be many ranks and divisions in God’s eternal heavenly kingdom, and differences of status would be based on the decisions made during one’s lifetime. The bride and the wedding guests were only two of several groups that Taylor believed would exist in heaven. Two other companies of Christians would emerge during the tribulation era. He described them only vaguely under the headings of “beasts” and “elders.” But Taylor was certain that there would be many differences of rank and privilege in God’s kingdom, and he was quite sure these divisions of status were eternal. At one point he said that “no Scripture teaches that all the saints will ever be ‘one,’ neither in this world nor in the world to come,” and he implied that ultimately there might be more than sixty different ranks of Christians living side by side for all eternity. He derived this number from a somewhat strained interpretation of Song of Solomon 6:8.71 Taylor’s intention in discussing these eternal differences of spiritual rank and status was to encourage Christians to submit themselves fully to God during their short lifetimes so that they would rule together with God for all eternity. The more perfect their obedience in the present, the closer they would be to God in the ages to come. This was all stockin-trade pentecostal preaching. But Taylor’s special emphasis on the eternality of the divisions that would exist within the community of the redeemed was distinctive, and it sometimes had a quite negative impact on present-day behavior. Taylor’s view tended to undercut any effort to seek unity between Christians of differing faith and/or experience. According to Taylor, the goal of the Christian life was not unity with other believers
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but individual faithfulness to God. Differences between Christians were thus never mere differences; he allowed little if any room for matters of adiaphora—that is, points of difference on matters of doctrine or practice about which Christians could agree to disagree without condemning each other. For Taylor, differences were always matters of greater or lesser faithfulness to God, and Christians were well advised to choose their paths carefully through the spiritual mine¤eld of the early twentieth century. Taylor wrote: “These are perilous times; these are judgment days. Where do you stand? Which side of the line are you on?” While Taylor saw himself as a spokesperson for the pentecostalism of the Azusa revival, on this issue he differed markedly from the attitude that prevailed in Los Angeles. The leaders at the Azusa Street Mission had gladly welcomed the merely converted and merely sancti¤ed as equal brothers and sisters in Christ; Taylor explicitly repudiated that kind of spiritual egalitarianism.72 Salvation History from Creation to Consummation In his later writings, especially The Second Coming of Jesus (1916) and The Rainbow (1924), Taylor developed a chronologically expanded view of God’s relationship to the world that situated that relationship in the long process of creation and the in¤nite ages of eternity. Taylor believed the universe was very old and that the earth, in particular, was “the result of the workings of God in his laboratory for millions of years.” He also believed that the earth would last forever, arguing that “God did not build the earth to destroy it.” Humanity was in some ways the pinnacle of God’s creative work, but Taylor thought it was important to remember that humanity was also a relatively recent addition to the universe.73 Taylor believed that long before humankind came on the scene, God had ruled over a vast angelic empire. This realm was “divided into different orders and courses, and . . . each one moved in his prescribed sphere.” Perfect order prevailed in this pre-human universe. Taylor said: “God sat on the throne in the center, while His [presence] ¤lled the universe, and was known and felt everywhere. The highest archangels of creation had their thrones near by, while around each one of them were other archangels and angels of inferior order. Commands came from the throne, and passed to the archangels and on down the line, while angels and archangels were speeding on their missions in obedience to the divine command. There was no discord, everything was in harmony.”74 In Taylor’s history of pre-human time, Lucifer was one of the great archangels in God’s empire and he lived on the planet earth, which was “up near the center” of the universe. Originally he was one of God’s chief
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angelic rulers, but somehow he turned against God. As a result, God was forced to cast him down from his previously high position, and as punishment God also destroyed the beauty of Lucifer’s region of space. Taylor believed that God carried out something like a divine carpet-bombing of Satan’s quadrant of the universe, and he argued that recently discovered “defects in some of the planets” could be traced back to this ancient bombardment. The earth existed for many millions of years in this semidestroyed state—which was long enough to provide “ample time for all geological developments claimed by scientists”—and then God decided it was time to reconstruct the planet. In a dramatic burst of creativity, God refashioned the earth and populated it with a host of living plants and animals (the old earth had been an entirely “mineral kingdom” lacking biological life). While Taylor believed that God had sometimes used slow processes in the work of creation, he was adamant that this new work of God had been done in a hurry. Explicitly rejecting all theories of evolution, Taylor said that the Genesis account of creation was a literal description of God’s recreative work. God fashioned the world anew in six 24hour days.75 Taylor’s analysis of the human phase of earth’s history centered on the long-lasting battle between good and evil and, in particular, between what he saw as a contest between the true and bloody religion of Christ and the false and bloodless religion of the antichrist. In contrast to many other theologians, he devoted very little attention to the origins of sin with Adam and Eve. What was critical for him was the enduring legacy of their fall, not Adam or Eve’s speci¤c transgression. Thus, the story of Cain and Abel was in some sense more fundamental for Taylor than the story of the fall itself. The story of Cain and Abel illustrated the spiritual battle that would characterize all of human history: Cain’s bloodless offering was rejected by God, while Abel’s bloody sacri¤ce—a prophetic foreshadowing of Christ’s own death—was accepted. In Taylor’s rendition of human history, that pattern would repeat itself over and over again. According to Taylor, the most decisive event in this long spiritual struggle took place during the time of Nimrod. Nimrod, who built the Tower of Babel, was the world’s leading proponent of false religion. His goal was to bring the whole world into an anti-divine coalition under his rule, and he came perilously close to accomplishing that goal. Had God not intervened at the last moment and confused Nimrod’s followers, Taylor said, the battle might have been lost then and there. God’s action at Babel was, however, only a stopgap. Nimrod’s plans had been temporarily stymied, but not crushed, and ever since Babel Nimrod had been ¤ghting
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back. In Taylor’s theology, Nimrod became a kind of humanized Satan haunting all the rest of human history, battling against God and God’s true followers. In this warfare Nimrod was aided by “the millions of [evil] spirits that inhabit our atmosphere.” Taylor said that these evil spirits were “the souls of bad persons” who, like Nimrod himself, sustained themselves through a process of reincarnation, a “transmigration of spirit” that allowed them to avoid ¤nal death as they “[passed] from one body to another.” Taylor even speculated that these evil souls might from time to time use the bodies of animals or insects to maintain a presence in the world. At one point, he actually called Nimrod “the lord of those who transmigrate.” As the end of the age approached, Nimrod would reincarnate himself one last time in human form as the predicted antichrist. When that took place, the end would be near.76 In contrast to this evil history of Nimrod and his minions, Taylor also outlined a parallel history of goodness and true religion. He said that the person at the head of this righteous family tree was Eber, who was a contemporary of Nimrod and the “great-great-great-great-grandfather of Abraham.” According to Taylor, Eber was unique in that he and his family were the only people on earth to remain aloof from Nimrod’s plans to unify the world against God. Because “the family of Eber were the only people who were not connected with Babel . . . his family were chosen of God to be a peculiar people.” Eber and his descendants the Hebrews (a family name that Taylor said was derived from the name Eber) formed a counterforce to Nimrod’s demonic army, and the two family lines would clash repeatedly. But Taylor was careful to point out that “not all of Eber’s children were included in the promise, but [only] the line . . . traced from him to Abraham, and from Abraham to Israel.” True faith could never be a matter of merely human lineage. God’s ongoing selection was necessary to keep the line of righteousness pure.77 Down through the ages, con®ict between the supporters of God’s true religion of blood and Nimrod’s false religion of bloodless ease continued, taking slightly different forms in the sequence of kingdoms that dominated the world: Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, and ¤nally Rome. In his own day, Taylor saw the threads of a new “kingdom of antichrist” being woven together as the end of the world drew near. Among the troubling signs he discerned was a new emphasis on mysticism and the occult. Taylor was concerned that modern forms of art (i.e., “sculpture, architecture and painting”) were leading people into idolatry. He also thought that education and merely human morality were beginning to replace religion in many lives: Secularism was on the rise. What
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is more, people were becoming increasingly sel¤sh. Taylor said they were focusing only on the “big ‘I’” instead of on the needs of others. Finally, the world was becoming more violent and cruel. He noted that “murder, suicide, homicide, infanticide, [and] foeticide” were on the rise. Taylor identi¤ed the driving force behind all these developments with one word: “COMMERCE.” He said: “Let things go on as they are now going and in a short time a few moneyed men will own the whole world; these men will work in harmony with each other, and will establish one grand commercial centre: ecclesiastical organizations and all forms of false religion will reverently bow and unite themselves to this centre.” According to Taylor, the love of money was indeed the root of all evil, and globalization was giving this lust for wealth new power and prominence in the world.78 Taylor predicted that the modern moneyed proponents of false religion would soon unite with each other and usher in the age of the ¤nal antichrist. (Taylor believed “there [had] already been many antichrists,” but the ¤nal and full embodiment of the spirit of antichrist would be unveiled at the end of the age.) When that happened, the city of Babylon would be rebuilt and Nimrod himself would eventually return to rule the world. Nimrod would be aided by a female consort who, as his religious chief of affairs, would launch a “false church” designed to gather everyone into a single religious organization. Nimrod and this female “false prophet” would then bear a child together, creating an evil parody of the Trinity. Taylor said the three—father, mother, and child—would constitute “hell’s trinity in unity.” The antichrist’s global empire would soon require everyone to receive the “mark of the beast” in order to buy or sell anything. Taylor said that this mark would “be a literal, visible, indelible badge stamped upon the very ®esh of the one receiving it,” and he predicted that “the greater part of the world [would] be branded with this mark.” Only a very few would have the wisdom to discern what was really happening—that is, that to receive the mark of the beast was to join forces with evil against good.79 As the end approached, it would look like the antichrist was going to be victorious. He would have imposed his own false and despotic religion of commerce over the entire earth, and virtually all resistance would have been eliminated. But at that very moment of apparent victory, Christ would intervene. Nimrod would be crushed in the battle of Armageddon and Christ would take over the planet. For 1,000 years the world would enjoy divine rule. Taylor said that this would “not be an age of perfect peace”—that would come later—but it would certainly be “a great step above this age.” The millennial earth would be inhabited by both believ-
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ers and nonbelievers, and Christians would conduct massive evangelistic campaigns to try to convert every last soul. As successful as those campaigns might appear to be, however, many would continue to resist God’s rule in their hearts. Thus, many would join with Satan in one last revolt against God when Satan would be set free for a brief time at the end of the millennium. God’s response to this ¤nal insurrection would be to throw Satan and all his wicked followers into a lake of ¤re, where they would be painfully punished forever.80 With Satan’s evil in®uence permanently removed from the universe, God would renovate the earth one ¤nal time, fashioning it into humanity’s perfect home for all eternity. Taylor was adamant that the present planet of earth would be humankind’s everlasting abode. He had to twist some biblical passages to arrive at that conclusion, but he was convinced that the God who had taken so long to prepare this “mansion” for the human race would not destroy the planet “after a brief space of a few thousand years.” During this ¤nal phase of earth’s existence, all the curses of the fall would be removed “from the human family as a whole, from the brute creation, and from the ground itself.” As for living arrangements, God would construct a new urban capital for the planet, a New Jerusalem, which would hover in the air “just above Jerusalem in Palestine” and would be large enough to house “one quarter quadrillions of occupants.”81 In that celestial yet earthly city, saints of all stripes and ranks would worship God and mingle with each other. While Taylor refused to speculate on the details, he was sure that life would not be boring. He said that heaven would not be “a place of inactivity, but of in¤nite and illimitable progress.” The awesome experience of God in the baptism of the Holy Spirit was only the slightest foretaste of all the wonders that awaited the saints in glory. At present, Christians were living in perilous times, but if they persevered—if they got in the Spirit and stayed in the Spirit until they were called to join Christ in the air—the rewards would far outweigh all the pains and struggles of this short life.82 The Poetic Theology of David Wesley Myland David Wesley Myland never visited the Azusa Mission and he was not converted to pentecostal faith by anyone connected to the mission. In fact, Myland was quite proud of his independent path to pentecostalism. That said, he was in some sense a stepchild of the Los Angeles revival nonetheless. His understanding of the pentecostal movement and his
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open-hearted vision of pentecostal theology was forged in the wake of the movement begun at Azusa and was written to help Azusa-style pentecostal believers make sense of their many and varied experiences of the Spirit. Cognizant of that diversity of experience, Myland developed a theology that was thoroughly different from Taylor’s. While Taylor sought doctrinal precision, Myland’s goal was to create a theology that had a sense of poetic resonance with the uneven terrain of lived religious experience. He used words as symbols designed to evoke faith and stimulate understanding, not as tools to cobble together a single set of doctrines to be imposed on all without exception. If there was one theme that dominated his theology, it was “Pentecostal fulness.” Like most early pentecostals, Myland believed that he was living at the end of the age and that Jesus would soon return to earth. He believed that he was living in the ¤nal “cloudburst” of Holy Ghost power, and he wanted everyone to get totally soaked by the “latter rain” which was falling so copiously from heaven. But despite his strong end-time beliefs, Myland never got caught up in the kind of detailed eschatological speculation that so dominated the thinking of Parham and Taylor. Myland’s musings about the future tended, like those of the leaders of the Azusa Mission, to emphasize the practical and pastoral as opposed to the fantastic.83 Myland’s The Latter Rain Covenant (1910) provides the best introduction to his theology. The title of this book comes from the passage in the eleventh chapter of Deuteronomy that records the divine charge given to the people of Israel just as they were about to cross the Jordan River and enter the promised land, and Myland loosely built his theology around the themes of promise and blessing found in that text. The latter-rain covenant promised judgment if the people of Israel turned away from God’s law but rich blessings if they would keep all of God’s commandments. God vowed that if the Israelites kept their half of the bargain their experience would be like “days of heaven upon the earth.” Myland could be a relatively careful exegete, and he knew that the ¤rst meaning of this text was historical, a chapter drawn out of the life of ancient Israel. But Myland also thought Scripture could validly be read through “typical” (i.e., typological) and “prophetical” lenses and, interpreted in that way, he believed the latter rain mentioned in the Deuteronomic text was a reference to the pentecostal revival that had ¤nally dawned on the church in his own lifetime. The pentecostal revival was the true beginning of God’s promised “days of heaven upon the earth.”84
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Myland was older than many of his pentecostal peers. He was ¤ftytwo when he wrote The Latter Rain Covenant, and by that time he had been involved in various forms of Christian ministry for more than thirty years. He had seen much more of life than the young Taylor, and he was fond of telling those younger than himself that it took “years of study, prayer and tears” to see truth clearly. Part of what Myland believed he had learned in all those years was that the neat distinctions of logic that theologians usually employed in their thinking did not always ring true to the messy and unsystematic experience of most ordinary Christians. It certainly did not ring true to his own experience, which involved a seventeen-year gap between the time when he ¤rst received what he called the “beginning” of his baptism of the Spirit and the day in November 1906 when he ¤nally received the “residue” of that experience. In light of those facts, it is not surprising that Myland rejected Taylor’s neat and systematic discussion of the work of the Holy Spirit. Myland said that the main reason so few people really “understand the workings of Pentecost [was] because they [were] trying to work it out intellectually.” By contrast, Myland said that God was a God of surprises who transcended theological predictability. He explained: “I have known people to ask for a little bit of justi¤cation and get sancti¤ed; I have known people to ask for a little bit of sancti¤cation and get healed.” Myland concluded that the pentecostal experience was just the same. It “doesn’t come the way you ask, it comes the way God says,” and that could vary considerably from person to person.85 For Myland, theology was ultimately about life, not about logic. While he believed that Christian faith could be systematically analyzed to some degree, the more important goal was to experience God in one’s life. To communicate his experiential vision of pentecostal theology, Myland rejected a rational linear mode of argument in favor of a much livelier style of writing that layered image upon image in an attempt to draw the reader into his own pentecostal lifeworld. The chapters that form the contents of The Latter Rain Covenant were ¤rst presented as a series of sermons at the Stone Church in Chicago, and the published text intentionally retained some of the feel and fervor of that original format. By the time of its publication, however, The Latter Rain Covenant had become more than a series of sermons. William Hamner Piper, the pastor of the Stone Church, called it a theological “treatise [that] ought to be a required part of the curriculum of every really Pentecostal School.” A treatise it is, but a distinctly pentecostal one that employed an imagistic style of writ-
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ing to communicate its inherently experiential message. In this regard, Myland’s theology bears a closer resemblance to some of the mystical writings of the Orthodox and Catholic traditions than it does to the logical religious treatises of reformational Protestantism.86 Spiritual Biography David Wesley Myland was born in Canada but moved with his family to the United States when he was quite young. He grew up in rural Ohio near Cleveland, and he lived much of his adult life in that state. Details concerning his early years are sparse, but we know that by his midtwenties he had married and was comfortably established in business with his brother. We also know that his family was religious. His mother had placed her hands on his head and dedicated him to the ministry as she lay dying. Clearly Myland must have felt some pressure to heed God’s call and ful¤ll his mother’s wishes by entering the ministry, but he wasn’t ready to put all his eggs in that one basket. He liked the family business and the comforts of life it made possible. Eventually, however, God forced him out of business and pushed him into ministry. Later he advised his readers that “God will have His way with you, brother, sister, and you had better let Him have it quickly. It will cost you more the longer you put it off, and besides, you will get less blessing and God less glory by your not yielding at once.” He had learned from experience.87 The exact circumstances of his decision to enter the ministry are unclear. Sometime in the mid-1880s he began serving as a part-time minister for the local Methodist church, while he also remained involved in the family’s retail business. That changed in December 1885, when a ¤re broke out in the shop he jointly owned with his brother. As he tried to salvage some of the books and papers from their of¤ce, he slipped, fell, and landed on a six-foot-high fence, fracturing his back and breaking three ribs. He was bedridden for six months, and during that time he seems to have decided once and for all to follow God’s call into ministry and to give up his business career entirely. Myland immersed himself in the work of the Methodist Church as soon as he was able to get up and around. He said that the next two years were a time of “zealous and strenuous work in the ministry,” but he added that despite his good intentions the results were not outstanding because his efforts were “not always according to knowledge”—he had more zeal than training or wisdom. He was also lacking in spiritual maturity. Comparing himself to many other Methodist preachers, he said that like them he had not yet
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“been cruci¤ed with Christ fully”—he had not yet experienced “the death of the self-life . . . and [his] life was not hid with Christ in God.” Myland would soon learn that the path to the death of self was painful, but it was also ultimately rewarding and was the only way forward in ministry.88 While recovering from his back injuries in 1886 and 1887, Myland had recurring pain and some intermittent temporary bouts of paralysis. Then in mid-1888, he experienced a sudden, massively debilitating relapse. While traveling on a train from Cleveland to Wellington, Ohio, he found that the entire left side of his body was becoming paralyzed and that he had lost sight and hearing on his left side as well. Obviously he had had a stroke. He made it as far as Elyria, where a friend took him off the train and transported him in a specially rigged wagon to his home in Amherst. Three different doctors examined Myland and all three concluded that he was on the verge of death. Things were looking bleak when Myland’s grandmother-in-law showed up with her Methodist minister in tow. The two of them prayed fervently for Myland’s healing. Up until this point, Myland himself had been a strong opponent of the doctrine of divine healing, so much so that he had actually denounced several proponents of the healing movement from the pulpit by name. However, as he lay dying and listened to the prayers being offered at his beside, he suddenly became convinced that God was going to heal him and was going to do it in a miraculous way.89 Myland heard that a convention of the newly formed organization called the Christian Alliance (a Christian group that advocated divine healing) was scheduled to meet in a nearby town, and he determined to go there to seek his healing.90 Transportation was arranged and Myland arrived at the meeting exhausted and in pain but expecting to be healed. He was lying on a blanket listening to a lecture when one of the leaders of the group, a Canadian minister named John Salmon, stopped by and talked to him. He asked if Myland was converted, and Myland answered in the af¤rmative. He asked if he believed God could and would heal him, and Myland said he did. Then Salmon asked him why he wanted to be healed. After a moment, Myland said he wanted to be healed so that he could “glorify God in [his] body and spirit, which are His.” Salmon smiled and said he believed Myland was “ready to be anointed” for healing. He placed a few drops of oil on Myland’s forehead, prayed that God would take away “his paralysis and other troubles,” and then told Myland to rise up and walk. Myland said that at that point: “Darkness came over me, the blackness of hell. It seemed I was sinking away. Somebody called out to praise God and I got into worse darkness. . . . That was the ¤ght
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of my life, and I didn’t know what to do but trust, and bless God, I did trust. I just said, ‘Jesus!’ four or ¤ve times, and was thrilled right through from head to foot, and that warm, thrilling, life-giving, animating, quickening, reviving, stimulating breath of Almighty God went through me.” Determined to claim his healing, Myland stood up and began to walk. He made his way to the main assembly to testify about what God had done for him and to apologize for having previously preached against the doctrine of healing. He then took the train home, and eight days later he was strong enough to sit for his ¤nal credentialing exams with the Methodist Church.91 While Myland passed his exams with ease, the leaders of the Methodist Church were not pleased with Myland’s newfound excitement about divine healing, so they assigned him to a backwater parish where they thought he could do the least damage. His assigned post originally included four churches, but two had been closed for lack of interest and giving was in arrears. Things would soon change, however. Shortly after his arrival, Myland prayed for the healing of a woman who was deathly sick and she recovered. Interest peaked. In response, Myland launched a two-week revival, and by the end of that period forty-some people had been converted. The work grew rapidly, and within two years the charge was so large it had to be divided in half. Giving was up 400 percent. Myland’s own faith was blossoming during these years as well. He said that one night while he was sitting in his library he received a special anointing of the Spirit that both carried him beyond himself and caused him to “sing things in a way I didn’t understand.” Later, Myland would identify this event as “the beginning” of his pentecostal baptism in the Spirit and he would interpret his singing as a form of speaking in tongues.92 In 1890, Myland came to the point in his own faith development when he felt it necessary to move beyond the Methodist Church. In his own words, he said “the Lord led me out,” but he was pleased that this could be done “in a very sweet way with no re®ection on anyone.” Myland was not a bridge-burner and had no desire to leave in a huff; in fact, he retained his Methodist ministerial credentials until the day he died. Nonetheless, Myland felt it was time to move on, and he shifted his allegiance to the Christian and Missionary Alliance (CMA) movement. During the next twenty years, he pastored several CMA churches in Ohio, operated a healing home in Cleveland, and published the religious journal, the Christian Messenger. His own life was punctuated with the miraculous, especially in the area of health and healing. In the autobiographical section of The Latter Rain Covenant, he recounted six other
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times when he had been healed by God after his initial experience in 1888. One involved an accidental case of arsenic poisoning, three had to do with respiratory infections, one was related to an accident that reinjured his back, and the last was the result of a furnace explosion that left Myland severely burned. These incidents of harm and healing were also often moments of spiritual advance for Myland. He frequently had visions of Jesus while he was sick, and it was in conjunction with his seventh and last healing that he received what he called the completion of his pentecostal baptism.93 This last event took place in 1906 shortly after he had heard about the miraculous events going on in Los Angeles. The Azusa doctrine of the baptism of the Spirit was new to him, but it resonated with his own experience. It gave him new words to explain his spiritual journey. Myland said: “I began studying and setting myself for this thing . . . [and] all the time I was expecting God to meet me in some wonderful way.” It was in the midst of this period of study and waiting on God that the gas stove exploded in his church. Myland was badly burned, and some of his wounds became infected. As blood poisoning spread through his body, Myland called out to God saying “unless you interpose I shall be dead before morning.” He asked God for three things: First he said that “if that experience [in his library] seventeen years before was the beginning of this Pentecost . . . give me the ‘residue’ of it now; second, heal me instantly and thoroughly; third, enlighten me concerning this subject of Pentecost so I might answer the questions that have been coming to me for months.” Myland said that about an hour later “I came to myself singing in ‘tongues.’” All three requests had been granted. He had received “the full measure of [his] Pentecostal Baptism,” he was perfectly healed, and he felt that God had revealed to him the deepest truths of pentecostal faith. His life would never be the same.94 In 1912, when the Christian and Missionary Alliance decided to cut its ties with the mainstream pentecostal movement, Myland felt compelled to leave that denomination. He ¤rst moved to Plain¤eld, Indiana, where he founded and ran the Gilbeah Bible School, which catered to the educational needs of former members of the CMA. He also tried to form a new denomination called the Association of Christian Assemblies, but both that organization and his school ¤zzled out in 1914. From 1915 to 1918, Myland was in Chicago teaching at another school he founded, the Ebenezer Bible Institute. In 1918 he moved to Atlanta, Georgia, to take a teaching post at Beulah Heights Bible Institute, and in 1919 he helped found the Apostolic Christian Association. Between 1920 and his death
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in 1943, he pastored several different churches in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Ohio. Myland’s life was full of unexpected twists and turns. While he could, perhaps, have described his journey of faith in terms of standard theological categories such as conversion, sancti¤cation, and the baptism of the Spirit, he chose not to do that. Instead, he tried to recount his experience the way it actually happened—in a simple narrative manner that preserved the ambiguities of real life. Myland had no intention of claiming that his own experience was normative for others, but he also rejected the notion that the experience of someone else could be normative for him or for any other devout believer. His own life convinced him that God dealt with people on an individual basis, and how individual people received their own experience of Pentecost was no exception to that rule. Pentecostal “Fulness” In keeping with his own spiritual biography and in order to make room for the different patterns that might characterize the lives of others, Myland used a variety of terms to refer to the pentecostal experience. By 1910, when The Latter Rain Covenant was published, the phrase “the baptism of the Holy Spirit” was already becoming part of the standard vocabulary of the movement, but Myland refused to limit himself either to that phrase or to the once-and-done image of pentecostal experience it implied. On occasion, he did use the terminology of the “baptism of the Spirit,” but he used that phrase sparingly and, as we have seen in his autobiographical comments, somewhat unconventionally. Myland’s favorite way of describing the pentecostal experience was to speak of it in terms of spiritual “fulness,” often in short phrases such as “Pentecostal fulness,” the “fulness of the Spirit,” the “fulness of blessing and power for service,” or “the Godhead fulness upon us.” Myland’s understanding of pentecostal fullness was that it was not static but involved progress and motion. Using a notion that fullness was gradiated, he wrote: “I want you to understand about the Spirit. It is not only a question of having the Spirit, or the Spirit having you, but it is how much and what quality you have.” He spoke of the possibility of experiencing “increasing fulness” and of the need to strive to “stay in this Pentecostal fulness.”95 Myland’s emphasis on fullness applied not only to the pentecostal experience itself but to the fullness of God’s involvement in that experience. Thus, more than many other early pentecostal theologians, he emphasized the role of the Father as well as the Spirit in the believer’s pentecostal experience. The fullness of Pentecost was “the Father coming down and
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taking possession of the body that He had created, manifesting His glory through it and doing His own witnessing through it while it lies yielded and quiet—receiving the ‘residue’ of the ‘fulness of God.’” At other points in his writing he used even more explicitly Trinitarian language to describe pentecostal fullness, arguing that “God is a Trinity, a Triunity: one in Three; and Three in One. So also is man, and if you are to have a whole God, God must have a whole man, and when the Triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit comes into the spirit, soul and body of the triune man, then you have God manifested in the ®esh, which is Pentecostal fulness, the ‘promise of the Father.’” In another passage he said that in any pentecostal experience, “the Father is there, the Son is there, and the Holy Spirit is there. Whenever God has come to anyone, the whole Godhead is manifested therein.” Rather than isolating the actions of one part of the godhead from another, as some pentecostal spokespersons were beginning to do, Myland carefully af¤rmed the cooperative participation of all the members of the Trinity. He declared: “This movement must be saved from saying that there is never any Spirit until there is Pentecostal fulness, and also after we get Pentecost, from saying it is the Spirit only. It is God! the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.”96 Throughout his writings, Myland constantly blurred the lines of difference that other pentecostals were trying to chisel with perfect clarity into their theologies. One such line dealt with differences of spiritual standing and status within the Christian community. Myland believed that there were different levels of Christian experience, that some Christians were “simply saved or justi¤ed” while others were “second-growth people” who had advanced much further into the fullness of faith. Myland’s discussion had a unique tone to it, however. It managed to heighten the difference between these two large groups of Christians while blurring the boundary that separated one from the other.97 One the one hand, Myland said that he believed in a “double idea of salvation and sancti¤cation,” saying that “God calls men to be saved, but He chooses them to be sancti¤ed. . . . There is the ekklesia, those called out, and also the eklektoi, those called the second time, called out from the called ones.” Membership in the ¤rst group (the ekklesia) consisted of the simply saved; membership in the latter group (the eklektoi ) consisted of all those whom God had called to a deeper life of faith and who had responded positively to that call. If Myland had stopped at this point, his distinction would have been clear, but he did not stop here. Instead, he immediately began to layer image upon image to his description of what constituted second-growth Christian status. The result was that instead of
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clarifying the boundary line between the two groups, Myland’s multiple images actually began to blur the divide by raising the bar higher and higher. In one passage he said that second-growth Christians were those who had “gone into the cruci¤ed life, the sancti¤ed life, the spirit-¤lled life, into the life of self-renouncement, the life that has laid down the self-life, the life that has lived the sacri¤cial life.” This litany of deeper-life metaphors naturally raised the question of just how many of these characteristics one had to possess, and to what degree of fullness, in order to qualify. The more that was required—the higher the bar was lifted—the fewer people could claim the status; if less was required, many more could make the grade.98 But while the line was blurry, Myland believed there was a real difference between ¤rst-growth and second-growth Christians. Perhaps most signi¤cant, he argued that the spiritual blessings of the pentecostal latterrain covenant were reserved exclusively for the second, more advanced group. He said quite forcefully that the latter-rain blessing, the powers and privileges of pentecostal faith, would “not cover and remain upon people who [were] simply saved or justi¤ed . . . but it [was] for the eklektoi, the second-growth people, the people in whom God [had] wrought a second work of grace.” Still, Myland was an empiricist and, having made a point of differentiating between these groups, he almost immediately had to retract his assertion and admit that sometimes Christians who clearly seemed to be no more than barely saved believers did receive the fullness of Pentecost before being sancti¤ed.99 Myland was cautious about how to interpret these kinds of seeming exceptions to his rule of spiritual progress. He suggested that in these exceptional cases the Spirit must already have been working out of sight in that person’s life. He said: “When people tell us they never had any of the Spirit before they received Pentecost, they speak unscripturally, for no soul could ever come into the Pentecostal experience without the previous working of the Spirit in his life.” At other times he could be more distinctly skeptical; he commented at one point that he “would not give much for a baptism of power on a life that knew nothing of the sanctifying grace of God and the cruci¤xion of self.” It was natural for people to “want to begin with the positive side”—to jump right into the joyous life of the Spirit with no need for any painful confession or cleansing from sin—but Myland said that “the death of the ‘old man’ comes ¤rst.” The joys of pentecostal fullness were reserved for those who had already, by God’s grace, died to self. But Myland also knew God was full of surprises and he knew that people who seemed by all measures unquali¤ed for the
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experience of Pentecost did occasionally receive the baptism of the Spirit. All he could do in such cases was to remind the recipients that if they did “not immediately go on into the ‘cruci¤ed’ life,” their faith could easily become perverted, and they might even fall away from the faith entirely. His advice was to be aware that while the fullness of God could sometimes be miraculously experienced in an instant, “the practical experience and administration” of the Pentecost experience took “years and years to prove.” Finally, he warned that “if your Pentecostal baptism hasn’t taken the last remains and residue of self-love out of you, you haven’t had the whole of Pentecost.”100 It seems that Myland’s real point in all of this was ultimately more motivational than it was ontological; like the leaders of the Azusa Mission, his concern was more practical than theoretical. His basic goal was to encourage as many Christians as possible to move out of the ¤rst category of faith into the second as soon as possible and then to persevere in the life of righteousness. He wanted people to move up the ladder of spirituality from minimalist, salvation-oriented faith (which he called “the worldly church”) to lively, progressive, and sancti¤ed faith (which he called “the true Philadelphia church”). For Myland the issue was not that Christians came in two neatly separate varieties—a nominal version and a truly devout version—but that all Christians should strive to become fully dedicated to God so they could be used by God to accomplish God’s own purposes in the world. He explained that even though “one soul is worth just as much as another, as far as the redeeming blood and salvation is concerned . . . one instrument or worker is not as ef¤cient as another in the hands of God, and He wants the best He can get.” Using a homespun analogy, he wrote: “Your father or my father would never take a piece of basswood to make an axe handle; he would select a piece of good, wellseasoned hickory, and God is as wise, and is selecting the ‘second blessing’ people for his instruments; a well de¤ned sancti¤ed life is one whose grain runs all the one way. God can make something out of that kind of a character. God is looking for ‘second growth’ timber Christians out of which to make His Pentecostal church.” Myland’s goal was to help all Christians move forward into the fullness of God and especially to help merely saved Christians get their grain running all in the same direction so that God could use them as his agents of Pentecost on earth. Ideally everyone could and should be a second-growth Christian.101 Receiving the Fullness of Pentecost So how did one receive the experience of pentecostal fullness? Myland’s answer to that question matched the intentional fuzziness of his
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theology in general. He offered no clear-cut formula that applied to everyone. He was almost anti-formulaic. His basic answer was that God would give a person the experience of Pentecost “when [God] sees your attitude is right,” and he added, in contradistinction to some of his more doctrinally compulsive pentecostal colleagues, that God “will give it to you whether you understand it or not.” Myland recommended that the best thing one could do to actively prepare for the pentecostal experience was simply to obey the commands of God, remarking that “you haven’t much trouble in pleading the promises when you obey the commandments.” That was the rub, however: You had to obey, and that wasn’t always easy. He wrote: “Of all the testimonies I have heard personally, the great trouble with everybody has been in the life of obedience. We are behind in our obedience. . . . The great purpose of God’s precious love is to teach His children in these important days, under these mixed conditions, how to know Him and obey Him . . . that we may yield unquestioning obedience to His will.” He advised that “it is useless to ask God for more of Himself until He gets more of you.”102 Myland held a tripartite understanding of human nature, and he believed that the entire person—spiritual, psychical (i.e., mental or intellectual), and physical—was involved in salvation and pentecostal fullness. He asserted that for the most part “God reaches the soul through the ear-gate, the physical nature, by the voice of the Spirit and the Word.” Then passing through the psychical nature, which “stands mid-way between the physical and the spiritual, binding them together,” God’s own Spirit would set a¤re the “affections and emotions” of the “spiritual facilities.” Once the person’s entire human nature was engaged in the process, the center of God’s activity returned to the soul or mind, because this was “the great power of the man, the center of his being, where he either glori¤es God, worships Him, serves Him in sancti¤cation unto honor, or where he commits all his sins.” Myland said that to enter fully into the experience of pentecostal fullness, you “have to have your imagination subdued, your reason adjusted, your perceptions clari¤ed, and your judgment and will sancti¤ed; otherwise you will be governed, not by knowledge, but by emotion and feeling.” And he added: “No other ground is so dangerous. This is where warning is needed, because the enemy everlastingly seeks to play all kinds of tunes on our emotions and feelings and then laughs at us while we try to dance to his ‘piping,’ but cannot.”103 While the mind needed to be involved in the process of pentecostal faith and spiritual maturation, Myland believed that it could also easily become a problem. He noted that people often found that “the biggest trouble” in opening themselves to the fullness of God came from “the
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intellectual nature.” This was so much the case that he said that “hardheaded fellows” sometimes needed “to be ‘cruci¤ed at the place of a skull,’ and then have [their] heads put to soak” under the in®uence of the Spirit. Another way to overcome the need to feel in control mentally was to employ group experience. Myland wrote: “When we get a whole lot of people together, into unity, they just ®ow into the goodness of the Lord, and all their starch and stiffness disappears.” Myland said that “you have to ®ow together” with others to get the fullness of God. This wasn’t something you could do all by yourself, with your mind working in overdrive.104 The experience of pentecostal fullness involved letting go of oneself and giving control of oneself over to God. For those who felt uncomfortable with that aspect of the experience, Myland advised: “When you seem to be slipping away from yourself and losing your bearing, just think, ‘I am ®owing into the goodness of the Lord;’ let yourself go; it is all right. Don’t hold on to yourself, or examine yourself, or hold back for fear you might slip somewhere; for you will ‘slip in’ and underneath will be the everlasting arms.” For Myland, this was the core of the pentecostal experience, allowing oneself to relax into God’s enveloping presence. In one of the most memorable phrases to be found in any piece of pentecostal writing, Myland said that the experience was like swallowing “God liquidized.” He wrote: “This ®ows. It is God liquidized; anybody can take it; babies and people that haven’t any digestion; it is an aid to digestion. It will cure the worst case of spiritual or moral dyspepsia in the world.”105 The mature experience of pentecostal fullness necessarily combined all the facets of the human personality working together under God’s control. In some sense, the spiritual nature needed to “dominate the psychical,” but at the same time the “psychical” had to be given “its divinely appointed place.” If one did not integrate the psychical and the spiritual in this way, things could go badly wrong. Myland said: “Brains are good in their place, but they count for nothing unless the heart is set on ¤re with the sacri¤cing love of God.” He explained: “Anything done in the psychical never gets into the spiritual, whether it is prayer, song, testimony or sermon because it is done in the intellect and never reaches down into the spiritual.” But the spiritual aspect of human nature could be equally problematic. Myland argued that if one remained in the spiritual realm alone one could easily end up being governed by emotions and feelings and not by reason and knowledge. Summing up his concerns, he sighed: “Oh, there is so much divorcement between the spirit and soul. We either serve God in a psychical, that is intellectual, way, without the spiritual, or
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we serve Him in the spiritual and forget the psychical, and go beyond all bounds of reason and judgment. If our service is only in the spiritual it leads to fanaticism; if in the psychical only, the result is formalism. God save us from either of these awful extremes and enable us to worship Him with both the heart and the mind.” What was needed was a balance between all three dimensions of the person—a simultaneously passionate, reasonable, and bodily experience of God.106 While that was the goal, not everyone got there the same way or in the same amount of time. Some people found their way easily to God; others had to struggle to get there. Myland said that God sometimes had to let people “glut themselves [with sin]” until “they [had] touched the deepest depth” before they could begin to respond positively to the gospel. He urged Christians to be patient with those they were seeking to convert or urge on to pentecostal fullness, and he especially urged patience with those in one’s own family. He wrote: “Brother, be patient with your wife; wife, be patient with your husband. Keep sweet; God will do His work. Wait in patience; ‘thou shalt be saved and thy house.’” Myland believed in turning one’s concerns about the spiritual state of one’s closest relatives wholly over to God and leaving matters there. Intercessory prayer was necessary—Myland said “Oh you must believe for people. . . . Put a strong line around them, the prayer of faith”—but he also thought people should stop worrying about their children and/or spouses. He said bluntly: “You must be saved further than that. You must have laid them on the altar, presented them there perfect in Christ Jesus and [left] them there.” As long as believers did that, Myland assured them that if they died before the rest of their families were brought into pentecostal fullness, the Spirit would take up the work of intercessory prayer on their behalf, and the Spirit’s prayers were always ef¤cacious.107 Eschatology Myland did not develop his historical and eschatological views with the same kind of detail and creativity as Taylor or Parham. For the most part, he seems to have assumed that he was living in or near the last days before Christ’s return to earth, but he was not adamant on that point and he actually cautioned his readers to avoid such speculation, saying that they might have to “wait fourteen years, twenty-one years, ¤fty, a lifetime . . . [or] another hundred years” for Christ to return. When Myland did touch on eschatological subjects his comments were usually rather tightly tethered to the biblical text. His longest sustained discussion of eschatological themes, The Revelation of Jesus Christ, published in 1911,
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took the form of a relatively lengthy commentary on the last book of the Bible.108 Myland’s approach to the Apocalypse was both irenic and pastoral. His goal was to produce a “comprehensive harmonic” textbook that would synthesize the insights of three rival schools of interpretation that were usually pitted against each other, schools of thought he identi¤ed as Praeterist, Presentist, and Futurist. He said he had “no desire to parade and magnify [the] differences” between these interpretive stances but wanted rather to concentrate on the most helpful positive insights provided by each. All three schools of thought had good points to make, but when they poured their energy into the criticism of rival views they tended to head off on tangents that were of no bene¤t to anyone. Rather than add to that rancorous clamor, Myland urged all three parties to “quit denying each other, and . . . get to the main thing.” In Myland’s view, that “main thing” was pastoral and practical advice. On the one hand, he wanted to use eschatology as a topic that would inspire everyone to new levels of faithfulness as the end of the age drew near. He said he wrote about the book of Revelation “to animate the heart and spur the reader on to greater zeal and sacri¤ce for God.” On the other hand, Myland wanted to comfort his readers and reassure them that they were on the winning side of history. He all but bellowed: “Let the world know that they will [soon] see the purpose of divine processes, and will no longer call us poor, humble, spirit-enlightened, baptized preachers the fanatics of the last days. Thank God we know the hope of our calling. We are not ¤ghting uncertainly like men that beat the air. Oh let me put into your souls the certitude of the hope of our calling so we shall be more than conquerors through Christ who loves us.”109 Myland believed that the pentecostal revival itself was one of the surest signs that Christ’s return was near. He argued that the “second Pentecost” which was taking place during the early twentieth century was restorative, having been sent by God to bring unity and perfection to the church, and indeed to bring the entire world “back [to] perfection and perpetuity” before “the coming of our Lord.” Myland believed that this restorationist interpretation of events was being miraculously corroborated by evidence from nature. He pointed most notably to the changing weather patterns in Palestine and argued that climate changes in the Holy Land served as a kind of barometer indicating parallel changes in the spiritual realm. Using data that he said was “issued by the American colony [in] Jesusalem,” Myland reported that “for many centuries the rain-fall in Palestine was very small,” but recent measurements revealed “a
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great increase, especially of the latter rain.” He calculated that “fortythree per cent more rain fell between the years 1890 and 1900 than fell from 1860 to 1870.” The rainy season in Palestine consisted of two separate times of increased precipitation—an early rain in the fall and a “latter rain” during the ¤rst months of the new year. Myland’s spiritual interpretation of this phenomenon (and many other pentecostals shared this view) was that the “early rain” was a symbol of the Spirit’s ¤rst falling on the church on the day of Pentecost as recorded in the book of Acts. The “latter rain” was then understood as a reference to the end-time revival of pentecostal faith and experience that would take place just before Christ’s return. Myland said that it was the latter rain that had been especially increasing in Palestine during the last decades of the nineteenth century, and he took this to indicate that the latter rain of the Spirit was “coming to the church of God at the same time it is coming literally upon the land.”110 Myland’s views concerning future events (e.g., the tribulation, the millennium, the great judgment, etc.) followed the generally accepted chronology popular in prophecy-minded circles of early-twentieth-century American Protestantism, including a seven-year period of tribulation, the battle of Armageddon, the millennium, and God’s ¤nal judgment of all humanity. To this more or less standard picture, Myland added only a few of his own unique insights, most notably an unusual three-step understanding of the rapture and a surprisingly generous calculation of just how many people would ¤nally be saved in the end. Myland suggested that the rapture would actually consist of three separate supernatural removals of Christians from the world. Myland identi¤ed the ¤rst group of Christians to be taken up to heaven as the bride. This most honored group of saints would be raptured out of the world just before the tribulation began. At the very moment when Christ and his bride were ascending up into heaven, Satan and his minions (the “false bride”) would be descending down to the earth to launch the tribulation. Myland had a penchant for speculating about the numbers of people who might be involved in different future events, and he suggested that somewhere around 100 million Christians would be involved in this ¤rst rapture.111 Myland believed that there would be two additional raptures of Christians during the seven-year period of the tribulation itself. These “tribulation saints” would be divided into two subgroups of about 100 million each. The ¤rst contingent would be snatched out of the world during the ¤rst half of the tribulation period, while the second group would
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be raptured during the closing years of the tribulation. Myland identi¤ed the ¤rst group of tribulation saints as the “second place people,” or “the second section of the Bride” and said their role in heaven would be to serve as “attendants on the Bride.” He said that the ¤nal group of raptured saints would become the great orchestra of heaven and that they would receive a rank or class slightly lower in status than the bride and the bride’s attendants. None of the masses of ordinary (i.e., “merely saved”) Christians would be taken up to heaven in this series of tribulation-era raptures. They would not be resurrected until the end of the millennial age when they, along with all the rest of humanity, would be brought before God in the ¤nal judgment.112 There were surely many spiritual reasons why any particular Christian might end up in one of the two later raptures (or no rapture at all) rather than in the ¤rst one, but one of the most interesting reasons Myland suggested was that these folks were simply too closely attached to their wealth and material goods. He said that many would be left behind because they were too “bound down by bank stocks, bonds and real estate,” and he added, “oh, you must be light” to go up to meet Christ in the air. Like many other pentecostals (including Parham, Seymour, and Taylor), Myland was of the opinion that striving after wealth and engaging in commerce were spiritually dangerous activities, and, reading between the lines, one can also detect a certain sense of resentment regarding economic class. Speaking in the ¤rst-person plural, Myland once mused that while “we are serving now,” there would come a time when God’s bridal saints—among whom he obviously numbered himself—would no longer have to serve anyone. He cried out: “We have more than served down here; we have suffered with Him and ‘if we suffer with Him we shall also reign with Him.’ We rule, we judge. Oh no, we do not serve.” In one sense this was a very reasonable lower-middle-class sentiment, but it was also a vision designed to encourage all believers to live fully for Jesus during the few years before the end of time. Myland exhorted all Christians to “rise up from your place, wherever you are, brother, in the old shop; sister, in the old kitchen; rise up and get a vision of God, and live the overcomer’s life there, and you shall reign with Jesus and judge the world, and angels too.”113 In his treatment of future events, as in his discussion of the levels and stages of spirituality, Myland’s ultimate concern seems to have been more motivational than anything else. He said that the reason God had given humanity any knowledge of future events at all was to encourage them to get ready to meet Christ in the ¤rst rapture. In light of that goal, he
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warned people “not wait to see Him until you meet Him in the air; you must see Him here in vision, in order to be trans¤gured” into someone who was worthy to join Christ in the air as part of the ¤rst rapture. The experience of pentecostal fullness was preparation for participation in the ¤rst-rapture bridal company of saints, and it was the only way to be included. That was the spiritual goal toward which Myland sought to encourage all Christians with his eschatological exhortations.114 But despite his urgency on this matter, Myland knew that not everyone would be included in this ¤rst rank of end-time Christians, and he also knew that being in the second, third, or fourth ranks of the kingdom of God was still a good deal. He predicted that overall everything would ultimately “come out all right in the end” for most people. He actually tried to compute just how many people would ¤nally end up with God for all eternity as opposed to with Satan, and his ¤gures were reassuring. Adding together the bride and all the tribulation saints and taking into account all who had died “before they [reached] the age of accountability” and all who would “be saved during the millennium,” Myland estimated that in the end Satan would get about “one-third and Christ twothirds” of the world’s total population. Myland was clearly an optimist about eternity. His 2 to 1 odds for heavenly salvation were better than many other American preachers would have given their followers. Myland wanted Christians to strive for God’s best, for God’s fullness, but he also knew that God was a God of love who would in the end save as many people as could possibly be saved. His view of the future was ultimately one of hope and assurance both for the most dedicated and for all the other mediocre Christians who were trying to follow Christ in their own stumbling, but devout, ways.115 Tongues and Other Manifestations of Pentecostal Fullness On the issue of tongues, Myland tended to be just as simultaneously clear and fuzzy as he was on most other subjects. There was no question that he af¤rmed the need for and importance of tongues, but at the same time there was always an element of caution in his discussion. At one point he wrote: “I am no modi¤er of tongues, please remember that, nor am I a stickler about tongues; you never had any too much tongues for me, but I will not, I cannot, and I shall not magnify tongues out of its legitimate place, its scriptural setting, and its value compared with other gifts of the Spirit. Tongues is the least of all the gifts, and when it is not kept so, there is trouble.”116
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Myland did not make as sharp a distinction between tongues as a sign of the baptism of the Spirit and tongues as a gift of the Spirit as some others did; he simply considered tongues one of several manifestations of the supernatural that God could use at different times for different purposes. Myland believed that speaking in tongues was the standard sign that one had received the baptism of the Spirit—at least it was the sign God was using most consistently in his own lifetime. He wrote: “One that He fully baptizes today shows the sign, and the best of it is, you cannot stop it. Tongues, in one sense, is the advance agent, the telltale of Pentecost. That is where it is valuable as a gift when nothing else will do.” Then he issued a warning to his readers that any “baptism of tongues” needed to be complemented immediately by other gifts and manifestations of the Spirit or it could produce more harm than good. He explained: “You need a baptism of interpretation when you get a baptism of tongues, and some need a baptism of discernment, and some will need, especially the leaders, a baptism of wisdom, and you will need to have a baptism of knowledge and a great baptism of faith to lead this kind of life, or you will have a great deal of trouble. And so when we get all these ministries together we can make some sort of a complete assembly, but, like the Corinthians, we may get too much of the gift of tongues and not enough wisdom to balance it, and then it works weakness.”117 Myland tended to emphasize the ongoing work of the Spirit in the believer’s life as much as he did the initiating work of the baptism of the Spirit. He believed that the supernatural manifestation of God’s power and presence in the world was necessary “in some way every day” for Christians to maintain their focus and advance deeper into the fullness of God, and tongues could be a powerful tool in that regard. He also liked the way that God could use tongues to keep the pentecostal community as a whole on the right path. Myland believed that it was all too easy for the merely human to take over, even in gatherings of the saints. To maintain the “freshness and newness” of the faith within the local community of believers, it was necessary to have an occasional “outburst of a tongue to subdue things and make us mind our business and look to God.” Tongues also reminded pentecostal Christians that God’s way of communicating was straightforward and unequivocal—this in contrast to human speech, which often shaded the truth one way or another. He noted aptly that “we are too well acquainted with the old English tongue, and we can play fast and loose with that,” but he said that “when God begins to talk,” all prevarication ceases. The heavenly language of tongues served as a mechanism to keep human discussions of faith honest.118
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Myland suggested that tongues be treated in the same way as all the other gifts, and basically that meant yielding to God’s will and pleasure. He said that in actuality “we have nothing to do with them [the gifts].” Thus he advised: “Don’t try to work your healing; don’t try to work your faith; don’t try to work your tongue; don’t try to work discerning or interpretation. Listen! Let it work you!” There was no need to push things ahead on one’s own, and in fact it was both dangerous and futile to do so. Instead Myland said that believers should let go and “God [would] give the performance. God [would] perform the signs and wonder.” But if Christians would truly yield to God, the result would be overwhelming. Myland exulted: “This is how I always like to see Pentecost. His fulness! Pentecostal fulness! If it is a tongue let it be the fulness of the tongue; if it is a discernment let it be the fulness of discernment; if it is interpretation let it be in its fulness; if healing or faith, let them all be in fulness; whatever the display, let it be in its fulness.”119 Myland’s view was that tongues was one of the nine gifts of the Spirit explicitly mentioned in the New Testament and that it was in some sense the least of those gifts. He explained that the gifts could be divided into three categories based on their relationship to the three dimensions of human existence. He said, “Three of the gifts are spiritual, three in the psychical realm, and three in the physical.” Tongues, miracles, and healings belonged in the third group—gifts linked with the physical realm— and Myland said that special discernment was required when exercising these physical gifts because Satan could imitate them. By contrast, he thought it was impossible for Satan to mimic the higher gifts of the Spirit, those connected to the psychical and spiritual realms. He explained: “Satan . . . cannot give you wisdom, nor can he give you intuitive knowledge. Satan cannot give you discernings of spirits nor true interpretation of tongues; nor can he give you true prophecy. Satan works from the physical, from the lower up. God works from the spiritual down.” The proper attitude, then, was to make sure that the spiritual dominated the psychical and that spiritual and psychical together dominated the physical. When that was done—when tongues and the other physical gifts were kept in their “proper setting”—the gifts would function properly and the in®uence of Satan would be kept at bay.120 In Myland’s theology, however, the gifts of the Spirit were not the only ways to manifest the work of the Spirit. There were other signs or marks of the Spirit that were of equal, or perhaps even greater, importance. Some of these were internal and were obvious only to the person; others were external and were able to be observed by others. George Tay-
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lor had proposed a similar system of internal and external manifestations of the Spirit, but he had linked the two types together so that every internal manifestation of the Spirit was invariably and necessarily linked to some kind of corresponding external manifestation. By contrast, Myland seemed to think that the internal and external manifestations of the Spirit operated independent of each other. Myland believed the most important internal evidence of Pentecost was a divinely infused sense of “quietness and everlasting assurance.” He went so far as to insist that “if ultimate, abiding peace is not the product of Pentecostal reception, experience and operation, there is something wrong with [that] kind of Pentecost; some spurious things somewhere, be assured of that.” For Myland, “the PEACE of God” was the sine qua non of all authentic “Pentecostal experiences and manifestations.”121 The external signs of the Spirit’s presence were also important for Myland, and the external mark that topped Myland’s list was the same as that of the Azusa Mission: love. He explained: “Love is the atmosphere in which faith and work live. . . . It is love that is the life of every gift, and without this it dies.” One of his favorite synonyms for the overused word “love” was “heart service,” a term he preferred because it made the focus on others explicit. He noted that unfortunately many Christians, including pentecostals, seemed to “have a good deal more of professed heart love than . . . of practiced heart service.” It was love in the form of genuine heart service toward others that was a sign of true Pentecost faith, love that manifested itself in the form of a “thirst for others” rather than as a “sel¤sh thirst” for oneself. Myland said: “Pentecost is not simply for me, not merely to satisfy my feeling, but to get ®oods on the dry ground; to make me a medium, a transmitter.” Being even more blunt, he wrote: “God sent this latter rain to gather up all the poor and outcast, and make us love everybody; feeble ones, base ones, those that have been cast out of human society; no one wants them, all the outcasts of India and China; these are what God sent the latter rain people to pick up.” That kind of love for others was a sure sign that the Spirit of God was powerfully present in any particular Christian believer.122 For Myland, one of the most important expressions of this thirst for others was the urge to share the gospel of God’s love with those who had not yet heard of it. He wrote that “the purpose of Pentecost is to make you a witness. You cannot help it. . . . God wants us as witnesses and pours upon us the subpoena of the court of heaven, immerses us in the Holy Ghost. . . . We are going to have a time if we try to get away from being a witness.” He predicted that “if God has His way, men and women
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who have come to these meetings will ¤nd new places in God’s earth to serve Him and bring forth fruit,” which is exactly what seemed to be happening. Myland reported that as a result of the great pentecostal outpouring of the latter rain, “God [was] making workers and landing them in the uttermost parts of the earth in about the same time that it requires an ordinary bible-school to examine them and enter them as students.” Never one to emphasize the negative, Myland assured his readers that “I am not depreciating training, nor putting a premium on the short cut, but I do love to see the Lord cut the thing short in righteousness.” Enthusiasm for missions, combined with the Spirit-empowered ability to do it, was another very important sign of pentecostal faith and experience.123 It is perhaps important to note that, unlike Parham and Taylor, Myland did not believe that the gift of tongues gave pentecostal Christians the ability to speak in the different languages of the globe, and he did not believe that the gift of foreign speech was the chief indication that one was quali¤ed for mission work in some other part of the world. Instead, Myland believed that what should set pentecostal missionaries apart from others was their visible and extraordinary faith in God, which would be especially evident in their attitude toward modern medicine. Myland said that personally he was “reluctant to help send missionaries that [had] to carry some materia medica with them.” For him, trust in medicine smacked of lack of trust in God. When queried about the fact that some missionaries might die without medical supplies, he answered in a rather brusque manner: “Well, suppose they do die. I want to tell you this, that where one has died trusting God for healing, a half a dozen have died who were trusting in medicine. The missionaries who have trusted God the fullest have come through the best. . . . If God has a purpose in a life over in Africa, He will keep that life until His work is done, if there is real trust. Let us pray for those who cannot fully trust.”124 A third and ¤nal external sign of Pentecost, according to Myland, was the ®owering of Christian unity—a unity that transcended all geographic boundaries and knit the global Christian community together. He said: “This is the intent of Pentecost, that my heart might be bound with men and women in Africa, in Japan, in the fastnesses of Tibet; that my spirit might be bound with men and women in India and we are made one in working out the purposes of God.” As did the leaders of the Azusa Street Mission, Myland believed that the dissolution of the lines of race and ethnicity was one of the most important marks of Pentecost. He said the ultimate goal was “homo-thumadon,” meaning “one-accordness,” and he said that this sense of Christian oneness was rooted in the very character
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of God. He wrote: “Seeing then that Pentecost results from the absolute oneness of the Godhead, what oneness and unity ought it to produce in us who have received! It ought to make us one body, and it will do it. I am one with everybody that is at all one with God. I simply cannot help it. The only thing that can keep me from being one with others is some work either of the ®esh or of the devil.” He then asked, in Spurlingesque fashion, whether Christians would be willing to “throw away [their] little scruples and colorings and shades of opinion” for the sake of unity. Myland hoped they would. He knew that unity—especially doctrinal unity—was hard to come by. He said it was “awful hard to get minds to think and speak the same thing.” But he was also aware that doctrine was not everything. Love, unity, and service to others were also important elements of pentecostal faith, so much so that he advised that “if we lose the love element out of [our faith] we had better quit preaching and get back to practice.” Myland believed that those who opposed unity because of their overly rigorous and detailed de¤nitions of doctrine risked putting themselves in the position of opposition to God—a position in which no good pentecostal would want to be found.125 Myland’s plea for love and unity brings us back to the central concern that motivated his theology. In his writings and sermons, he sought to provide the young pentecostal movement with a ®uid vocabulary of faith that could circumvent the divisive doctrinal squabbling that had already begun to appear. At one point Myland said that Satan had already “wrought a great deal of havoc . . . in this precious Pentecostal Movement” and that he hoped his theological teachings would be a helpful corrective. He was convinced that the movement could push ahead only if pentecostal believers were willing to ®ow together as one people of God.126 Myland’s metaphorical, polyphonic, poetical, and at times quite folksy theology provided an alternative to the tight (and sometimes divisive) logic of Taylor’s systematic approach. Juxtaposed in that way, one might ask whether Myland’s style of theology was in some sense more pentecostal than Taylor’s—though one could also turn the tables around and ask if Taylor’s was not the more paradigmatically pentecostal theology and Myland’s just a wimpy, watered-down version of what it ideally ought to be. To pose such questions is to ask which style of theology better captures the essence of true pentecostal faith. That may be a fair question to ask, but it is also a question that is historically unanswerable. History reveals no self-evident norm of pentecostal faith. Instead what we ¤nd are sincere and devout differences among the varying spokespersons for the
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movement. These differences are signi¤cant, but they cannot easily be laid out along any continuum of better to worse embodiments of pentecostal faith. They are instead mere differences—alternative ways of making reasonable and faithful sense of an experience of God that Parham, Spurling, Seymour, Taylor, and Myland would all have agreed ultimately transcended the inadequate words they used to try to describe it.
3 Holiness and Finished-Work Options
鵷鵸 Between 1910 and 1918 a series of con®icts erupted within the pentecostal movement that pushed theological developments in different directions. The result was the emergence of three distinct theological subtraditions within the movement: (1) holiness pentecostalism, which was largely limited to the South, stressed the need for three separate and distinct spiritual experiences (justi¤cation, sancti¤cation, and the baptism of the Spirit) as part of the normal and normative path from conversion to spiritual maturity; (2) ¤nished-work pentecostalism leaned in a somewhat more Reformed direction, arguing that full salvation involved only two distinct experiences, regeneration and the baptism of the Spirit; (3) Jesusonly, or Oneness, pentecostalism was born in the midst of a dispute over the proper means of water baptism and eventually ended up championing a unitarian understanding of the godhead. Racial division in the movement also emerged during these years. Part of that racial division was, no doubt, purely social in character, but theological concerns were not totally absent. Especially in the area of theological anthropology, white and black pentecostals often differed from each other. These divisions of the pentecostal movement have often been described in terms of fragmentation, but the metaphor of fragmentation misrepresents the underlying dynamics. Early pentecostalism was never united enough to fragment. A more accurate and helpful way of understanding the emergence of these various subtraditions within the rubric of larger pentecostalism would be to see them as part of the necessary process of clarifying and codifying pentecostal values, practices, and beliefs as the movement advanced. That is, as different thinkers involved in the movement tried to work out the details of what was implicitly included in the original pentecostal impulse, they tended to slowly diverge as they arrived at alternative conclusions regarding this or that particular item
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of theological concern. Differing opinions regarding these matters then sometimes became catalysts for further differentiation, helping to pull small and scattered differences of opinion together into larger patterns of divergence. This dynamic is perhaps most visible in the emergence of the Oneness movement, during which a decision about the proper mode of baptism ultimately cascaded into a host of other theological choices which ultimately led to a rejection of the Trinity as that doctrine had been traditionally taught. A similar, but perhaps less visible, process was at work in many sectors of the early pentecostal movement. This chapter looks at the ¤rst such divergence within the movement —the emergence of competing theological positions regarding the nature of salvation and the trajectory of Christian maturation. The primary issue was whether pentecostal faith was more accurately and properly de¤ned by a three-step pattern of Christian experience (justi¤cation, sancti¤cation, and the baptism of the Spirit) or by a simpler two-step process that emphasized justi¤cation (followed by progressive growth in holiness) and the baptism of the Spirit. Before 1910, different pentecostal leaders had advocated slightly different understandings of the various stages of Christian experience, but those views had usually been presented in a homiletic style that eschewed the kind of theological precision that would later mark this dispute. As individual thinkers tried to become more precise about the details of pentecostal faith, however, clear differences emerged. The history of developments that spawned the holiness versus ¤nishedwork dispute have been amply documented elsewhere1 and need be mentioned here only in the barest outline. The issue burst into view in 1910 when the young and talented William H. Durham of the North Street Mission in Chicago declared quite straightforwardly that “identi¤cation with Jesus Christ saves and sancti¤es” and that no second work of grace was either taught by Scripture or required by logical necessity. Holiness pentecostals, who maintained a Wesleyan belief in sancti¤cation as a second de¤nite work of grace (and hence thought of the baptism of the Spirit as a third distinct experience), opposed Durham’s two-step simpli¤cation of the Christian experience. Durham’s response was not designed to encourage dialogue. He said curtly: “Brethren stop the battle. You are on the wrong side.” The battle did not stop, of course—even with Durham’s death in 1912—and the emergence of separate holiness and ¤nished-work subtraditions within the pentecostal movement became permanent. For the most part, holiness three-step pentecostalism would ¤nd its primary stronghold in the South, especially in the Church of God (Cleveland,
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Tennessee) and in the Pentecostal Holiness Church. Finished-work pentecostalism would be most prominently represented by the Assemblies of God, which was formed in 1914.2 This chapter explains the theology of the most articulate early spokesperson for each of these two divergent pentecostal subtraditions. William H. Durham represents the ¤nished-work perspective and Joseph Hillary King represents the holiness position. The goal here is not, however, to see these two individuals as merely proponents of those views. Instead the goal is to examine the actual contours of their theology, which in each case includes much more than the small handful of concerns that are typically cited as dividing ¤nished-work and holiness versions of pentecostal faith. The theologies of William Durham and Joseph King were signi¤cantly more nuanced and wide ranging than the caricatures of these subtraditions might lead one to expect. William H. Durham’s Simple Gospel of Full Salvation The origins of the holiness versus ¤nished-work dispute within early pentecostalism can be traced to one person: William H. Durham. Durham’s theology, which was produced during a very short two-year period (1910–1912), created a new map of pentecostal faith that recon¤gured theological options in a way previously unimaginable. His views forced holiness pentecostals to articulate their theology with greater clarity and detail than they had done before; simultaneously, Durham’s ideas opened the way for other, even more radical, pentecostal voices to emerge. Spiritual Biography Durham was born and raised in central Kentucky about ¤fty miles south of Lexington. In keeping with his family’s religious heritage, he joined the local Baptist church in 1891 at the age of eighteen. Durham said that this decision “was sincere at the time,” but he later discounted its signi¤cance, saying it was “a great disappointment.” He explained that he did not experience any “real change of heart” and “had no joy or peace or knowledge of salvation.” Shortly after joining the church, Durham decided to leave Kentucky and strike out on his own. He moved ¤rst to Chicago and then to Tracy, Minnesota, in the southwestern corner of the state.3 It was there that God began to intervene in Durham’s life seriously. A burgeoning pietist/holiness movement had taken hold in this region led by George Lorenzo Morgan, who was connected with the World’s Faith
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Missionary Association (an organization founded and run by Charles and Minnie Hanley, who lived about 250 miles south of Tracy in Shenandoah, Iowa). In®uenced by this movement, Durham turned his life over to God in 1898. He was twenty-¤ve at the time, and he later said that his conversion was largely a private affair. He took pains to underscore that claim, saying he came to God not as a result of “attending revival meetings or any other kind of meeting” but as a consequence of his own personal private Bible study and meditation. While private, Durham’s experience of conversion was still dramatic. He explained that as soon as he yielded himself to God he received a vision of the cruci¤ed Christ which ¤lled him with “joy unutterable” and a deep and abiding sense of assurance that God had, indeed, saved him fully.4 With time, however, Durham slowly lost both the joy of his salvation and the sense of assurance he had previously possessed. Holiness colleagues told him “that sancti¤cation was what [he] needed,” so he set himself to seeking that “blessing the best I knew how for a long time.” In 1910, he ¤nally received that sancti¤cation (at least that is how he labeled the experience at the time; he would later reinterpret the experience as a reclaiming of his full salvation), and the result was that he felt “thrilled with power and glory” and he obtained a new “liberty in preaching the Word, for the Spirit always seemed to rest upon me.” At the time this took place, Durham believed that the experience of sancti¤cation had also conferred on him the baptism of the Spirit, but despite that belief he still sensed “a conscious shortage in [his] own experience and . . . never could make it compare favorably with the teaching of the Acts of the Apostles.” Durham hungered for something more, and in that regard he was not unlike hundreds or thousands of other early-twentieth-century U.S. Christians who were in a sense pentecostals in waiting, groping their way toward a pentecostal baptism of the Spirit long before they knew precisely what they were looking for.5 Feeling called into full-time service to God, Durham formally joined the World’s Faith Missionary Association in February 1902 and was soon preaching up a storm in the cities and towns of the upper Midwest. He visited Chicago in 1903, and the next year he seems to have accepted a call to pastor the North Avenue Mission in the Humboldt Park district of Chicago, though this appointment seems to have had virtually no affect on the scope or pace of his itinerant ministry. In the summer of 1905, he married Bessie Mae Whitmore (from Tracy, Minnesota), and that didn’t slow him down either. During the ¤rst three months of their marriage they traveled an estimated 3,000 miles while Durham preached at more
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than seventy-¤ve services. In October 1905, the Durhams set out on another trip that would take them from Chicago through Homer, Nebraska, and Denver to Los Angeles. On the way home they stopped at Colorado Springs, Sioux City, and Tracy, Minnesota (where Bessie gave birth to their ¤rst child in May) before ¤nally returning to Chicago. Durham was not a person who could stay still for long, and this pattern of restless wandering would de¤ne the remainder of his short career.6 Durham said that during all of this time, he was preaching a fairly standard holiness message of salvation and sancti¤cation. In 1906, however, he and a number of his parishioners in Chicago started to hear rumors of a new and different outpouring of the Holy Spirit in Los Angeles. Those distant rumors became a local reality when one of his colleagues, John Sinclair, obtained the pentecostal baptism complete with speaking in tongues. Durham said that Sinclair was “a man of God that I had labored with for over three years and [I] never doubted that he had the Spirit as well as I, and when I saw him stand up ¤lled with the power and glory of God, and heard him sing and speak in other tongues, it had a wonderful effect on me, and I said to myself that if that was the way the Holy Spirit manifested Himself then I had not received Him.” Despite that conclusion, Durham hesitated. It was only after his own rereading of the biblical book of Acts that he ¤nally was convinced of the new pentecostal doctrine concerning the baptism of the Spirit and tongues. The issue then became one of how to receive this blessing, and Durham was convinced that the best method was ¤rst hand. So he took the train to Los Angeles to see what was going on at the Azusa Mission. He arrived in Los Angeles in early February, and after a month of observation and spiritual struggle he ¤nally received his baptism. Durham described the experience with great attention to the physical. He said his body was “jerked and shaken” for three hours before God ¤nally took over his vocal cords and began to use his tongue and lips “to produce strange sounds.” About that same time, he said, he “heard Brother Seymour, the pastor, say, ‘He is through now.’”7 Like so many others who visited Azusa, Durham returned home a changed person. In quick order the North Avenue Mission became a major new center of the pentecostal revival. Durham preached to over®owing crowds composed of both local folks and visitors from afar. The North Avenue Mission was located in an ethnically diverse section of the city, and Durham saw that as a spiritual advantage. As did leaders at Azusa, he exclaimed that “God was no respecter of persons” as “Italians, Persians, Scandinavians, Germans, Africans, Indians, Baptists, Method-
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ists, Salvationists, in fact most all orders of people” were being brought together by the power of the Holy Spirit and were then being sent from the mission to spread the pentecostal gospel around the world. Within a few years, Durham had become one of the most well-known and wellrespected pentecostal preachers in the country and he was, without doubt, the informal leader of the pentecostal movement in Chicago and the upper Midwest.8 Then tragedy struck. On August 8, 1909, Bessie gave birth to the couple’s second child (a daughter also named Bessie), but there were complications. As a result, Durham’s young wife died a few weeks later. Their newborn baby girl would pass away six months later in February 1910. It was a time of both grief and reconsideration for Durham, and his conclusion was to press ahead in the pentecostal cause with renewed vigor. Shortly after his wife’s death, two sisters, Gertrude and Ethel Taylor, moved into the Durham home to help with both child care and secretarial matters. As a result, Durham was more free than ever to roam about the country, and that is what he did. He also began preaching a new message, one that would shock many of his friends and colleagues.9 Durham’s new message was that salvation was a ¤nished-work from the moment of regeneration. No subsequent experience of sancti¤cation was required to complete one’s perfection in holiness. And therefore one could begin seeking the baptism of the Holy Spirit the moment one was saved. Durham threw down his new theology like a gauntlet, and it sent shock waves through the pentecostal movement. Many questioned Durham’s proposal, but he remained ¤rm. He said that ever since his own baptism in the Spirit he had been unable to preach the doctrine of second-work sancti¤cation and that by 1910 he had become convinced (by both the Holy Spirit and his own “long and careful examination of the Scriptures and much earnest prayer”) that the traditional holiness understanding of second-work sancti¤cation was simply not biblical. He felt he had no option other than to oppose holiness theology within the pentecostal movement as strenuously as possible. And that is what he set out to do.10 At ¤rst Durham claimed (perhaps a bit disingenuously) that he “had no thought that [he] was setting forth something new”; he was just “preaching one of the blessed primitive truths of the New Testament.” However, his message was indeed new and by the beginning of 1911 opposition to it was coalescing in a number of pentecostal circles, including his own home town of Chicago. Durham said that he felt “practically disfellowshipped” by some of his closest friends, but rather than yield to
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opposition, he interpreted resistance as proof that his ideas had hit home. He came to believe that any and all opposition to his ¤nished-work theology could ultimately be traced to the devil himself. More and more Durham saw himself as embroiled in a “great battle” against heresy and for truth.11 As part of his theological offensive, Durham left Chicago in February 1911 and headed off to Los Angeles once again. This time, however, he was going west to instruct others, not to be instructed, in pentecostal faith. He was going to California to make his stand for truth at the geographic epicenter of the movement. In Los Angeles he was resolutely denied access to the pulpit of the Upper Room Mission (the largest pentecostal congregation in the city) because its leader, Elmer Fisher, believed that Durham was “crooked in doctrine.” So Durham set his sights on the Azusa Street Mission. The ¤res of revival had cooled at the mission, and Seymour was away on a preaching tour in the East. The situation seemed like a divine opportunity, and Durham stepped easily into the pulpit. Soon crowds were pouring in to hear his new proclamation. When Seymour returned in May, he was shocked by Durham’s message and had him abruptly barred from the mission. Angry and disappointed, Durham lashed out at Seymour, saying that the power and glory of God had departed from him and that his ministry was full of “failures and blunders.” He said that Seymour had “once [been] a mighty man, [but was] such no longer.” Durham symbolically shook the dust off his feet and left the Azusa Mission.12 Having been kicked out of the city’s two main pentecostal congregations, Durham decided to set up shop on his own. He obtained a property on the corner of Seventh and Los Angeles Streets and opened a new mission on the site. As many as two-thirds of Seymour’s congregation aligned themselves with this new work and the church was up and running quickly. Despite his mission’s success in Los Angeles, Durham was soon feeling called by God “to make [himself ] an offering to the whole pentecostal movement, and not con¤ne [his] labors to any particular ¤eld.” Leaving the congregation in the hands of his co-workers Frank Ewert and Harry Van Loon, Durham set off on a zigzagging trip across the continent, spreading his ¤nished-work gospel wherever he went. By Christmas, he was back in Los Angeles, and while he was there he married Gertrude Taylor, who had been serving as his daughter’s primary caregiver. In February, Durham and his new wife took off on another preaching tour, heading back to Chicago via Portland, Oregon.13 In June 1912, overworked and exhausted by his schedule, Durham
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fell seriously ill in Chicago. His problems were respiratory, most likely tuberculosis. Sensing that the disease might be fatal, he decided to take the train home. It is said that “his last prayer to God was that he might be given strength to travel home to Los Angeles and see his beloved friends before he died.” Durham and his wife left Chicago on Tuesday, July 2nd, and arrived in Los Angeles on Friday, July 5th. He was alive when he got there but was on the verge of expiring. He died on Sunday morning. Far from ending his in®uence, Durham’s death seemed to speed up the pace with which his theological vision coursed its way through the pentecostal community. Obviously he had struck a chord that people wanted to hear. Durham’s theological vision would eventually give rise to a spectrum of pentecostal organizations speci¤cally de¤ned by their ¤nished-work approach to Christian faith; the formation of the Assemblies of God in 1914 was the most prominent.14 Durham had intended to write a systematic textbook on pentecostal theology, but his death cut that work short. The projected title had been The Work of Christ and the Holy Ghost, and he had begun a prepublication sales campaign as early as 1910. In the absence of this planned but nevercompleted volume, it is necessary to piece together Durham’s comprehensive theological vision from the numerous articles he wrote and published in his journal Pentecostal Testimony, some of which read almost like drafts of chapters for his book. Like every theologian, Durham’s corpus contains both critical and constructive dimensions. In terms of sheer volume, the critical dominates. He was an avid watchdog for truth and expended great energy unmasking the theological errors of his day both within and outside the pentecostal movement. The following exposition begins with those critical views. Durham was not merely a critic, however; he was also a constructive theologian who sought to expound God’s truth as plainly and accurately as possible. On one of his more upbeat days, Durham said that his real goal was “not to see how many false doctrines we can run down, but to set forth God’s real message for today.”15 Durham’s Crisis Theology Like many other theologians, Durham was fueled by a ¤erce opposition to error. He believed that the Christian faith as a whole was under severe attack by modern ideas and ways of life. The spiritually lukewarm and vacuous churches of his day troubled him deeply, and he believed that God would not allow such a situation to endure for long. A great crisis loomed on the horizon—a spiritual crisis which God would use to create
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a clear line of division between the true church and the multitudes of merely nominal Christians around the world. As early as 1910, Durham had written that “for years it has been clear to me that we are drawing nearer and nearer to a great religious crisis.” This crisis was centered on the church. For Durham, the church was supposed to be a bastion of truth and purity—redeemed Christians living holy lives unspotted by all the impurities of the world—but when he looked at the great mass of so-called Christians in his own day he had dif¤culty seeing any differences between them and the world at large. He once huffed: “If God could tell the church and the world apart He could do better than I could.” Nonetheless, he believed that God would inaugurate a great crisis—indeed, it had already begun—through which God would reestablish a clear boundary between the truly redeemed and everyone else. Durham looked forward to that crisis and hoped that God would hasten its arrival. He saw his own ministry as one of the catalysts God was using to bring it about.16 In a pair of articles published in 1910, Durham laid out the spiritual terrain as he saw it, charting the strongholds of the devil and pointing out weaknesses in the ranks of the faithful. He had many concerns. Outside the church, the forces of unbelief were being marshaled against the faith as never before. Modern science was at the forefront of this attack, and Durham minced no words condemning the scienti¤c world, which he said had “become intellectually mad.” Durham believed that the real goal of many scientists was “to rule God out entirely, or to leave us only a vague, mysterious, impersonal God,” and he felt that this conspiracy of scholars had to be exposed and denounced. Not surprisingly, he attacked higher education in general as one of the chief means by which modern disbelief was being spread, saying that some of the best schools in the nation were teaching that religious faith was no longer a necessary part of civilization. Finally, he heaped scorn on those engaged in higher criticism of the Bible. He said that ultimately this was the most destructive development of all, since higher critics undermine “the faith of the people in the inspiration of the Bible, and in the miracles recorded in the Bible. Thus they have ruled out the real power of God and made the stories of His wondrous works in the days of old appear as myths and fables.”17 If things were bad outside the church, Durham believed that conditions within the Christian community were little better. He said that the church of his day was “full of unbelief.” The pulpits of the land were staffed “with skeptics and higher critics, who are following closely in the footsteps of the unbelieving higher educationalists. . . . Instead of telling
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of the quickening power of faith in the Blood of Christ, the ministers are preaching evolution; instead of preaching the Bible doctrine of regeneration, and calling men to repentance, they preach reform, and advise men to come under the moral in®uence of the church.” He lamented: “It cannot be said that the church of today is drifting away from God; it has already drifted away from Him. . . . There is not one leading denomination of today, whose preachers are contending for the doctrines on which the denomination was founded. . . . Instead of telling of the power of God to save and justify, they deny there is any such power. They have a form of godliness, but deny the power thereof.”18 Durham thought that the proper response to this situation—the necessary response—was ecclesiastical separation. True Christians needed to leave their corrupt and misguided churches, and they needed to do it immediately. He declared: “If a man wants to preach the Gospel of Jesus as it is in the Bible, he has to do it outside the religious denominations of this day.” Durham actually thought that the churches themselves would happily usher true believers to the door, glad to be rid of the righteous troublemakers within their midst. Because of that, he was befuddled by the fact that many “honest souls . . . who love the truth” remained within the membership ranks of America’s historic denominations. This was a great frustration for him, and he blurted out: “How . . . can God’s children stay in these institutions of men who ¤ght God and hinder the progress of the Gospel, and which are so organized that they can never accept the truth of God? How can God’s children pay their money into these institutions when it is used to ¤ght God with, and when God’s real Gospel messengers are denied the privilege of preaching the Gospel inside the doors?”19 There were, of course, many other Christians in early-twentiethcentury America who were also taking a stand against the liberal drift of the mainstream churches. Today these individuals are often lumped together under the label “fundamentalists” (though that particular term was not coined until several years after Durham’s death). Durham respected the fervor and values of his fundamentalist contemporaries and recognized that they were his allies in some sense, but in the ¤nal analysis he considered them to be almost as befuddled as their liberal modernistic opponents. For Durham, this was a tragic situation. Fundamentalists had gotten so much right. Their passion to “defend the Bible as the Word of God and contend that it is inspired and that all the wonderful things it records really occurred” was right on the mark, but somehow his fundamentalist contemporaries had also concluded that they needed to take a
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“stand against all [the] modern miracles that God is working,” including the restoration of the pentecostal experience and gifts. For Durham, this was an irrational stance, one which arti¤cially separated God’s actions in the past from God’s actions in the present. It was also a conclusion that made fundamentalists as dangerous to true faith as their modernist opponents—maybe even more dangerous because they wrapped their errors in so much truth. Rather than seeing fundamentalists as comrades in arms, ¤ghting together against the secular drift of the world and the worldly drift of the churches, Durham came to see fundamentalism as yet one more body of error that needed to be unmasked and condemned.20 Linked by their common denials of the miraculous in contemporary life, fundamentalists and modernists were together (and in somewhat opposite ways) helping to create a dangerous spiritual vacuum in American culture, and Durham believed that that vacuum would not remain empty. The world desperately wanted to see and feel the power of God. If modern people could not ¤nd that power in the church, they would seek it elsewhere, and that is precisely what Durham thought was happening. A wide range of “false religions” was springing up, claiming to offer people the divine power they could not ¤nd in the traditional churches. He argued that “Christian Science, New Thought, Theosophy, etc. [were] ®ourishing and deluding their tens of thousands of souls” precisely because of this failure of the churches.21 Durham’s deepest hope was that God would somehow miraculously turn this situation around by investing the church with a massive restoration of spiritual power. Originally he thought that the holiness movement might be God’s antidote for the spiritual hunger of his generation—that the holiness movement “might be . . . one of the means that God would use to hasten the crisis” that was needed to set things right. By 1910, however, he had moved past that hope, reckoning that despite their love of some of God’s words, people in the holiness movement “rejected, generally, so much truth that it would prevent them from ever contributing very much toward hastening the crisis.”22 In Durham’s view, the holiness movement’s problems were legion, but its basic error was that it had taken the simple primitive gospel of Christ and turned it into a complicated two-step process that separated forgiveness from holiness. The holiness movement preached that justi¤cation as experienced in conversion provided only partial release from sin in the form of pardon for sins committed. It took a second work of grace (sanc-
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ti¤cation) to actually cleanse all the sin and depravity that inhabited the human heart. According to Durham, this holiness “theory kept people in continual doubt, as to whether they were sancti¤ed or not,” and this tended to promote frantic attempts by holiness believers “to gain the favor of God, by a careful observation of certain rules and practices.” The search for inner holiness invariably collapsed into external legalism. The underlying problem was that holiness teaching misrepresented the basic character of God, undercutting a fully biblical vision of God’s power and willingness to save those who placed their faith in Christ. Durham wrote: “We agree with all who teach that without holiness no man shall see the Lord, for that is what the Bible teaches; but we do not agree with them that it takes two works of grace to make a man holy. . . . When God saves a man He does a complete work, not a half-way work.”23 While the chief error of the holiness movement was this misunderstanding of salvation, Durham also faulted the holiness movement—or, at least, certain holiness preachers (Durham often used the phrase “holiness movements” in the plural, indicating his awareness that this was not a single uni¤ed body of believers)—for rejecting water baptism, denying the doctrine of divine healing, and failing to af¤rm the premillennial return of Christ. Durham believed that members of the holiness movement(s) had become, just like their modernist, fundamentalist, and denominationalist contemporaries, part of the problem rather than part of the solution.24 The Promise and Problems of the Pentecostal Movement In light of his totalistic critiques of virtually all the Christian groups of his day, it is not surprising that Durham believed that God needed to raise up a new movement to inaugurate the promised crisis that would separate true faith from religious error. According to Durham, that movement was pentecostalism. He pronounced without quali¤cation that “the Pentecostal movement is the means that God is using to hasten the crisis. . . . It is drawing a line around the world, so to speak, and every person that comes in contact with it has to get on one side or the other. There is no half way ground.” Durham believed that God was using the pentecostal revival to initiate “a genuine Apostolic . . . outpouring of the Holy Ghost, exactly like the one described in the Bible.” At times, he claimed even more, writing “there never was a people on the face of the earth, not even excepting Bible days, who trust in and exalt the Blood of Jesus more
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than the pentecostal people are doing today.” In particular, it was pentecostalism’s focus on the power of the Spirit that was bringing the crisis to a head. He wrote: “When people see the power of God working before their very eyes, in a way they cannot explain nor stop, it stirs them to the depths . . . it simply explodes the theories of men. . . . When the covering is removed from the religionists who are resting under the ®imsy shelter of the false theory that the days of miracles are past, their rage knows no bounds.”25 If such was the reaction of mere mortals, Durham was certain that the demons felt even more threatened. He asked bluntly: “Is it any wonder that Satan would rage against such a people?” The answer was that it was no wonder at all. Of course Satan would rage. Durham made satanic persecution one of the chief signs of real Christian faith. He believed that “the clearer Christ is revealed among God’s people, the more the devil will hate and persecute them.” This persecution would be characterized by its “murderous hatred”—a hatred that transcended all logic—and when Durham looked around him, he thought it was quite clear where that kind of hatred was being directed. He said that the pentecostal outpouring of the Spirit was “drawing a heavier ¤re of the enemy than any other religious work in existence.” While he admitted that “no one, so far as we know, has been killed,” Durham thought that it would only be a short time before pentecostal martyrs would be lying dead in the streets. God was hastening the great crisis, and Satan was responding. The pentecostal revival was God’s instrument for bringing about the ¤nal division between true faith and false: So, then, the real lines will be drawn by the revelation of Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit in God’s people and by the works of power which will be wrought in their midst. If God’s people will yield themselves to the control of the Holy Spirit, He will guide them into His truth, endue them with real power and distribute among them all the nine gifts as recorded in the twelfth chapter of ¤rst Corinthians. This will prove in the face of the whole world, that the days of miracles are not past, that God remains just the same, and that their spiritual condition is accountable for their lack of power. Thus they will be called upon to decide for or against God. . . . The largest part of the religious world will refuse to do this, and will join or remain in the ranks of the Anti-Christ. . . . When we reach the place that all the gifts are possessed by the Church, and when the lame walk, and the blind see, and the sick are healed, and demons cast out, thus proving that God is with us of a truth, it will prove conclusively the spiritually dead condition of the religious world, and it will be to their interest to get us out of the way.26
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These sentiments are almost identical to those advanced earlier by George F. Taylor. Taylor, too, had suggested that God was “drawing a line among the saints,” dividing the Christian world along a spiritual fault line revealed by the pentecostal awakening. But Durham’s taxonomy was much simpler than Taylor’s, consisting of only three spiritually de¤ned “classes” of humanity—and he believed two of those groups would soon coalesce, leaving only two real options. Durham’s three groups were: (1) unbelievers; (2) cold and formal Christians; and (3) true pentecostal Christians. (It was the ¤rst two groups that would ultimately merge into each other.) This kind of simpli¤cation of categories was to become a hallmark of Durham’s thinking in general. Employing an Occam’s razor of sorts, Durham sliced through all the complexities others wanted to introduce into the discussion. Durham could hardly have been clearer or simpler in his basic contention. He wrote: “The teaching in the Pentecostal movement is true and . . . every other theory concerning the subject is false.” Case closed.27 While Durham could sound absolutely certain when making such proclamations, he was far from blind regarding the signi¤cant problems that existed within the movement. Pentecostal theology was true and all other theologies were false, but pentecostal theology could be made truer, and that was Durham’s calling. The errors of pentecostalism fell into several different categories. Some errors were merely temporary diversions that were to be expected within any new movement during its years of infancy. Along these lines, Durham was more than willing to admit that “evidence of babyhood” still lingered in the pentecostal ranks, and he likened those aspects of the pentecostal movement to the spiritual immaturity the Apostle Paul had to address in his letters to the church at Corinth. Durham was also quite sure that with time the pentecostal movement would naturally move beyond its childish ways.28 Durham identi¤ed a second category of error as deriving from the mistaken opinions of various “cranks and fanatics” that had found their way into the new pentecostal movement. This situation was problematic, but it was also to be expected and was actually a sign of spiritual vitality. He argued: “Every great revival attracts not only honest seekers and wellbalanced people, but cranks and fanatics. I never saw the exception. Every revivalist of any note has had his troubles with them, and we have had our full share. There is a host of them and they all desire to air their theories or ride their hobbies; but they are no proof that God is not working, but rather prove that He is working.” Durham thought the errors of
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these cranks and fanatics were relatively minor and usually involved the misinterpretation of physical manifestations associated with the pentecostal experience. Some fanatics were too quick to claim that every manifestation, however odd, was from God; other fanatics were too cautious, prone to label virtually any unusual physical manifestation as inspired by demons.29 Durham said that the truth about physical manifestations was actually to be found somewhere in the middle between the extremes advocated by these opposite schools of fanatics. In a surprisingly nuanced statement, Durham wrote that “in many genuine experiences the ®esh is allowed to get in some little measure.” When that happened, he said, “God is hindered and the person does not have as beautiful an experience as he would, had he kept self entirely out,” but that didn’t mean that the whole experience was to be discounted. In these cases, discernment was needed to help sort out the truly spiritual elements from the ®eshly. At the same time, Durham recognized that some manifestations really were satanic in origin, and these counterfeit manifestations needed to be identi¤ed and corrected without hesitation. Durham said that some people, himself included, had a natural knack for this kind of discernment. He said: “I can detect the workings of the devil as soon as I see them.” For those not so gifted, he provided the following advice: [Satan] always leads people to do foolish and unscriptural things, that in the end do not pro¤t; while the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to pro¤t withal. Satan destroys body, mind and soul, ¤lls with doubt, fear, envy and strife, destroys con¤dence in God and man, and in the Word of God. The power of God strengthens us bodily, mentally and spiritually, increases our faith in God and man, ¤lls with love, joy and peace, deepens our love and strengthens faith in Jesus Christ the only Son of God, and in the blessed Word of God.30
Durham found a third set of pentecostal theological errors more troubling than those addressed above. This body of errors derived from the sometimes bitter competition for leadership that existed within the early pentecostal movement. Durham believed that theological criticism and innovation had, in some cases, become merely one more tool to use in this competition for leadership—one more means of leveraging oneself into a position of prominence. He wrote: “The Pentecostal movement today is suffering more from this thing perhaps than any one thing. Folks set themselves up as leaders, and expect others to recognize them as such. They feel the best way to establish themselves is to overthrow all who
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oppose them.” Durham railed against this trend (ironically so, for he seemed to embody it) and called for a “radical purging” of such activity. “Jealousy, contention and strife” among the core leadership of the movement had to cease. Sectarian pentecostal organizers who were more concerned with their own little spiritual ¤efdoms than they were about God’s universal kingdom needed to be stopped in their tracks.31 Durham thought that one of the best ways to correct this situation— to undercut the logic of institutional competition—was simply to deinstitutionalize the movement. If there were no positions to ¤ght over, competition would no longer make sense. He called on his pentecostal colleagues and followers alike to envision the movement as an association of individual believers and congregations held together by the Spirit and not as a coalition of organized institutions. In a moment of combined critique and exhortation he wrote: There have been men on the inside of the movement whose heads the enemy has ¤lled with the idea of, and desire for leadership, and they have spent much time trying to convince the people that the work needed organization, and of course trying to work themselves into the position of leaders. They seem to be so blind that they can see nothing beyond a mere human organization. They seem to think that after all the failures of man along these lines God is going to entrust the present great work to the control of man. Knowing God’s work has been hindered so much by man trying to control it in the past, and that His people are unwilling to be tricked again, these schemers are cunning enough of course to only contend for a very simple form of organization, and if they cannot get full control of the work, they will leave no stone unturned to get as much control as they can. People of God in every land, I plead with you in the name of Christ, remain free.32
One of Durham’s greatest organizational concerns related to education: what to do about the tens and hundreds of pentecostal Bible schools and missionary training homes that were springing up across the country. Many saw this development in a positive light, but Durham had a different opinion. He believed that most pentecostal educational outposts were little more than launching pads for persons trying to jump-start their careers within the movement. But even apart from that competitive deforming of pentecostal education, Durham wondered if formal education was good preparation for ministry. When he was asked his opinion about which school or schools he would recommend, Durham replied that he would “not endorse or reccomend [sic] any of them.” As far as he was concerned, they were almost all training grounds for error.33 It was not that Durham rejected ministerial training altogether;
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rather, he thought that such training ought to take place within the context of the local congregation and not in some “little, petty Theological Seminar[y].” One learned ministry by doing ministry. He argued that the local church was “the only place God ever provided for the training of his people for the work of the ministry.” Within the context of the local community there was no room for prima donnas. New believers took their places as babes in the congregation and slowly grew into spiritual adulthood. Within the arti¤cial context of the Bible school, too many Christians came to think of themselves too highly too quickly. Rather than emerging as true servants of God within the pentecostal movement, they emerged as needy leaders lusting for followers to con¤rm their status, and false theological innovation became an easy means to that end.34 Durham believed that while theological error could be packaged in many different forms, ultimately all theological errors were the result of one of two basic impulses: Some heretics erred by going beyond the clear teaching of the Bible; others erred by failing to keep pace with the many new truths God was revealing as history drew to a close. In an article entitled “False Doctrine,” Durham listed a range of pentecostal errors that pushed well beyond the plain teaching of the Bible. His analysis of each error was short and to the point and his corrections and/or refutations of each position were equally brief. One of the views he discussed was the erroneous claim that a person was not saved until that person had experienced the baptism of the Holy Spirit—in Durham’s words, “the theory that the baptism in the Spirit and the new birth were synonymous, thus taking the position that only those who had the baptism and spoke in tongues were saved at all.” Durham’s response was curt: “The truth is, sinners receive Christ, and believers, and believers only, receive the Holy Spirit.” Durham also criticized the emergence of certain proto-Oneness ideas that were beginning to circulate within the pentecostal movement, especially those that claimed that “Christ and the Holy Spirit are one.” He responded: “We are not going to advance a long theory about the Trinity. There has been too much of that in times past, but we do say that Christ and the Holy Spirit are not in Scripture one and the same.” Along similar lines, Durham rejected the notion “that converts should be baptized in the name of Jesus only.” He said that “nothing could be plainer” in the Bible than that converts were to be baptized using the Trinitarian formula “into the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” (Durham wrote this in early 1912, well before the Jesus-only baptismal dispute arose as a major dividing force within the movement.) Finally, Durham confronted several errors dealing with mar-
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riage. In particular, he condemned the teaching that pentecostal persons ought not to marry, or, if they were married, that they ought to abstain from all sexual activity within their marriages. Once again, Durham was blunt in response. With regard to the ¤rst assertion, he wrote simply: “The Scripture does not forbid [one] to marry.” With regard to the second, he said: “I have seen several poor souls that were on the verge of insanity on account of this very thing. This is not, and never was in any age a Pentecostal doctrine. . . . It ought to be condemned and exposed.” In all of these instances, Durham said the underlying problem was the same: Well-meaning believers had gone “beyond what is written” and had gotten themselves “onto dangerous ground.” The remedy was simple biblical truth. As Durham wrote: “Pardon plain speech. Facts are facts.” Pentecostals should take the Bible at face value and leave off all speculation that allowed “false doctrines . . . [to] creep in.”35 But as troubled as Durham was by these kinds of innovative errors, he was more irritated by errors that arose when believers failed to advance into the new light that God was in the process of revealing at the end of the age. He wrote: “We are living in a wonderful day. God is moving very rapidly indeed. The revelation of one precious truth follows another so closely that only those who are in very close touch with the Lord seem able to grasp these precious truths as fast as they are revealed.” Durham knew that the effort to keep up with God’s new revelations could be tiring and that folks sometimes lagged behind because of spiritual exhaustion or simple failure to understand. But he was incensed by people who dug in their theological heels and determinedly resisted God’s new revelations, and he was almost apoplectically irate at those who tried to silence God’s messengers by suggesting that even though God had revealed certain new truths to some people those truths should not be preached in public until they had gained wide acceptance. Against such persons he thundered: “The theory that it is not time to preach any truth that God has revealed is absurd. If [something] is the truth it ought to be preached. If it is not the truth . . . it ought to be exposed and discarded.”36 In Durham’s view, advocates of “the second blessing theory” were by far the worst resisters of new truth and the most dangerous of all heretics. His opinion was devastatingly negative. He impugned both the intelligence and character of second-blessing theologians, saying that their views stemmed from “lack of knowledge of the Word, and also lack of real spiritual development, as well as wrong motives.” Such persons needed to admit their mistakes and confess the immaturity of their own experience if they were to be saved from error. But this rarely occurred. By locking
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themselves into their own restricted vision of how God was working in the world and by trying to force their views on others, these people were dooming themselves to spiritual dwarfdom and, what was more troubling, they were preventing the pentecostal movement itself from becoming all God intended it to be. Denouncing those whom he called “the strongest advocates of the second blessing theory,” Durham wrote: Instead of earnestly desiring to be deepened into Christ and changed into His glorious likeness, that He may be all in all, they aspire to leadership and to be something themselves. Instead of taking their places as babies, and leaning on the strong arm of the Lord and “growing up into Him in all things Who is the head,” they take it for granted that they are perfect, neglect to continually seek for a fuller knowledge of God, and revelation of Jesus Christ to their souls, and become con¤rmed babies or spiritual dwarfs; yet all the time claiming, and in many instances, really believing themselves to be in a state of grace unknown to many. Every church and holiness movement needs a radical purging of these things. The pentecostal movement will have to be purged from them, before it will be the burning and shining light in the world that God has ordained that it shall be.37
Despite the harshness of his rhetoric, Durham could sometimes be a bit more understanding—but ultimately no less opposed to the errors of traditional holiness theology. In his more moderate mood, Durham recognized the inevitability that various errors that were associated with older ways of thinking would likely persist within the pentecostal movement for at least a while to come. He wrote: “The people who make up this movement have largely come into it from other churches and holiness movements, and, as in all cases in the past, have brought much of the teaching of the churches and movement, from whence they came, with them.” For them, pentecostal truth was something added to what they already believed. But for Durham, spiritual advance involved a process of subtraction as well as addition. He wrote: “The Holy Ghost not only reveals truth, but exposes error as well. When He reveals truth we must accept it, or we will lose out. When He exposes error we must drop it, or we will go into darkness and confusion.” Durham believed that most persons found it relatively easy to add new truth to their existing repertoires of faith but relatively harder to give up errors of thinking to which they had become attached—and that dif¤cult increased exponentially in those areas where what now needed to be discarded had formerly been considered “precious truth.” As Durham put it: “It is a small matter for people to give up what has been known as gross error, but when it comes to
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giving up theories that we have believed to be precious truth for years, it is another thing, but in these days we are called upon in many cases to do that very thing. Especially is this true with regard to the theory that sancti¤cation is a second, de¤nite work of grace.”38 Durham believed that while some pain and dif¤culty might be involved, God was calling on pentecostals to rid themselves of all theological error. This was the end of the age and God was “sifting” the church, creating a new people who would possess God’s full power. He taught that that power could be given only to “a clean, honest people, who accept and prize all His truth, and detest and reject all error.” He declared: “These are the days that try men’s souls. These are the days when God is sifting and bringing to light. These are the days when the theories of men are being tried by the Word of God, and shown up in their true light. Men are weighed in the balance and found wanting. Men are proving their loyalty to their theories and their disloyalty to God, by clinging to their old theories after they are exposed by the Scriptures.” It was time, especially for pentecostals who held a second-work view of sancti¤cation, either to give up their erroneous ways of thinking or to be cast out of the pentecostal movement and ultimately to be cast out of God’s grace as well. While Durham could sympathize with the pain involved, he allowed for no compromise on the basic point. Facts were facts and truth was truth. It was that simple. He said that when Christ returned, he hoped he would be among that “little company standing against almost unheard of odds, but standing as unmovable as a rock, defending the glorious truths of the Gospel.”39 Like many other pentecostals, Durham longed for the “unity of all God’s people in the Spirit.” But perhaps more than others, he was unwilling to buy that unity on the cheap; he was unwilling to compromise truth for the sake of fellowship. He decreed: “We cannot afford to purchase unity by sacri¤cing the Truth of God.” Durham saw himself, in the grand scheme of things, as one of God’s great truth-detectors. He had been charged with the task of rooting out error wherever it was found, and he took up that challenge with a vengeance. The result is that almost all of Durham’s theological writings have a strongly critical edge; but Durham also had a simple constructive theology to proclaim.40 The Simple Gospel of Full Salvation Durham believed that the gospel of Christ in its original, primitive form was simple and clear. It was really was good news and was understandable to everyone who heard it. Over the years this simple gospel
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message had been obfuscated by the accumulated layers of human tradition, opinion, and theory. His goal was to strip off those layers (occasioning the need for all the criticism outlined above) and to reveal again the gospel of Christ in its original simplicity and splendor. Durham believed that this re-revelation of lost truth was preparation for the ¤nal great crisis of history. The gospel message was being puri¤ed as part of “God’s last call to the Church and to the world” before Christ’s glorious return to earth. He thanked God for “restoring His precious truth to His own people, and . . . freeing them from error,” and prophesied that God would “have His simple, primitive Gospel preached in all the world exactly as it was in the days of the Apostles, so that all men can decide whether they wish to stand for Christ and His Gospel or for the foolish theories of men.” The eschatology re®ected in these comments is in many ways quite similar to the end-times theology of many other early pentecostal theologians, and Durham surely believed he was living at the end of the age, but eschatological concerns actually play a remarkably small role in his theology. For Durham, it was the birth and maturation of personal faith, not the times and seasons of history, that mattered most.41 Durham’s central message concerned the ¤nished work of Christ, which he believed was “by far the most important teaching in the Bible.” When asked to summarize the doctrine he preached, Durham responded: “I preach the ¤nished work of Calvary, that we come into Christ and are fully saved in conversion, and that the next step is to be baptized in water, and then in the Holy Spirit; that we do not, according to the Scriptures, have to seek for any intermediate experience.” In contradistinction to his pentecostal predecessors, Durham made salvation and not the baptism of the Spirit the central focus of his theology. This is not to say that Durham sought to diminish the importance of the baptism of the Spirit. He clearly believed that the baptism of the Spirit was a crucial experience which every Christian ought to have, but he always situated that baptism in relation to the prior fact of conversion. He wrote: “Conversion is the great experience that works a complete change in the life of a man. . . . He is now ready for the next great experience, that of receiving the Holy Spirit. This is always a de¤nite experience. . . . When a man receives the Holy Spirit, he is sealed unto the day of redemption. The baptism in the Holy Spirit, then, is the seal of a ¤nished salvation in Jesus Christ.” In keeping with this emphasis, Durham devoted signi¤cantly more print to the task of explaining the full and ¤nished nature of salvation than he did to the baptism of the Spirit.42 Durham said that salvation occurred in the single act of conversion
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and provided complete release from sin: “In conversion we come into Christ, our Sancti¤er, and are made holy, as well as righteous. When one really comes into Christ he is as much in Christ as he will ever be. He is in a state of holiness and righteousness.” For Durham, salvation and sancti¤cation took place simultaneously—they were part and parcel of the single experience of true conversion. He wrote: “God never saves a man from outward sins that He does not save him from inward sin at the same time.” In this regard, Durham suggested that he did not disagree with the advocates of holiness theology when they asserted (in contradistinction to Calvinist teaching) that holiness was a necessary part of full salvation. His disagreement was only with the notion that it took two separate acts of divine grace to accomplish that goal. Durham believed without quali¤cation that “when God saves a man He does a complete work, not a halfway work.” He seemed baf®ed about how a two-work theory of salvation had ever come into existence: If folks claim that it takes two works of grace to save a man, how do they get around the fact, that by one act of disobedience we were all, or as the Scripture says “many” were made sinners, and by the obedience of one many are made righteous? Through one sin of Adam we were all made sinners, and through one great act of obedience, even that obedience unto the death of the Cross, all who believe are made righteous as soon as they believe. . . . What could be more clear and plain, and what could be more glorious and wonderful? Dead and buried with our blessed Lord, and raised from the dead with Him.43
Like many other pentecostals, Durham emphasized that salvation not only corrected past wrongs, it also provided something new—something that even humanity before the fall had lacked. Forgiveness of sins and the removal of humanity’s sin nature were foundational, but the new life Christ offered the believer was more than that—it offered identi¤cation with Christ. Durham wrote: “We are not saved simply because we are forgiven our sins. We are saved through identi¤cation with our Savior Substitute, Jesus Christ. We are given life because He died for us and rose again.” Durham used the concept of identi¤cation with Christ to hold the two dimensions of salvation—the corrective element and the additive element—together. According to his ¤nished-work view of salvation, God’s grace allowed the believer to identify him or herself with both Christ’s death and his resurrection. This same duality was also aptly symbolized in the ordinance of water baptism. Durham said that the believer was “buried with Christ by baptism into death, because his faith has iden-
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ti¤ed him with Christ in His death on the Cross. But God has quickened him with Christ, when he believed in Jesus Christ, and he passes out of death into life, being made a new creature in Christ. So, just as Christ came forth from the grave to die no more, the believer in Christ comes up from his burial in water to die no more, but rather to be identi¤ed with Jesus Christ in his new life.”44 As this last sentence indicates, Durham did not think of water baptism merely as a symbol of the change that occurred in the person’s life through conversion; instead, he believed that the act of water baptism actually played some role in effecting those changes. Durham taught that the “watery grave” of baptism was “the dividing line between the old life and the new.” Conversion and water baptism were logically connected and normally ought to follow each other in quick succession. The single act of salvation, which began with the private and personal experience of conversion, was completed by the public act of water baptism.45 This was Durham’s textbook theology of salvation, but he recognized that in actual fact things rarely took place as smoothly as his theological model implied. Like every other successful pentecostal preacher, Durham was attuned to the empirical realities of Christian life, and he recognized that the lived experience of many, perhaps most, believers was more theologically complex and convoluted than ought to have been the case. Salvation was supposed to be a one-time experience—a complete and total change of life—but many Christians underwent two or more crisis experiences before they felt fully established in their salvation. Durham even went so far as to acknowledge that “very few people ever become really established in one or even two experiences. Most people have the morti¤cation of more failures than that.” He said that he himself had had more than two experiences and added that “almost every saint of God that I have talked with has told me that they, too, have had more than two experiences.” Trying to sort out the relative merits of these different experiences was dif¤cult, for at the time when they were taking place, each “experience was just as de¤nite as another.” The most common solution was simply to accept one’s last experience as superceding all previous experiences. Durham noted that for many Christians, “the ¤nal experience would be the de¤nite one, and it might be a ¤fth, or tenth, just as clear as any person’s second.”46 How were these multiple experiences to be interpreted theologically? The holiness answer, at least in its standard Wesleyan form, was that multiple experiences were required. Full salvation involved a double cure that
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included a ¤rst event of conversion and justi¤cation and a second and distinct event of full sancti¤cation. When persons had had more than two experiences, the proponents of holiness theology offered the Arminian answer that somehow those persons had lost their sancti¤cation or regeneration and needed another act (or acts) of divine grace to re-redeem and/or re-sanctify them. Durham rejected the Wesleyan postulate that minimally two separate acts of grace were necessary to effect full salvation in the believer’s life, but other than that he basically accepted the Arminian logic of his Wesleyan opponents. Durham argued that individuals who felt the need at some point after their initial experience of salvation for any number of subsequent experiences to complete and/or restore their sense of joy and assurance had almost surely become involved in a cycle of lost and regained salvation. Durham was adamant that God never doled out salvation piecemeal, one partial experience at a time. One was either fully saved or not saved at all; no other explanation was admissible for him. He was convinced that those who interpreted their Christian experiences in a manner different from him were quite obviously “misnaming” their experiences.47 The fact that many people required several experiences to become fully established in their salvation was, for Durham, “no proof . . . that more than one experience is necessary.” He believed that “the plain truth is, that only one [experience] is necessary if we know and obey the truth.” He saw the pattern of multiple experiences that had become popular in his day as just another sign of how weak faith had become instead of evidence that his claims were not sound. Durham believed that most modern preachers did not emphasize the cost and rigor of true Christian discipleship suf¤ciently. Converts were thus unprepared for the struggle that followed conversion and, lacking spiritual discipline, these persons fell easily (and often unconsciously) into sin when they were tempted. By contrast, Durham emphasized that the Christian life was “a battle from conversion to glori¤cation” and that Christians needed to be ever vigilant against both the frontal attacks of Satan and his oblique temptations. As for persons who fell into sin and lost their salvation, Durham said: “God will restore us over and over, if we truly repent when we fail, but it must be an insult to Him for us to teach that it takes more than one work for Him to save us from all sin if we meet His conditions faithfully.” He added: “If, through our weakness, we get from under the precious Blood, one or even more times, after conversion, it is necessary for us to humble ourselves before God and get back; but we can only approach Him, as at
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the ¤rst, through the precious Blood of Christ, as one who has sinned, and not as a justi¤ed person.”48 The Baptism of the Spirit According to Durham, the baptism of the Holy Spirit was the event that marked the end of this cycle of vacillation. The baptism of the Holy Spirit placed God’s seal on the believer; it put a lock on the believer’s heart that prevented any future fall from grace. Thus, the baptism of the Spirit was both the second great step in the Christian life and the ¤nal foundational experience for all that would follow. The baptism of the Spirit rendered salvation permanent and in the last days was also making recipients “immune against [all] attempts of Satan to shake our faith in [God].” In reality, the baptism of the Spirit was nothing more and nothing less than the event by which the Spirit of God took up permanent abode in the believer’s life, and when God entered the Christian’s life in that manner, that person was irreversibly changed forever.49 Durham believed that in the normal order of things, this experience should follow fast on the heels of conversion and water baptism, for it was “the entrance into the Spirit-¤lled life” and not some kind of special blessing reserved only for those who had already attained “an advanced state of Christian experience.” Durham quite naturally believed that baptism in the Spirit was the single most valuable experience a Christian would ever have after conversion—even though he believed that the Christian life should be punctuated with many wonderful experiences of God.50 For Durham, conversion and the baptism of the Spirit together constituted the beginning of a much longer process of spiritual maturation. Conversion was a full and complete start to the Christian life, but it was only a start. He likened the newly converted individual to a newborn baby, saying: “Our salvation is complete in Christ the moment we receive it, but in stature, or so far as maturity is concerned, we are simply little, innocent, helpless babes, perfectly clean but with the whole Christian life and experience before us.” Following spiritual rebirth (salvation), the baptism of the Spirit was the doorway to further Christian development. Durham said that Spirit baptism was “the entrance into the Spirit-¤lled life,” the beginning of a life of ongoing growth and maturation. Durham explained: “It is absolutely necessary for those who have received the Spirit to continually yield themselves up a living sacri¤ce to God, and in real, inward humility walk in the Spirit and live a life of prayer and faith. Only those who know and do this will grow and develop in the Christian life, as God has a right to expect of us.”51
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There was no end to this process of spiritual growth in Durham’s theology; the baptism of the Spirit did not bring believers to perfection all at once. Instead, spiritual growth was “a continual work or operation of the free grace of God” and this was to go on unabated until one’s death or translation to heaven in the end times. In Durham’s theology, this progressive, incremental understanding of grace was coupled with a practical vision of redeemed human nature. Salvation, the baptism of the Spirit, and growth in grace did not destroy human nature but rather allowed persons to increasingly tame their natural desires and abilities and to bend them more and more to serve God’s will. Durham wrote: “We believe that as long as we live in this world we are in our humanity, and that instead of God’s destroying our human nature, He expects us to control it. In other words, after cleansing us and ¤lling us with the Spirit, he expects us to yield ourselves to the Holy Spirit continually, that He will have full control of our faculties.”52 Durham had originally understood baptism in the Spirit in highly personal terms—as a special gift provided “for our own blessing and encouragement.” Later, however, he came to see it both as a source of special empowerment and as a special charism that would help Christians remain ¤rm under the pressures and persecutions of the end times. Durham believed that the baptism of the Spirit always equipped the recipient with some kind of new and “powerful gift or enablement for service.” Spirit¤lled believers were Spirit-empowered believers. Durham was convinced that the baptism of the Spirit provided believers with a heightened sense of spiritual resolve, and this would be needed as the end of the world drew nigh because “opposition to the truth of God [would] become greater and greater till it [would] be as it was in the days of Noah. The world [would] utterly harden its heart against God.” As the situation degenerated, however, God would empower believers to stand ¤rm in their faith “against almost unheard of odds.” He said that God would “¤ll true believers with the Spirit, and reveal the Gospel of His Son in their hearts; and they will thunder it in all the world as it has not been preached since the days of the Apostles.” In the end, the community of truly Spirit-¤lled persons would be seen “standing as unmovable as a rock, defending the glorious truths of the Gospel” as the world fell into the abyss of evil.53 Durham believed that the baptism of the Spirit was, like conversion, “always a de¤nite experience.” The key was knowing how to recognize the genuine thing, and, for Durham, tongues was the infallible marker of the true baptism of the Spirit. A true baptismal experience was “invariably accompanied by the speaking in other tongues.” Speaking in tongues was
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itself the last step in the process by which God ¤lled the believer and took up permanent abode in the believer’s physical body. It was also an outward sign to others that the recipient had ¤nally passed through the experience. Durham summarized his understanding of these matters as follows: The power, which has already overcome and which shakes the person’s body, simply moves to his vocal organs and begins to operate on them and, if yielded to, soon produces a language. After a person had spoken in tongues we pronounced them through. By this we meant his baptism was complete. Many would have the power on them and not get through to the baptism at the ¤rst time, or even the second. When this was the case the power of God, after dealing with a person, would simply lift from him. When He ¤lled him and spoke in tongues He remained with him.54
For Durham, the linkage of tongues with the baptism of the Spirit was the “great distinguishing truth” of the pentecostal movement, and it needed to be vigorously preached and staunchly defended. He believed that the doctrine of tongues as the physical manifestation of the baptism in the Spirit was “one of those penetrating truths of God . . . that locates every man that hears it.” The precision of the evidence, the blunt factuality of whether or not one had spoken in tongues, put “every soul on the face of the earth in a corner.” One had either experienced this or not. There was no fuzzy middle ground where one had to wonder whether or not one had truly been baptized in the Spirit. Tongues was God’s clear and indisputable signal that the divine baptism had taken place, and for Durham there was no mistaking imitation tongues for the real thing. He once said that no one “ever had a stranger experience than those who speak in tongues for the ¤rst time. No one could ever describe it. To me it was the strangest, most wonderful experience I have ever had.” He noted that sometimes when “people begin to fall prostrate on the ®oor, and to be shaken by the power, and to speak in tongues, sinners and formal professors of religion [get] angry and crticise [sic] and condemn those who are dealt with, and declare God would never work that way.” But he suggested that such a reaction perfectly proved his point—it “[proved] conclusively the spiritually dead condition” of those who voiced such criticisms. The baptism of the Spirit with tongues was one of God’s most powerful means of drawing a line of distinction between those who were truly serious about Christian faith and everyone else.55 While the baptism of the Spirit with the accompanying evidence of
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speaking in tongues was an experience beyond all theology, Durham was convinced that a right theology of baptism in the Spirit was necessary if people were to receive this blessing. He said that whenever the baptism of the Spirit was correctly preached with the doctrine of evidential tongues included, people were led to seek God anew and to tarry until they got “the real baptism.” As Durham put it, whenever pentecostal preachers stand “for this truth and really preach it, if they are straight, or reasonably straight, in other doctrines and are a clean people, the power never leaves them, and people continue to get the baptism.” This was so because “God always honors His own message.” Conversely, the failure to preach the necessity of tongues as part of the genuine baptism of the Spirit invariably blocked people from receiving the experience. Durham said that the vague teachings of some (i.e., the teaching that tongues was not the necessary mark of the genuine baptism of the Spirit and that certain other items might qualify as substitute evidence of the in¤lling of the Spirit) had encouraged some individuals to prematurely claim the baptism of the Spirit before they had actually received it. In those cases, the people involved inevitably stopped seeking the real baptism and locked themselves into a form of spiritual immaturity until they changed their theology. Not one to mince words, Durham accused such preachers of theologically “[dragging] down the standard of God” in a way that was “little short of blasphemy.”56 Durham did not believe that speaking in tongues at the time of one’s baptism in the Spirit necessarily provided the recipient with the ability to speak in tongues after that event. He argued quite the opposite, saying that “no person, . . . so far as we know, has ever taught that it was necessary for the person to continue to speak in tongues from time to time after receiving the Holy Ghost, as an evidence that he had received Him, but on the contrary, most of us have taught that if the person [spoke] clearly in tongues at the time of his baptism, it was not really necessary for him to ever speak in tongues again.” Durham was obviously alluding in these remarks to what other pentecostals would identify as a distinction between tongues as the sign of the baptism of the Spirit and tongues as a gift of the Spirit that provided the recipient with the ongoing ability to engage in glossolalic speech. Durham himself did not usually separate these two kinds of tongues quite as precisely as some others, however. As a matter of fact, he sometimes blended them together, and he also believed that most Spirit-baptized pentecostals retained the ability to regularly speak in tongues after their baptismal experience. For Durham, the gen-
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eral rule was that tongues continued; when someone lost the ability to speak in tongues after having done so at the time of their Spirit baptism it was the exception.57 While Durham believed that baptism in the Spirit was one way in which the power of God was being visibly demonstrated at the end of the age, he also believed that God was at work in other ways. He was convinced that God was restoring all the miraculous gifts of the Spirit that were mentioned in the New Testament. He wrote: “We believe that the wonderful works [sic] that God is doing throughout the world today is His ¤rst great step toward restoring to His people, the church, the portions of truth and gifts of power which they have not yet come into possession of theretofore.” He said God “[wanted] His full gospel preached,” and God wanted that gospel visibly demonstrated through the gifts of the Spirit as well.58 While Durham was adamant in his af¤rmations of the miraculous, he could also be surprisingly cautious about the supernatural. He went out of his way to denounce the proposition that anyone who truly received the baptism of the Spirit would be transformed “into an apostle or mighty miracle worker.” For Durham, the gifts of the Spirit were truly miraculous, but they were not particularly ®ashy. Thus we ¤nd in his writings none of the almost magical claims made by some others. We read nothing of the supernatural powers of translocation, immunity to heat and cold, and other items that Charles Parham made so prominent in his discussion of the special body of believers he called “the redemption.” Similarly, we hear none of the exuberant claims George Taylor made regarding the power individual Christians had to use their gifts freely at their own will and whim. For the most part, Durham’s theology of spiritual gifts was much closer to that of David Myland, who emphasized that the gifts were given to help believers serve the needs of others. In Durham’s scheme of things, God was still in the process of restoring all the biblical gifts to the church, but when that restoration was complete, the result would be a church intent on serving humanity—a church where “the lame [would] walk, and the blind [would] see, and the sick [would be] healed, and demons cast out.”59 For that power to be manifest, both Christian individuals and the church as a whole would have to advance in holiness. Durham believed that power followed purity; God gave miraculous power only to those who would use that power properly. Thus he argued that the personal conduct of the believer had “a great deal to do with what he develops into,
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or is chosen for in his Christian life. Many failing to live a holy, separate life before God and the world, do not qualify for any of the honors God has to confer upon those who do walk before Him in perfect obedience.” Durham said that God expected every believer “to live a clean, holy, separate life, to crucify the ®esh, and walk in the Spirit.” He described the Christian life as “a battle from conversion to glori¤cation” and said that only those who persevered in obedience would be chosen for the highest tasks and honors. He admonished his readers, saying that “when God has a great work to do or of¤ce to ¤ll, He lays His hand on some one who is already walking before Him in holiness or purity of heart and life.” According to Durham’s theology, obedience and purity of life in the day-today events of ordinary existence were the primary ways of preparing oneself to be chosen by God for a higher calling in the future.60 According to Durham, prayer was another indispensable ingredient in the life of holiness and power, and by prayer he meant “real, intercessory prayer in the Holy Spirit.” Spirit-¤lled Christians did not achieve new levels of holiness by praying for themselves; they did so by praying for others and by having others pray for them. It was that reciprocal pattern of “prevailing prayer” that would eventually bring the Christian community as a whole, and not just a few select individuals, to a state of advanced holiness. For Durham, spiritual growth was ultimately a communal phenomenon, not an individual accomplishment; one could not progress in holiness and leave others behind wallowing in spiritual immaturity. Durham argued that neither pentecostalism nor any other Christian movement would “make much more progress till we recognize our failure to perform our duty to the Lord along this line, and set our hearts by real prayer and supplication in the Spirit, to seek the face of God; ¤rst, that we may know and enjoy Him as we should, and second, that He will send a revival of His mighty power, that will sweep over the earth in mighty, living power, for the salvation of every soul who desires salvation, and that all who desire it in reality may be baptized in the Holy Spirit, and that the gifts may be restored to the Church.”61 Taken as a whole, Durham’s message was a stirring call to the pentecostal community to be clearer in its thinking, more consistent in its living, and more united in the new truths God was revealing as the end of the age drew nigh. His theology represented a strenuous attempt to identify the essential beliefs of the movement and to eliminate all forms of error and sloppy thinking. He hoped that eventually all pentecostals would fall in line behind him. That did not happen. But in staking out
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his own vision of what pentecostalism in its best and purest form should look like, Durham’s theology became a catalyst that would change the movement forever. Joseph Hillery King’s Holiness Theology of Pentecostal Faith In response to Durham’s simpli¤ed two-step theology of the Christian experience, those who favored a three-step theology of pentecostal faith found themselves needing to explain their views with a new sense of clarity and detail. Prior to Durham, the language of conversion, sancti¤cation, and the baptism of the Spirit had been used by a variety of pentecostals to describe the Christian life, but those terms had often been used in a rather loose manner and were sometimes sandwiched into a larger taxonomy of spiritual experiences and attainments. That changed after Durham. Pentecostals who were ¤rmly committed to the Wesleyan view that sancti¤cation was a second de¤nite work of grace in the believer’s life subsequent to conversion would become much more exacting in the way they articulated their theological analysis of spiritual maturation and development. In the years immediately following Durham’s death, no one did this better than Joseph H. King. Spiritual Biography Joseph Hillery King was born in 1869 and raised in South Carolina. He was the grandson of a slave overseer (who was also a veteran of the Civil War) and the son of a tenant farmer. By lineage, he was a child of the South, but he seems to have harbored little if any of the bitterness that some other southerners who were committed to the notion of the “Lost Cause” seemed to carry with them through life.62 This may have been due to the in®uence of his mother, whom King described as “always unassuming, almost guileless [and] free from the spirit of combativeness and retaliation,” but it was surely also partly his own choice.63 King was sad to report that during the formative years of his life, when he “needed to have the most favorable and effective religious in®uences” exerted on him, he had lived in a virtual religious vacuum. He said that “a high state of Christian experience was absolutely unknown” in the region. Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians were all in the same sad shape. He said that “what passed as the gospel in all these churches was almost no gospel at all.” But despite the supposed poverty of religious in®uence, King seems to have become fairly familiar with revivalist Protestantism by his early teens. The year he became sixteen (1885) proved to
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be a major religious turning point in his life. In May of that year, King received what he took to be a call to preach the Gospel—even though he was not even converted at the time. When he was converted later that same year it was as much a con¤rmation of his call to preach as it was a personal spiritual transformation. As a matter of fact, King said his conversion really wasn’t very dramatic at all, producing only “a very light sense of change of heart.” In retrospect he wrote that “it was but a bare start, and if I was saved, it was but a twilight entrance into the Christian life. Yet it was a step taken, and whatever was done, I have never retraced that step.”64 Immediately following his conversion, King joined the local Methodist church. Later that same year he had an unanticipated mystical experience one day while sitting in church—an event that he interpreted as God’s full cleansing of sin from his life. His autobiographical account speaks for itself: “As I seated myself an unexpected, strange, and to me, a blessed thing took place. Some invisible hand instantly placed my whole being into the hand of God. . . . A marvelous change was wrought in me. I found my heart ¤lled with light, love, and glory. . . . I seemingly was taken out of myself and thought I was within a few feet of the gates of Heaven. When I came to myself I was standing in the aisle in silence.” When he arrived home after this service, King told his mother what had happened—that he had been sancti¤ed at the meeting. With perhaps typical parental realism, she replied: “Oh, you know you are not sancti¤ed.” But King himself said he continued to believe “beyond a doubt” that he had indeed been sancti¤ed that day.65 In light of this life-changing experience, King began a doctrinal study of the Christian faith, focusing especially on the teaching of “Sancti¤cation as an experience distinct from Justi¤cation.” He says that after wading through various published texts and periodicals over a ¤ve-year period, he became “rooted and grounded in this view of truth” and he later thanked God that he had never thereafter “been moved from it by any species of reasoning or supposed Scriptural arguments that have been put forth by the opponents of the Second Blessing theory of Holiness, whether Calvinist, Antinomians, Zinzindor¤ans [sic], [or] the ‘Finished Work’ advocates.” This ¤rst real effort at theological inquiry also further reinforced his sense of ministerial call. He said his “thinking always shaped itself into preaching” and he ¤nally decided that he either had to start preaching “or quit thinking, one of the two.” As a means of giving outlet to that impulse, King sought licensure with the local Methodist Quarterly Conference in May 1887. However, his application was denied. Most likely it
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was his youth and lack of training that played the biggest part in the rejection of his application, but King always felt that a certain prejudice against holiness theology had also played a role.66 King wrote in his autobiography that the next several years of his life were characterized by a series of “sad mistakes and serious blunders,” beginning with the loss of his sancti¤cation. Later he would reassess his life history and conclude that he likely had not lost his sancti¤cation at this time, but the belief that he had fallen from holiness deeply affected his self-understanding during these years.67 For the next decade, he struggled unsuccessfully to regain his supposedly lost sancti¤cation, and during this period of spiritual stress he made perhaps the most unfortunate decision of his life—a decision to marry a woman who was thoroughly ill-disposed toward the life of a minister’s wife. It happened this way. King left his father’s home in 1889 at the age of twenty, determined to establish himself as an independent adult. He enlisted in the army, but the military was not a good match for King’s personality and skills, and he was discharged after a very brief term of service. He seems to have decided that marriage provided an alternative route to adult independence. In his memoirs, King never even mentions his ¤rst wife’s name. All we know is that the marriage was short and disastrous. Before their marriage King asked his wife-to-be if she was willing to aid and encourage him in his ministerial calling, and she had apparently agreed. Almost immediately after the wedding, however, she reneged, saying that prenuptial promises “were like pie crust—made to be broken.” She was not and would not be content as a poor preacher’s wife. King said that “midnight gloom” settled on his soul. Two options presented themselves, neither of which seemed acceptable. He could travel and preach by himself, but if he was unaccompanied by his wife his reputation would be questioned and his ministry undercut; or he could stay at home and work a regular job, but that would mean rejecting his ministerial vocation. King sought some kind of reasonable compromise, but none was available. In the end, he became convinced that God was telling him he had to leave his marriage “for the sake of the gospel.” It was a dreadful choice: either follow God with all his heart or to turn his back on God and follow his wife. In one “awful moment,” he ¤nally decided he had to obey God. He packed his bags and left.68 In March 1891, King ¤nally obtained the Methodist license to preach that he had previously been denied. For the next seven years, he served the Methodist Church in northern Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee, much of the time as a “circuit walker” (he had no horse) serving three
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or four parishes as part of one charge. He was ordained a deacon in 1894 and received full ministerial credentials in 1896. From January 1895 to May 1897 he was enrolled at the School of Theology of Ulysses S. Grant University in Chattanooga, and upon graduation he was all set to become a successful Methodist preacher. Then suddenly things took an unpredictable turn. He was assigned to a charge in northern Georgia where, to his chagrin, he discovered that several members of his church (who were apparently associated with Benjamin Hardin Irwin and his FireBaptized Holiness Association) were promoting a range of radical doctrines within the parish, including divine healing, the premillennial return of Christ, and the baptism of the Holy Ghost. King said these doctrines were “all new and very strange to me,” and his ¤rst reaction was negative. He accused his parishioners of espousing “doctrinal unsoundness and religious extravagance,” but within a few weeks he found himself warming to their views. Then, in February 1898, he recorded that he himself had ¤nally received a new (or renewed) experience of “full cleansing,” and soon thereafter he received what his parishioners called “the baptism of the Holy Ghost and ¤re” as well. He had become one of the radicals.69 Just a few months later, King said that he had “received a direct revelation from the Lord that it was His will for [him] to surrender the pastorate, and enter the evangelistic ¤eld.” Despite his love of the Methodist Church, he complied with what he took to be God’s demand and resigned. For a while he was involved in an independent revivalist ministry with another holiness preacher named A. C. Craft, but by midsummer of 1898 he had split with Craft (apparently on amicable terms) and had joined with B. H. Irwin and others in their efforts to transform the FireBaptized Holiness Association into the Fire-Baptized Holiness Church. Irwin was elected as the ¤rst general overseer of this new church, but within two years he was ousted on charges of sexual immorality and King had the leadership of the church thrust upon him. King held the post of general overseer for the next ten years (1900–1910), and during that time he moved the headquarters of the new denomination to Royston, Georgia, where a friend had agreed to provide space for the church’s printing operation. King himself moved to nearby Toccoa. While heading up the denomination, King continued to pursue his own itinerant evangelistic ministry.70 King ¤rst heard news of the “Paci¤c Coast Pentecost” at the Azusa Street Mission near the end of 1906 while he was on a preaching tour in Canada. Shortly after his return home, King had a more up-close introduction to the movement when G. B. Cashwell, arriving fresh from Los
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Angeles, began preaching about the revival in nearby Dunn, North Carolina. Some members of the Fire-Baptized Holiness Church in Toccoa attended the Dunn meetings and, with King’s cautious approval, invited Cashwell to visit them in Georgia. Cashwell accepted the invitation and held a ten-day pentecostal revival in Toccoa in February 1907. King attended Cashwell’s services with his critical faculties acutely attuned to discover any theological errors that Cashwell might have advocated. Having led the Fire-Baptized Holiness Church for six years, he was well aware of how easily “the spirit of religious extravagance” could give rise to “wild and foolish” views. His work as general overseer had involved him in the need to tame such things before.71 King said that after Cashwell’s ¤rst sermon, they “crossed swords in combat over the question of the evidence of baptism,” and he reported that Cashwell “did not sustain himself with credit to himself or the theory he was advocating.” However, the next day when King knelt to pray, he found that his communication with God was blocked; “the way was closed, and God was gone.” He began to wonder if his attitude “relative to the evidence of Pentecostal baptism” might be to blame. He “resolved to make a thorough investigation of the question,” stating that if he was wrong, he needed to know that, and if he was right, he needed to know that as well. For the rest of the day he read and reread various biblical passages dealing with the issue of tongues and the baptism of the Holy Spirit, rooting through all the commentaries he had available. By the end of the day he had become convinced, against his will, that Cashwell’s teaching was more biblical than his own. He concluded that he either had to “accept the new light, or be dishonest.” The next afternoon, February 15, 1907, King sought and received the baptism of the Spirit with tongues. Within a few months, virtually all the other ministers of his denomination had also come to accept “the truth of Pentecost as now being taught,” and the of¤cial doctrinal statement of the church was formally revised to be “in harmony with the new revelation of truth.”72 King spent the next several years helping to consolidate the FireBaptized Holiness Church’s transition into pentecostalism and developing relations with other pentecostal believers in the South. One result of this was that the Fire-Baptized Holiness Church merged into the Pentecostal Holiness Church in January 1911. While King had helped pave the way for this development, he was not involved in the ¤nal events. He had stepped down as general overseer in 1910 and left for a two-year world tour. When he returned, King agreed to serve as principal of the denomination’s Falcon Holiness School in North Carolina, but he quickly realized
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that school administration was not his calling and resigned his position at the end of the 1912–1913 school year. He decided to resume his preaching career, but before stepping back in the pulpit, he “laid all active work aside” for several months in order to write the book From Passover to Pentecost, which was published in 1914. King said he “had contemplated writing this book for many years” and was glad he could take the time to complete it before becoming immersed once again in the hectic schedule of pastoral ministry. In 1924 he would began to write a follow-up volume, but that work was never completed because of King’s heavy workload.73 The last thirty years of King’s life were both steady and rewarding. For much of this time (1917–1941) King served as general overseer of the Pentecostal Holiness Church, and during his tenure the church was growing and active. He also ®ourished in his personal life. King had not felt free to remarry as long as his estranged wife was still alive, believing that to do so would be an act of adultery. However, when his ¤rst wife passed away during the late 1910s he began to contemplate marriage once again. Soon his affections were drawn to Blanche Leon Moore, and they were wed on June 1, 1920. Their marriage, which produced four children, seems to have been a happy one. King died in 1946, and the last thing he reportedly said to his wife was that he was looking forward to spending eternity together with her, “[praising] God for His marvelous love that made us ‘heirs together of the grace of life.’”74 Experience, Hermeneutics, and Religious Con®ict King once said, “My experience is my creed.”75 While this statement should not be taken as de¤nitive of his theological method as a whole, it does re®ect accurately the importance King assigned to the experiential dimensions of faith. King’s own spiritual growth was experientially driven. This is illustrated in his autobiographical writings, where King portrayed his life as one of slow progress in faith punctuated by various crucial, and often mystical, moments of advance: his conversion, his sancti¤cation, his resancti¤cation, his baptism with ¤re, and his ¤nal baptism of the Holy Spirit. He saw these events as building on each other and he understood each to be only one more partial step toward the full promise of the Christian life described in the Bible. King typically attributed his spiritual growth, especially episodes of dramatic advance, to the in®uence of others, which stands in marked contrast to Durham, who emphasized that the most important spiritual turning points in his life occurred alone and in private. The individuality of Durham’s experience is consonant with his anti-institutional, entrepreneurial approach to Christian minis-
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try. The sociability of King’s experience is consonant with his commitment to organized, institutional church ministry. Unlike Durham, King was an institutional person, comfortable within the structures of denominational life.76 He enjoyed his years in the Methodist ministry—despite the fact that his own rigorous holiness convictions contradicted the lax moral lives of some members of that denomination. It pained him deeply to leave that church, and he did so only because he believed he had received a directive from God. But in leaving the Methodist Church, King was not leaving institutional life behind. Within only a few months he had joined the Fire-Baptized Holiness Church. He seemed to need some kind of institutional connection to ®ourish as both a person and a minister. King not only liked organizations, he liked leading them and, as head of the Fire-Baptized Holiness Church, King learned a lesson quite different from the one he had learned earlier with the Methodists. In the pentecostal world, the challenge was too much “religious extravagance,” not the lack of religious enthusiasm.77 Dealing with this kind of overheated faith was just as dif¤cult as dealing with moral or spiritual laxity. Ultimately King became convinced that sound institutional structures formed a necessary hedge around personal faith; individual fervor and organizational responsibility kept each other in check. It is thus not surprising that a linkage of personal experience with institutionalized faith became an important element in his most important theological publication, From Passover to Pentecost. One of the chief motifs in From Passover to Pentecost is that the different experiential “phases” of the Christian life were de¤ned and foreshadowed by the institutional festivals of ancient Israel. According to King, the “institutional” character of these ancient Jewish celebrations “[pointed] necessarily toward the atoning work of Christ,” while the “festal” character of these holy days presaged the salvi¤c application of Christ’s atonement to the individual. In particular, King believed that Passover stood for justi¤cation, the Feast of Weeks for sancti¤cation, and “Pentekostee day” for the baptism of the Spirit. It was not just this onefor-one analogy that was at work, however; the overall pattern was just as important. That is, King thought that the institutional and objective aspects of faith had to be fused with the personal and subjective dimensions of the religious life for the work of God to be complete. He explained: “It is [only] when atonement is translated into human experience that it, and its author, receives glory.”78 King’s biblical hermeneutic followed this same dual format, with the historical or “dispensational sense” of the text encasing a deeper meaning
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that focused on “truth experimental in nature.” These two meanings could differ from each other, but when they were rightly understood they were never contradictory. Citing as an example the portable tabernacle used by the people of Israel during their years of wandering in the wilderness, King said that historically the tabernacle had provided the people with an earthly model of the heavenly court of God, but typologically the tabernacle was “a parable of the plan of redemption instituted for the salvation of the race.” King believed that the Old Testament was literally ¤lled with descriptions of other objects, rituals, and historic events that were similarly revelatory of God’s grand plan of redemption.79 King believed that the biblical narrative, and indeed the whole ®ow of salvation history from Adam to the present, revealed that God was progressively unveiling more and more truth to humankind as the years rolled along. He said that “divine revelation was progressive in its unfolding,” adding that “the discovery of the meaning of the truth thus revealed is of necessity progressive” as well. King believed that those who came later in the ®ow of events were much better positioned to understand the real meaning of earlier events than those who had themselves been directly involved in those historical occurrences. Those who came later in the saga of faith could look back on earlier events and see the fullness of the God’s plan retrospectively revealed in them, whereas the persons who had been directly involved in those events could only see the surface meaning of what was going on.80 Nowhere is this demonstrated more clearly than in the lives of the apostles. After Jesus was put to death, the apostles were in a state of despair and disarray because they could not see beyond the limits of the revelations of their own day. In common with Jewish expectations of that time, the disciples had expected Jesus to literally ascend to the throne and become the political king of Israel. Their “mistake,” according to King, was that they quite naturally con®ated the ¤rst appearing of Christ with “that which we now call the Second Coming.” But before the resurrection they could not have seen things any other way; they did not yet have the advantage of later events to help them see the real signi¤cance of the cruci¤xion. King was careful to indicate that this kind of temporary doubt regarding the mission of Christ “was not the kind to bring condemnation.” Instead, it was natural and unavoidable. He explained: “There is an unbelief that proceeds from sin, and there is an unbelief that arises from a want of suf¤cient evidence.” The disciples’ mistake clearly fell in the second category. It was “honest doubt.” What made honest doubt different from spiritually culpable doubt was that “a man with honest
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doubt [would] accept evidence readily in support of that which he doubts when it is presented in a reasonable manner,” and that is what the disciples did in response to the resurrection of Christ. Honest doubt was always ready to listen to new information. By contrast, sinful doubt was immune to new insight; it was intractably wedded to old ideas.81 King believed that in his own day the new pentecostal message was calling Christians to move beyond their old ideas in precisely the same way that the disciples had had to adopt a new interpretation of Christ after the resurrection. He said that “the present world-wide Pentecostal movement . . . [was] leading the people out into larger ¤elds of truth, which enrich and empower the soul for better service.” This new revelation was meeting resistance, however, and King said that such resistance could only be expected. He pointed out how hard it had been for the sixteenth-century reformers “to get people to break away from the harlot Church,” adding that it had been “almost as death itself for . . . those Reformers to give it up, and change their views of truth in harmony with the simple doctrines of the New Testament.” Similar dif¤culties had manifested themselves in all other reform movements in the history of the church. Human beings had a natural desire to hold on to what was familiar. He said: “We cling to our tenets of faith with an undying tenacity. . . . We are desperately attached to our doctrinal formulas, and theological dogmas. If they should ever be overthrown, the most of us would be thrown into awful confusion. We get very uneasy when we even think that there is a probability of their being overthrown.” King knew this from his own life. At least twice (when he was ¤rst introduced to the notion of the baptism of the Holy Ghost and ¤re and when he ¤rst encountered the teaching that tongues was the necessary sign of true baptism in the Spirit), he had found himself needing to dramatically revise his own thinking in the light of new revelation. He had found both experiences painful, but they were also necessary, and his goal was to help people with similar “religious prejudices” give up their old views and accept the new revelation of Pentecost.82 Unfortunately, religious prejudice could also continue once one had become a pentecostal believer. The baptism of the Spirit did not automatically make one fully open to truth. King said that in fact, the pentecostal experience sometimes seemed to strengthen the tenacity with which people clung to their mistaken views of faith. He once confessed that “the Pentecostal people of today, with but few exceptions, are the strongest in prejudice of any people on earth, except Jesuits, bigoted Jews, and fanatical Mohammedans. And any attempt on the part of any to change it is
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most stubbornly resisted and bitterly denounced.” While he wished things were different, he had come to believe that “religious prejudice is very tenacious and is quite dif¤cult to overthrow. Regeneration, sancti¤cation, nor the baptism [of the Spirit] can remove it.”83 King may have had a variety of pentecostal “heretics” in mind when he penned these words,84 but undoubtedly advocates of ¤nished-work theology were at or near the top of his listed of theologically prejudiced and mistaken pentecostal believers. From his perspective, Durham’s ¤nishedwork position came “as near being a ‘damnable heresy’ as anything we know.” It was inconsistent and illogical and, even worse, it fostered sin and undercut holiness. Nonetheless, King said that “this thing” had somehow “found its way into the ranks of the Pentecostal people of today. We hear the cry of the ‘¤nished work’ throughout the world, heralded most ardently by many with an earnestness surpassing that of the ¤rst proclamation of Pentecost by the same individuals.” He was stunned by its success and the sheer doggedness of its proponents and believed that only entrenched religious prejudice could account for its appeal. In his own careful scholarly way, he attacked the ¤nished-work virus and tried to inoculate believers against its “misleading, unscriptural and false” in®uence, but he was not optimistic about the outcome. Deeply ingrained religious prejudice was almost impossible to remove once it had become ¤rmly established in the mind.85 In the long run, King seems to have decided it was more important to shore up the defenses of the holiness-pentecostal movement than continually hammer away at the errors of ¤nished-work theology. While he continued to criticize theological error when that seemed necessary, criticism of other views played a relatively minor theme in King’s writings overall—a stunning difference from Durham’s propensity to launch into unrestrained tirades against his opponents. At heart, King was a constructive theologian, not a polemicist, and this was consistent with his position as an institutional church leader. Rather than being a manifesto for change, From Passover to Pentecost reads much more like a guidebook for members of the Pentecostal Holiness Church and other holiness-oriented pentecostal believers, written to help deepen their understanding of truths already held dear. When it is understood in that sense, From Passover to Pentecost represents a signi¤cant advance over the earlier writings by other holinesspentecostal leaders, especially the theology of George F. Taylor. King jettisoned Taylor’s sometimes rather strange historical and eschatological speculations and set aside several of his other more extreme notions. In
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moderating Taylor’s theological stridency, King’s perspective represents the beginning of what would become a distinctive shift in the center of gravity within American pentecostal theology which would distance the movement from the wilder speculations and contentious claims of many ¤rst-generation pentecostal writers toward the more denominationally domesticated and “orthodox” views of most second-generation pentecostal theologians. Initial Salvation: Repentance and Conversion From Passover to Pentecost focuses on the three pivotal experiences that de¤ne the normal progression of the Christian life: conversion, sancti¤cation, and the baptism of the Spirit. Like Myland, King used a variety of terms and phrases to name these different experiences. This was a way of underscoring the fact that experience itself was primary; labeling was secondary. Within King’s threefold experiential theology, an important divide existed between the second and third experiences. The ¤rst two experiences were linked together as separate, though connected, acts of redemptive grace. In King’s theological system, he described conversion as “initial salvation,” while he called sancti¤cation “full salvation.” The third experience in King’s tripartite scheme was the baptism of the Holy Spirit and, in contrast to conversion and sancti¤cation, he taught that this was a post-salvation experience that provided the believer with a deeper relationship with God and special empowerment for service. King’s view was not particularly original, but his development of this theological position was more comprehensive than that of any previous pentecostal theologian, and he took pains to ground this sequential understanding of the Christian life in a reading of the full biblical canon.86 The experience of conversion was the ¤rst step on the road to full salvation. Conversion, or spiritual rebirth, provided the believer with the divine remedy for the speci¤c sins he or she may have committed and reestablished a personal relationship with God. This initial participation in salvation was then made complete by the subsequent experience of sancti¤cation, which removed the root impulse to sin. King believed ¤rmly that God was a God of process and order. Just as it had taken an extended period of time, punctuated by certain key events, for the ancient Israelites to fully occupy the Promised Land, in the same way the Christian’s entrance into full salvation involved a process of time marked off by two distinct acts of God’s grace. King said that there was a God-ordained rhythm to this process of salvation and that it was wrong for anyone to
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try to collapse the duality of God’s pattern of salvation into a singular event. The initial experience of salvation involved both repentance and conversion—the ¤rst forming the necessary platform for the second. This order of events was ¤xed. King said that the human act of repentance had to come ¤rst before God could provide forgiveness. Why was this so? Because repentance, by admitting its own lack and need of assistance, opened the door to faith, and faith was the only means by which any human being could receive salvation. Always ready with a formulaic adage, King put it this way: “No faith without repentance, no salvation without faith.” True repentance produced the kind of faith one needed to seize hold of God’s offer of salvation. Or, as King said: “Repentance includes surrender, and the surrendered heart can and does believe without dif¤culty.”87 King described repentance as a human activity, the personal act of turning toward God in sorrow for sin and in conscious need of salvation —and for King, repentance was not merely an attitudinal change; it involved action. He said “We must turn from sin before God turns us from the same” and that repentance was “all on the side of the human.” However, in this very same passage King almost immediately modi¤ed his comment to admit that God was somehow involved in the process of repentance, even though it remained a primarily human act. He was never able to work out the relationship between the human and divine elements of repentance with total precision, but he struggled to get the balance right. He suggested at one point that while “God helps us to repent. . . . [God] does not turn us in this respect Himself alone,” but right away he reversed himself again, saying that individuals needed ¤rst to “change [their] course . . . change the outward,” then God could and would change the inward. One option that King clearly wanted to avoid was ascribing any salvi¤c ef¤cacy to the act of repentance. He even went so far as to say that repentance, understood as the reformation of one’s personal life, was essentially “worthless before God” when it came to the matter of salvation. For King, the bottom line seemed to be that repentance was a necessary step in the process leading to salvation, even though it did not effect salvation itself, and that even though it was to some degree stimulated by God, it was primarily an act of the human will.88 King believed that, in contrast to the humanly oriented act of repentance, conversion proper was “solely an act of God’s mercy.” Human beings were saved by God’s grace, and King was adamant that “the work
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of grace in initial salvation . . . must not be underestimated.” He argued that it was virtually impossible to “magnify the exceeding grace of God through which we have been saved.”89 King understood the act of conversion as a single but multifaceted event. He wrote: “This gracious work of God within us comprehends ¤ve distinct things all related in the work of salvation. These are Pardon, Justi¤cation, Regeneration, Adoption, and Assurance, or witness of Spirit. These are not ¤ve distinct experiences, but are the necessary constituents of the one great experience of salvation from our sins.” While these ¤ve elements of salvation were related, King described their unique characteristics. In pardon, God provided forgiveness of sins. In justi¤cation, God “[pronounced] us free from the condemnation of His law.” In regeneration (which King also referred to as “the birth of the Spirit”), repentant sinners were restored to a state of acceptance from God identical to what they had enjoyed in their earliest years of childhood before they had committed any adult act of “voluntary sin against God.” In adoption, individuals were granted the status of being children of God in a manner identical to the “human sonship” enjoyed by Christ himself.90 Finally, in assurance, the human “spirit [received] the impress of the Holy Spirit and [was] assured of forgiveness and acceptance.” King said that “in every truly converted soul these ¤ve co-related elements exist consciously. They constitute the initial experience of salvation. Though they are distinct in nature, yet are they simultaneous in occurrence. The accomplishment of one necessitates the accomplishment of the whole.”91 Given everything King thought was involved in the experience of conversion, one might assume that the experience itself would have to be almost by de¤nition a dramatic and life-changing event, but that is not what King believed. Indeed, his own conversion had been quite understated, and that fact surely helped shape his views. Regarding his own conversion he wrote: “I had [only] a very light sense of change of heart. He called it “but a bare start” of the Christian life. King admitted that describing his conversion in this way might lead some to question whether he had truly been regenerated, but he believed ¤rmly that he had indeed made a start in the Christian life with this mild conversion, “however dim its ¤rst beginnings.” All of this was in keeping with King’s patient vision of God and God’s ways of dealing with humankind. Spiritual birth, like physical birth, was only the start of one’s journey of faith. Everything did not need to happen at once. Full salvation was not a single event but an extended process that began with conversion and extended literally for all
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eternity. This understanding of conversion was, of course, antithetical to the fast-paced salvation preached by folks such as William Durham.92 In terms of the speci¤c impact of conversion on salvation, King said that initial salvation was God’s remedy for “sins” as distinct from “sin.” This was a fundamental distinction for holiness-pentecostal theology in general. He wrote: “In every unsaved heart sin exists in a twofold manner. There are sins and sin. The former refers to acts, the latter to condition. Sins are actual, sin original. Sin is inherited, sins are committed. The former descends to us by transmission from Adam’s fall, the latter are acts of disobedience against God’s law.” King explained that since the fall of Adam, everyone had been born “with the principle of sin in them,” and eventually that inherited “seed of sin” would lead every individual to commit some intentional act of sin. But he also believed that God held no one guilty as a sinner until that person actually perpetrated a speci¤c act of sin. King was insistent on this point, saying that no one was culpable before God on the basis of Adam’s sin alone. He resolutely rejected the “Calvinian” claim, as he called it, that all of humankind was doomed to hell because Adam’s guilt had been congenitally passed on to all his heirs. Mincing no words, he stated: “The condemnation of Adam’s sin has not been imparted to every one born into the world. . . . No man has to go to hell because of Adam’s transgression.” It was sins that required forgiveness, not sin in general. King argued that every child was born innocent before God and that “if they [died] while in this state of unconditional acceptance, they [would] pass into heaven to enjoy life forever.” It was only after an individual had committed a willful act of sin “somewhere in adult age” that the person fell under God’s wrath. Initial salvation reversed that process and restored the individual to the state of original innocence they had enjoyed as young children.93 King based his notion of childhood innocence on a unique interpretation of the atonement. He began by admitting that in a certain sense Calvinist theologians were right when they asserted that “we all sinned in Adam.” What the Calvinists failed to understand, however, was that God had immediately intervened and applied certain aspects of the remedy of the atonement to humankind as a way of limiting the effects of Adam’s sin. King argued that “the atonement in its virtual institution preceded the sin and fall of man”; it was an already “accomplished fact in the mind of God” before Adam sinned. In essence, God had prepared the atonement long in advance so that it was ready to take effect the moment Adam fell. King explained: “Adam was potentially in the atonement before the
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¤rst sin, and because of this, Adam was prevented from dropping into the abyss of eternal night, the moment he sinned.” And it was not only Adam who was protected in this way. King also believed that all of Adam’s descendants were, just like Adam, “potentially in Christ” even before they were born. As such, they were fully “delivered from the guilt of the ¤rst sin, and its obligatory punishable demerits” until such time as each person individually repeated Adam’s fall.94 King said that because of this universally applied aspect of the atonement, everyone was “born into the world in a state of acceptance with God, through the merits of Christ’s death.” The effects of this natal innocence lingered on for some time after birth, affecting humankind in a number of positive ways. In particular, King believed—or at least he hoped—that the long-term in®uence of the atonement that applied generally to humankind made it possible even for the “heathen” who had never heard of Jesus Christ to ¤nd God and be saved. King argued: The atonement covers all the ground of sin. Millions know nothing of it, historically. Yet everyone is mysteriously touched by the atonement in that aspect of it which is unconditionally applied. There may be those who have the essential Christ that know nothing of the historical Christ. They may have pressed, in heart, up through the mist of heathenism, and prayed to the God that made the heaven and earth, and in this way touched Christ and found peace. We do not know this to be true, but we infer the same from certain statements in the Word. . . . This shows, indirectly, the effect of atonement upon heathen hearts, preventing the absolute erasure of every trace of the divine image from their being, and opening a way whereby truth may ¤nd its way into their conscience and reason.95
Later in his career, King would develop an even more optimistic understanding of the preconversion human condition. Focusing on the notion of the imago dei, King wrote: “Man is a germ of Godhead. He is Deity’s ¤re concentrated to the point of ¤niteness. This spark is organized into intelligence, and endued with personality. Man, generated by In¤nite Deity, bears His likeness.” King refused to believe that humanity was “constitutionally antagonistic to God.” He insisted instead that there was actually “a natural congeniality between the nature of God and the nature of man.” Humankind was, no doubt, capable of terrible acts of sin and evil, but the fact remained that humanity somehow bore God’s image. Human existence was at its deepest, though often-hidden, core fundamentally good.96 While it is clear that King had a very high view of the natural God-
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given attributes of humanity, that lofty anthropology did not translate into any kind of simplistic optimism with regard to the human condition. Instead he used the created grandeur of human nature as a backdrop to highlight the heinousness of sin. The very moment in which individuals committed their ¤rst sin, they became “rebels in God’s sight . . . [and] under condemnation.” And not only that, sin—the actual act of breaking God’s law—fundamentally changed the existential condition of the human person. Like a powerful narcotic, sin was almost immediately addictive. A single act of sin led naturally to another act of sin and then to another and another. The lust to sin became virtually irresistible. King said that if sinners did not “immediately return to God” seeking forgiveness and restoration, they invariable fell into a pattern of behavior that kept them “sinning for years.” This ongoing life of sin allowed the sin principle inherited from Adam to become stronger and stronger, making it harder and harder for that person to repent. King wrote: “Through much sinning the sin principle . . . [grows] rapidly in us in lust and deceit, so that our whole nature is depraved, and sold under sin.” Because this was the normal pattern, children who had just come of age and had not yet had time to fall as deeply into this vicious cycle of sin usually found it easiest to repent.97 Full Salvation: Sancti¤cation While King believed that conversion provided pardon for the sins one had committed and restored the sinner’s good standing with God, he held that conversion by itself had no direct impact on the “principle of sin” which continued to reside in the deep recesses of the human heart. Sancti¤cation was needed to deal with that residual problem of sin. King was very clear regarding this distinction. He wrote: “Original sin is dealt with separately in God’s economy. It is a distinct department of sin, as related to us, and its destruction demands a separate, distinct act on God’s part. It is not removed in regeneration. It remains in us after that grace is received. . . . Its removal is by a distinct act of grace. This is subsequent to regeneration.”98 This is not to say that conversion had no effect whatsoever on the principle of sin embedded in the human heart. King believed that the sin principle was, to some degree, “held in check by the grace of regeneration” so that it no longer fully controlled the sinner’s will. He said that after conversion the “Old Man” could in®uence but “not control us.” Elsewhere he explained: “Sin exists with salvation in the heart, but it cannot reign in the heart in which grace abides.” Still, full salvation required that
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the sin principle be totally eliminated, not merely held in check. It required “the death of the Old Man”—literally the execution of the Old Man in a separate act of grace and cleansing subsequent to regeneration. This twofold pattern of release ¤rst from sins and then from sin itself seemed only logical to King. How could sinners possibly see farther than their own individual sins while they were in a state of unrepentant condemnation? It was only after the guilt of those sins had been removed that they could examine themselves with suf¤cient depth “to see original sin imbedded deep in [their] consciousness” and to begin to desire a full cleansing from that root cause of all speci¤c sins. Inward cleansing necessarily followed outward cleansing. The full salvation one obtained with “the Second Blessing” necessarily followed the initial experience of salvation in conversion.99 While King favored the relatively formal language of systematic theology when discussing conversion (i.e., pardon, justi¤cation, regeneration, etc.), he clearly preferred language that was more metaphorical when discussing sancti¤cation. His writings on this topic thus bear a certain resemblance to the prose of D. Wesley Myland, who was similarly disposed to favor imagistic descriptions of Christian experience over more logical and systematic de¤nitions of Christian faith. Like Myland, King also appealed to multiple images of sancti¤cation instead of focusing on a single analogy or metaphor. King could and did describe sancti¤cation as full cleansing from sin. But sancti¤cation also meant being made perfect in love. It was the death of “the Old Man” (the sin principle). It was complete deliverance from inbred sin. It was the second work of grace. It was the second blessing. King said there were so many ways to discuss the meaning and signi¤cance of sancti¤cation that he would “not con¤ne [himself ] to any single designation of this great work or experience.” What he proposed instead was a wide-ranging examination of biblical passages that lifted up this or that slightly different facet of the sanctifying experience. Like Myland, his goal was not precision of focus but depth of understanding—to provide his readers with layer upon layer of what God’s second great work of grace could mean for them.100 For King, the Bible was literally brimming over with metaphors, symbols, and stories that illustrated and explained the double nature of full salvation. King pointed to the narrative of how Abram was called out twice from his people (¤rst from Ur and later from Haran) as a clear depiction of the need for a second sanctifying “calling out” of the believer subsequent to conversion. He used the story of how God changed Abram’s name to Abraham as an illustration of the fact that “full salvation is an
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enlargement upon [initial] salvation.” He saw the stories of Isaac, Ishmael, Esau, and Jacob as illustrations of the total change of life brought about by sancti¤cation. King also argued that the design and artifacts of the tabernacle were rife with symbolism of the fully redeemed life, and he made similar statements about the Jewish calendar. He interpreted the image of the Sabbatical year, as opposed to the weekly observance of the Sabbath day, as a sign of the “greater, broader, longer rest” that was available in sancti¤cation as opposed to mere regeneration. He saw the double selection process used to form Gideon’s small but dedicated band of warriors as a clear parallel to the double selection process of conversion and sancti¤cation that prepared the believer for spiritual battle. King went on and on. He took virtually every double image that appeared in the Hebrew scriptures as illustrative in some way of the double nature of full salvation, and King mined each for all the typological signi¤cance it could offer.101 King treated the New Testament in a somewhat different manner. While he did at times interpret the New Testament symbolically and/or metaphorically, his more typical approach was analytic and inductive. Thus, when he dealt with the issue of whether the disciples were saved and sancti¤ed before Christ’s death, his answer was based on a thorough examination of all the indirect evidence available in the Gospels (since the New Testament contains no direct accounts of the conversion of any of the disciples). The logical conclusion that he “adduced” from the biblical text was that the disciples had been saved as much as two years before Christ’s death and that they were fully sancti¤ed at the Last Supper. In contrast to King’s hermeneutic of the Old Testament, which stressed the symbolic, his orientation toward the New Testament was typically more literal. The Old Testament provided ¤gurative models of Christian experience; the New Testament supplied straightforward historical precedents.102 Still, King was not opposed to reaching for his symbolic hermeneutical tools from time to time when certain New Testament passages seemed clearly to point beyond the merely historical. This was especially the case with regard to the many stories Jesus told. Christ’s discussion of the vine and the branches found in the ¤fteenth chapter of the Gospel of John is a case in point. King interpreted the planting of the vine to be symbolic of conversion. It was a seedling of faith that had the potential to mature and bear fruit in due time. If left in its natural state, however, the yield would be small at best. To increase production, the farmer had to intervene and cut off all the nonbearing shoots that were sucking strength
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away from the fruit-bearing branches. Pruning was, for King, symbolic of the purging that God performed in the human soul through the second blessing. He wrote: “The fruit of the Spirit is planted in regeneration, and the purging of the believer, as a fruit-bearing branch, is the removal of all that is opposed to this fruit, from the heart, so that more of the Spirit’s fruit may be borne and manifested.” King then went on to restate his conclusions in less symbolic, more systematic language. He wrote: “In every justi¤ed believer there remains the Adamic nature, and he must be cleansed from the same original de¤lement, or sin, in order to bring forth more fruit. He is not fully cleansed at conversion, but is cleansed from his own sins, and is thereby enabled to bear fruit, but not the ‘more fruit’ as God desires. The removal of the Adamic sin puri¤es the heart and ‘more fruit’ appears as a natural consequence.”103 As a theology designed primarily to shore up the faith of pentecostal Christians who were already convinced of the truth of sancti¤cation as a second work of grace, King’s multilayered biblical discussion of the nature of sancti¤cation was undoubtedly an effective approach. This was theology for the pulpit, sermonic prose, intended to inspire readers who for the most part were undoubtedly already in King’s theological camp. But even as he wrote From Passover to Pentecost, King knew that his task necessarily involved criticism of error as well as the rearticulation of truth. In 1913, holiness-pentecostal theology was under attack from a number of sources, and part of what he had to do was root out as thoroughly as possible the theological errors that were creeping into his church. Clearly King was a reluctant critic, but he was up to the task when pushed, and three heresies struck him as particularly dangerous: “Calvinian Theology,” Durhamite ¤nished-work theology, and the altar theology of Phoebe Palmer. When he used the term “Calvinian Theology,” King meant the doctrine that salvation was merely a judicial ruling rather than an existential change of life—that is, that salvation changed one’s legal standing before God without fundamentally altering the life experience of the individual involved. Further, Calvinist theology, at least as King understood it, asserted that it was actually necessary for sin to remain in the Christian because progress in holiness was driven by the consciousness of remaining sin. The awareness that one was still an active sinner was the mechanism Calvinist theologians believed that God used to heighten the contrast between human depravity and divine holiness and to prompt believers to strive ever more fully (but always imperfectly) to conform their lives to
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God’s own standards of holiness. Stating the Calvinist case as best he could, King said that the logic of the position was something like this: “If we feel that we are holy as he is holy, then we no longer seek after him, no longer do we long for conformity to his image and character. If we no longer desire, or seek for such, then humility departs, pride begins to reign, and the result is ruin.” By contrast, the guilt and sense of unworthiness generated by the self-awareness of sin prompted striving toward holiness.104 King would have none of this. He thought Calvinist teaching in this area was as illogical as it was unbiblical. The foundational premise of the Calvinist position was that awareness of sin was the necessary source of the desire to be more fully conformed to God’s character, and King utterly rejected that assertion. Instead, he argued that it was holiness itself, and not sin, that made the heart truly long for more holiness and for closer fellowship with God. He asserted: “The purer we are the clearer our vision of God, and the clearer the vision, the greater the sense of contrast, and the greater the contrast, the more we aspire to be like him.” According to King’s theology, holiness begat holiness. Sin could never be, and had never been, a source of spiritual progress. He said that if, as the Calvinists believed, awareness of perpetual sin was a necessary element for growth in holiness, then the removal of that sin would be a curse. King sarcastically mused: “If sin be a necessity, it is a blessing, and if a blessing, then the only curse is its removal.” But such a notion seemed clearly nonsensical to King. For him, sin was always and only a problem to be overcome; it was never part of the solution. Sin was not a necessary element in the process of growing in holiness; sin was the chief impediment standing in the way of true progress toward holiness.105 In King’s scheme of things, ¤nished-work theology embodied the opposite error of Calvinism. Rather than claiming that sin remained perpetually in the believer from conversion to death, the proponents of ¤nished-work theology claimed that God fully and immediately removed all sin from the believer at the time of conversion. They asserted that when God saved a person, God both fully forgave their sins and fully cleansed them from all taint of original sin. King believed this claim was blatantly false and, once again, his chief evidence was experiential. Even a cursory examination of the lives of ¤nished-work believers would indicate that sin remained in them after conversion. The problem with ¤nished-work theology was that it made it impossible for Christians who were deluded by its claims ever to label the sin that remained in their lives
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by its rightful name. Since they believed themselves free from sin, their imperfect behavior had to be explained in some other way. King said that they would sometimes speak of their sin as “a weakness, an in¤rmity, or an adjunct of the animal nature,” but they refused to call it sin. Because ¤nished-work theology prevented believers from dealing honestly and appropriately with the sin that remained in them after conversion, that sin was allowed to fester and grow and inevitably to break forth into open transgression of God’s law. At the heart of the ¤nished-work error was the inability to make a “distinction between the objective completeness of the atonement on the cross, and its subjective completion in the heart and life of believers.” This error had been in existence long before William Durham introduced it to the pentecostal community, but now that ¤nishedwork theology had “found its way into the ranks of the Pentecostal people,” King said it had to be unmasked as the “damnable heresy” it was. And King had a ®air for making ¤nished-work theology sound worse than bad. He was more than willing to tar it with any words or labels that he thought would warn off the faithful. At one point he called it, not particularly accurately, “Antinomianism, Darbyism dressed up in Zinzendor¤an garb.” What good pentecostal would want to believe that ? King hoped the answer was none.106 The last theological error King felt compelled to address was of a different type. Rather than dealing with broad issues of salvation and holiness, the concern here was more narrow: how best to understand the relationship between sancti¤cation and consecration. King was concerned about the growing number of holiness-pentecostal believers who were being attracted to the altar theology of Phoebe Palmer (though King never mentioned her explicitly by name). Palmer’s theology said that consecration was a condition of sancti¤cation or, as King put it: “that we must, and do, lay ourselves upon the altar with sin in us, in order to have that sin cleansed away.” The basic idea was that the believer had to give his or her entire being over to the service of God before God would cleanse that person from all sin as preparation for that promised life of service. In a certain sense, Palmer’s theology of sancti¤cation was quite similar to King’s theology of conversion. King had said the human act of repentance was the necessary ¤rst step toward regeneration, and Palmer had extended that way of thinking to include the human act of consecration as a necessary ¤rst step toward full cleansing and empowerment for service. But King rejected that logic. He argued that Christians who still harbored sin in their lives were in no position to make any promises to God whatsoever, let alone obtain full cleansing from sin and power for service.
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God’s way of doing things was ¤rst to make individuals holy and then to call and empower them for service.107 King’s argument against Palmerite theology was largely hermeneutical. He suggested that while Palmer’s altar theology was purportedly modeled on the sacri¤cial system of ancient Israel, she had inverted the biblical order of events. According to the Old Testament, the perfection of the animal to be sacri¤ced was a precondition for its acceptance as a valid consecrated gift to God. Nowhere was the act of sacri¤ce itself construed as a means of perfecting or cleansing the animal brought to the altar. King’s position was that the altar did not perfect the sacri¤ce; rather, the “sacri¤ce had to be perfect in order to be offered.” Applying that same principle to the Christian life, King concluded that consecration did not precede, but “[followed] cleansing from all sin in the Biblical order” and that modern-day theologians had “no authority to reverse it.”108 While King’s formal argument against Palmer’s altar theology was based on what he believed was sound biblical exposition, his reading of the biblical text had also obviously been in®uenced by his own personal experience. In the autobiographical appendix to his book, King recounted his own experience of sancti¤cation as follows: An invisible, mighty hand seized hold of me and placed me in the hands of the Eternal Father. It was done as quick as thought, and done before I had time to think. I had nothing to do with it. Every atom of my little being was in the hands of God absolutely and eternally. I examined carefully [to] see if there was anything that was not in His hand, but I found nothing. He had all of me. Did I exercise faith for cleansing? The thought never once entered my mind. I was in a passive mood, and God was the actor on the occasion.109
Re®ecting on this experience later in his life, King said that at the time of his sancti¤cation he “did not know what consecration was, nor how to make it.” If King’s own experience was valid, and he clearly believed it was, then the experience of sancti¤cation did not require a prior act of conscious consecration on the part of the recipient. It was not even necessary for the recipient to be actively seeking a full cleansing from sin. As King said: “It was done as quick as thought, and done before I had time to think. I had nothing to do with it.” Sancti¤cation was a pure act of God’s grace poured out on the believer in God’s way at God’s time. It was to be desired and it was to be expected and in some sense it was to be sought, but ultimately sancti¤cation was a free gift from heaven received according to God’s own schedule. It could not be coaxed out of
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God’s hands by any human act of consecration. Consecration was not a means of preparing oneself for sancti¤cation; instead, consecration was made possible by God’s prior cleansing of sin from the heart.110 The Baptism of the Holy Ghost (and Fire) Sancti¤cation was God’s second great work of grace in the believer’s life, but it did not mark the end of the Christian’s spiritual development. As glorious as sancti¤cation was, it was largely preparatory, paving the way for the even more extraordinary experience of the baptism of the Spirit. The baptism of the Spirit was qualitatively different from the preceding experiences of conversion and sancti¤cation because with this baptism the Spirit of God came literally to dwell within the believer, as opposed to merely acting upon the believer. God’s intermittent external in®uence became God’s permanent, internal, complete presence. Conversion and sancti¤cation were in a certain sense spiritual housecleaning activities for King and other advocates of holiness-pentecostal theology. They were largely “negative” in the sense that they were actions of God’s grace designed primarily to remove what was wrong rather than to add anything new. Conversion followed by sancti¤cation restored the recipient to a relationship with God similar to that of Adam before he sinned. In contrast to mere restoration, the baptism of the Spirit represented a quantum positive leap forward, placing the believer in a position qualitatively superior to anything that Adam ever enjoyed. When God ¤rst placed Adam in the Garden of Eden (King does not talk much at all about Eve), God did so under certain probationary conditions designed to test Adam’s spiritual mettle before bestowing on him all the gifts and abilities God had designed for humankind. King said that had he not fallen, Adam would have been “translated to a higher life” at the end of this “Edenic probation.” But he did fall, and the hope that humanity would be able naturally to enter into that higher life was deferred. King believed that with the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost, God was beginning to reopen the way toward that higher level of existence. The baptism of the Spirit was “something new in the earth.” What happened on the day of Pentecost had no parallel in history: “Nothing like it had ever occurred or been given before.” Conversion and sancti¤cation restored the believer to Edenic innocence; the baptism of the Spirit started the believer on the road to the higher life God had originally intended for all humankind.111 King used a variety of images to describe the baptism of the Holy Ghost (which he sometimes continued to refer to as “the baptism with the
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Holy Ghost and ¤re” following the older terminology of the Fire-Baptized Holiness Church).112 He said that the experience was equivalent to being “¤lled with God’s fulness.” It was being “divinely inhabited.” It was “the Comforter . . . come to abide in me forever.” It was “the glori¤ed Christ . . . returning to earth to live in men.” King believed that prior to the coming of Pentecost, devout believers in God had been able to experience something of God’s power and presence on them and within them from time to time, but the outpouring of God’s Spirit at Pentecost created an entirely new situation. The historic day of Pentecost marked a dramatic watershed in the history of human spirituality, and King believed that the personal experience of Pentecost created a similar watershed in the life of the individual believer. Before the baptism of the Spirit, God’s in®uence on the believer was primarily external and episodic. As a result of the baptism of the Spirit, God’s presence became internal and permanent. The believer experienced an “inward revelation and indwelling” of God. The external anointing of the Spirit gave way to the “¤re of the Trinity within.”113 As this last phrase indicates, King believed that the baptism of the Spirit involved the entire Trinitarian godhead. This was not merely a baptism of the Spirit but a baptism that marked “the actual incoming of the Father, Son and Spirit” into the believer’s life. King said that the “distinctive feature” of the experience was the “revelation of the Trinity in us.” While this Trinitarian theme was mentioned in From Passover to Pentecost, King explained his views in more depth in an article entitled “Fellowship,” which was published in the Pentecostal Holiness Advocate in August 1917. Here he indicated that the experience of Pentecost involved a new and wonderful connection with the entire godhead: The love current, fathomless and limitless in God marks the activities of the Holy Ghost. . . . When the current is made to include us, He proceeds and ®ows through us, establishing the same conditions and producing the same results. Our fellowship is with the Father and the Son, and as adjusted to human conditions, it is the fellowship of the Godhead. . . . The Pentecostal outpouring of the Spirit is the beginning of this in its fullness. It does not accompany previous experiences.114
There is a strong sense in this passage that the baptism of the Spirit not only provided the recipient with unique ¤lling of the Spirit but that somehow the believer was also taken up into the eternal fellowship that de¤ned the inner being of the Trinity. King’s thinking on this point bears a strong resemblance to the Eastern Orthodox understanding of salva-
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tion as “dei¤cation,” even though it is highly unlikely that King himself was directly acquainted with Eastern Orthodox theology. At the very least, King’s understanding of the baptism of the Spirit was bold and innovative. Along with many other early-twentieth-century U.S. pentecostals, King believed that the baptism of the Spirit when it was truly received would be marked by speaking in tongues. Employing a frame of reference somewhat similar to his denominational colleague George Taylor, King understood tongues to be the outward sign of the inward change that took place the moment one was baptized in the Spirit. He wrote: “Its internal aspect would be characterized by revelations of the Godhead in a manner unknown by holy men of past dispensations. . . . The speaking in other tongues is the only outward aspect of Pentecost, the same being given as an evidence of its reception.”115 While the baptism of the Holy Spirit in all its fullness had never been possible before the day of Pentecost, King said that something like a partial baptism of the Spirit had been available to devout believers in God throughout all time. He was not particularly precise in his use of language regarding this partial baptism of the Spirit, but the fact that he would discuss it at all is evidence of his desire to speak as truthfully as possible about the human experience of the Spirit. King was not one to sweep awkward examples of the Spirit’s work under his systematic theological rug. Thus he pointed out that, among others, “Zacharias and Elizabeth, Mary, Simeon and Anna [had] received the baptism of the Spirit in a wonderful manner, but it was not according to the measure of the Spirit’s outpouring after the glori¤cation of the risen Christ.” He said that Jesus himself had “received the baptism of the Spirit up to the highest degree in his day,” but it was not the full pentecostal experience of that baptism.116 After the Spirit had been poured out at Pentecost, the full baptism of the Spirit became available, but many Christians continued to receive only partial or incomplete baptisms of the Spirit. This was King’s own experience. He originally claimed the baptism of the Holy Ghost and ¤re as a result of an experience he had had in 1898—an experience that did not include speaking in tongues. When he looked back on that experience after his pentecostal baptism in the Spirit, he understood that this earlier experience had been incomplete, but he still asserted that he had, in fact, “[received] something from God.” As may be obvious, King believed that these partial baptisms of the Spirit needed to be respected as truly divine in origin. Nonetheless, he also believed they must never be equated with
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the full baptism of the Spirit. The full baptism was always marked by speaking in tongues. The disciples set the standard when they received the Spirit on the day of Pentecost, and “it was accompanied by a sign, the new tongue speaking language unknown to the speaker.” Any Christian who claimed to have received a similarly full baptism of the Spirit needed to reproduce the same sign as part of their experience. The sign of tongues was an essential part of any true and full experience of the baptism of the Spirit.117 King understood the act of speaking in tongues associated with the baptism in the Spirit to be “ecstatic speech,” language that lifted “the person . . . out of himself with great joy.” Of his own experience, he said: “Praises seemed to well up from my inner being in a new manner, and my tongue moved in some way.” The recipient of the baptism spoke in the language of the Holy Spirit—a divine language that was rarely if ever understood by either the speaker or anyone else who was present. While King highly valued this form of ecstatic speech, he believed that glossolalic speech represented only part of the linguistic power that was given to the believer at the time of his or her baptism in the Spirit. The baptism of the Spirit actually provided the recipient with a “twofold witness” of language. King explained: “He, the Spirit, witnesses to Jesus in his own tongue, or language, and He gives to us the power to witness in our own tongue.” The ecstatic and unknown speech of the Spirit was obviously the more dramatic of these two kinds of linguistic witness to the work of the Spirit, but the normal-language gift might ultimately be seen as the more important because it gave the believer new and heightened power to engage in the “¤ery proclamation of the gospel.”118 As was common in the pentecostal movement by the time he wrote, King made a clear distinction between the sign of tongues which indicated that one had truly experienced the baptism of Spirit and the gift of tongues as an ongoing activity within the life of the church. In terms of external characteristics the differences were clear. Tongues as a sign of the baptism of the Spirit were uncontrollable and ecstatic. By contrast, the gift of tongues always left the speaker “having complete control of himself while speaking.” However, it was the underlying purposive differences that really set the two modes of glossolalic speech apart. Tongues as the sign of the baptism of the Spirit was given for the bene¤t of the individual believer; tongues as the gift of the Spirit was given for the uplifting of the congregation as a whole. Because that was the case, the interpretation of tongues was crucial. King wrote: “The gift must always be interpreted.” He said that “when the Spirit bestowed the Gift of Tongues, he also be-
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stowed a corresponding Gift of Interpretation. The one was essential to the other.” To exercise the gift of tongues without the corresponding gift of interpretation was to misconstrue the basic purpose for which the gift was given.119 King did not develop his thoughts on the gift of tongues in relation to prophecy very much in the ¤rst edition of From Passover to Pentecost, but he discussed this theme at length in the second version of the book, which he published in 1934. In this revised and enlarged edition of From Passover to Pentecost, King opined that perhaps tongues had been overemphasized in the pentecostal movement and prophecy had been undervalued. His own corrective was now to suggest that prophecy should be seen as the greater of the two gifts because “it imparts great bene¤ts to the many,” while tongues provided personal edi¤cation for only one individual. He said that tongues were good, but “the good is not to be put in the way of the better or best.”120 King de¤ned “Pentecostal prophecy” broadly to include “all communications and utterances of truth that the Holy Ghost shall make directly and fully through men for edi¤cation, encouragement, and comfort of believers to the measure of the fulness of the times, and for the conviction of the world in respect to sin, righteousness, and judgment.” Two things distinguished pentecostal prophecy from earlier forms of prophecy. The ¤rst was the permanent nature of the prophetic of¤ce. King wrote that in earlier times “there was a power upon him [the prophet] as he spoke . . . but when he ceased to speak the power did not continue with him.” By contrast, the pentecostal prophet was “conscious of an indwelling Divine personality that is permanently residing in his being, and there is no withdrawing of power when the message is delivered.” The second characteristic of pentecostal prophecy was that it was absolutely clear in its meaning. King wrote: “There is a clearness of understanding as to the meaning of the messages given to the Pentecostal prophet that the man of old did not have. His [the pre-Pentecostal prophet’s] words were obscure to his own mind, and he often wondered what was the meaning of that which he had spoken. But the Pentecostal seer has the full assurance of understanding of the signi¤cance of that which he is inspired to utter.” According to King, pentecostal prophecy contained “no obscurity, no vagueness, no ambiguity hidden in their meaning.” All was clear and all was uttered for the uplifting and edi¤cation of the whole community.121 King’s emphasis on the importance of prophecy, combined with his conviction that prophecy was clearly a greater gift than tongues, ulti-
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mately led him to reconsider the nature and function of tongues as a sign of the baptism of the Spirit. In the original edition of From Passover to Pentecost, King had been unequivocal in his insistence that speaking in tongues was a necessary marker of the pentecostal baptism of the Spirit. In the second edition, however, he was less certain that tongues, and tongues alone, indicated that one had received a full baptism of the Spirit. His conclusion was that the gift of prophecy could also be construed as valid proof that the person so gifted had at some point received the fullness of the Spirit. He wrote: “We af¤rm once more that the New Testament prophetic function is a strong evidence of a Pentecostal experience, state, and ministry. The sign of tongues, and the gift of tongues, adduced as an evidence of Pentecost, are not equal to the prophetic function or gift; therefore the latter [the gift of prophecy] is to be accepted as an evidence of Pentecost as much as the former.”122 For King, the baptism of the Spirit was not the end of the Christian life but in a sense its real beginning. He believed that tongues may have been a valid signi¤er of the beginning of that Spirit-¤lled journey of faith, but prophecy better re®ected the progressive nature of that journey. Focusing on the progressive dimension of pentecostal existence, King wrote: “We are ¤lled with God’s fulness in Pentecost, but not all the fulness of God. We are but entering the harvest ¤eld of the full gospel, and it is ours to gather in all the grain, as far as it belongs to this age.” King believed that pentecostal perfection was not instantaneous but was “the result of instruction, discipline, severe testings, [and] sufferings, that cover a long series in life’s pilgrimage.” On that long path toward perfection, the gift of prophecy offered the believer the edi¤cation needed to remain faithful and to ®ourish.123 King believed that while life in the Spirit was joyous in a certain sense, growth in perfection was often a painful process. He stressed that suffering was a necessary ingredient in the kind of spiritual growth that needed to take place after one had received the baptism of the Spirit. King understood the story of Gideon’s army (found in the seventh chapter of the biblical book of Judges)—especially the way Gideon’s soldiers had to smash the pitchers in which they had hidden their torches as part of their ¤nal night assault on the camp of the Midianites—as an especially apt metaphor of the pain involved in spiritual progress. He wrote: The pitchers represent believers “who have this treasure in earthen vessels”[—]the ¤re of Pentecost. They must be broken. This represents deeper cruci¤xion wrought in us after we are baptized with the Holy Ghost and ¤re.
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Persecutions come, sufferings are experienced, sorrows crush us, and we are spiritually smashed. The ordeal is severe, and the process painful, but it is that the ¤re may shine the brighter in us. God must smash and grind to powder those whom he will use to do an extraordinary work. Moses, David, Paul and Wesley illustrate this truth more forcibly. Thousands of other have experienced the deepest sufferings, and become, as a result, the brightest saints.124
Actually, King believed that spiritual progress would continue even after life on earth had ended and that this postmortem process of growth would be more joyous and less painful than the growth in holiness experienced on earth. He provided only a few references to this topic in From Passover to Pentecost, but his later writings supply more details. King said that eternity would be divided into a series of “numberless and endless” epochs and that each of these eras would be “different to some extent from all the others.” He thought that this sequence of differing time periods hinted at a pattern of progress and concluded that this sequence of eras would entail “change, but not decay.” Eternity would involve “change of improvement, or new revelations, of glories, imparting new joys.” These things would take place as the saints themselves “[reached] higher ground ‘in the heavenlies.’” King assured his readers that there would be “no monotony in heaven.” God had great plans for humanity.125 In another context, King actually described the postmortem progress of Christians as a series of new spiritual births akin to the “new birth” experienced in conversion. He said that in the future “all the birth-giving powers of the everlasting Covenant [would be] housed in the New Jerusalem” and would ®ow “out to the sons of men, bringing them into the heavenlies to sit with Jesus (Eph. 2:6). This means more than one birth. It may include multitudes of births into the heavenlies, or the things of the Kingdom.”126 For King, the threefold pattern of spiritual advance in this life (conversion, sancti¤cation, and the baptism of the Spirit) was clearly only the beginning of a much larger process of growth in holiness and growth toward God. At its core, King’s theology was deeply and consistently optimistic. In imagery sometimes akin to that of later-twentieth-century process theologians, King pictured God as luring believers forward into deeper truth, fuller experience, and widening vistas of being.127 He said that the human heart itself witnessed to the need for this expansion of horizons. He wrote: “Time is too narrow and limited to furnish that which our inner being craves, or the opportunity for the full expression of
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our powers as redeemed in Christ.” While theologians such as Parham and Durham looked for a dramatic apocalyptic crisis to unleash the full powers of the Spirit-¤lled community, King viewed the fullness of pentecostal experience in a longer and less cataclysmic perspective. As a result, his theology has an air of graciousness and patience that sets it apart from many other early pentecostal writings.128
4 Oneness Options
鵷鵸 The emergence of Oneness pentecostalism is usually associated with the camp-meeting held at Arroyo Seco (in the Los Angeles area) during the spring of 1913. There is evidence that Oneness views had been circulating in certain parts of the pentecostal movement before that time, however, so it is perhaps best to view the Arroyo Seco meeting as the place where pentecostals who were already predisposed in this direction were ¤rst able to solidify their views and connect with other like-minded believers. The Arroyo Seco revival clearly helped pave the way for Oneness pentecostalism to coalesce into a visible theological movement. The Arroyo Seco gathering was held at a time when concern about theological and organizational divisions within the pentecostal movement was on the rise. Maria Woodworth-Etter, who was the main speaker at the event, was especially troubled by this growing differentiation of pentecostal views. A year earlier, she and Fred Francis Bosworth had overseen an extended pentecostal crusade in Dallas designed largely to bridge the holiness–¤nished-work divide that had opened up in the wake of William Durham’s ministry. Her message in Dallas had been twofold. First, she said that pentecostal believers needed to discover or create new bonds of love that could unite believers across the growing differences of doctrine that were pulsing through the movement. Second, she advised all pentecostal believers to seek more of Jesus. This second word of advice would ultimately prove more signi¤cant than her call for unity. Her call to seek more of Jesus led to a growing expectation that God would soon reveal something new about Jesus, and it was that expectation that set the context in which Oneness pentecostalism would leap into existence as a new movement. From the moment the Arroyo Seco meeting began, a sense of anticipation hung in the air. Everyone seemed to be waiting for something to happen. While Woodworth-Etter continued to hammer away at the theme
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of unity, it was the message of Robert MacAlister that most shocked the crowd. His main point was that water baptism should be performed in the name of Jesus alone and not in the Trinitarian names of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The morning after MacAlister’s talk, another minister, John G. Sheppe, went running through the camp shouting that the instruction to baptize believers in Jesus’s name was the new revelation for which people had been hoping. The meeting as a whole was not quite sure what to make of all this, but a small coterie of pentecostal leaders was convinced that the new message of baptism in Jesus’s name signaled a critical turning point in the history of the movement. They left the meeting determined to spread the new message of Jesus-only pentecostal faith across the country, hoping to unite pentecostals under this new banner. Far from uniting the pentecostals, however, the new teaching—often called the “New Issue”—quickly became a catalyst promoting further theological diversi¤cation within the movement. Re®ection on the signi¤cance of baptism in Jesus’s name prompted a rethinking of the basic nature of God. As a result, many Jesus-only pentecostals slowly morphed into Oneness pentecostals who championed a unitary theology of the godhead. Within those new Oneness circles, the relationship between salvation, sancti¤cation, and the baptism of the Spirit was also being rethought. In the end, most Oneness pentecostals would theologically collapse these three activities into one another, assuming that a person should be saved, sancti¤ed, and baptized in the Spirit all at the same time in the single experience of “the birth of the Spirit.” Ideally this would take place in the context of water baptism, where the individual would descend into the water as a sinner seeking grace and emerge from the water speaking in tongues as a fully saved, sancti¤ed, and Spirit-¤lled saint. As a movement, Oneness pentecostalism drew virtually all its followers from the ¤nished-work sector of the pentecostal movement. By 1916, tensions between Trinitarian and Oneness proponents had reached a boiling point. Theological differences were becoming too blatant to ignore and too intense to allow either side to compromise. The Trinitarian leaders of the Assemblies of God, the largest ¤nished-work organization, decided they had to act. They drew up a Statement of Fundamental Truths that strongly af¤rmed a traditional Trinitarian understanding of the godhead and essentially disallowed all Oneness views. When that document was presented to the church clergy, more than a quarter of the pastors who had previously been involved in the Assemblies of God left the organization to create their own Oneness pentecostal churches. The ¤rst attempt on the part of Oneness pentecostals to organize
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themselves into a denomination took the form of the General Assembly of Apostolic Assemblies, created in January 1917. That particular organization never really got off the ground, however, and in 1918 Gar¤eld T. Haywood brokered a deal that would allow the faltering General Assembly to be subsumed into the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World (PAW ), which had been founded by J. J. Frazee in 1907 and was headquartered in Portland, Oregon. Haywood would himself soon rise to leadership in the PAW and, as an African American, he struggled to maintain the multiracial character of the newly enlarged denomination. Nonetheless, an exodus of white members in 1924 transformed the PAW into a primarily African-American church. Several different predominantly white Oneness denominations emerged in the mid-1920s and, through a series of complicated mergers (including a partly successful attempt to reunite with the PAW ), these churches eventually joined forces to create the United Pentecostal Church in 1945. Perhaps the most prominent early Oneness pentecostal spokesperson was Frank J. Ewart. Ewart had been at the Arroyo Seco meeting and had been deeply affected by the suggestion that baptism should be performed only in Jesus’s name. Wanting to settle the matter in his own mind, he studied the issue for a year before deciding that the Jesus-only formula was to be preferred. As a convinced Oneness believer, he became an indefatigable proponent of the movement. His journal, Meat in Due Season, soon became the most important vehicle of publication for spreading the message. Ewart wrote a wide variety of short articles for his journal, but he never developed his thoughts into any kind of sustained and systematic book-length discussion of Oneness theology until the mid-1930s. At that point he produced a number of volumes that explained Oneness theology in some detail—including The Name and the Book (1936), Jesus: The Man and the Mystery (1941), The Revelation of Jesus Christ (mid-1940s), and The Phenomenon of Pentecost (1947)—but the dates of these works place them outside the era of ¤rst-generation pentecostal theological re®ection. Within the time frame of the ¤rst generation itself, Gar¤eld T. Haywood and Andrew David Urshan stand out as the two most proli¤c and articulate theologians of the movement, and this chapter will focus on them and their writings. Haywood was a multitalented church administrator, a popular songwriter (whose musical compositions were enjoyed by Oneness and Trinitarian pentecostals alike), and a thinker of wide and varied interests. His theological writings covered a broader range of religious subject matter than any other pentecostal theologian of the era. Haywood was also an
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inductive theologian, willing to ¤ll in the gaps between the various bits of information about God and the world that were available in the Bible in ways that other pentecostals would not—a trait that made his publications somewhat more speculative and creative than others. Andrew Urshan was, by contrast, a predominantly practical and pastoral theologian. His focus was on theology in relation to spirituality—a theology of lived experience—and because of that, even his most abstract musings were usually grounded in concerns of existential faith. Although he dealt with a more narrow swath of theology than Haywood, Urshan tended to be broader in spirit. He was instinctively more ecumenical than Haywood and less prone to draw theological lines of division in the stillforming pentecostal movement. This disposition made him a somewhat reluctant champion of the Oneness cause. It was only when his Trinitarian friends forced him to choose sides that he ¤nally cast his lot fully with the Oneness party. Even after that point, however, Urshan was never a totally party-line thinker, and in many ways he continued to try to walk a ¤ne theological line between extreme Oneness and what he considered to be mistaken Trinitarian views of God. Examined together, the theologies of Haywood and Urshan remind us that signi¤cant diversity existed within the Oneness camp of the early pentecostal movement. While these two men would have agreed on many of the basic principles of Oneness faith, their writings re®ect different dispositions of faith and different styles of theological re®ection. Gar¤eld Thomas Haywood’s Speculative Theology G. T. Haywood’s publications contain the most wide-ranging theological vision produced by any ¤rst-generation pentecostal leader from either the Trinitarian or Oneness wings of the movement. His ruminations included, among other things, signi¤cant discussions of the character of the godhead, the person and work of Jesus, the nature of creation, and the long trajectory of salvation history. While Haywood put great stock in direct revelation from God—he said that many of his insights had been directly revealed to him by the inner teaching of the Holy Spirit—Haywood also put more trust in scienti¤c insight than any other early pentecostal thinker. Haywood was instinctively systematic in his approach to theology; he was not content to leave bits and pieces of scienti¤c truth and theological insight lying around unconnected to each other. Instead, he wanted to connect those dots of knowledge to see what larger patterns of truth might emerge. That kind of inductive expansion of theological truth—
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which is something every systematic theologian does—necessarily involves a certain degree of reasonable speculation. Haywood would undoubtedly never have used that word to describe his own theology, but there was nonetheless more than a bit of spiritual-theological creativity present in his many published works. Spiritual Biography and Key Theological Themes We do not know many facts about Haywood’s life. Unlike many other early pentecostal theologians, he rarely waxed autobiographical in his published works. We know that he spent the great majority of his life in one city, Indianapolis, where he moved with his family at the age of three. He came from a middle-class home where his mother was a teacher and his father a foundry worker. During his high school years, Haywood added to the family income by holding down a job as a cartoonist for the two African-American weekly papers that were published in his city. In 1902, at the age of twenty-two, he married Ida Howard from Owensboro, Kentucky. The couple had one child, a daughter named Fannie Ann. Haywood’s family was devoutly Christian, and during his childhood years he was apparently exposed to both the Baptist and Methodist versions of black church life, but unfortunately we know little of his early impressions of faith. Whatever the previous state of his Christian faith, it seems that Haywood’s religious life was dramatically changed in the years 1907–1908 under the ministries of Glenn Cook and Henry Prentiss, though the precise details are unclear. We know Glenn Cook was active in Indianapolis as early as 1907 as a pentecostal revivalist. Haywood may or may not have received his own pentecostal experience under Cook’s ministry. In any event, it seems that Henry Prentiss, who arrived in Indianapolis in 1908, was an equal or greater pentecostal in®uence in Haywood’s life. Prentiss had been present at the Azusa revival and had then been involved in a pentecostal ministry in Whittier, California. His work in Indianapolis was directed speci¤cally toward the African-American community, and Haywood became involved in the congregation Prentiss founded. Haywood’s skills as a leader must have become obvious fairly quickly. When Prentiss left Indianapolis in 1909, Haywood assumed the pastorate of the congregation. Haywood was unordained at the time; to remedy that situation, he sought and received of¤cial ministerial credentials from the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World. He retained membership in that denomination from 1911 until his death in 1931, and he held various
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leadership roles in the church. Despite that institutional commitment, Haywood mingled freely with persons from other pentecostal churches and organizations, especially in the 1910s when pentecostal institutional boundaries were still relatively ®uid. Most notably, he was a signi¤cant presence at several of the early organizational meetings of the Assemblies of God. A key turning point in Haywood’s pentecostal faith came in 1915, when Glenn Cook returned to Indianapolis preaching the freshly formulated Jesus-only version of pentecostal faith. Cook was closely connected to Frank Ewart—in fact, Cook and Ewart had rebaptized each other in Jesus’s name the previous year—and the two men were quickly becoming the most well-known proponents of the movement. Haywood was thus getting the new message directly from the main source. When Cook told him about the new teaching, Haywood responded positively and almost immediately asked to be rebaptized in Jesus’s name. Soon Haywood’s entire congregation of over 450 members followed suit. The Oneness movement had established an important beachhead in Indiana and had recruited one of the movement’s most articulate future spokespersons. At this time Oneness pentecostal theology was not well de¤ned. The movement was just beginning and was groping its way toward an understanding of the larger theological implications that might be implied by the new baptismal practice. Of the many persons involved in the work of clarifying Oneness beliefs, Haywood was to become the widest ranging in his theological re®ections. He published numerous books and booklets that sought to spell out the details of Oneness theology and to discern how the many new truths God seemed to be revealing might be related to older conceptions of Christian faith and life. Much of the material in these books came from articles previously printed in Haywood’s journal The Voice in the Wilderness. Only a few of his books are dated, so it is dif¤cult to place them in precise chronological sequence. The following exposition of Haywood’s theology represents a panoptic summary of his ideas rather than a developmental analysis of his thinking. Haywood’s theological re®ections can be divided into three large thematic areas—themes that he tended to develop more or less separately in his different books. Haywood’s ¤rst broad concern focused on the nature of God and God’s saving presence in the world. Two speci¤c items were of crucial importance: (1) the unitary nature of the godhead; and (2) the relationship between the human and divine dimensions of the historical Christ. These topics were best developed in his books Divine Names and Titles of Jehovah and The Victim of the Flaming Sword. Haywood’s second
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general theme focused on the nature of humanity and the drama of humanity’s fall, redemption, and future judgment. This material was developed most fully in The Birth of the Spirit in the Days of the Apostles and The Finest of the Wheat. His third extended theme was the overall history of the world, including the creation of the earth and the stages of earth’s prehistoric, historic, and future development. Haywood’s longest book, Before the Foundation of the World: A Revelation of the Ages (1923), is the text in which this subject is most comprehensively explained. Truth, Revelation, and Tradition If we could narrow Haywood’s life vocation down to one short phrase, it would be “communicating truth.” As a theologian, Haywood was certainly not unique in this concern—most theologians see themselves as purveyors of truth—but Haywood brought a higher level of intensity to his work than most. He never tired of saying that “what men need today is truth. Ye shall know the Truth and the Truth shall make you free. Let no one disregard these things but consider them in the fear of God.” Pentecostal people might have needed to be inspired, edi¤ed, and encouraged in a general spiritual sort of way—and Haywood helped meet that need through the various hymns he composed—but the driving force of his life and ministry was his concern that truth be communicated. Pentecostals needed to learn how to think clearly and correctly about their faith. This is not to imply that Haywood thought that knowledge by itself was suf¤cient. He said quite bluntly that “knowledge of books does not help a man who has not God. . . . You cannot save a man by encyclopedia and dictionary and by knowing how to count the stars and all that.” Elsewhere he added “I do not care in the least about intelligence if it does not assist me to ¤nd more of God.” But Haywood still believed that clear thinking—logical and systematic theological re®ection on faith—was a necessary and indispensable part of the pentecostal experience. The two went hand in hand. He wrote: “The need of the hour is the unfolding of the truths of God unto his people.”1 Within U.S. pentecostal circles, however, truth was becoming a matter of debate and contention. At the time when Haywood wrote, competing claims regarding newly revealed truths were producing tensions all across the movement. Diversity had been present within pentecostalism from the beginning of the movement, but the crystallization of several relatively distinct pentecostal theological schools of thought in the 1910s had made that diversity more palpable and had forced the lines of difference to be de¤ned more clearly and formally. Like many other pente-
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costals of the time, Haywood tended to portray these developments in rather dismal terms. Hardening lines of diversity signaled failure within the pentecostal movement. The fear was that if pentecostals could not stay united, God would reject the movement and simply start over again with somebody else. Haywood wrote: “If one man or one people fails God, He will take up another and move on. . . . If any people start out with the power of God in their midst and become full of pride and lose their spirituality, God will put them aside and take up another. And if the latter fails, he will set them aside and take up still another.”2 The Hebrew prophet had warned Israel over and over again to be faithful or be cast aside. Heywood thought that such warnings applied to the church as well, especially to movements of renewal such as pentecostalism. Haywood was disappointed by what was happening, but he was not surprised by it. Haywood believed that the Holy Spirit had been predicting the disintegration and division of the pentecostal movement almost from the very beginning of the revival at the Azusa Mission. People speaking in the Spirit had predicted a coming crisis, and by the late 1910s Haywood was identifying that crisis as the failure of the pentecostal majority to move forward into the newly revealed Jesus-only version of pentecostal faith and practice.3 He described the situation as follows: Some have stumbled and fell; and others have been snared and taken; while others through fear have failed to go on with God. Yet there are a few who are contending for the faith that was once delivered unto the saints. Multitudes, multitudes, are in the valley of decision! . . . Had we maintained an “ear to hear what the Spirit saith,” and walked in the ways of the Lord, what wonder might our God have performed; and what a sweeping victory would have been wrought in “subduing” our enemies! Failing to understand God’s ways and purpose many have cleaved to the traditions of the past, and like the golden wedge, the shekel of silver and the Babylonish [sic] garment ( Joshua 7: 10–21), they have caused internal con®icts amid God’s people, and our enemies have smitten us on every side.4
While Haywood believed that many pentecostal people, and perhaps the whole movement, stood on the brink of being rejected by God, he believed that disaster could be avoided if drastic action was taken quickly: “Our only hope of victory is the destruction of Achan (troubler) and his forbidden treasures (traditions). . . . Every vine that our heavenly father hath not planted must be rooted up. Achan must be stoned.” For Haywood, “Achan”—the symbol of the pernicious in®uence of tradition— was the root cause of almost every pentecostal theological problem, and
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its removal was required if advance was to take place. People resisted new truths because they were intent on defending their old traditions—they were, in essence, addicted to their traditions, willing to cling to them at all cost, even “at the expense of the WORD of GOD” itself.5 Haywood said that he could understand to some degree how this backward-looking dynamic could have come to dominate non-pentecostal churches. After all, those people had only their “natural minds” to fall back on. But he was thoroughly befuddled by the fact that some pentecostal Christians who had, from all appearances, truly understood the new spiritual logic of Pentecost could themselves suddenly turn tail and run back to tradition. How could this be? How could people who had experienced the pentecostal baptism of the Spirit turn away from God’s unfolding revelation and wrap themselves in the ideas and theology of the past once more? It did not make sense, but Haywood knew that there were many pentecostal believers who had been “cleansed and ¤lled with the Spirit” and who had then failed to go on into the full revelation of pentecostal truth. Somehow these people had not properly gotten “God’s truth hidden, or engraved in their hearts.”6 Haywood thought that lack of good teaching was the basic problem, though in some cases the issue was lack of any teaching at all. Some pentecostal believers were being led astray by “men of corrupt minds” who were wandering through the movement spreading their own “divers and strange doctrines.” Other pentecostals were, knowingly or unknowingly, seeking instruction from teachers who were not themselves Spirit-¤lled believers, and this was guaranteed to result in error. He explained: “A natural man, without the Holy Ghost, cannot teach the mind of Christ— the mind the saints of God possess. No natural man can successfully teach Spirit-¤lled people. He will so confuse them and mix them all up, that they will not know where they stand.” Behind all these particular causes of error, however, Haywood thought he saw a deeper historical pattern that eased his concerns to some degree. His said that counterfeit faith had often ®ourished during periods of expanding truth, and he believed that that pattern was simply repeating itself in his own day. He wrote that whenever “the truth is lifted up in the eyes of the people by the mighty power of God, then the false clinging on its tail, is lifted up for a season.” He was certain, however, that ultimately “the truth shall always prevail.” Haywood saw his own calling as one of providing the pentecostal community with “wholesome instructions in the word of God” which was the only effective antidote for error. Pentecostals “[needed] the TRUTH, and
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not tradition!” Haywood’s calling was to preach that truth in any and every way he could.7 Haywood believed that the theological problems of his own day were part of a much longer history of warfare between truth and tradition in the church. Using the New Testament parable of the wheat and the tares as a key for understanding that bellicose history, Haywood argued that the tares of tradition had ¤rst appeared within the Christian community shortly after the apostles died. By the third century, tradition had come to dominate the Church’s thinking, and the result was that “the Church went into the most miserable darkness that ever came upon any people”— 1,000 years of error led by “papal Rome.” Eventually, however, the tide began to turn. Haywood said that truth began its own offensive against tradition. The Protestant reformers of the sixteenth century launched the ¤rst wave of what would become a centuries-long struggle to dismantle “Romanish” tradition and to reclaim lost truth, and that battle was still raging in his own day. He wrote: “From the beginning of the Reformation even down to the days in which we now live, the cry of the hearts of the people of God has been incessantly, ‘Back to Pentecost.’”8 Haywood noted that in this battle, opposition had often come from an unsuspected and ironic source: other seemingly serious and devout Christians. He noted: “Every advance truth that forged its way to the front, throwing light on the ‘path of the just,’ has always met with a storm of opposition from those who are supposed to be seeking for a closer walk with God.” In his own day, Haywood believed that this pattern of religiously grounded resistance to new revelation perfectly described the manner in which the holiness movement had sought to hold the new pentecostal message at bay. Using the image of separating wheat from chaff, Haywood wrote: “The old method of getting the chaff from the wheat was by beating or ‘frailing’ [sic] it, and that which was closest to the grain was the hardest to beat off; and so it is today, the doctrines of the second de¤nite work of grace (subsequent to conversion) modern holiness teachings, and traditions of men, are the most stubborn foes of the ‘baptism of the Holy Ghost’ and the deeper reveled truths of today.”9 Haywood also believed that in the early twentieth century, a whole new coterie of adversaries was appearing on the stage. He included “skeptics, in¤dels . . . and higher critics of the Bible” in this group which he thought was committed to replacing the wisdom of God with the wisdom of their own human thoughts. He was quite certain that the arrogant claims of these people he took to be intentionally irreligious would soon
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be squashed. God’s patience was nearing its end. He wrote: “Human wisdom has almost reached its length. Now is the time for God to begin to display His wisdom upon His people and destroy the wisdom of the wise and bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent of this world.”10 At times, Haywood also included scientists on his list of modern humanistic adversaries of divine truth, but he was always somewhat more nuanced in his discussions of science than he was when commenting on outright skepticism or higher biblical criticism. Haywood believed that the natural order could reveal divine truth. He sometimes used natural revelation to defend his own theological assertions; at one point he even went so far as to say that “to ignore natural things in our search for spiritual or heavenly things” was one of the “gross [errors] on the part of the ministry today.” Haywood also believed that contemporary scienti¤c research was “revealing to the world things that [had] been hidden for thousands of years.” Haywood noted that many scientists, even those who were not believers, were sometimes moved to almost religious ecstasy by the beauty they observed in nature. In Haywood’s opinion, science naturally led to awe, not skepticism. This positive evaluation of science did not blind Haywood to the fact that some modern scientists held views that were quite critical of religious faith, but he believed that “true science and the word of God” would always be “in perfect harmony.”11 While Haywood could appreciate the rigors of well-done scienti¤c inquiry, his own preferred method of theological investigation was rather more simple and straightforward. He believed that virtually everything humanity needed to know about God, the world, and salvation was available by direct revelation from God. He explained: “For that cause, [God] has given to us the Holy Spirit that He might teach us all things, guide us unto all truth, take of His things and show them to us—search out the deep things of God—and show us things to come.” Haywood believed that this kind of illumination from the Holy Spirit was part and parcel of what Christians obtained as a result of baptism in the name of Jesus. He explained that just as the Spirit of God had “brooded upon the waters and brought forth order out of chaos” at the time of creation, so the Spirit today continued to “brood over the baptismal water to bring to light the hidden things of God.” When the believer came up out of the baptismal water, he or she emerged with the revelatory power of the Spirit residing within them. Endowed in this way, the pentecostal believer was newly able to understand “the secrets that had been hidden for ages in embryonic manner, awaiting the days when the Holy Spirit should be poured out upon His people to make these things fully known.”12
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While Haywood’s notion of revelation was broad, it was also clearly tethered to the biblical text; the Spirit did not operate in a vacuum. The primary function of the revelatory work of the Spirit was to provide pentecostal believers with the interpretive keys they needed to uncover the secret truths God had hidden away here and there within the biblical text. That is to say, revelation did not typically provide the believer with totally new truth that had nothing to do with scripture; instead, the Spirit allowed new light to shine out of the sometimes obscure language of scripture. One of the chief mechanisms for doing this was the symbolic or typological interpretation of the Bible, especially the Old Testament. Haywood believed that many of the Old Testament’s “mysterious feasts, ceremonies, days, months, years and jubilees of Israel” contained secret knowledge that had been “hidden from the eyes and understanding of the natural man.” The Spirit made those secrets known. Haywood thought that the help of the Spirit was also frequently needed to understand the meaning of various New Testament passages, though overall he seems to have thought that the New Testament was relatively more straightforward in meaning than the Old. In sum, Haywood’s theology of revelation was almost always linked to the biblical text. The Spirit helped believers cut through older mistaken views that “applied [the Bible] in the wrong direction” and gave them the insights they needed to get the meaning right. And once the true message of the Bible had been uncovered, the believer’s task was to “cleave to the Word of God . . . [and not] be afraid to declare what the Lord has revealed to us on this matter.”13 The Nature of the Godhead Haywood began his re®ections on the nature of the godhead by explicitly rejecting the doctrine of God as Trinity, which had been held in common by the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches (and later most Protestant churches) for over 1,500 years. He thought that classic Trinitarianism was just one more part of a long tradition of error that had misled Christian thinking for centuries. Haywood argued that “our traditional theology has gotten this truth badly confused” and he declared that the real fact was “that there is but one Holy, Eternal Spirit of God.” Haywood did not believe in the Trinity; he believed in a “One Person God.”14 Despite the stridency of his Oneness views, Haywood was not a proponent of simplistic monotheism. His theology actually allowed for a signi¤cant degree of complexity within the godhead. He pointed out, for example, that one of the names of God used in the Hebrew Scriptures, Elohim, is a plural noun and should be understood as a symbol of the
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plurality of the attributes that de¤ne the complex character of God. Elsewhere Haywood spoke of the “seven Spirits of God” mentioned in the book of Revelation, saying that such imagery pointed toward “the Holy Ghost in His sevenfold operation as light-and-life Giver.” Perhaps more signi¤cant, Haywood was also willing to admit that a certain sense of threeness—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—was part of the Christian revelation. None of that, however, caused him to reconsider his own stress on the fundamental unity of the Divine Being. He wrote: “There is but one God and He has been manifested in a three-fold manner. And this threefold manifestation was not intended to establish a ‘three person’ God idea, but instead, it was to reveal to mankind that there was a true and living God who loved them with an everlasting love.” Elsewhere Haywood explained: “The Christian churches have taught that there are three ‘persons’ in the Godhead, drawing their conclusion from the mysterious expression ‘Father, Son and Holy Ghost.’ The term ‘three persons’ is erroneous, and unscriptural. The personal, visible form of God was Jesus Christ, and today the Christ with us and in us is ‘that Holy Spirit.’ These three are one, and not three.” In this passage and others, Haywood seemed willing to admit that while it might be valid to speak of God in terms of an “economic Trinity” (God’s threefold manner of relating to the world as creator, redeemer, and sustainer), any notion of God as an “essential Trinity” (God as ontologically tripartite in identity) was to be rejected.15 To a certain degree, Haywood’s re®ections on the nature of the godhead ran parallel to his understanding of progressive revelation. He believed that during the long span of human history God had slowly revealed more and more truth to humanity concerning the divine being. Divine truth came into the world bit by bit, and in that incremental process of revelation each new bit of truth demanded a rethinking of previously revealed truths. In Divine Names and Titles of Jehovah, Haywood likened this slow process of revelation to the opening of a ®ower bud— and Haywood suggested that just as that botanical process could not be rushed, the slow revelation of God’s glory and being could not be rushed either. He wrote: “The Mystery of Revelations is [like] unto the blossoming of a rose. While a rose is con¤ned in the bud, every petal is perfect; but though we try ever so earnestly to pick it open before its time, we are forced to admit that all our efforts are in vain. And the ¤nal result is that the petals are torn and the rose as a whole is marred beyond recognition. But if we leave it until its appointed time it will gently unfold itself in all its beauty, every petal in its place and the air will be ¤lled with its fragrance.”16
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Haywood believed that in the course of church history, theologian after theologian had tried to pick apart the mystery of the godhead before God was ready to reveal that mystery. Those theologians had used various theories and philosophies to try to pry apart the unopened petals of divine truth and see what was inside, but all they had when they were done was marred and damaged pieces of the divine mystery. Assembling these pieces as best they could, some theologians came to the strange conclusion that God was three in one. Others simply threw up their hands and “[uttered] with a gasp of dismay, ‘Things too wonderful for me; it is a MYSTERY.’” But now that the “fulness of times” had come, Haywood said: “The Rose of Sharon has gently unfolded, and we are beginning to see the ‘King in His Beauty.’ What a fragrance ¤lls the air! JESUS, JESUS, BLESSED JESUS! The mystery of the FATHER, SON and HOLY GHOST is fully comprehended in Christ Jesus.”17 Haywood believed that in times past, God had used a variety of names, appearances, and manifestations to communicate different aspects of the divine nature. In Divine Names and Titles of Jehovah, he focused on the imagery of God that was used in ancient Israel, paying special attention to the ten “Jehovah Titles” found in the Hebrew Scriptures. Each of these titles highlighted a different character trait of God. Thus, for example, the name Jehovah-Jireh pointed to the fact that Jehovah was a God who provides; Jehovah-Ropheka portrayed God as one who heals; Jehovah-Shalom indicated that God sends peace; Jehovah-Roi lifted up the image of God as a shepherd. Were these ten names of God meant to signal that God was somehow ten persons in one? Of course not. According to Haywood, each of these names merely “[signi¤ed] a different relationship of the great Divine to mankind.” For Haywood, the piecemeal fashion of God’s self-revelation to the ancient Hebrew people represented something like a connect-the-dots picture with each dot representing a different facet of God’s overall character and personality. Each dot pointed beyond itself to a greater whole of which it was only one part; each pointed to a “secret name” above all the other revealed titles and of¤ces of God, which communicated the full character of God’s being.18 It was precisely that name that had been revealed in Jesus. As Haywood put it, “the Almighty’s new name is JESUS.” The revelation of Jesus transcended all other events where God had “appeared . . . in various forms, and spake unto the fathers by the prophets in divers manners.” In Jesus, God had ¤nally allowed the divine unity to be fully revealed and the divine name to be identi¤ed without ambiguity. Haywood argued that “all the titles that Jehovah ever bore are comprehended in this one
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name JESUS.” The name “Jesus” included and transcended every other name or characteristic of God revealed in the Hebrew Scriptures. He said: “The name of Jesus bears in it all that God’s other name ever bore. Jesus is Elohim, the creator (Col. 1:16), Jehovah and Shaddai (Rev. 1:8), Elyon, the Most High ( John 3:31; Eph. 4:6), in fact, all the attributes of God as are revealed by His names are all found in Jesus.” Haywood claimed: “As Father, He was the Creator, Begetter of all things. . . . As Son, He was our example in the days of His ®esh, from His baptism in the Jordan up to His ascension on the resurrection morning. . . . As Holy Ghost He comes within and abides forever.” Summing up his view in a sentence, Haywood announced, “The name of our God is JESUS.”19 A key element in the development of Haywood’s Oneness view of the godhead was a desire to protect and defend the full divinity of Jesus in as strong a manner as possible. In an age when he thought skepticism and doubt were on the rise, Haywood wanted to make it impossible for anyone to question the divinity of Christ. Jesus was not only the Son of God; Jesus was God in all God’s fullness. As Haywood put it: “Jesus and God are one and inseparable” and “Jesus is the Father as well as the Son.” He added: “That Jesus Christ is the son of God, is acknowledged by all Christendom, and we believe that with all our heart. There is no argument there at all. But the thing that sets the religious world in a commotion is this revelation that Jesus Christ is God, the only true God that we can ever see.” At one point, Haywood even went so far as to say: “The Fatherhood of God is found only in the Son, who was God manifested in the ®esh.”20 Haywood’s concerns about the oneness of the godhead were developed to some degree in opposition to certain tritheistic interpretations of the Trinity that had begun to appear within some sectors of the pentecostal movement. Haywood liked to point to a nameless “man in Chicago” who was “reported to have said that he could tell when the Spirit of the Father spoke through him, and when the Son spake, and when the Holy Spirit spake.” Haywood described these claims as “very erroneous” and went on to demonstrate from Scripture that whenever the Father, Son, or Holy Spirit spoke to a person it was always with the singular voice of the one God. God was not divided in speech any more than God was divided in being. Of course, most traditional Trinitarian theologians would have agreed with Haywood on this point. In traditional Trinitarian theology, the actions of each person within the Trinity are understood to interpenetrate the other persons so that when any one of the divine persons performs an action, all of the divine persons necessarily act together. This is
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the doctrine of perichoresis. Haywood wanted to take things a step farther, however. He argued that whenever God acted in the world, regardless of the speci¤c divine manifestation through which this occurred, it was the single uni¤ed godhead that was present in that action. In Haywood’s mind, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were not all co-equally and cooperatively God, as classic Trinitarian theology af¤rmed; they were identically God—different appearances of “the Self-same Spirit.”21 It is important to point out that Haywood was not alone in his criticisms of classic Trinitarian theology. During the last two centuries a number of mainstream theologians have questioned the usefulness, accuracy, and even the basic comprehensibility of the doctrine of the Trinity. Summarizing this discussion, church historian Cyril Richardson said that many modern Christians have found the doctrine of the Trinity arti¤cial, confusing, and ambiguous. Speaking for himself, he explained: “My conclusion . . . is that it is an arti¤cial construct. It tries to relate different problems and to ¤t them together into an arbitrary and traditional threeness. It produces confusion rather than clari¤cation; and while the problems with which it deals are real ones, the solutions offered are not illuminating.” On a more popular level, British literary ¤gure Dorothy Sayers made the same point, saying that for most ordinary laypeople “the Father is incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, and the whole thing incomprehensible. It’s something put in by theologians to make it more dif¤cult—it’s got nothing to do with daily life or ethics.” Other modern theologians have pushed the discussion in a different direction, stressing with renewed vigor the threeness of the divine being. Some such theologians, especially the advocates of a position known as the social Trinity, have sometimes used language that almost sounds like tritheism, describing God as a community of love—three separate divine persons bound together only by mutual love for each other.22 The point is that Haywood’s speculations regarding the ontological character of the godhead—along with Oneness theology in general—¤t within this larger pattern of modern reaction against and reformulation of the classic Christian doctrine of the Trinity. While Oneness pentecostals may self-consciously have de¤ned themselves in opposition to many of the currents of theology that were swirling around them in the early years of the twentieth century, in another sense they were full participants in those developments. Usually Haywood was content to simply describe his views of the godhead without feeling the need to place any formal label on his position or to identify his views with those of any other theologian. This makes
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sense, since Haywood saw himself as being merely biblical in his opinions. At one point, however, he did indicate that he basically agreed with the third-century modalist theologian Sabellius, whose views, Haywood said, were “more scripturally based than that of the Athanasian Creed.” And just what was Sabellius’s view of God? According to Theodoret, a historian of the ancient church, Sabellius taught that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were one and the same divine person who appeared “now as Father, now as Son, now as Holy Spirit. He [said] that in the Old Testament he gave laws as Father, was incarnate in the New Testament as the Son, and visited the apostles as the Holy Spirit.”23 For Sabellius, God was a single and uni¤ed being who had appeared to humankind at different times in different forms for different purposes. Later Trinitarian theologians would ¤nd fault with Sabellius’s views for two basic reasons: First, his view of God implied that God was changeable; second, his view opened the possibility that God, as fully incarnate in Jesus, might actually have suffered in some way on the cross. Trinitarian theologians would later reject both of those suggestions as heretical. The anti-Sabellian Trinitarian assertion that God could not suffer or change soon became one of the ruling orthodoxies of mainstream Christianity, a stance that remained virtually unchallenged until the nineteenth century. During the twentieth century, however, the doctrine of God’s impassibility has been subject to considerable criticism at the hands of various theological movements. The experience of two world wars and the holocaust of the Jews raised questions within mainstream scholarship about the adequacy of any theology that placed God beyond suffering. Liberation theology took things a step farther and argued that God most certainly did suffer with the poor and oppressed. More recently, many feminist theologians have argued that any adequate view of the godhead has to include affectivity, relatedness, and suffering. Other theological movements have raised similar issues. Haywood’s theology of the godhead has something in common with these recent developments. Haywood believed that God was capable of suffering with and for humanity. It was under the heading “the Father revealed” that Haywood argued that God in Christ “wept with them that wept. He suffered with those that suffered. And in all their af®ictions and griefs, He was touched with the feelings of their in¤rmities, and bore with them their burdens and heavy oppressions.” Haywood developed his Oneness views because he thought that was the best way to summarize what the Bible taught. It is hard to imagine, however, that Haywood was unaware of the broader implications of Oneness theology regarding the
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affectivity of the godhead. At the very least, it is clear that Haywood’s God was not a God of distant philosophical and Trinitarian impassible perfection. Haywood’s God was a God of care and affection. Haywood’s God was Jesus.24 Christology Haywood’s primary Christological assertion was that Christ Jesus was the human embodiment of the singular undivided God of all creation. According to Haywood, Jesus Christ was “God manifest in the ®esh.” He was “the Mighty God,” “the Everlasting Father” appearing in human form. Christ was “the one and only true God that we will ever see or can see.” Haywood seems to have believed that a Oneness view of the godhead would reinforce the claim that Jesus was fully and undeniably God, but stressing the presence of the entire godhead in Christ in this way also heightened the mystery of the incarnation. Haywood said that when the prophets of ancient Israel had ¤rst announced the future embodiment of God in Christ, they were “confounded at their own utterances.” Haywood himself said that the subject was a mystery “beyond human conception.” He asked with wonder: “How could the Mighty God, Creator of the heaven and earth, who ¤lls the immensity of space, become con¤ned to the limits of the body of a Virgin and assume the form of man?”25 Haywood and his Oneness colleagues were, of course, not alone in their astonishment at the incarnation—virtually all Christian theologians view the incarnation as a mystery of some kind—but Haywood’s commitment to the irreducible oneness of God’s being made the incarnation even harder to grasp. Traditional Trinitarian theologians had the option of speaking as if only one part of the godhead had became incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth, and that allowed them to suggest that the other parts or persons of the godhead had remained transcendently above the created order in heaven. Haywood, however, did not have that option. He understood God the Father and God the Son to be one and the same person. He said: “Jesus is the Father as well as the Son.” Thus, when Haywood re®ected on the incarnation, he had to ponder what it might have meant for the entire godhead somehow to have become temporarily con¤ned to a human body—and that was truly a mystery beyond human comprehension.26 If the details of the incarnation necessarily remained a mystery for Haywood, one thing was crystal clear in his mind: Jesus was fully and absolutely divine. This was a nonnegotiable issue for Haywood, and he went out of his way to denounce other interpretations of Christ that saw
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him as less than fully divine. He explicitly rejected the suggestion that Jesus Christ was merely a prophet or great reformer. He also balked at the idea that Jesus was another “great personage” inspired by the same “Divine spirit” that had inspired “Confucius, Buddha, Moses [and] Mohammed.” For Haywood, Jesus was God. No other opinions held water.27 Haywood was aware that, in stressing the importance of the full deity of Christ, he was simply reasserting what most Christians had always believed about Jesus. But he also thought that his emphasis on the full divinity of Jesus was somewhat different from what most Christians believed. He argued that “the divinity of Jesus Christ, with the majority, has merely been a speculation and not a revelation from God.” Nominal Christians said the right things with their lips, but they lacked conviction in their hearts. Haywood was not particularly surprised by this situation. He wondered how things could possibly have been otherwise. Without the internal presence of the Spirit to reveal Christ’s true nature to them, speculation was the only option available. Left to the devices of their natural minds alone, these Christians had instinctively “seen our Savior as a man” and had “judged Him after the ®esh” instead of truly honoring him as fully divine. Haywood believed many of them were not in willful error but were simply “bewildered.” He even went so far as to say that God would have mercy on those who “[opposed] Jesus being called God” ignorantly. He added, however, that “those who [were] doing it [opposing Christ’s full divinity] because of prejudice hatred, personal ambition, honor of one another, or because of losing friends or money” were in grave “danger of being left in darkness.”28 While Haywood’s ¤rst Christological concern was to emphasize the divine side of Christ’s being, he was also convinced that Jesus was in some way human. He said that Jesus “was God in the ‘likeness of men’; the Lord and Master in the ‘form of a servant;’ The Everlasting Father ‘as a son’; the Eternal Spirit ‘manifest in ®esh’; Divinity robed in ‘humanity’; the High and Lofty One in ‘humility.’” Elsewhere Haywood said: “Remember this man Christ Jesus had a double nature in Him—humanity and Divinity.”29 These comments certainly af¤rm the humanity of Christ in some way, but they leave unde¤ned the precise nature of the relationship between the human and divine aspects of Christ’s being—and Haywood never clari¤ed what he thought that relationship was despite his numerous comments on the subject. At one point, he explained: “In the ®esh he was the Son of man and Son of God. As a man he walked, wept, prayed, suffered and died. As God He raised Himself from the dead.” Elsewhere, he de-
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clared: “The life of Christ in the ®esh was the example of a son of God. And of all that he suffered, He bore it as a man.” In one of his most down-home comments, Haywood called the human aspect of Christ “the Eternal Spirit’s right hand Man.” Elsewhere Haywood suggested that the best way to describe the relationship was to say that “the Divine reveals the human side of God and the human reveals the divine.” Haywood was clearly less articulate about the matter of Christ’s humanity than he was about the subject of Christ’s divinity.30 When we turn to Haywood’s theology of the work of Christ, we ¤nd a similar diversity of viewpoints in his writings and a similar lack of coherence. Haywood’s behavior in this regard does not, however, necessarily place him in bad company. Over the centuries, Christianity has given rise to a number of different theories that have tried to explain how the life and work of Christ effected the salvation of humankind, and none of these has fully dominated the others. As a result, most theologians have appealed to several of these theories in their writings, often with little attempt to combine them together into one grand vision of the atonement. Some of Haywood’s remarks echo the view that the incarnation itself, the joining together of the human and the divine in Jesus, provided the means of salvation. Haywood once said: “GOD was in (the body of ) Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself.” At other times, Haywood’s rhetoric seems to echo what is known as the exemplary, or moralin®uence, theory of the atonement. Speaking of Christ’s birth, he wrote: “The heavens bowed down and the Lord God of heaven and earth took on the form of man and became a pattern for us who should afterward follow in His steps.” Elsewhere he declared that “Christ in the ®esh was the example of a son of God” and that believers should endeavor to follow Christ’s pattern of sonship (his conformity to God’s law and will) in their own lives. Still other comments seem to re®ect a substitutionary view of Christ’s work on the cross—the idea that Christ’s death on the cross, paying the penalty for human sin in the place of sinners who deserved to be put to death for their misdeeds—is what made salvation possible. This is surely what Haywood had in mind when he said it was Christ’s “broken body and His shed blood on Calvary that made peace between God and man.”31 The theory of Christ’s saving work that Haywood most fully developed was his own theory of Christ as the “victim of the ®aming sword.” In a literal sense, the ®aming sword referred to the weapon held by the cherubim that God placed at the gate of Eden after the fall to keep Adam
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and Eve away from the tree of life. In a more symbolic sense, the ®aming sword referred simply to the curse of death that was placed upon Adam and Eve and all their descendants when they fell into sin. Since that time, any and all human attempts to storm the gates of Eden and reclaim eternal life had proved vain. In Haywood’s own more colorful language: “The sentence of death was passed upon all and the rights to the tree of life had been forfeited. Whoever attempted to regain it must come against the Flaming Sword. . . . [Thus] death reigned from Adam to Moses.”32 Haywood believed that the system of animal sacri¤ce that developed very early in the history of the human race was one way of coping with this situation. He said that animal offerings provided a kind of “temporary restraint” that held off the person’s own death for a short while. This was obviously an ineffective way of dealing with sin and death, but it continued because there simply was no alternative. Eventually, however, “God himself grew weary of its continuance” and promised to provide a “better sacri¤ce” that would one day “restore the way to the tree of life.” And “after many weary years of waiting,” Christ appeared. He came to earth as humanity’s champion and savior. He came as “a commander and leader of the people . . . to show the way to the tree of life.” He came to share a dream of hope with those “who sat in darkness and the shadow of death.” Haywood explained that “to accomplish this he must pass the Flaming Sword in the hand of the cherubim.” Christ had to face and triumph over death, and Haywood said that Christ was more than up to the challenge, though the con®ict was very real. He wrote: When His hour arrived He was not discouraged. He faced it like a man of war. The con®ict was terri¤c. The Sword pierced His brow and blood came streaming down His face. His body was lacerated. His hands were torn and bleeding, the Sword wounds entered His feet and His side, but onward He pressed. In the midst of His suffering He gave the thief an assurance that He would regain the entrance into paradise. . . . In the heat of the struggle He cried, “I thirst,” and as darkness settled upon Him the lamentable cry, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me,” brought the terrible con®ict to an end. And when He had cried with a loud voice, “It is ¤nished,” He gave up the ghost and entered into paradise. Thus he braved the ®aming sword and gained for us a right to the tree of life in the midst of the paradise of God.33
Haywood provided few, if any, details about exactly how Christ’s death as the victim of the ®aming sword secured salvation for humanity. Clearly Haywood thought of Christ as humanity’s hero engaged in
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bloody battle to win back eternal life, but against whom was he ¤ghting and why? Haywood’s ®aming-sword theory has some similarity to the classical theory of Christus victor, where Christ, rather than being portrayed as a suffering savior, is presented as the divine champion who vanquishes the forces of evil, binds the devil and his demonic cohort in hell, and sets humanity free. But Haywood’s theory seems to pit Christ against God in a certain sense, ¤ghting against a sword that God placed between humankind and eternal life.34 It is also unclear which part of Christ Haywood believed was directly involved in this battle. Was it the human side of Christ or the divine or a combination of the two? Most of Haywood’s imagery points toward the human side of Christ, from the bodily wounds to the cry in response to God’s desertion of him. This interpretation seems con¤rmed by other comments Haywood made, such as his statement that it was “as a man” that Christ “walked, wept, prayed, suffered and died.” However, Haywood’s language was ultimately ambiguous. Alongside his imagery of Christ as humanity’s hero he could also suddenly turn around and write: “With reverence and adoration we bow our knee unto Jesus Christ the ‘Victim of the Flaming Sword’ to give to our God the glory due His name. . . . His name is exalted above every name that is in heaven and earth. Hence, the demons of hell are enraged, the religious world is astonished, and the tents of the fearful pilgrims are being violently shaken by the rushing mighty wind that is moving through the land proclaiming the NAME of the Lord. He who was slain is worthy.” All of this certainly sounds like Haywood believed it was Jesus the one true God manifested in the ®esh who was the real warrior ¤ghting for humanity against the ®aming sword. But if that is the case, the question of who Jesus was struggling against becomes even more problematic.35 In the end, perhaps the best we can say is that Haywood’s Christology was more evocative than de¤nitive. It was more imagistic than logical— more like the quasi-poetical theology of D. Wesley Myland than the neatly categorized theology of George F. Taylor—and thus it may be wrong to hope for unambiguous clarity. If salvation really is a mystery of grace—and Haywood believed that there were degrees of mystery in everything we know about God—perhaps religious language will always trip all over itself as it inadequately seeks to put that mystery into words. And in Haywood’s particular case, this undermining of the adequacy of language may have been intentional. Haywood wanted to blur many of the older lines of distinction that theologians had worked so hard to draw. He wanted to help believers grasp, if not fully understand, that ultimately
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nothing was separate from anything else in the will and work of God. This style of mixing categories that others wanted to keep separate re®ects both the strength and weakness of Haywood’s theology. The strength is its refusal to arti¤cially separate the different facets of God’s being and relationship to the world; the weakness is the necessarily fragmentary nature of almost all of Haywood’s theological statements—necessarily fragmentary because human language could never say everything that Haywood’s theology seemed to imply needed to be said all at once if the truth was to be accurately portrayed. The Human Condition and the Birth in the Spirit Haywood believed that when God created humankind, Adam and Eve were “the masterpiece of God’s workmanship.” They possessed “an animal-like nature,” but, more important, they had an “angelic intelligence” that set them far above all other living things. They were the highest and best of God’s new created order. Haywood also believed, however, that when God ¤rst inaugurated the human race God made humanity intentionally incomplete. Human beings were never meant to be static organisms, complete and perfect with no room for growth. Haywood believed that from the very beginning they had been fashioned for progress and advance. This incompleteness had nothing to do with sin. Even if the fall had never taken place, humanity would still have had to undergo a process of spiritual development and maturation in order to stand complete and whole before God.36 Haywood explained the peculiar incompleteness of Adam and Eve in terms of a difference he perceived between the concepts of the image and the likeness of God. He argued that while the ¤rst humans were created already in possession of the full “image” of God, they lacked, at least to some degree, the divine “likeness.” Haywood seems to have thought that it was God’s intention to only slowly infuse human nature with the full glory of the divine likeness over an extended period of time. He once stated “from all appearances the making of man into both the image and likeness of God” was intended to take “the entire period from the time that man was made of the dust of the ground until the close of the Millennium.” The only exception to this long process of becoming perfect was Jesus Christ, who foreshadowed the fullness of the divine likeness that all of humanity would one day bear.37 Haywood believed that while the ¤rst humans lacked some of the attributes redeemed humanity would ultimately possess, they were impressive creatures nonetheless, and present-day humanity continued to
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possess many of Adam and Eve’s original attributes. In particular, human beings remained “threefold [creatures], consisting of Spirit, soul, and body.” Haywood said the human “body was formed from the dust of the ground [and when] God breathed into his nostrils the breath (spirit) of life . . . he became a living soul.” He then added the suggestion that “the union of the Spirit and the body apparently produced the soul.”38 In this passage, Haywood’s use of the word “spirit” in both capitalized and uncapitalized forms renders the meaning of the word “spirit/Spirit” somewhat ambiguous. Perhaps this was intentional. While Haywood clearly believed that the “spirit of man” was different from the “Spirit” of God, he also believed that at the moment of creation Adam possessed both his own spirit and the fullness of the Holy Spirit. Haywood believed that as originally created, Adam and Eve enjoyed the full bene¤ts of the baptism of the Spirit. Haywood arrived at this conclusion by arguing backward from the short phrase in the New Testament that referred to the “renewing” of the Spirit. He suggested that in Adam, all of humanity had once possessed the baptism of the Spirit. The pentecostal message was that a person could now regain that aspect of humanity’s original nature. He wrote: Do you know everyone of you had the baptism of the Holy Ghost at one time? Mystery of mysteries! Though you cannot remember it, yet I think I can make you see it. Does it not say, “the renewing of the Holy Ghost?” (Titus 3:5) To be a Son of God you must have the Holy Ghost. Was not Adam the Son of God? Yes . . . so if we are all from the loin of our ¤rst father, Adam, and Adam was the son of God, then we undoubtedly had the baptism of the Holy Ghost in him.39
This glorious picture of human beginnings quickly changed, however, with Adam’s transgression and the consequential fall of humankind. Haywood’s description of the fall is relatively brief and impressionistic, but it is important to note both what he said and what he did not say about the ¤rst sin and its results. He called Adam’s sin and its consequences a “fatal calamity” that was “keenly felt by all humanity from Eden to Calvary, and from Calvary till now,” but he differed from many other theologians by suggesting that the effects of the fall did not all appear at once. Haywood mentioned three immediate consequences. First and most obviously, “the sin of our forefather Adam thrust us out from the paradise of God.” What Haywood had in mind here was quite obviously the physical expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, but he also implied that the fall involved a spiritual expulsion from God’s presence. In particular,
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Adam and Eve and all of their progeny lost the paradisiacal experience of the baptism of the Spirit at this point. Second, Haywood said that at the time of the fall, humanity immediately lost any natural right to eternal life. Finally, the world itself was changed to make human existence more arduous: The ground was cursed, the toil of agriculture increased, and women would henceforth experience great pain in childbirth.40 What Haywood did not say about the fall, however, is just as important as what he said. He did not say that humanity’s religious impulses and abilities were totally destroyed. Haywood argued that even “though man was put out of the garden, yet he endeavored to worship God.” He proposed that, for at least a while after the fall, it was possible for some people to actually avoid sin. He wrote that numerous people were able to avoid “[sinning] after the similitude of Adam’s transgression.”41 Haywood did not believe that the personal holiness of these individuals placed them outside the effects of Adam’s fall—none of them possessed the baptism of the Spirit, they were all still subject to death, they all lived in a fallen world, and they all were tainted in some way by Adam’s guilt—but they were not captive to sin in the same way that would later become the rule. The fall did not undo things all at once. It took time for sin to fully dominate humankind, but eventually sin did come to rule. Haywood saw Satan as the active agent behind this process of progressive degeneration. It was Satan who pushed humanity ever deeper and deeper into evil, “[causing] the world to be ¤lled with sin and violence” until the whole human family ¤nally became “full of ‘wounds, and bruises, and putrifying [sic] sores’; the whole head was sick and the whole heart was faint.”42 While the fall and its long-range consequences greatly damaged the original status and splendor of humanity, the basic structure of human nature remained the same. Human nature was still composed of the tripartite union of body, spirit, and soul, but Haywood de¤ned those terms in his own original way, and the soul was the key component. According to Haywood, the soul had originally been formed out of the interaction of God’s Spirit with the human body, and thereafter the soul remained the connecting point that held body and spirit together. The soul was a kind of interfacing mechanism that allowed the human spirit to control the human body. Haywood himself used the analogy of a phonograph. He wrote: “The soul is never separated from the body. . . . On it is impressed the desires, or affection gathered by the spirit through the mental realm, and afterwards carried into actions by the body. The soul is to the body what the records are to the phonograph. (See Rom. 1:20.) Whatever is imprinted on the soul will be acted out unconsciously by the body.”
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While in theory Haywood’s anthropology implied that either good or bad desires could be impressed on the soul, he seemed to believe that in the fallen world, bad impressions tended to overwhelm good ones. He implied that this was the reason Satan could so easily push the world deeper and deeper into sin. He explained that “when the spirit of man begins to reach out after evil things, evil impressions are stamped upon the soul,” and then those evil impressions themselves predispose that person to contemplate other “evil deeds, wicked works and practices.”43 However, Haywood believed that the desire to do good had not been fully removed from the human heart. He believed that people were “mean and in sin” not because they wanted to be that way “but because the devil has them bound and they cannot help it.” Given that situation, the main goal of evangelistic preaching was to revive the suppressed desire for righteousness that lay dormant in each and every human heart. Effective gospel preaching produced spiritual struggle within those who heard it as a gospel-renewed desire to do good ran headlong into evil impressions that were deeply etched on the soul. Haywood wrote: “The preaching of the gospel stirs one’s spirit to seek after righteousness. Though the spirit may be inclined towards righteousness, yet it cannot do the things they desire to do on the account of the soul being, as it were, ¤lled with evil engravings of past affections. Hence there is a struggle between the spirit and the body, because the body is inclined to ful¤ll the deeds recorded on the soul, while the spirit endeavors to perform the works of righteousness.” Effective preaching strengthened the will to do good and produced “genuine conviction unto godly sorrow,” which was the prerequisite for true repentance leading to salvation.44 Haywood believed that the actual cure for the sinfully “engraved” soul was, of course, well beyond human effort, even if that effort was strengthened and forti¤ed by solid gospel preaching, arguing that nothing could “remove those evil records engraved upon the soul, or heart, but faith in the blood of Jesus, the Bishop of our souls.” He believed that once a person was cleansed by the blood of Jesus, however, the road forward had the potential to be astonishingly easy. He wrote: “The Holy Spirit comes in to help the spirit to place new records on the soul, that the body might perform the will of God, walking in newness of life. . . . Thus by having new records on the soul it becomes as easy for a man to walk and live righteous as it was for him to live wickedly in his former life.”45 That was Haywood’s theological theory about how things were supposed to happen. He knew, however, that strangely and sadly many persons who were cleansed by Christ’s blood still “[failed] to get God’s truth
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. . . engraved in their hearts.” Some still heard the sounds of sinful “records” being played on the “phonographs” of their bodies. He warned such persons: “You who are ¤lled had better keep ¤lled. You had better not let it ebb away from you. . . . Don’t let the ®esh come around and try to collect off of you some desire, or self-will, for you are dead to sin. You owe the ®esh nothing.” He continued: Take the Spirit and make the ®esh morti¤ed and ashamed. Keep this old ®esh house in good shape, but don’t you get stuck on it. Kill out abnormal desires, sinful desires. Ask God to make you have a perfect hatred (Psa. 139:22) against the world, the ®esh and the devil. If your relatives are morti¤ed at you, then you be morti¤ed at them in their sins. If the devil acts disgraced because you live holy and say “holiness unto the Lord,” then make him more disgraced and morti¤ed by perfecting that which is lacking in your faith.46
While the imagery of changing records on the phonograph of the soul implies that the transition to full holiness should be total and abrupt, Haywood sometimes used other metaphors that suggest the pathway from sin to holiness was a process and not an instantaneous transformation. Likening the experience of salvation and sancti¤cation to a child learning how to walk, he wrote: “No new-born child walks perfectly at once. First they crawl, then they totter and fall. But they do not keep falling. By this I mean that a man or woman who is ¤lled with the Holy Ghost and starts out to walk with Jesus Christ, may stumble and fall at ¤rst, but don’t get discouraged if the devil tries to trip you up. God will help you. . . . Do not let any failure daunt your courage. You know God is able to carry you through.”47 Of course, before any baby could crawl, walk, or even stumble, that baby ¤rst had to be alive, and Haywood said that that same simple principle applied to the spiritual life. One did not slide slowly into Christian faith; dramatic change was required. One could not be gently nurtured into faith; one had to be born into faith before one could begin to grow in holiness. In this case, as was often the case, spiritual developments paralleled earthly, human patterns of life, growth, and maturation.48 Taking his own advice seriously, Haywood noted that while spiritual birth took place in a moment, it was, like natural birth, invariably preceded by a period of gestation. He explained: “Everyone with ordinary understanding knows that there is a difference between ‘begettal’ [i.e., conception] and ‘birth’,” and he said that the same was true in the realm of the Spirit: “A child of God is ¤rst ‘begotten’ by the Word (I Cor. 4:15)
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of the Gospel before he can be born of the Spirit.” In the language of older theology, the time lag between spiritual “begettal” and spiritual birth would have been known as a period of conviction, a time of struggle between one’s unregenerate desires and the righteous demands of the gospel. Haywood was not averse to that kind of imagery, but he was always careful to stress that the wooing of the Holy Spirit was never coercive. Human desire was a necessary part of conversion. As Haywood put it: “God does not get behind a man with a whip and drive him to heaven, but He ¤xes it up so you ‘will’ follow Him because you love Him.” Elsewhere he wrote: “God will make you feel your need before He will ever give you anything.” In one of his most memorable lines, Haywood summed things up by saying: “God is love. He never was a terrorist.”49 The actual “birth of the Spirit”—a somewhat unusual phrase that Haywood used to refer to the “new birth,” or start of one’s spiritual life— took place as the logical culmination of this process of conviction, or “begettal.” Haywood used numerous images to describe this event. He called it the “rest” that Jesus provided at the end of one’s struggle toward salvation. It was being born again. It was putting on Christ. It was becoming a son of God. It was being saved and, according to Haywood, when God saved someone God saved that person completely. He wrote: “I do not believe in a half sonship. I believe in full sonship.” God offered “real salvation,” “genuine salvation,” “full salvation” that utterly transformed a person’s life. This included and, in fact, was identical to the “full baptism of the Holy Ghost.” Haywood believed that people who called themselves Christians but who had not received the baptism of the Holy Spirit were “not in the body of Christ.” Only fully saved, fully Spirit-baptized believers were true Christians. One was either a pentecostal Christian or not a Christian at all.50 According to Haywood, when God did a work of salvation in a person’s life, that person was saved, sancti¤ed, and ¤lled with the Holy Spirit all at the same time. The presence of the Holy Spirit was renewed in the person’s life and that person was essentially restored to Adam’s original state of existence. Haywood said: “Our past life is forgotten. God remembers it no more. A cruci¤xion has taken place (Gal. 2:19–20) and a new life has begun. Having been born again, God has forgiven all our trespasses and started us off anew.” All of this together constituted “the Holy Ghost New Birth.” Haywood understood God’s activity in human salvation in the same way that he understood God’s incarnate presence in Jesus Christ: It was an all-or-nothing proposition. When God entered a person’s life, God did not come tiptoeing in one little step at a time; God entered
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completely and all at once into a wholly transformed person. Just as God was one, the human experience of God in salvation was one. And that experience was uncontainable and undeniable; even the physical body felt the effect of God’s entrance as “the Spirit thrills and vibrates the bodies of the baptized saints.” The soul was cleansed and the spirit renewed, and as a result people got happy. As Haywood stated it: “God ¤lls our hearts with joy! When you get happy your whole being becomes ¤lled with light. Praises to the Lord drives [sic] away gloom and sickness. When Christ comes into your life, He makes you a new man or woman. When the demons are raging, and when your friends have turned their backs upon you, you can still give glory to God. If you love the Lord, you cannot go back on Him.” For Haywood, salvation was total and irreversible or it was not really salvation at all.51 Haywood believed that in order to be saved, one had to prove one’s faith through obedience, and to do that one needed to demonstrate one’s obedience through action. Something had to be done. An act had to be performed, and that act was water baptism. Haywood wrote: “If Christ told us we must be baptized, then if we say we believe we must be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving ourselves.” The issue was unambiguous for him: “Baptism in water is a command of God.” His advice was simple and blunt: “Do what God commands.” To be truly saved, one had to be “born of water and the Spirit.” The point was not that the water of baptism had any magical power in and of itself. Haywood said “water alone does not save us,” but he added that water became “a saving medium” when it was mingled with Christ’s blood.” He explained: “The life of the Blood of Christ is connected with baptism when it is administered in His Name. It is not by water only, but by water and blood, and the blood is in His name.”52 Haywood believed that to be saved by water baptism, baptism had to be administered in Jesus’s name and not according to the traditional Trinitarian formula “in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.” He said: “This is God’s plan. It proved successful in the days of the Apostles, why should it not be so now[?] Have we become instructors of the Almighty, that we should ‘correct’ the ‘errors’ of apostolic days by substituting our modern methods in the place of those given by the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven?” Christ himself had “demonstrated the manner in which we should come to be the sons of God” with his own baptism in the Jordan River, and the apostles had declared that the proper manner of following Christ’s example was to repent and be baptized “in the NAME of Jesus for the remission of sins.” Haywood declared: “If you
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have never been baptized in the name of JESUS CHRIST, you have never been immersed properly. This is the only name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved. If you repent deeply enough in your heart, and be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ, I will guarantee that you will receive the baptism of the Holy Ghost as you ‘come up out of the water.’”53 Haywood believed that the experience of the baptism of the Holy Ghost would be undeniably felt not only by the recipient as he or she emerged from the baptismal water but also by others present at the event. In this regard, the ability to speak in tongues was crucial. He called tongues “a sign that the time of refreshing” had come to an individual, and he added: “We cannot believe that a man has received the Holy Ghost until we see the signs as were manifested in Apostolic days, therefore tongues are for a sign.” Haywood was actually a bit miffed by what he saw as a falling away from this teaching in the pentecostal movement as a whole, saying that at the beginning of the movement, when most pentecostals still believed “that the birth of the Spirit was one thing, and the baptism of the Spirit another, practically all of those who received this miraculous experience . . . stood ¤rm and proclaimed far and wide that . . . all who were baptized with the Holy Spirit spoke with other languages as the Spirit gave them utterance.” He argued that it was only later, after the Oneness movement had begun to teach that the birth of the Spirit and the baptism in the Spirit were supposed to be experienced as a single salvi¤c event, that some began to question whether speaking in tongues was a necessary part of the experience of the baptism of the Spirit. Haywood saw this softening of belief regarding the evidentiary role of tongues as part and parcel of a larger falling away from truth within the pentecostal movement as a whole. Not only were many pentecostals failing to keep up with God’s new revelations, some were backtracking from the most basic teachings of the movement. Haywood himself made a distinction between the gift of tongues and tongues as a sign of the baptism of the Spirit, and he believed that only some Spirit-baptized believers received the gift of tongues. He was convinced, however, that everyone who received a true Holy Ghost new birth would speak in tongues at the moment of their baptism.54 According to Haywood, a true experience of the Holy Ghost new birth (one con¤rmed by tongues) placed one within the true Church and, in a certain sense, placed one literally in Christ. He wrote: “The Lord Jesus Christ is the head of the church which is his body. . . . The body is Christ. For as the body is one and hath many members, and all members
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of that one body, being many are one body: SO ALSO IS CHRIST. . . . The way we get into this Christ, the Church, is by baptism.” He explained further: “Christ in person is our Lord Jesus Christ. Christ in mystery, is the Church. . . . Christ in Spirit is the Holy Ghost.” For Haywood, the corporate body of Spirit-¤lled saints literally became an extension of the incarnation. The one God of the universe, the same God who had been incarnate in Jesus Christ, was also literally present within them in the form of the Holy Spirit. The Church became the present embodiment of the “Son of God.” Haywood wrote: “The Son of God on earth is the body of saints and the one Lord in heaven is Jesus. We who are ¤lled with the Holy Ghost have come back into the one man, which is the body of Christ, or ‘the kingdom of God’s dear Son.’ God only sees us now in one big body, called My beloved Son.”55 The full standing of the church as the “beloved Son” was not yet apparent, but Haywood believed the time was ripe for this to be revealed. He suggested that “if ever there was a tine for God to manifest His sons to the world it is now.” He predicted that “the power that now lies apparently dormant may revive and burst forth at any moment.” When that happened, when the sonship of pentecostal believers would be fully revealed, the world would be stunned. Haywood said “God shall manifest His sons through mighty signs and wonders.” Perfected by the Spirit, the church would begin to do works that would be greater in scope and power than those done by Christ himself during “the days of His ®esh” on earth. Haywood believed that “the latter days of our human existence” would “be glorious and far exceed anything that mortal eye has ever beheld.”56 In the interim, while the spirit-¤lled church awaited the full reception of its promised eschatological powers, the baptism of the Spirit already conferred a range of special abilities on the body of believers. For example, all the New Testament gifts of the Spirit were accessible. Haywood said the Holy Ghost new birth put believers “in the door of the body of Christ, and gives us access to the other ®oors, or fullness of the Godhead.” Haywood also believed that the Spirit provided health and healing for pentecostal believers, saying that “God wishes us to walk so in Him that we shall have victory over all the powers of sickness and disease and the like; it is our privilege in the Lord.” Perhaps most important, the baptism of the Spirit conferred the ability to preach the gospel with power. Haywood wrote: “When you get baptized by the Holy Ghost, or come through the veil, you are ready to go forth and tell the glad tidings.” He said: “That is our whole service—to ‘save men.’ The church was ordained for that purpose.”57
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But while Haywood believed that the ¤ery Spirit-empowered preaching of the gospel would result in dramatic results in some regions of the world—in particular, he thought there would be mass conversions in the Holy Land—he did not believe that the world as a whole would respond favorably to the Spirit-¤lled preaching of the last days. He explicitly argued that “the teaching of ‘converting the world to Christ’ during the Gospel Age [was] false.” He said that what Christians should look for instead was persecution. The truthful Spirit-¤lled preaching of the gospel had always produced this result. This was even true of the apostles, who began to suffer persecution only after they had been ¤lled with the Spirit. Such persecution was not a calamity but a chance for believers to show their true mettle. Suffering was an opportunity to follow in the footsteps of Jesus. It opened the door for believers to share more fully in Christ’s blessing. Haywood believed it was “through suffering alone” that believers gained the right to behold Christ’s full glory and someday to reign with him on high.58 The opportunity to suffer for Christ was a gift of God’s grace, but unfortunately it was a gift that was often rejected rather than embraced. Haywood lamented: “The reason people do not have the life of Christ manifested in them is because they will not suffer.” In Haywood’s theology, the joy of the Spirit was necessarily mingled with the temporary sorrow of suffering. This experience paralleled the experience of Jesus Christ, and it de¤ned the path of discipleship that all true Christians had to walk if they were serious about following Christ’s example. Haywood wrote: “God intended that everything Jesus did, the saints should do also because, ‘ye are members of His body.’” This necessarily included suffering. As Haywood himself put it: “We must suffer with Him. We are as sheep dumb before its shearers and led as lambs to the slaughter, killed all the day long, to take the place of those daily sacri¤ces offered up back in the old law. Your life is just as mysterious as Christ’s life was. Christ is High Priest and the Lamb, and we are the priesthood and sheep.” Like the paired opposites that de¤ned different dimensions of Christ’s work, the experience of the spirit-baptized Christian was similarly bipolar. Joy and suffering were welded together in the new life one received through the pentecostal birth in the Spirit.59 History and Eschatology Like many other early pentecostal theologians, Haywood situated his understanding of the present age in a broad view of God’s purposes and plans for the world. But Haywood had his own distinctive understanding of those issues, and in many ways his vision was more circumscribed than
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that of most of his pentecostal peers. In particular, he believed that the information available to humanity covered only a 50,000-year period of earthly history. What might have occurred before that 50,000-year period, or what might take place after, was veiled in mystery and known to God alone. Haywood’s most detailed discussion of these historical and eschatological themes is found in Before the Foundation of the World (1923). In the foreword to this work he wrote: The contents of this book is an unfolding of the mystery of time from creation until the dawn of eternity. It is not a piece of guesswork, or fancy imagination set forth that one should glory in the ®esh, or exalt himself in any way above others, but is in perfect harmony with the word of God. . . . It answers the skeptics, in¤dels, scientists and higher critics of the Bible. . . . It inspires faith in the word of God and feeds the souls of His anointed. It shows the age of the earth and silences wild speculation. . . . It tells of the age of monsters whose bones are being discovered. It opens the door of the future and shows us things to come. . . . It reveals the ¤nal end of all nations and the preservation of Israel forever, and to us who have obtained salvation, it gives a greater knowledge and understanding of the greatness and majesty of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, by whom were all things created that are in heaven and that are in earth.60
Haywood was convinced that God had not made the world all at once in a six-day rush. He wrote: “The Bible nowhere teaches that the earth was made in a ‘moment.’” Haywood argued that the days mentioned in the Genesis account referred to periods of much “longer duration than what . . . has been generally believed and taught.” Numerous other turn-of-the-century theologians had proposed similar extended-day interpretations of Genesis. Haywood’s particular version suggested that each day of the creation actually represented a 7,000-year period of divine creativity—an insight he claimed he had received as a direct revelation from God. He also believed that the biblical account of creation actually provided an overview of the whole ®ow of earthly history, not just its beginning. Thus, he ¤gured that the global scenario outlined in Genesis covered 50,000 years: seven days of 7,000 years each, followed by an extra 1,000-year period called the “jubilee of jubilees.”61 Haywood believed that the account in Genesis was a kind of divine blueprint for creation; it was a summary of God’s architectural plans for the construction of the earth. Thus, when the text said that God rested on the seventh day, it merely meant that the design phase of creation had been completed and the actual task of making the world was ready to begin. In Haywood’s lexicon, the terms “create” and “make” had rather
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different meanings. He explained: “To ‘create’ is to ‘originate,’ to cause to exist[,] while to make is to ‘form,’ or ‘produce.’” Thus, while God’s “creative plan was ¤nished before the foundation of the world,” God’s actual making of the world was still an ongoing process. According to Haywood’s calculations, the process of making the earth had been going on for 41,000 years.62 At the end of creation—at the end of the design process before God actually began to build the world—God stepped back and declared that “His plan was perfect in every detail.” At the same time, however, God also foresaw “the fall of Lucifer and . . . the fall of man and his ruined condition. He saw His work marred, made void, ruined without form and wasted.” Even though God could foresee these horrible events, God went ahead anyway with the actual making of the world. As Haywood put it: “His plan was already laid and must be carried out.” But from that very moment God also began to fashion a remedy for the calamity that was going to befall the world. Haywood argued that even before the world had been brought into existence, God had already determined that in “the fullness of time. . . . He would send forth His Spirit and prepare a body, as the only begotten of the Father, through whose death He might ransom mankind from the fall.” He argued that this is what the Bible meant when it said that “the Lamb was slain before the foundation of the world.” Haywood said: “God laid his plan out and saw it all before it took place. . . . Before the foundation of the world God planned to save us through the method of the cross of Calvary.” The result was that in the same way that the world had been “created” in God’s mind before it was “made,” Christ was cruci¤ed in the mind of God for the redemption of the world long before any part of the world itself had been brought into existence. The basic plot and ¤nal outcome of the human story were determined long before the drama of earthly history actually played itself out.63 Haywood discussed each day or age of the earth’s history in a fair amount of detail. He said that the ¤rst 7,000-year period of earthly history brought into being the basic building blocks of the universe. This ¤rst creative era saw “the bursting forth of the invisible God into the midst of empty space, grappling with things unseen, whirling them round and round, thus creating an unmeasurable, luminous [mass] of gaseous substance.” Haywood believed that the various spiral nebulae that were visible through modern telescopes were leftover examples of what our own solar system had once looked like.64 The second day was “the mineral or geological period.” During this age, God caused matter to condense into solid form and the earth took
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on the shape of a planet. As the planet cooled, it shrank and its surface cracked to open up huge depressions that soon ¤lled with water, becoming the “fossil oceans” geologists would later discover. Above these vast seas the sky was also ¤lled with water in the form of clouds. Between these two waters—that is, the seas and the clouds—God situated the dry land of the ¤rmament.65 Vegetative life burst into existence on the third day, and for the next 7,000 years plants dominated the planet. Haywood said these plants were of a quite “different foliage from that which we see today.” He said that this was the great coal-making era of the earth’s geologic history and that God had included it in the earth’s history so humanity would later be able to mine ef¤cient and transportable fossil fuels to meet their energy needs.66 The events of the fourth day were relatively less dramatic, but no less important. The main event was the new division of time that emerged in “preparation of the sons of men.” The Bible mentions the creation of the sun, moon, and stars, but Haywood reinterpreted that to mean that this was the time when the sun, moon, and stars became visible from earth for the ¤rst time. He rejected the notion that these heavenly bodies had not been in existence earlier. His own interpretation was that “prior to this time clouds and thick darkness shut out the light of the stars which God had created, but now they began to shed forth their light upon the earth, affecting its seasons and regulating its days, months and years.”67 During the ¤fth 7,000-year period of God’s making of the earth, the ¤rst forms of animal life were brought into existence. These were explicitly animals “created out of the water.” Haywood included a range of life forms in this category: “bivalves, crustaceans, mollusks, invertebrates, vertebrates, amphibians, birds, reptiles, [and] sea monsters.” Expanding on his vision of the earth’s evolutionary history, Haywood described this age as follows: “It is said that much of what is now land was at that time under shallow bodies of water, perpetually warm under a tropical climate, and that herein was the home of innumerable hideous sea monsters; huge bats with wings spreading from tip to tip, thirty feet; the monster dinosaur, a large lizard-like creature, more than a hundred feet long; the ‘tyrannosaurus,’ a dinosaurus [sic] specie more than 150 feet long and many millions of other reptile-like creatures.” Haywood was obviously fascinated by all of this, especially by dinosaurs. He wrote about them at some length and even included several drawings of them in his book. It is not surprising that he grappled with how to explain their ultimate
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demise. In the ¤nal analysis he blamed Satan. Haywood believed that during the ¤rst ¤ve days of creation, the earth had been the angel Lucifer’s primary place of residence. When Lucifer decided to revolt against God—an act that Haywood dated to roughly the 6,000-year mark of this ¤fth creative age—God apparently responded by cursing both Satan and his home planet. The result was that the dinosaurs and virtually all other living creatures died. The last 1,000 years of this ¤fth day of creation were thus years of awful silence. Haywood said that no chirping birds could be heard, no croaking frogs, no roaring dinosaurs. The only sound was the wind blowing through the trees and over the grassy ¤elds.68 In light of this great extinction, the sixth day was a time of renewal and re-creation. Since the water-created animals of the ¤fth day had all been wiped out by God’s judgment against Satan, God repopulated the planet with a new kind of animal “made from the ‘dust of the ground.’” Even the birds and ¤sh of this sixth age were of a different kind than the fossilized birds and ¤sh that had lived earlier. God’s crowning act, of course, was the making of humankind—which God placed on earth as a substitute for the angels who had previously guarded and cared for the planet. As Haywood himself put it: “The creation of mankind was for the purpose of replenishing the earth with another order of creatures, ‘a little lower than the angels’”—a little lower, but perhaps more capable of understanding God’s love.69 Haywood believed that regardless of how wonderfully humanity had been made, humankind soon fell from grace “through the tragedy in Eden” prompted by Satan’s temptation of Eve. From that moment on, God and humankind had wrestled together against “the prince of darkness, forging their way to the dawn of a better day.” In Haywood’s view, the fall gave rise to a new kind of cooperation between God and humankind at the same time that it separated humanity from God on the basis of sin. Haywood argued that two different “classes of people” emerged in the wake of the fall. On the one side were those drawn to evil, on the other were those struggling to remain righteous, and the ensuing years of human history had witnessed a longstanding battle between the forces of good and the forces of evil. Haywood said that Seth’s righteous descendants fought against Cain’s evil progeny; Abraham and his children struggled to maintain their purity against the corruptions of the Gentiles; and, since the time of Christ, the church had been at war against the world.70 Haywood believed that as the sixth day drew to a close, one ¤nal “death struggle between the forces of right and wrong” would erupt. The
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“great climax in the drama of the age of sin and death” was about to play itself out, and the entire world would feel it. Haywood said that “the whole creation [was] . . . waiting for the time when the devil shall be bound a thousand years, and there shall be ‘on earth peace and good will toward men.’” Soon the bride (the “sealed” body of righteous and Spirit¤lled believers71) would be raptured out of the earth and the great tribulation would take place. The forces of evil would be defeated and God would then establish a 1,000-year rule of peace on earth overseen by a restored nation of Israel. At the end of this millennial era—at the end of the last 1,000-year segment of Haywood’s sixth day of creation—there would be an uprising launched by the armies of Gog and Magog. God would crush that rebellion, and the seventh and ¤nal day of the earth’s history would begin.72 The ¤rst event of the seventh day would be the great white throne judgment. Spirit-¤lled believers would be exempt from this judgment, for God had already made them holy and thus ready to spend eternity in heaven, but the rest of humanity, both those living and those who had died, would have to face God’s ¤nal evaluation of their lives. This group of people would not be judged on the basis of their “holiness,” for, lacking the Spirit’s ¤lling, they had none; rather, they would be judged on the basis of their “righteousness.” Haywood explained the difference between these two standards by saying that “righteousness is moral actions, while holiness is a consecrated state.” God required righteousness from everyone, but holiness was beyond human achievement and could only be obtained as a gift of God’s grace. The verdicts handed down in the ¤nal white throne judgment would send individuals who were not ¤lled with the Spirit either to the torments of the “lake of ¤re” or to resurrected life on the new earth with the promise of one day joining the Spirit-¤lled saints in the holy city of God.73 Haywood provided only a few sketchy comments about how different classes of humanity would fare in the white throne judgment. Among other things, Haywood said that Jews would be judged by a different standard than anyone else. God had a special bond with Israel because of the promise made to Abraham. Jews would thus be “resurrected at the white throne judgment and placed on the New Earth.” In that new setting, God would “preserve Israel as a people . . . forever and ever.” Haywood believed that Gentiles who were not ¤lled with the Spirit would “be held responsible for that degree of light which [they had] received.” This standard would be applied to self-declared Christians and non-Christians alike. Haywood said that sincere and righteous Christian believers who
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had never heard of or received the baptism of the Spirit would be raised to life and be granted the opportunity of one day joining the Spirit-¤lled saints in heaven.74 He also argued that righteous “heathens who died without knowledge of Christ” would be raised to life and “judged ‘without the law’ . . . by their conscience.” They too could anticipate someday merging with the holy throng in heaven. While Haywood believed that “there is hope for one who has never heard,” he was convinced that there was virtually no hope for those who had had an opportunity to hear “the gospel, con¤rmed with signs and wonders and [believed] not.” These people would be cast without hesitation into the lake of ¤re along with all others who were “fearful and unbelieving and abonimable [sic] and murderers, etc.”75 After this judgment had taken place, the new earth would ®ourish under God’s direct rule, and the light of the sun and moon would no longer be necessary because “the glory of God from the New Jerusalem shall lighten the earth.” The world itself would initially be populated by three different groups of people: Jews, sincere and righteous Christians who had not been baptized by the Spirit, and “the righteous from among the heathen.” Floating overhead, “suspended in the sight of all those on the earth,” would be the New Jerusalem itself, the holy city of God, and this is where the raptured Spirit-¤lled saints of all ages would have their home. Following the description in the book of Revelation (21:16), Haywood said that the holy city would be shaped like a cube and would be 1,500 miles long on each side. He did the math and estimated that there would be almost 4 billion rooms in this city, more than enough to accommodate all God’s saints in palatial splendor.76 Those who lived in the New Jerusalem would have the privilege of visiting the earth whenever they pleased and, indeed, they would have “perfect liberty to soar away through unlimited space” whenever they wanted, “[traversing] the boundless realms of the universe with a rapidity that will eclipse the records of light.” As for the folks living on the earth itself, the righteous Gentiles could all hope to eventually join the raptured saints in the holy city. The process worked this way. Righteous Gentiles would be allowed to join the perfected saints in the holy city after the total number of years they had spent on earth added up to 365. He explained: “The righteous who die at the age of 25 years will live 340 years before [their] translation takes place. Those who die at the age of 65 years will live 300 years on the New Earth before they are translated, and so on to the end.” Eventually the new earth would be left to the children of Abraham alone, as all others would have been raptured away. As the last
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and seventh day of creation drew to a close, God would institute a ¤nal 1,000-year “jubilee of jubilees.” Haywood provided no description of what that era might entail, and he said that he had no idea what God might have in mind for the years of eternity after that grand jubilee was over. All of that was hidden, at least for the time being, from human view.77 Haywood was not opposed to speculating about theological truths that were not directly revealed by God as long that speculation was based on solidly revealed truth. But there were limits on his speculation. Like most pentecostals, he believed that the speculative search for truth was secondary to the more immediate task of living a holy life. As much as he enjoyed ruminating on historical and eschatological ideas, he knew that there was plenty for Christians to do with the knowledge they already possessed. Andrew David Urshan’s Spiritual Theology Andrew David Urshan was, if anything, an even more proli¤c writer than Haywood. This was especially the case during the years 1917 to 1923, when he published six books on pentecostal themes: Timely Messages of Warning (1917); Timely Messages of Comfort (1918); The Almighty God in the Lord Jesus Christ (1919); The Doctrine of the New Birth (1921); The Supreme Need of the Hour (1923); and My Study of Modern Pentecostals (1923). Some of these works are clearly sermonic in nature, written to encourage the faithful and to provide practical advice about how to improve one’s Christian walk, but others are quite theological, expounding doctrinal teaching in a fairly formal and systematic manner. That distinction should not be overdone, however, for Urshan believed that “sound doctrine” was the foundation of spirituality. He explained that “doctrine is the meat which makes us strong,” and he added that “to get saved and yet be ignorant of the sound doctrine . . . is to be in a place of danger and liable to deception.”78 Urshan thought the world in which he lived was, in fact, full of deception. It was an age of apostasy, a “perilous time” in which people had become “lovers of themselves, greedy . . . seeking pleasure more than God.” The church, unfortunately, was no exception to this rule; Urshan said that “the whole of present-day Christendom [was] in a tumult of confusion.” All of this led him to ask: “Why do men take so kindly to humbuggery, and why are they so slow to learn the truth?” In light of the trends of the day, Urshan felt that sound doctrine needed to be taught with greater clarity than ever before so that believers could discern truth
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from error and walk faithfully in the ways of truth. In the introduction to The Doctrine of the New Birth, he explained his purpose as follows: The need of a book LIKE THIS, on the infallible and unchangeable doctrine of our Lord is most important; especially in these days of world-wide Apostasy. Just as the worldly commercialists and politicians are continually busy making inventions and machinery to make money and satisfy their mad sel¤sh desires, even so are the modern nominal Christians doing, busy inventing new man-made ways of salvation; they are not only revolutionizing the traditions of their mistaken Elders, but are making many new and strange doctrines under pretense of the Name of Christ.
Urshan thought that pentecostal believers needed to be inoculated against these new and strange doctrinal viruses that were eating away at the heart of Christian faith. He also believed that if “members of the Christian churches had been taught and trained” better, they “would not have been so easily misled” by modern heretical innovators. He hoped that his own writings would be an antidote for the errors of “unbelieving churchianity” that were becoming so prevalent in his day.79 While Urshan believed that sound doctrine was essential, he also tried to keep doctrinal concerns in proper perspective. Disciplined re®ection on the faith was not an unmixed boon; doctrine by itself was not the answer. Urshan knew that even the best of “our own understanding, wisdom and education does not always lead us in the right path,” and he further argued that human philosophy was often directly “against the word of God.” Urshan warned pentecostal would-be theologians to be very “careful with human reasonings” and to take their stand solidly on the word of God alone, saying that “whether we fully understand it or not” the Bible was the only true guide for faith. Urshan thought that even if one was wholly biblical in one’s beliefs and opinions, there were other ways of falling into error. There were ways of living that were doctrinally correct but attitudinally wrong or spiritually dead. Doctrinal pride could easily become a problem, so Urshan encouraged believers never to boast of their great theological knowledge. Dead orthodoxy was just as bad, and Urshan denounced those whose vision of the truth was “limited to . . . lifeless theological doctrine.” His own watchword was that Christians should prove the soundness of their theology by the spiritual vitality that characterized their lives.80 One of the issues that troubled him most was the way that pentecostals with differing theological opinions ridiculed and demeaned each other. Urshan understood the problem of ungracious dogmatism from
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¤rst-hand experience. He had felt it within his own family and he had sensed it in larger pentecostal circles, especially as the spread of the “New Issue” raised tensions within the movement. Urshan himself was convinced that pugnacious orthodoxy had been a bane to Christian faith throughout the centuries, and he sought to avoid it in his own ministry. He encouraged his peers to do the same, writing: To preach doctrine is most essential, because the true Gospel doctrines are to Christianity, what bones are to the human body. Without Bible doctrines, there would be no Christianity. But it is one thing to preach doctrine with a meek spirit, clothed upon with the love of Christ; and quite another to proclaim the truth in the way [some people try] to force it upon [others]. Herein lies the defeat and success regarding doctrinal matters. There have been terrible calamities in Christendom from the very beginning to this very day, (which have come through stormy discussions over Christian fundamentals being taught in the churches) because of this human zeal and force.
Urshan admitted that he himself had at times contributed to this sorry state of theological animosity. He said: “We have all been guilty of this in a measure at sometime or another; and have caused many unnecessary grievances, disasters, persecutions and losses of dear friends. Many splits and divisions have come in among God’s people because of this.” But his prayer was that some day God would “forgive us and heal all such wounds in the Body of Christ.”81 One of the ways Urshan tried to promote a peaceable theological atmosphere within the pentecostal community was by focusing on what he thought were essential doctrines, leaving other theological issues simply unaddressed. The result was that Urshan’s theological writings were for the most part more narrow in breadth and focus than most of his peers. This is especially evident if we compare Urshan to his Oneness colleague G. T. Haywood. Haywood, as we have seen, was panoptic in theological vision, addressing many different theological subjects and concerns. By contrast, Urshan limited his focus almost entirely to just two areas of theological re®ection: the nature and means of obtaining the “new birth” and, to a signi¤cantly lesser degree, the nature of the godhead as revealed in and by Jesus Christ. There is an old adage that says the fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing. Given those contrasting categories, it seems fair to label Haywood a pentecostal fox and Urshan a theological hedgehog. Urshan did not try to comment on everything; instead he devoted his theological time and energy to only one or two big
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things—in this case, the one or two big things that Oneness pentecostals held especially dear. Spiritual and Theological Biography In order to understand Urshan’s theological attitudes and priorities, it is necessary to know something about his own spiritual journey. Urshan himself felt that theology could never really be abstracted from life, and his autobiographical ruminations underscored that point over and over. Andrew David Urshan was born in the small village of Abajaloo in the Urmia region of Persia (Iran) in 1884. He was the ¤rst child of the family, and he was named after his father, who was a Presbyterian minister. Urshan’s family was part of the Persian Nestorian community, a Christian quasi-ethnic subgroup whose roots went back to the years before Islamic rule was established in the region in the mid-seventh century. When Persia became Muslim, the entire Christian population of the nation was lumped into one administrative subunit called a melet, and life within that melet was overseen by the patriarch of the Nestorian Church, the leader of the largest ecclesiastical organization in the country. The patriarch was responsible for collecting taxes, keeping the peace, and administering justice within the Christian community. In essence, to be a Christian in Persia was to be part of this quasi-ethnic subgroup. As time passed, the size of the Nestorian melet slowly decreased in numbers but it became socially more cohesive, and it was into that small and tight-knit community that Urshan was born. While Urshan’s father had become a Presbyterian as a result of his contact with Western missionaries, he remained ethnically Nestorian. The younger Urshan was raised to respect that Nestorian heritage, even though his own family’s faith had become more Protestant and pietistic than traditionally Nestorian in theology and practice. Despite his parents’ attempts to nurture him into Christian faith, Urshan described himself as an unruly child, corrupted by friendship “with boys who had no fear of the Lord.” It was not until he was sent at the age of ¤fteen to the American Presbyterian Training College in nearby Urmiah City that he truly adopted Christianity as his own. After a year of training in the city, he returned to his village of Abajaloo to be a teacher in the local church school. He had forty students, and his task was to instruct them in a basic grade school curriculum and the Christian faith. He was an inspired teacher, at least on religious topics, and soon “the spiritual tide became so strong” that his students started a mini-
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revival in the town. Despite his success as a teacher, however, he decided to leave Persia and emigrate to the United States. His journey was arduous, following a roundabout itinerary that took him through Russia, Eastern Europe, and Germany and ended with a torturous Atlantic crossing (he was seasick the entire time). He arrived in New York City in the late fall.82 For six months he worked in a hat factory in Yonkers, then he left New York for Chicago, where he took up employment as a waiter. Urshan slowly moved up the ranks of Chicago’s culinary world and eventually opened a restaurant of his own with a cousin. Urshan had several relatives in Chicago, and one cousin, who was a member of the Brethren Church, constantly harangued Urshan about his need to be baptized by immersion. Having been born into a staunch Presbyterian family, Urshan had, of course, been baptized as a child; but his cousin insisted that a mere sprinkling of water on an infant’s head was no baptism at all. Eventually Urshan was convinced and was rebaptized by immersion. Despite lingering resentment over the irritating manner in which his cousin had berated him, Urshan found this to be a life-changing experience. For Urshan the issue was not so much baptism itself as a commitment to live according to whatever “new light” God might reveal to him from the Bible. In this case, he had received new light concerning water baptism and he immediately followed the Bible’s command. Later God would reveal other things to him. From this point on, however, he always tried to live his life based on the principle of immediate obedience to new revelation.83 Urshan was attracted to The Moody Church in Chicago (named after the nineteenth-century revivalist Dwight L. Moody) and its popular fundamentalist pastor, A. C. Dixon. In keeping with the evangelistic thrust of that church, Urshan himself began to hold street-corner evangelistic meetings, sometimes dressing in what he called a “Mohammedan Priest’s costume” to attract attention. But he never felt bound merely to The Moody Church, and he would often visit other congregations. One of the most important such visits took place in 1907 or 1908, when one of his restaurant patrons invited him to visit his small holiness church. Urshan was, at this time, in ¤nancial dif¤culty, and he also described himself as spiritually “backslidden.” He felt in need of God’s help, and he took that concern with him to the holiness church. At ¤rst, Urshan was put off by the homely appearance of the “old wooden shack-like” building where the holiness congregation met. He was also disturbed by the group’s “uproariously noisy” style of worship, so much so that he actually decided to leave the meeting, but the place was so full he could not get out. Then, sud-
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denly, the Spirit moved in his heart. Urshan began to cry out for victory over his sins and for relief from the ¤nancial troubles that beset him, and he said that God immediately reached down and touched him. He wrote: “I felt on my head, a sensation of ¤re which penetrated my whole being! A wonderful peace began deep within. . . . I found I could not stand on my feet. . . . I knew I had received that which I should have experienced in the beginning of my Christian life, namely this—that my old man with his lusts, and desires was nailed to the Cross with Jesus.” Urshan described this event as one of both complete sancti¤cation and the ¤lling of the Holy Spirit. He wrote: “Pentecostal ¤re from heaven [came] upon me in such a measure, that I was actually ¤lled with the Holy Ghost . . . and endued with power from on high.’”84 While Urshan thought that he had reached the pinnacle of spiritual experience, he was soon surprised to discover another group of Christians in Chicago who claimed an even deeper and more powerful experience of God’s presence in their lives. These people called themselves pentecostals, and at the pentecostal services he attended (this was apparently William Durham’s congregation) Urshan observed people being violently shaken by the Spirit and crying out in “some strange language.” At ¤rst he was terri¤ed, but he was entranced as well. He sensed God’s Spirit at work within this intense fellowship of believers. At this time, Urshan was living with a group of “Persian boys” whom he had more or less taken under his wing as new immigrants.85 He said that these “assyrian [sic] boys knew nothing of such a people [pentecostals], and their strange way of worship,” so he decided to use them as spiritual guinea pigs of a sort. He prayed that if the pentecostal message was true, God should allow these younger friends who knew nothing of pentecostalism to experience the baptism of the Spirit with its accompanying signs before he himself received the experience. Within the next few days, one of the Persian boys fell into a trance and began speaking in an ancient Syriac language. Soon the others followed suit, and eventually Urshan himself received the baptism of the Spirit accompanied by speaking in tongues.86 Oddly, or so Urshan thought at the time, the joy he experienced as a result of his own baptism of the Spirit soon gave way to depression. He said he became so spiritually “dry” that he could no longer preach and he could hardly pray. He began to doubt the existence of God. He even contemplated suicide. Beaten down by despair, Urshan ¤nally came to the conclusion that all he could do was “cling to [the] Bible and stand upon its promises” regardless of how he felt, and the very moment he decided to do that the gloom began to dissipate. He felt as if he had been tested
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by God and had been found faithful. His spiritual self-con¤dence returned. The result was that after four weeks of utter despondency, his soul was ®ooded with a new sense of power and joy. He wrote: “The glory of God rushed forth like a mighty river which had been damned [sic] up so long, and my whole being was a®ame!” As a result of this extraordinary ¤lling of the Spirit, Urshan also claimed a new ability to intuitively understand the Bible without any of the arduous study that he had formerly found necessary. From then on he said that ¤ve minutes was all he ever needed to prepare a sermon because God always revealed the real meaning of the text to him—hermeneutics made simple!87 Urshan and his “Persian boys” were at this time still attending The Moody Church. They were given use of the building in the afternoon to conduct services for the Persian community. Urshan’s general orientation of faith ¤t quite well with Dixon’s fundamentalism, and the pastor of The Moody Church must have recognized that. Both thought they were living in “days of darkness and apostacy [sic],” both thought that heresy was on the rise, and both thought that Christians had to take a strong stand for truth.88 But while Urshan and Dixon obviously shared certain fundamentalist dispositions, the issue of tongues would drive them apart. Urshan said that as soon as Dixon heard he had been consorting with pentecostals, he pulled him aside and warned him “against the tongues folks,” insisting that Urshan was already “¤lled with the Spirit” and didn’t need to seek any further con¤rmation of that fact. Dixon also denounced pentecostals from the pulpit, lumping them together with various other “spiritualists, and religious fanatics” who had lost touch with true Christian faith. But Urshan was unconvinced by Dixon’s arguments. The pentecostals he knew did not ¤t Dixon’s description of them; in fact, they seemed to Urshan more fully Christian than anyone he had met. When Urshan refused to renounce his pentecostal views, Dixon barred the doors against him and his friends. Needing to ¤nd another location for the Chicago Persian congregation, Urshan opened his own Persian Pentecostal Mission on North Clark Street.89 Urshan and his followers were intensely pious, often staying up most of the night to pray. Their experiences included many heavenly visions and new insights of truth. Urshan wrote that even though they were ravished with visions and new revelations, they always hoped for ever-more “NEW AND FRESH LIGHT FROM GOD’S SPIRIT.” Eventually the group received a dramatic revelation concerning the name of God. Urshan recounted the event saying: “One day while searching the scriptures . . . the Lord called my attention to two words in Matt. 28:19, namely:
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‘THE NAME!’ ‘THE NAME’! ‘Baptizing them in or into the NAME!’ Not in the NAMES! . . . The blessed Lord showed me then and there, that ‘The Lord Jesus Christ’ is the ONE PROPER NAME of God for this Gospel dispensation.” Urshan said that from that point on he “began to baptize new converts INTO THE NAME OF THE LORD JESUS CHRIST: which is the ONE NAME of the Father, the Son, and Holy Ghost.” Later in his life, Urshan claimed that he received this revelation in 1910, a full two years before the Oneness movement began to take formal shape following the Arroyo Seco camp-meeting. His memory of precisely when this event took place may not be entirely accurate, but it is clear that he wanted to claim that he had arrived at his Jesus-only pentecostal faith on his own apart from the in®uence of other Oneness movement leaders. He saw himself as a pentecostal pioneer, not as a follower.90 In late 1913, Urshan left the United States to visit his homeland. Despite an initially cold reaction from the people in his hometown, he was soon successfully spreading the pentecostal message in his old stomping grounds around Urmiah. However, World War I began to create troubles in the region. Urshan said that God gave him a vision of the coming crisis, and he was tempted to return to America quickly, but he decided to stay in Persia with his own people. He saw ¤rst hand the massacres of Christians that took place and the epidemics that swept over the region as the war progressed. Urshan himself caught typhus while caring for others. When he recovered, he decided to ®ee the region and headed north to Russia. It was there, in Russia, that he ¤nally allowed himself to be rebaptized in the name of Jesus alone. The pentecostal Baptists of St. Petersburg convinced him that it would be hypocritical for him to continue to preach baptism in Jesus’s name without having been baptized in that manner himself. It was while he was in Russia that Urshan also ¤rst heard news of “a division among God’s Pentecostal people in America, over the use of different formulas, in baptizing converts.” Urshan was disheartened. He clearly thought that the language of baptism was an important issue, but he “loved all these people” and he “did not want to take a de¤nite step with—or against—either side.”91 Immediately upon his return to the United States in 1916, Urshan was questioned about where he stood on the “New Issue.” His ¤rst reaction was to try to remain above the fray, arguing that he had “not [returned] to this country to preach the doctrines, over which there seemed to be much discussion; nor had [he] taken sides with either faction.” However, he was soon forced to choose sides, and it was his friends within the Assemblies of God who pushed the issue. Urshan prayed about the matter
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for months, and in mid-1918 he ¤nally declared his allegiance to the Oneness side against the Trinitarians. The Trinitarians who had demanded his decision were disheartened, but Urshan’s choice was ¤nal.92 The experience of having to choose sides in the internecine pentecostal struggle over Oneness versus Trinitarian frameworks of theology caused Urshan to reevaluate the history of the movement as a whole. Urshan believed that the pentecostal movement in its original form had been uniquely raised up by God. It was “the most wonderful movement that ever had taken place on the face of the earth since apostolic times.” He argued that “every former revival [had] been headed by some man of God . . . but this Pentecostal revival fell in two years[’] time all over the world. . . . Holy men and women belonging to different denominations received the spontaneous spiritual blessing and spoke in tongues.” Pentecostalism’s divinely driven hot spirituality blazed up all around the globe, but the movement had begun to cool, and with that cooling, problems had begun to emerge. Urshan said that pentecostals were “drifting into formalism, legalism, worldliness, and self-suf¤ciency.” He said he had even seen “the terrible working of the spirit of the higher critics among us Pentecostal people.” Writing in 1919, he warned: God will not let us stay in our present miserable state. He will have us puri¤ed and made straight under heavy, hot irons of persecution. Every bit of worldly spirit and all the higher or lower criticism of His Holy Word must be taken out of us. He will have a people that will hear and do every command up to the last letter. He is going to make us practice the Bible principles and the doctrine of Christ, up to the last jot and tittle before He can lead us to perfection.93
Urshan had originally tried to interpret the Oneness-Trinitarian con®ict in terms of lack of love among pentecostal believers. He increasingly came to see the rift as an issue of truth as well. Trinitarian pentecostals had decided to follow the mistaken baptismal practices of “modern Theologians.” They were tri®ing with heresy. By contrast, Oneness pentecostals were willing to suffer for “the Name.” They were “glad and full of praise to Him for counting [them] worthy to suffer shame for His NAME.” Urshan believed that God’s “pruning time” had begun and that Trinitarian pentecostals were about to be lopped off from the movement so that true pentecostal faith could ®ourish.94 About this same time Urshan experienced another major turning point in his life. Shortly after his return to Chicago from Russia, he mar-
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ried a woman named Ethel (he does not provide her last name) and began to raise a family. This was a shock to many of his friends, since he had previously been committed to celibacy for the sake of serving God. He never did say explicitly what changed his mind, and he continued to assert that the single life was spiritually better than marriage. Nonetheless, he believed that marriage was allowable, and he felt that God had told him it was within “His permissive Will” for him to wed. Urshan’s description of his married life was, however, noticeably reserved. At one point he said it had also been characterized by “so much suffering.” Urshan did not elaborate on what he meant by this, but we know that his wife left him sometime in the late 1920s or early 1930s under circumstances that are not clear. What is clear, however, is that Urshan derived great joy from his four children. His fatherly pride is evident in the comment that all of them had “been ¤lled with the Holy Ghost and are used in the Apostolic Faith Ministry.”95 Urshan continued to engage in itinerant evangelistic ministry up until at least 1934. He led revivals in cities and towns all across North America and sometimes in Europe as well, while his family apparently maintained a permanent residence in Chicago. He eventually became known as the “Persian Evangelist,” and people ®ocked to hear him preach. Urshan was also a player of sorts in pentecostal denominational developments during these years, helping to organize and/or reorganize a number of different groups. He was involved at least peripherally with the Assemblies of God in the late 1910s while simultaneously being a member of the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World. In 1925, he helped to organize a new denomination called Emmanuel’s Church in Jesus Christ, for which he served as the ¤rst foreign missions secretary. In 1945, he took part in the multichurch merger that created the United Pentecostal Church. Urshan remained active in ministry until his death in 1967. Obtaining the New Birth The doctrine of the new birth, of being made right with God and ¤lled with the Spirit, de¤ned the core of Urshan’s theology. He described “this holy doctrine of the new birth” as “the Bible doctrine of all divine doctrines, and the revelation of all the revelations from God.” But while the experience of the new birth de¤ned the central concern of Urshan’s theology, he was not wedded to any one term as the best label for this experience. He referred to the experience variously as being born again, as being baptized by and ¤lled with the Spirit, as full conversion, as receiving
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the gospel in our lives, as being ¤lled with the fullness of God, and as undergoing spiritual transformation. The phraseology was not what was important; it was the underlying experience.96 According to Urshan, the new birth was part of God’s plan for humanity from the very beginning of creation. God created Adam and Eve “perfect in every detail” as far as their humanity was concerned, but God created them spiritually incomplete in that they lacked the ¤lling of the Spirit. In order for Adam and Eve to obtain that ¤lling, they, like every other human being, would need to experience a “second birth” through which the “Divine Celestial Life” would enter their bodies and souls. This was true even before Adam and Eve had fallen into sin, and since then the new birth had become even more necessary. Urshan said that as a result of the fall, humanity as a whole had been “subject to sorrow, sickness, insanity, and death, not only physical death, but also the second death or the Spiritual death.” In light of this dire situation, the new birth needed to do double duty, simultaneously reversing the effects of the fall and lifting people to a higher plane of spiritual existence.97 The basic nature of the new birth remained the same, however. According to Urshan, the “new birth [was] nothing short of the coming of God Himself into our life,” and he urged people to seek that experience: “You were born to be reborn—you were born once that you should be born again—you were born after the ®esh; you must be born after the Spirit. Be born again! Do not be satis¤ed with your fortunate ¤rst birth rights either, for you must be born again. . . . Just as sure as we are human in the Adamic nature; we can equally be sure to become divine in Christ Jesus. So if we were born once, why not be born again, with a better, happier, and supremely more blessed birth?” Through the New Birth one entered into the ongoing “miraculous process of God’s own endless existence graciously offered to the human family to partake in and through Christ Jesus, the Lord of Glory.” This was real conversion. This was the beginning of one’s real sancti¤cation. This was the real baptism of the Spirit.98 Urshan believed there was only one way to truly be born again. This involved being “born of water (baptism) and of the Spirit (the Spirit baptism).” One or the other by itself would not do. Both elements were necessary. He argued that “water baptism without the Holy Spirit baptism is not full Christian baptism” and that “Spirit baptism alone without water baptism is not full Christian baptism, either.” The second of these two points—the necessity of water baptism even if one had already received the baptism of the Spirit—would perhaps have been seen as the more
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unusual requirement in the eyes of many pentecostal laity. Urshan explained: “Those who imagine we get remission of sins before baptism can have no correct knowledge of its signi¤cance. If we receive remissions of sins before baptism, there would be no need for baptism, which is the ‘birth of water,’ or ‘the washing of regeneration,’ ‘the cleansing of water in the Word.’” Urshan argued that one needed to experience “God’s real twofold baptism” of both water and the Spirit before one should “dare to call yourself a bible born Christian.”99 Urshan knew that a number of his contemporaries were teaching that belief alone was the necessary condition for obtaining the new birth. He derided that view, saying it had “so belittled and lowered the standard of this Heavenly birth teaching that every modern church member claims to have been born again.” He said that many preachers told their “people just to believe on the Lord Jesus, and accept his ¤nished work on the cross and you are right then and there born again.” But Urshan strongly disagreed with this belief-only, ¤nished-work theology, calling it an “incomplete man-made teaching.” He queried its proponents, saying, “Experience? No experience, just believe, only believe and that is all. May God have mercy on such. They forget that the devil believes all this and he is still a devil.”100 Urshan’s main point was that people needed to express their belief in obedience and con¤rm their belief by experience. Belief clearly had an important role to play. Urshan said that before one could obey the gospel “we have ¤rst to comprehend it,” but he believed that the most important thing was obedience, especially the obedience of baptism. He wrote: “My dear reader, you say you believe in Christ. Very well, but have you put on Christ by the baptism in His name?” Urshan argued that “water baptism [was] the test of a genuine faith and submission to the will of God and His plan of salvation.” Belief without that visible sign of submission was not genuine belief at all, and it was certainly not saving faith. In the same way, Urshan thought that baptism without the physical experience of God’s entrance into one’s body was incomplete. He said that when the power of God entered a human being, that person would know it—that person would feel it in his or her very bones. Obedient belief produced experience.101 Urshan believed that salvation “contained both Spirit and matter,” and it affected both soul and body. He said that “a strong ¤re makes a great engine tremble and shake,” and he believed God was a strong ¤re, literally shaking the bodies of those being ¤lled by the Spirit. Often people fell on the ®oor as the Spirit rumbled into them. They shouted or
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wept or sang or danced, and sometimes they did all those things at once. Their bodies trembled under God’s awesome power. And they invariably spoke in other tongues. Urshan said that if one had not “felt the divine wind blowing in your heart, [so that] your bones, muscles, teeth and tongue could not stop from shaking,” it was doubtful one had truly been born again. He added: “Unless you speak in tongues as the Spirit gives utterance you lack the Heavenly sign of [your] oneness with Christ or the Spiritual Christ’s presence within you.” The new birth was not a matter of belief alone. It was a matter of experience—an undeniable experience of God’s inrushing presence con¤rmed by “the speaking in tongues as the Spirit gives utterance . . . and shaking of the body, and prostration under the power of the Spirit.”102 Urshan was more precise, and perhaps a bit more dogmatic, about the relation of tongues to the new birth (the baptism of the Spirit) than he was on most of the other subjects he discussed. He said that speaking in other tongues was the necessary validation that one had truly experienced the baptism of the Spirit. In the new birth, God physically entered the believer and took control of that person’s body. Control of the tongue, the communicative organ of the body, was a sign that God was indeed in control of the whole body. Urshan wrote: “If God gets your tongue in a right way He has got you—not only has He got the best of you, but the worst of you, which is your tongue. No man can tame or control the tongue. Therefore, when God has it He has all of you. We like that sign because it signi¤es God’s full control of our being.”103 While Urshan believed that speaking in tongues was a necessary “sign” of the baptism of the Spirit, he was careful to distinguish this from other “evidences” of the baptism of the Spirit. At ¤rst glance this might seem like merely a semantic quibble—the notions of sign and evidence seem fairly synonymous—but Urshan saw a difference. He wrote: “Evidence is the production of the goods, while a sign is an indication of the goods.” He speci¤ed that “the evidences of the baptism of the Holy Spirit are the fruits of the Spirit, but the sign of the baptism of the Spirit is speaking in other tongues as the Spirit gives utterance.” Urshan wanted to disallow the con®ation of these two categories, precisely because some of his pentecostal peers were beginning to suggest that the visible presence of the fruit of the Spirit in a Christian’s life was evidence in and of itself that one had received the baptism of the Spirit even if one had never spoken in tongues. Urshan denied that proposition, saying that the sign and the evidences both needed to be present for someone to claim with validity that they had experienced the new birth. He said that “just as on
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a tree, there are leaves and the fruit growing together,” in the same way the truly reborn and Spirit-¤lled Christian would manifest both the sign and the evidences of the new birth. Urshan also obviously believed that the leaves/sign of tongues would appear before the fruit/evidences of the Spirit.104 Urshan thought the concept of new birth was frequently misunderstood and was often poorly preached. This was true both within the pentecostal world and outside that community of faith. Urshan believed that as a result of this de¤ciency, many “so-called Christians” had experienced only “a mere touch of conviction, or a shallow conversion” and not the real thing. His pastoral advice was that such persons should move forward as quickly as possible into the full experience of the new birth. That was good practical advice, but it provided no information regarding the spiritual status of these halfway Christians. Just what was the state of “those who have believed in Christ but have never been immersed in Jesus name, and have not received the Holy Ghost”? Urshan offered several different answers.105 Like his Oneness colleague G. T. Haywood, Urshan suggested that this halfway condition could be explained to some degree as a gestational period falling between spiritual conception and the new birth itself. Urshan wrote: “Just as a baby must be begotten or conceived and developed in the womb then be born; even so spiritually some ¤rst hear the word and embrace it until the life of God begins in the heart; this is spiritual conception of the word and when continuing in the word, the word grows to a birth and that is being born of God or of the Spirit after being begotten of the word.” Urshan also thought that the biblical distinction between the “kingdom of heaven” and the “kingdom of God” offered a means of explanation. Using this terminology, he argued that these liminal, incompletely reborn Christians belonged to the kingdom of heaven, but they did not yet belong to the kingdom of God. In this context, he de¤ned the kingdom of heaven as all those who had in some sense submitted themselves to “the Lord ruling among men on the earth.” Urshan believed this was a mixed company “[containing] both wheat and tares, good and bad ¤sh,” and he implied that it was not always possible to tell who was wheat and who was tare. The kingdom of God, by contrast, consisted of all those who had been truly born again and sealed by the Spirit.106 Urshan’s ¤rst analogy of conception and birth implied that, all things being equal, spiritual rebirth would follow naturally and normally from spiritual conception. Urshan’s second metaphor made things a bit more
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complicated, however. Moving from the kingdom of heaven to the kingdom of God required an act of volition; it was not an inevitable development. Urshan said that in light of that fact, halfway Christians needed to actively seek the completion of their rebirth through the ¤lling of the Spirit. At times, Urshan became quite excited, saying that halfway Christians couldn’t just wait in the womb for the birth process to begin naturally, they had to make an effort themselves. He sometimes fell into rhetoric that made him sound like a coach yelling to players on a sports ¤eld. At one point he shouted in print: “ASK! ASK! ASK! SEEK! SEEK! SEEK! and KNOCK! KNOCK! KNOCK! and KNOCK!” That was the way the new birth took place.107 While these two analogies went a long way toward explaining the spiritual dynamics leading up to the new birth, Urshan seems to have felt that they were still not adequate to describe all the varieties of spiritual experience he had observed in his ministerial career. Urshan pointed out, for example, that some quasi-Christians who had not yet received the new birth in its fullness could do great things through the power of the Spirit. He said that some halfway Christians had done miracles, cast out devils in Jesus’s name, healed the sick, and preached the gospel with power and zeal. He himself had engaged in successful evangelistic ministry and had experienced a number of wonderful visions from God before he had been baptized in the Spirit. How was one to make sense of such things? Urshan suggested that such things might be possible if the Holy Spirit was specially with a person, even if the Spirit was not yet literally in that person. He argued that this had been the state of “the Disciples of our Lord previous to their spiritual baptism,” since the Spirit did not literally enter into anyone until the day of Pentecost. For some people, the mere proximity of the Spirit was apparently suf¤cient to empower them to preach and work miracles even before they were fully reborn by the ¤lling of the Spirit. Urshan may have thought that such persons were merely gestational Christians in a certain sense, but if so he certainly presented them as superbabies in the making. They were in a different category than most.108 In describing his own spiritual pilgrimage, Urshan layered several more interpretive categories onto his understanding of how one might move toward the fullness of the new birth. In his Life Story, Urshan said that his own spiritual seeking had led him through three separate experiences that culminated in the baptism of the Spirit. He recounted that he was regenerated at the age of ¤fteen while attending the Presbyterian school in Urmiah; he was sancti¤ed seven or eight years later through an
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experience he had in a holiness church in Chicago; and he was baptized in the Spirit a year or so after that.109 Each experience had made him “more hungry and thirsty for Jesus,” and he said that his sancti¤cation, in particular, had made him “a clean temple for God,” ready for the Spirit’s baptismal indwelling. Elsewhere he generalized that experience, saying that anyone seeking the new birth needed ¤rst to “be cleansed in order to receive God, for He dwells only in the Holiest of all. We must be true believers in order to receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.” This sounds like classic three-step holiness-pentecostal theology: regeneration followed by sancti¤cation leading to the baptism of the Spirit. At other times, however, Urshan could sound rather Reformed in his theological categories. This was especially the case when he argued that God provided the believer with a kind of “judicial” holiness at the time of his or her conversion and that this judicially imputed holiness was only later slowly transformed into actual holiness by the sanctifying work of the Spirit—with a special boost being given when one received the baptism of the Spirit. He wrote: “Judicially we are complete, holy in Christ in sight of God at the very moment we are truly converted. Christ is made unto us, holiness, etc., but experimently [sic] this holiness, which is the gift of God in and through Jesus Christ for us, begins in our conversion, and [increases] as we receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit, and walk in the Spirit, mortifying the ®esh daily.” This sounds like classic two-step pentecostal theology: regeneration followed by the baptism of the Spirit and a life of growth in holiness.110 In the end, Urshan was unwilling to identify either of these ways of talking about the new birth, or any other, as the best or only way of describing how God brought people into the fullness of this experience. He seems to have believed that God could intervene in people’s lives in different ways, and he thought it unnecessary to subject that experiential complexity to the judgment of only one theological norm. What was nonnegotiable, however, was that every potential Christian needed to struggle forward toward the baptism of the Spirit which brought the recipient into the fullness of the new birth. He wrote: “I don’t say you are not saved before you have the baptism; you are saved that you might get the baptism—you are saved to get the ¤re and have it blazing.” Urshan believed that no one should be content to stop short of that goal and that absolutely no one should preach a gospel that required less.111 Living as One Reborn As glorious as the new birth was in and of itself, Urshan ultimately thought that the event was only the beginning of one’s spiritual life, not
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the end. The real purpose of the reborn life of the Christian was to progress toward the goal of becoming “divine in Christ Jesus.” Urshan’s theology of the new birth was one of continual growth toward perfect holiness and not a theology of once-and-done transformation. He said that the ultimate goal was “to grow perfect in love, perfect in Holiness, perfect in Peace and in the full stature of the man Christ Jesus.” For Urshan, the new birth was “the beginning not only of sancti¤cation but of all other Christian traits.” Life after the initiating experience of the new birth was to be characterized by constant advance, and the pathway to advance was paved with purity, self-discipline, and godly sorrow. The life of the reborn saints was not one of comfort, joy, and ease but of tears and mourning leading to perfection.112 Urshan believed that the new birth was the beginning of the recipient’s perfection in holiness. In some cases, God granted Christians a certain kind of sancti¤cation before they were fully reborn (this had been Urshan’s own experience), but it was the new birth itself that really started one on the road to “perfect holiness.” Urshan wrote: “When we are born, we get Christ’s Spirit into us and that Spirit of truth is ‘the Spirit of holiness’ which comes into our lives to change us from day to day into the perfect image and full stature of the man Christ Jesus. Let us therefore never forget that there is awaiting us a more perfect sancti¤cation yet, and let us see that we are not only keeping clean daily, but that . . . we are also growing into perfect holiness.” Urshan believed that when a person experienced the new birth, the holiness of God was somehow sprinkled on that person to the point where “we ¤nd its traces all over us.” Those traces of divine holiness were, however, merely a foreshadowing of what God had in store for the reborn Christian. Urshan promised: “God means for us not only to have the traces of His Holiness, but [to] be ¤lled with all His fulness and become Holy as He is Holy.”113 One of the places where progress in holiness was most easily observed was in the patterns of human speech. Just as the ability to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave utterance was the sign that one had received the new birth, morally and spiritually disciplined ordinary speech provided evidence that one was continuing to walk in the Spirit. Urshan said that the Spirit “makes us not only to speak in Heavenly tongues, but [to] speak truth with freedom at all times. Take that old tongue and keep it from backbiting, from lying, cursing, swearing, and from sowing discord among brethren. Loose it to talk righteousness, and truth, direct it to pray through and praise Thy name continually to encourage broken hearts.” Of course, changed speech was of little value if it was not accompanied
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by changed activity under the guidance of the Spirit. He said that “words and works are two different things,” but both needed to be transformed by the new birth.114 Urshan extended the notion of evidences of the new birth to include a wide range of Christian attitudes and behaviors. His general rule of thumb was that “the best way of knowing a person or a thing is to watch their outcome or fruit. . . . Here is God’s way for us to ¤nd out the true elect.” Alluding to the fruit of the Spirit as de¤ned by the Apostle Paul in Galatians 5:22–23, he wrote: “Here is a grand picture of the elect who are ¤rst full of ®owing mercy; second, tenderheartedness or kind, which means gentle toward all; third, humble not only outwardly, but deep down in heart; fourth, meek or willing to receive reproach without murmuring; ¤fth, longsuffering, or suffering patiently.” Then he asked: “Reader, have you got these divine traits down deep in your soul, are you letting the same to ¤ll your human nature and to ®ow over your whole being as a good garment that will wholly cover you when it is put on[?]” For Urshan, progress in holiness involved deep volitional change; it was not a matter of surface readjustments. He said that the ultimate goal was to have one’s own will merge fully into the will of God, to “come to a place where our own ways, our paths can be directed by the ways and paths of the almighty God, and we will ¤nd that whatsoever we do is just what God wants us to do.”115 In another passage, Urshan developed a list of seven traits that he thought provided a comprehensive pattern of what new life in the Spirit ought to look like. The ¤rst evidence he identi¤ed in this context was “great courage and boldness” in living for and testifying about Jesus. Urshan asked: “Has the Holy Fire burned up all the cowardice out of you so that you fear no man nor the devil, but heroically live, testify and die for Jesus?” The second evidence was “a sincere, honest and graceful heart.” The third evidence was “enduring severe persecution for the sake of Christ or the truth joyfully. The fourth evidence was having been “emptied from the love of money and the things concerning this life.” The ¤fth evidence was the miraculous “unity of mind and spirit” that existed among all those who had truly been reborn by God’s Spirit. The sixth evidence was knowing “how to pray and [taking] delights in prayer more than anything else.” Expanding on the signi¤cance of prayer as an evidence of holiness, Urshan wrote: “The devil can preach, shout, dance, criticise [sic], backbite, and quote scriptures, too; but he can never with tears and a broken heart supplicate on behalf of the lost souls.” The seventh and last evidence of growth in the life of holiness was “a burning
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love and exaltation toward the person and name of Jesus Christ our Lord.” Though Urshan believed that God could and did endow believers with great spiritual power, this list of what he considered to be the seven most important evidences of the Spirit-¤lled life concentrated on concerns that were clearly more pastoral and evangelistic in nature than miraculous. This was in keeping with Urshan’s understanding of what true holiness entailed. He wrote: “The Lord showed me that I should never seek the nine gifts, but only desire them to be operated by the Holy Spirit in His own time and pleasure. Instead I should earnestly seek to be ¤lled with the fullness of God, which is the compassion for souls.”116 While life in the new birth involved many positive dimensions, Urshan also knew that part of the reborn experience was negative in character. He believed that progressive sancti¤cation involved the removal of certain aspects of one’s old life as much as it meant the addition of new attitudes and abilities; growth in holiness involved puri¤cation as well as empowerment. And when one reads Urshan’s complete works, this negative, or ascetic, dimension of holiness actually looms larger than the positive. It seems that of the seven items listed above, Urshan devoted more pages of print to the fourth item (being emptied of the love of money and the things concerning this life) than he did to all the other more positive evidences included in that list. One of Urshan’s favorite images for describing this purifying, ascetic process of progressive sancti¤cation was that of being washed and ironed by God: the washing of regeneration was followed by the painful ironing of sancti¤cation. Urshan wrote: “God takes out our wrinkles by putting us under the heavy irons of af®ictions and stretches us in all directions so severely that we think we will be torn to pieces.” Urshan advised that when undergoing that process, “We are better off just to keep quiet and have patience.” He said: “Do not murmur under the heavy irons of His sovereign work and power . . . but endure temptations and heaviness under trials of your faith. Strive to cease from sin, but do not forget it will come by suffering in your ®esh, mortifying the desires of your nature. Pray for the fullness of God, but be willing to ¤rst be emptied completely.”117 When Urshan stressed the painful aspects of sancti¤cation, he often made the body central. This makes sense, given the fact that Urshan believed that the new birth involved the physical as well as the spiritual. Urshan spoke often of the need to subjugate the ®esh, saying, for example, that “when the Holy Ghost comes in us, He commences to kill our ®eshly desires, even our good works, and then He commences to put Christ into our very ®esh.” Urshan was quick to point out that while God clearly
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aided the believer in killing ®eshly desires, the human will was involved as well; he argued that Christians needed to work with God’s Spirit by “[walking] in the Spirit, mortifying the ®esh daily.”118 One of the most down-to-earth examples he used to illustrate morti¤cation of the ®esh had to do with the enjoyment of a good chicken dinner. He wrote: “Do you remember how you used to love chicken dinners? My, they did taste so good! And you would think about them a great deal, but after you come to this place [the baptism of the Spirit], you will eat chicken or turkey, but they don’t amount to much any more. You have put your love on Christ.” This example should not be treated too lightly. Throughout the history of Christianity, food-related discipline has often been seen as the bedrock of all other ascetic practices. The great saints of the past often engaged in lengthy fasts, sometimes even life-threatening fasts, as means of advancing in piety. One thinks, too, of Augustine’s general advice to Christians that they should eat only what was necessary to live and should never allow gastronomical delight to sully the holiness of their lives. Urshan’s advice ¤ts quite neatly into that tradition of dietary asceticism, and the point seems to be that if one cannot control one’s passion for food, one can hardly claim to control the many other more powerful desires and affections that dwell within the human heart, and it was precisely those other desires that Urshan ultimately wanted to address.119 The life of holiness that Urshan believed God required of all reborn Christians involved a total restructuring of the pattern of affections that described one’s life, a recon¤guration of one’s deepest hopes and longings. He wrote that when the Spirit “¤lls our human senses, we don’t enjoy the things we used to love much”; instead, love for God and others would overwhelm one’s former wants and desires. Many of the wants and desires Urshan had in mind were not immoral in and of themselves—in fact, some of them were merely natural human emotions and others were attachments that would have seemed laudable to most people—but Urshan saw them as blocking the path to perfect holiness. A critical issue was familial affection. Urshan wrote: “You used to love your children so much, you were dreaming about them and talking about them. You may still love your children, but it will be different. And the same with your wife or husband. I don’t say you will ¤ght each other, but you will not be so intense about each other. You will be like Paul, who said, ‘Let him that hath a wife be as though he had none’ (I Cor. 7:29).” Urshan’s own family life apparently followed this minimalistic model and that minimalism eventually took its toll on his marriage, which resulted in separation, but
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he urged others to follow that pattern of life nonetheless. Holiness took precedence over all merely human relations.120 In a sense, Urshan seemed to believe that any increase in holiness had to be predicated on a necessary decrease in one’s other desires and attachments. He may not have thought this was precisely a zero-sum relationship, but he clearly believed that human affections had to be tempered in order for godly affections to ®ourish. Natural human affections, however good and moral they might be in the abstract, needed to become mere “shadows” of what they previously were if perfect holiness was to be achieved. In the journey toward perfect holiness, there were many hard choices to be made and many sorrows to endure. He wrote: “Christianity is not human and worldly joy, peace, and happiness, but joy in the Holy Ghost and this joy is ‘the joy of the Lord,’ not the joy in the ®esh. . . . So to have the real Heaven-born joy in our hearts, there must be ¤rst a Heaven-born travail of the soul in His people.” Urshan could wax eloquent about this need for spiritual suffering and travail, about the need for sorrow and mourning if one wanted to advance in the life of holiness. He wrote that “if you trace the life of God’s prophets and apostles you will see more tears than anything else.” Bringing that message home to his readers, Urshan advised: “Beware of the people who can shout, dance, talk and glory in their spiritual experience, but do not pray, weep and travail to bring forth for God. Beware of yourself if you have no divine grief in your soul.”121 For Urshan, the heart of godly sorrow was rooted in God’s own sorrow over the many people in the world who were headed for “the ®ames of eternal loss.” Urshan wondered how anyone could “laugh and dance when the ¤re is burning a house ¤lled with sleeping children.” To drive his point home, he added that “God’s heros [sic] do not weep because they are afraid of persecution, or because of their earthly losses. . . . They weep like Hannah of Old because they feel barren and not as fruitful for their God as they ought to be.” But Urshan believed that those who were truly on the pathway to holiness wept for other reasons as well. They wept “because of the sin of God’s people.” They wept over the “poor discernment of the saints, who so easily give in to . . . false teaching.” They wept because they were “tender-hearted and broken-spirited” in general. All in all, Urshan believed that the road to perfect holiness was bathed in tears. Intermittent moments of joy might dot that path, but the saint’s highway to heaven would necessarily be paved with grief, self-denial, and persecution. Urshan believed that suffering and endurance had been the lot of true Christians throughout all of time, and he felt that the years ahead
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would be even more trying. He said that the “last days” were beginning and a “special persecution” loomed on the horizon, “a real persecution . . . to separate us and purify us from every bit of the love of the world.” This ¤nal persecution would create a “real separation between the wheat and the tares.” The middle ground of quasi-Christianity would soon disappear and one would either be fully saved or not saved at all. The dividing line would be the willingness to suffer for the name of Jesus.122 Given the pain and suffering that he believed was involved in the reborn life, it may have come as no surprise to Urshan that a good number of Spirit-baptized believers ultimately regressed rather than progressed in the life of holiness. At some point in their spiritual development these people had decided that enough was enough. They believed that they had accumulated enough holiness to guarantee their acceptance with God and that they could now relax. In Urshan’s vision of things, these people were backsliders. As soon as one ceased to move forward in the Spirit, the constant currents of sin and sloth would take over and one would invariably, if almost imperceptibly at ¤rst, begin to drift away from God. While many backsliders might outwardly still appear to be good Christians, at least for a while, the trajectory of their lives had changed, and that was the crucial issue. The essence of the reborn life was found in its constant striving for greater holiness, and that trajectory of spiritual growth was in many ways more important than the speci¤c degree of holiness one possessed at a given moment. Spiritual self-satisfaction thus became for Urshan a sure sign that someone had entered a backslidden state. Backsliders were always quick to say: “Once I am in grace, [I will] always [be] in grace. Don’t tell me I will be lost. I am sealed. I am all right.” Urshan believed that that kind of spiritual smugness was a clear indication that one was in grave danger.123 Urshan frequently described backslidden Christians as “lukewarm,”124 and he would always quickly add that the “normal” Christian life was supposed to be hot. He wrote: “You are either a hot Christian or you are lukewarm. Jesus Christ did not say there was anything else between. . . . [The] man whose heart is on ¤re, his prayers are hot. . . . He brings ¤re upon people who are seeking. . . . His song is so hot it makes a man melt in tears, and get up and dance. . . . The man who is a HOT Christian is a holy man; he has the righteousness of Jesus in him. . . . Oh beloved, God’s standard for His people is for them to be HOT Christians, ‘boiling’ Christians, not cold nor lukewarm.” It was unimaginable to Urshan that anyone would actually want to be lukewarm, but there were such people and Urshan labeled them spiritual traitors. Their desire for a life of ease
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led them to “forget that the New Birth experience in their life is ‘the pearl without price,’ and the Precious Priceless treasure within their earthen vessels. They forget how much it cost the Heaven of heavens to make it possible for them. They forget the martyrdom of millions of God’s prophets, apostles and Christians who died to maintain this so great salvation doctrine; to leave us an example of encouragement that we may hold fast on our New Birth experienced profession.”125 Urshan never explained precisely what happened to people who turned away from God in this way. Did they actually lose God’s Spirit? Did they need to be re-reborn in order to be restored? Urshan did not say. We do know, however, that he believed that restoration was possible if backslidden Christians “would wake up and repent before it is too late.” He said that “Jesus loves his lukewarm church” and was ready to forgive, but also he warned lukewarm believers that Jesus was “ready to spue [sic] them out if they [did] not repent.” As for those who failed to accept God’s gracious offer of restoration, they would be treated harshly. Urshan said that to be a lukewarm Christian was “worse than to be a Chinaman who never knew God, or a Mohammedan who never knew Jesus Christ.” God did not look kindly on those who had actually felt the divine life stir within them and then pulled back from that encounter for the sake of “little ®eshly pleasures.” Such ¤ckle people were unworthy of redemption.126 Urshan assured those who remained faithful to their new birth that God would honor their perseverance and ultimately bring them to a state of perfect holiness. He said that beyond the struggles of the present life “there is awaiting us a more perfect sancti¤cation yet . . . there is another birth (coming forth) ahead of us yet. This will be our ¤nal birth into a life of Glory, Perfection, Power and eternal bliss.” Urshan did not speculate on the details of that future bliss, but he was quite certain that God had “good and great things . . . prepared for them that love Him.” In that glorious future, all the sorrows of this present life would ¤nally be transformed into eternal joy—and that eternal joy would be pure joy, unmixed with sadness of any kind. In light of that ¤nal transformation, Urshan felt that the spiritual growing pains of the present could and should be endured with patience and contentment.127 The Nature of the Godhead While comments about the nature of the new birth can be found scattered throughout Urshan’s writing, his explanation of the godhead was concentrated largely in one volume, The Almighty God in the Lord Jesus
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Christ. This work was published in 1919, just after Urshan had been forced to sever ties with his friends in the Assemblies of God over the “New Issue.” For the most part, Urshan’s attraction to Oneness theology was related to his desire to defend the full deity of Jesus Christ, and he believed that Oneness theology provided a wealth of resources for defending Christ’s deity that were simply missing from traditional Trinitarianism. He thought that Trinitarian theology historically had helped push people away from belief in the full divinity of Jesus and had encouraged Christians to see Christ as inferior to God the Father. Urshan said that the standard Trinitarian formula led many believers with “narrow minds” to think they knew “all about the person and the glory of Jesus Christ, and that he is the second person in the Trinity, or the Son of man and the Son of God [and thus] inferior to God the Father.” What also troubled Urshan was the way in which traditional Trinitarian theology confused many ordinary laypeople and drove them toward what he thought was the false simplicity of liberal or deistic monotheism. He wrote: There are thousands upon thousands of Christians who, having attempted to ¤x their eyes on three separate, distinct Persons, according to the theology taught them, and becoming greatly puzzled and confused thereby, Christ and His divine fulness being obscured from their sight, have forsaken that teaching and gone into Unitarianism, or the teaching of what is called One God, the Father; and little by little these people, who never had clear sight of the Lord and God in His Son, have lost even that poor theological sight of Jesus that they had, and the outcome of it all is, they are deceived and out of THE WAY. They think they have God the Father apart from His Son Jesus Christ, and thus they are sinking into error and eternal perdition.128
In reaction to such developments Urshan lamented: “O brethren! Let us preach a full Christ, not only the Son of God and the Son of Man, but the very God Almighty who ¤lls all things.” What he especially liked about Oneness theology was that it so clearly taught that “Jesus is God.” Oneness theology said “Jesus Christ is God, [the] Creator, as well as the Saviour.” It af¤rmed that the name “Jesus” was, in fact, the one name of the Father, the Son, and Holy Ghost. It left no room to quibble about the full divinity of Christ; it af¤rmed the full deity of Jesus Christ in language that was clear and unambiguous.129 While Urshan felt that the weaknesses of Trinitarian theology had become especially evident in the modern age, he believed that the errors of Trinitarian thinking had actually deformed Christian history almost
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from the very beginning. At one point he argued that “the Greek and Latin fathers were bewitched by the Trinitarian ¤ction as early as Justin’s time,” which would place the theological “fall” of the church in the midsecond century. Since that time, different Catholic and Protestant divines had been simply “drawling out [the] triune formula” in their baptismal liturgies as if it was magic. Urshan himself believed that baptism according to the Trinitarian formula was a “senseless ceremony” that did not confer God’s Spirit on the recipient, and he called the traditional baptismal phraseology little more than religious “hocus-pocus.”130 The easy manner in which Urshan lumped together Catholics and Protestants in this critique of Trinitarian theology may have had something to do with his own Persian and Nestorian background. The Catholic Church of the Roman Empire had labeled the Nestorian Church of his ancestors heretical, and Protestants had later followed suit. Urshan, however, believed that Nestorius (the person from whom Nestorianism takes its name) had been an exemplary Christian saint and had been wrongly accused of heresy. Urshan asserted that Nestorianism had actually preserved Christian truth in the face of Catholic error. In particular, he said that the Nestorian Church had avoided the errors of extreme Trinitarianism while still af¤rming the importance of God’s threeness. Using a Persian word from Nestorian theology, Urshan said that God was “a triunity of three Kenoomas [personalities] and never a trinity of three separate persons.” This language allowed the oneness of God’s being to be maintained alongside the threeness of God’s divine attributes. Urshan also suggested that the Nestorian Church had always taught that it was the one “perfect God” in all God’s fullness that had become incarnate in Jesus Christ. Given this reading of church history and Nestorian theology and given the obvious pride he took in his Nestorian heritage, Urshan may well have felt a certain sense of enjoyment in pointing out the errors of the Trinitarian theology of Western Catholicism and Protestantism. At least on one level, he was saying that Nestorius had been right all along.131 While Urshan was at times quite vehement in his criticisms of Trinitarian theology, his own constructive view of the godhead actually sandwiched certain Trinitarian emphases into a generally Oneness-oriented theological framework. God was one, but God’s divine character bore the imprint of threeness. Urshan wrote: “I personally cannot refrain from believing that there is a plurality in God’s mysterious Being, and that this plurality is shown as a three-ness, not three separate, distinct Beings or Persons of God, but a mysterious, inexplicable, incomprehensible
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three-ness.” His explanation of this threeness was a bit awkward, but Trinitarian language has often been just as awkward. He said that there were not “three of¤ces of three Gods, but one of¤ce of one God with three branches.” He pointed to Noah’s ark as a biblical symbol of what this meant. He said Noah’s ark had three compartments but only one entrance, and he exclaimed: “What a beautiful type of the triune God, Christ being the central compartment, with whom the ¤rst and last compartments are connected, through whom alone we can enter into the Holy Spirit and the Father.”132 Urshan’s preferred shorthand method of identifying a proper sense of threeness within the one godhead was to use the capitalized, multihyphenated phrase “the T-H-R-E-E—O-N-E God.” This was really a word picture for Urshan, a visual symbol that allowed him to acknowledge both the threeness and oneness of God without using language or phrases that were tainted with traditional Trinitarianism. It was his technical way of trying to open up a space of relative theological neutrality between strident Trinitarianism and strident Oneness theology—a space of theological discourse that could perhaps provide common ground for the pentecostal movement as a whole. When it came to the language of devotion, however, Urshan’s rhetoric was all on the Jesus-only side. He said that Jesus was the name that ¤lled him with awe because “Jesus Christ is that one NAME of the T-H-R-E-E—O-N-E God.” He explained that: “[God’s] proper NAME is not Father, nor Son, neither Holy Ghost, but the Lord Jesus Christ. That does not do away with the loving Fatherhood of the Almighty, nor with the gracious Sonship of the Lord, and neither does it do away with the blessed existence of the excellent Spirit of God, but it does make clear and harmonizes all the scriptures with all the fulness of this T-H-R-E-E—O-N-E Godhead summed up in this dispensation for all the human race in that sweetest of all names, JESUS, the anointed Jehovah Lord.”133 Even when discussing Jesus as the name of the singular godhead, however, Urshan never lost sight of the threeness that was also present within God’s character. He believed that the full and proper name of the eternal “T-H-R-E-E—O-N-E God” was the tripartite title “the Lord Jesus Christ.” Using an almost Trinitarian-sounding formula he argued that the “Heavenly Father’s adorable Name was ‘JESUS’, the Saviour; ‘CHRIST’ the Embodiment of the Holy Spirit; and ‘THE LORD’ the eternal God, the Possessor of Heaven and Earth.” “In short,” he said, “the Lord’ . . . stands for ‘The Father.’ ‘Jesus’ . . . stands for ‘The Son.’ ‘Christ’
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. . . stands for ‘The Holy Spirit.’” Having parsed things out in this fashion, however, Urshan immediately reaf¤rmed that the Lord Jesus Christ was the singular name of the singular godhead.134 Like other Oneness pentecostals, Urshan believed that timing was signi¤cant; he believed that the revelation of “Jesus” as God’s true name was taking place in his own day for a speci¤c reason. Urshan repeatedly said that Jesus was God’s newly revealed name “for this dispensation”— that is, “Jesus” was the revealed name of God that especially applied to “the dispensation of the fulness of times.” In Urshan’s chronology, the historical era of the fullness of time was a short period that partly overlapped with the last years of the gospel dispensation and partly pointed toward the future. It represented the time during which the Apostle Paul’s prediction of Christ’s preeminence in all things would be ful¤lled. That promise, recorded in Ephesians 1:10, stated that when the “fullness of time” had arrived, God would “gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven, and which are on earth.” Urshan saw the revelation of the oneness of God’s name as a harbinger of that cosmic Christological uni¤cation of all things which would soon follow. As Urshan awaited the unveiling of this ¤nal chapter in the drama of redemptive history, he assured reborn believers that the end-time powers of Christ were already available to them in “the Name.” He wrote: “What Christ is in glory, His Name is down here. What His matchless Name is down here, His majestic person is in Heaven. This is the greatest gift of all gifts that God has given to the church.” The gift of knowing God’s name allowed Oneness believers the opportunity to participate in the promised unity of all things in Christ well before that unifying process was historically complete. In a certain sense, their present experience had already been absorbed, ahead of time, into the ¤nal state of things that God had planned for the future.135 Of course, Urshan believed that the present experience of Christians, no matter how glorious, was but a foretaste of the wonders yet to come. He said that in this present world one could see God only “in the revelations of the Holy Spirit,” but in the future believers would look directly “upon His glorious, shining, sun-shine-like face.” For that to happen, however, believers had to struggle to become more like Jesus in their own personal lives. Christians could see more of God only as they became more like God themselves. In the ages to come, as Christians moved deeper and deeper into “the Divine Celestial Life” that had ¤rst been sown in their lives at the moment of their new birth, they would see more and more of the divine wonder of God’s own beautiful being. The joys
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and sorrows of faith on earth were but the beginning of the believer’s glorious journey toward God and into godliness that would continue forever.136 The Oneness theologies of Urshan and Haywood gave the early pentecostal movement a new breadth and depth of vision. The breadth came largely from Haywood, who stretched the pentecostal interpretation of the Bible and Christian experience to cover more of the subjects of traditional systematic theology than any other pentecostal thinker of the period. The depth came largely from Urshan who, perhaps more than any of his pentecostal theological peers, struggled to make theological sense of the actual life experiences of the pentecostal community even when those experiences were painful and hard to understand. In a certain sense, the Oneness theologies of Haywood and Urshan were also more distinctively pentecostal than anything that preceded them; at the very least, they were less dependent on previous forms of Christian theology. While most early pentecostal theologians assumed the truth of the traditional doctrines of God and Christ and then layered a new emphasis on the work of the Spirit on top of those doctrines, Oneness theologians were more suspicious of the past and more open to the newness of what God was revealing in the present. For Haywood and Urshan, the task of the theologian was ongoing, requiring them to peer onto the misty future and try to discern the shape of God’s emerging truth on behalf of and for the edi¤cation of all God’s children.
5 Theology and Race
鵷鵸 Early pentecostal theology cannot be discussed without examining the issue of race. Race is an essential part of the equation because, from the very beginning, pentecostalism straddled the race line in ways that most other American religious movements did not. Neither white folks nor African Americans nor people from any other ethnically identi¤ed group of Christians could claim the movement as their own. It belonged to everyone. The pentecostal Spirit convicted, transformed, and empowered individuals regardless of their racial identity. Multiracialism was part of the fabric of the movement, and it naturally tinctured the rhetoric of many early pentecostal theologians. The revival at the Azusa Street Mission in Los Angeles was a key event in this regard, prompting pentecostal leaders to re®ect more selfconsciously than they had before on the signi¤cance of race within the movement. The leaders of the mission believed that the egalitarian nature of the gospel required pentecostalism to be anti-racist in faith and practice. And it was not merely ideals that mattered at Azusa; it was actual practice. This meant that the social ethos of the mission had to be such that even the lowliest person would feel welcomed. The editor of The Apostolic Faith newspaper called this the principle of “the stable at Bethlehem”—the principle of identifying with the poor and marginalized —and the leaders of the revival worked hard to make sure everyone felt equal. They even went so far as to argue that if the pentecostal movement “had started in a ¤ne church, poor colored people and Spanish people would not have got it,” but because it began in a run-down “Colored Church,” everyone felt at home and everyone was blessed by the Spirit. Wealthy visitors who tried to maintain their social status and dignity in the meetings often found themselves brought low socially as well as physically as the power of the Spirit drove them weeping to their knees or caused them to thrash about on the ®oor alongside sinners and seekers
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from the lowest echelons of society. The privileges of race and class had no place at the Azusa Street Mission. Thus it was not without reason that many pentecostals came to believe that the color line was being washed away by the Spirit. The leaders of the mission were convinced that God’s Spirit was “melting all races and nations together” into one common family in the Lord.1 While the anti-racism of the leaders of the Azusa Mission did play an important role within the early pentecostal movement and while the their ideal has remained an important point of reference for many pentecostal believers, historians need to be careful not to assume that all early pentecostals held identical views about race. Pentecostals held a variety of opinions on this topic, just as they did on every other subject. Thus, in marked contrast to the egalitarian ideals of the Azusa Street Mission, some pentecostals were blatant racists. In this regard, Charles Parham is perhaps the most well-known example. Later in his life he even went so far as to praise the Ku Klux Klan. Individuals such as Parham were not typical, however, and his views should not be used to paint the whole pentecostal movement as backwoods, bigoted, and racist. That would be as far from the truth as it would be to assume that Azusa-style egalitarianism de¤ned the whole movement. Most pentecostals would have agreed that the movement was and ought to be multiracial in its overall character, they would not necessarily have agreed with the Azusa ideal that the movement should also be intentionally interracial in its local social organization. As a result, some pentecostal gatherings and associations were racially segregated while others were intentionally integrated. With time, and as the movement became more institutionalized, patterns of pentecostal organization unfortunately tended to become more segregated. This segregation of the movement followed the lines of race that de¤ned the nation as a whole and specially emphasized the divide between white Americans and African Americans. Several events stand out as symbolic of this larger pattern of development. One of the most signi¤cant was the creation of the Assemblies of God in 1914. Prior to that date, many of the people who came together to form this new organization had been part of a larger, looser af¤liation of pentecostal ministers headed up by the African-American leader Charles H. Mason. The formation of the Assemblies of God effectively weakened the ties that held that informal interracial alliance together and strengthened the fellowship networks that existed among non-holiness white pentecostals. The result was that Mason’s Church of God in Christ became decidedly more black with the formation of the Assemblies of God, while the Assemblies of
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God itself emerged as an almost entirely white denomination. It would be wrong to argue that race was determinative in this development. That was surely not the case. But racial issues do seem to have played some role in the process, even if those concerns were largely unspoken, often unconscious, and arguably moderated by a sense of genuine care and love that transcended racial lines. Similar patterns of racial division emerged elsewhere within the movement in the 1920s. In 1926, for example, the Church of God voted to create a new, separate “Negro Assembly” for African-American congregations within the denomination. After protests from numerous AfricanAmerican members in the northern states, the Church of God backed off from this demand and made the arrangement optional rather than mandatory, but fellowship across the lines of race were dampened by this illconceived proposal for years to come. Overall, the Oneness wing of early pentecostalism had a slightly better record with regard to race than the Trinitarian branch of the movement, but Oneness pentecostalism was not entirely immune to this larger process of segregation. Thus even the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World, a church that took special pride in its interracial character, found itself split along the lines of race when a majority of its southern white members withdrew to create a new denomination in 1924.2 In historical perspective, it is hard to see how things could really have turned out differently. The pentecostal movement came into existence at the height of the Jim Crow era and it would have been an act of stunning moral courage for pentecostals, especially those in the South, to have taken a consistent stand against the racism of the culture. But while the racial divisions that took place in the movement in the 1910s and 1920s are understandable, they are troubling nonetheless. The nonracist, integrated vision of pentecostal faith that ®ourished for a brief time during the early years of the Azusa Mission had provided the movement with a working model of what nonracist pentecostalism might look like. For pentecostals to consciously push that alternative aside was tragic and diminished the movement as a whole. It is a sorry comment on white pentecostalism that virtually no church leader or theologian considered the racial division of the movement an issue worthy of his or her serious and sustained theological re®ection. The only question that remains is to what degree this declension was a theological failure as well as a moral failure. On the surface, the answer seems to be that theology did not play a major role in either encouraging or justifying the racial segregation of the movement. In another sense,
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however, theology—or, more accurately, theological silence—can be seen as the heart of the matter. The failure to articulate a clear and coherent theological rationale for pentecostal anti-racism was one of the key factors that allowed the pentecostal movement to lapse into the racist social patterns of the surrounding culture. The leaders of the Azusa Mission had tried to ¤ll that silence to some degree, but they also tended to collapse the issue of race relations into the broader category of love—an approach that muted the distinctiveness of racism as a speci¤c kind of moral and spiritual failure. It would be the mid-1920s before any pentecostal leader would take up the speci¤c challenge of explaining why Christianity in general, and pentecostalism in particular, ought to be explicitly anti-racist in thought and practice. The Anti-Racist Theology of Robert Clarence Lawson Bishop Robert Clarence Lawson of the Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ was the ¤rst person in the pentecostal movement to address race with any degree of sustained theological attention. His book The Anthropology of Jesus Christ Our Kinsman (1927) is entirely devoted to the topic. The ¤rst section of this volume consists of a powerful critique of racism as a social ill, while the second half develops a theological vision of the atonement that places anti-racism at the very heart of the gospel. The trigger for Lawson’s composition of this work was the (re)emergence of racism within the pentecostal movement in the late 1910s and early 1920s, but he was also troubled by larger worldwide issues of racism and injustice. Thus the scope of The Anthropology of Jesus Christ Our Kinsman extends well beyond the circumscribed world of early-twentieth-century pentecostalism. Lawson’s analysis and critique addressed virtually all of white Christianity and Christian-dominated Western culture, and his theological solution was, if anything, even more universal in scope and application. While his theology was rooted in a pentecostal understanding of God and the world, his anti-racist vision clearly transcended the movement. Biography We do not know much about Lawson’s life, but the few facts that are available suggest that he was an interesting and innovative leader.3 He was a southerner, born into an extended African-American family in New Iberia, Louisiana, in 1883 and raised by an aunt who lived in the area. In his early adult years, he became relatively famous as a tavern singer in southern Louisiana, and his reputation soon spread to a variety of other
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towns where signi¤cant numbers of African Americans lived. As a musical performer, Lawson was frequently on the road, and it was during a singing tour of the Midwest that he ¤rst encountered the pentecostal message. He was in Indianapolis at the time and had fallen ill. The nurse assigned to him in the hospital was a parishioner from G. T. Haywood’s Oneness pentecostal congregation. Through her, Lawson met Haywood, and he soon fell under the preacher’s spell. In 1913, at the age of thirty, he laid his wild life aside, was converted and baptized in the Spirit, and joined Haywood’s church. From the beginning of his Christian life, Lawson displayed an aptitude for ministry, and, with Haywood’s blessing, he was soon crisscrossing the Midwest founding congregations in cities as far apart as St. Louis, Missouri, and San Antonio, Texas. During the late teens he settled down for a three-year stay in Columbus, Ohio, and while there he had a row with Haywood that resulted in Lawson’s departure from the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World. Several issues were involved, but the two key items seem to have been divorce and gender roles, especially feminine dress and demeanor. It is not unusual for Christian groups to divide over issues such as these, so there is no need to look beneath the surface disputes to seek the real motive for Lawson’s split with Haywood. Having said that, however, it may be that Lawson was in some way looking for a reason to move out of the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World, and his differences with Haywood on these issues gave him an excuse to do so. Lawson was clearly a better leader than he was a follower, and he seems to have been ready to head out on his own. It is telling that Lawson was reluctant to join any other existing group after leaving the PAW. At about this time, Lawson also had some negative interactions with the Church of God in Christ, and he must have been leery about putting himself back under any church’s authority. He organized his own new denomination, which took the name the Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ of the Apostolic Faith about the same time he moved to Harlem, where he started a new congregation called the Refuge Church of Christ. By the mid-1920s, Lawson had established himself as a well-known independent church leader within the African-American Christian community of New York City. Lawson was a self-con¤dent and multitalented church leader. During his long and successful ministerial career, he launched a school in North Carolina, started a religious radio program in New York, wrote a variety of tracts, and composed a number of popular hymns and gospel songs. He traveled broadly and read widely, and his visions of the world and faith
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was considerably less parochial than those of many other early pentecostal leaders. It was partly that enlarged scope of vision that fueled Lawson’s critical analysis of race, faith, and society. For Lawson, racism was not merely a matter of white American prejudice, it was a moral and spiritual failure that spanned the globe.4 Racism and Faith Lawson believed that racial prejudice was “the greatest enemy of mankind.” It was a “terrible scourge,” “[af®icting] the nations, like a mighty monster [holding] them in captivity.” In Lawson’s eyes, racism deformed human society and crippled the personal lives of all affected by it. His goal—which he thought was the only reasonable response to racism—was to “kill race prejudice” before it could wreak any more havoc on the world. That task, of course, was immense. Most white people were so completely bound by prejudice in matters of race—so “biased to the Negro in every phase and department”—that it was dif¤cult to know where to begin. Lawson explained that white boys and girls were taught from the earliest days of childhood to “look upon the darker races as inferior in both blood and in intellect,” and that elementary school prejudice was then reinforced for the rest of their lives by the incessant drone of white “newspaper logic and propaganda” which insisted that black people always be portrayed in the worst light possible and whites in the best. Any facts that might potentially undercut white supremacy were kept conveniently out of view.5 One of the few places where Lawson thought he might have a chance to gain a toehold in his campaign against racism was in the churches. After all, the churches were supposed to be committed to “the high Christian idealism of the ‘Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of all men.’” The churches were supposed to be beacons of hope and care to all the people of the world. By and large, however, the white churches of the nation seemed as locked into racist logic as any other sector of society. They were as divided by race as the nation as a whole, and no one seemed to feel any sense of discomfort about it. Lawson was ®abbergasted, and he wondered how white Christians could so easily ignore Jesus’s command to love others in the same way they loved themselves. He reminded them that the Bible said: “If any man say, ‘I love God,’ and hateth his brother, he is a liar; for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?” But Lawson’s pleas went unheard; in fact, race relations within the churches seemed to be deteriorating rather than improving. From his perspective, mutual hatred between the
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races was on the rise, and that hatred was beginning to have a devastating impact on world evangelism. He wrote: “Largely because of color prejudice the Christian missionary movement is at a standstill in India, China, Japan and Africa. . . . Indeed, it appears that Africa is destined to become a great Mohammedan empire.” He further explained that “the darker races have reached a point where they will not kindly accept a gospel of love and brotherhood when the denial of their essential manhood by christian [sic] people negatives [sic] the tenets which they are asked to accept.”6 In Lawson’s own theology, brotherly love—mutual care and concern that treated people from all races the same—was a core value. He believed that everyone bore the image of God in their person and that because of that all human beings were fundamentally equal. Distinctions of race, ethnicity, class, and culture were at best secondary considerations, contingent differences that did not affect a person’s fundamental humanity. Because of this egalitarian vision of humanity, Lawson had no problem asserting that “the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man” de¤ned the moral core of the gospel. The same notion had recently been popularized within white European and American church circles by Adolph Harnack, perhaps the most well-known theologian of his day. In a series of lectures that was originally delivered at the University of Berlin (where Harnack taught) and was later published in the United States as What Is Christianity? Harnack labeled the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of humanity the simple and unchanging “essence” of the gospel. That ideal of the gospel quickly became the motto of the liberal theological movement in the United States, and it was especially prominent in the social gospel movement.7 Lawson read broadly and may have known of Harnack’s book, but he would have had no need to be tutored into an egalitarian moral vision of Christian faith by Harnack or any other liberally inclined white theologian. Belief in the common fatherhood of God and the equality of humankind had been part of African-American Christianity from its very beginning. It was precisely that issue that had sparked the creation of the ¤rst independent African-American denomination (the African Methodist Episcopal Church) in the early 1800s. When Richard Allen and his colleagues left the Philadelphia Methodist Church to create this new denomination, they did so because they believed the systematic racism of the white members of that church amounted to the functional—and heretical—denial of the biblical ideal of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of all humanity. The motto of Allen’s new church was, in
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fact, “God Our Father, Christ Our Redeemer, man Our Brother.” Lawson’s rhetoric may also have been affected to some degree by his famous contemporary, Marcus Garvey, who was active in Harlem during the time Lawson was living there. Garvey used the phrase “The Brotherhood of Man and The Fatherhood of God” as one of the mottos for his Universal Negro Improvement Association. Lawson’s appeal to the universal fatherhood of God and the seamless brotherhood of humanity was thus deeply rooted in both African-American Christian history and the present-day experience of African Americans in the early twentieth century. Lawson’s distinctive contribution was to champion that broader ideal within the relatively narrow world of pentecostal faith.8 While Lawson had little hope that American Christianity as a whole would ever transcend its ingrained racism, he expected his own pentecostal community to rise above that bleak picture of prejudice in the church. He explained: When God poured out his spirit here some ¤fteen years ago, culminating [in] the movement, called “The Apostolic Faith” we thought surely if ever there were a people of God that would love one another, regardless of race, color or nationality, these were the people, namely, The Pentecostal People, the possessors of the faith of the Apostles. We thought surely that now had come upon the stage of action a people who would rise above prejudice, and measure up to the high ideals of the “Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man,” regardless of color, or race. We thought sure that wherein the other churches had failed upon the issue of the “color line” and had divided into race and national groups, for instance colored and white Baptist and Methodist churches, etc. Welsh Presbyterian Church, German Lutheran Church, etc. that the pentecostal people would teach to these a wonderful lesson by example in showing that the true people of God are one regardless of what nationality or race they may belong; by abiding together in the bonds of fellowship, love, and organization, thus bringing on them the blessings recorded in the 133rd Psalm. . . . We trusted that the Pentecostal people would rise to redeem man by example and precept.9
But Lawson’s hopes were to be dashed. Rather than continuing to promote the inclusive vision of the early years, the pentecostal movement seemed to be in retreat from its anti-racist ideals. Lawson said that this was especially the case in the South, where white pentecostal ministers were beginning to “[refuse] to take credentials signed by a Negro.” He said that a “wave of prejudice” was washing over the movement and that many were falling into “sin through the egotism of race-pride, thinking themselves better than other people because of race, and separating them-
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selves in the body of Christ through shame of their brethren of the colored races.” Lawson added that “by separating themselves like Peter did at Antioch, they [were] not walking according to the truth of the gospel” and had broken step with God.10 Lawson had no doubt that the pentecostal movement still possessed a wealth of spiritual fervor, but he was convinced that fervor alone could not sustain the movement. Holy Ghost zeal needed to be reinforced with Golden Rule ethics. He wrote: “It is alright to sing and shout and pray and preach loud, but what this poor world is longing for is the real love of God, lived.” And it was precisely that “love of God, lived” that the pentecostal people seemed to be losing. Lawson cautioned his white colleagues that their refusal to “accept their colored brethren upon absolute equality” was a failure of love that placed both them and the movement as a whole at grave risk. Lawson thought that the situation within the pentecostal world had already deteriorated so much that God might be on the verge of calling forth a new people to carry on the work of the gospel—a new people who would be more willing to display the love of God to everyone regardless of race or color. He argued: “If the white brethren don’t preach the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man irrespective of color or nationality, and exemplify the true spirit of brotherhood and equality to all. . . . God will bring deliverance from another quarter, and will raise up a new people who would both preach it, and exemplify it in their lives and relationship to their fellowmen.”11 Lawson was following well-established pentecostal rules of rhetoric when he spoke in this manner. For years pentecostals had preached that Christians were required to live in compliance with all the truth available to them and to adjust their walk of faith as new truths were revealed. If Christians held back or followed God’s call half-heartedly, they risked being cast away. Lawson applied that old pentecostal rule of faith to the matter of race. He warned that “whenever a people or a movement have come up to a proposition and have failed to walk according to the truth of the gospel, they have lost power with God, and have failed, as an instrument in his hands, in saving the world for Christ.” And that was precisely where pentecostals found themselves with regard to race: They had seen God’s light and had then stepped back. Lawson hoped that the movement would recover its moral footing and would “rise to redeem man by example and precept,” but he was not at all certain that that would happen, and, given that uncertainty, he could not help but wonder whom God might choose if and when the pentecostal movement failed. His conclusion was that “Ethiopia”—a symbol for all people of Africa and of
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African descent—was the likely candidate. The selection of “Ethiopia” to be God’s primary agent of grace in the world, should that occur, would both guarantee the end of race hatred and ful¤ll an old biblical prophecy. Lawson wrote: “Ethiopia having stretched forth her hand for fellowship and help to her white brothers and been refused, shall turn to God; and then shall be brought to pass the saying, Princess [sic] shall come out of Egypt, and Ethiopia shall soon stretch forth her hands to God. Psa.69. It may be that God will use her to bring the gospel to the nations, because she will not spurn or hate any, for she knows what it is to be hated and set aside, and furthermore, she being black will love the darker races.”12 Lawson felt that it was his role at this critical juncture of history to speak the truth in love for the purpose of ending racial prejudice within both church and society. Truth was the necessary foundation on which any real change in race relations had to be built. As Lawson put it: “One race is puffed up over another because of a misconception of that race, therefore, the only thing to kill race prejudice is to give truth, knowledge, and understanding to races that are [prejudiced] against each other. To love a race worthily we must esteem that race properly.”13 Of the many speci¤c truths Lawson might have shared that could have helped foster proper racial esteem, two took center stage in The Anthropology of Jesus Christ Our Kinsman. Lawson’s ¤rst word of truth had to do with the simple facts of history. Lawson believed that present-day racism was fueled to a large degree by false ideas about the past that reinforced the views of white supremacists and undermined black pride. It was necessary to demolish this pseudohistorical foundation of white supremacy as the ¤rst step toward helping white Christians in general, and pentecostal Christians in particular, rethink their prejudicial attitudes. Lawson adopted an Afrocentric approach to history to de®ate white claims and to level the historical playing ¤eld so that the accomplishments of all the world’s races could be seen for what they were. Having more or less wiped the slate of ordinary history clean, Lawson then turned to his second word of truth, which focused on redemption history. Arguing that Christ’s ability to be the universal savior of humankind was based on Christ’s literal physical identi¤cation with all the peoples of the world, Lawson declared that Christ was necessarily a mulatto. He said that the blood of all the races ran through Christ’s veins. God had used a process of providential miscegenation to slowly fashion Christ’s family line into a perfect blend of all the peoples of the world. In light of Christ’s own racially mixed identity, Lawson believed that any and all attempts by
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Christians to separate the races within the church had to be seen as utterly contrary to God’s will. Racism and Christian faith were totally and utterly incompatible. A Corrected Racial History of the World Theology is in®uenced by facts as well as by Christian values, and in the area of race relations Lawson believed that certain facts needed to be set straight before theological re®ection on race could proceed in a positive manner. This was especially necessary in the United States, where he said that the schools and news media provided a daily dose of racist lies, exaggerations, and racial stereotypes that presented white superiority as simply the natural order of things. Lawson thought that history was the main battle¤eld where the truth needed to be reasserted, and his goal was to retell the history of the world in a manner that gave proper credit to the various races of the world for what they had actually accomplished. For Lawson, history was in many ways the fountain of truth, setting people free or binding them in ignorance. Malcolm X would later say much the same thing, writing that “of all the things that the black man, or any man for that matter, can study, history is the best quali¤ed to reward all research. You have to have a knowledge of history no matter what you are going to do. . . . The thing that has made the so-called Negro in America fail, more than any other thing, is your, my, lack of knowledge concerning history. . . . But when you and I wake up . . . and learn our history, learn the history of our kind, and the history of the white kind, then the white man will be at a disadvantage and we’ll be at an advantage.”14 Lawson’s historical strategy was forthright and hard hitting. Rather than seeking merely to moderate this or that prejudicial attitude of white world history, he took direct aim at the underlying meta-myth: the notion that white people, and white people alone, were the creators of human civilization. Lawson’s bold counterproposal was that white people actually had nothing to do with the emergence of human civilization. Instead, it was black people, the descendants of Ham, who brought civilization to birth. Afrocentrism was the tool Lawson used to strip away the lies of white supremacist history so that the truths of black accomplishment could be revealed. From time immemorial, white people had rooted their sense of superiority in the supposed achievements of their race; they assumed that they ought to rule the world because their race had always ruled the world. The foundation of this myth was the claim that all the great civilizations of
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history had been created and dominated by white people. Lawson identi¤ed H. G. Wells as one of the most outspoken proponents of this view. Referring to Wells’s widely read Outline of History, Lawson said that his standard practice was to “give credit to the Nordic Aryan for most of the progress of civilization” and to deny credit to every other race. Lawson said that in instances where, on the surface of things, it appeared dif¤cult to ascribe a particular advance to the Nordic race, Wells creatively doctored the evidence to maintain the myth of white supremacy. One of Wells’s most outrageous suggestions in this regard was his hypothesis that some dark-skinned people were actually genetic Caucasians. Wells called these people “dark whites” and he used this concept to claim, among other things, that the ancient Egyptians were really white underneath their dark skin and thus their grand achievements reinforced rather than refuted the notion of white superiority.15 Lawson’s response was to say that Wells’s style of “dishonest scholarship” deserved no respect from any genuine scholar, and he was pleased to announce that the ranks of genuine scholars who rejected Well’s racist views were on the rise. He pointed to academicians such as the groundbreaking anthropologist Franz Boas of Columbia University as exemplars of this new breed of historian: people who were committed to the honest analysis of the historical record regardless of race. These new-style academicians, who came from some of the best colleges and universities in the country, agreed with Lawson that older historical accounts were both wrong and racist. Like Lawson, they insisted that “white-skinned humanity got its civilization from the black-skinned variety” and not the other way around. It is thus not surprising that Lawson developed a rather positive attitude toward cutting-edge progressive scholarship that was quite different from the deep suspicions of the academy nurtured by fundamentalist Protestants and some pentecostals.16 Lawson’s own view of human history followed the relatively standard division of the world into three races—a taxonomy derived from the biblical story of Noah. According to this narrative, Noah’s three sons, Ham, Shem, and Japheth, were the progenitors of three separate and distinct branches of humanity: Ham and his African descendants formed the “Negro” race; Shem and his progeny constituted the Jewish race; and Japheth and his heirs made up the Caucasian race. Using these three categories of race, Lawson argued that the world’s oldest civilizations were all black in origin and rule. Lawson said that the Kingdom of Ethiopia was the most ancient and that it had been founded by an individual named “Ethiops,” whom he identi¤ed simply as a “Son
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of Ham.” The Sumerian empire was similarly Hamitic in character. Lawson said that its roots could be traced back to the Sudanese region of northeast Africa and that its ¤rst leader was “Nimrod who was the oldest son of Cush, the son of Ham.” (In contradistinction to George Floyd Taylor, who held Nimrod in very low regard, Lawson thought of him as a great ruler, on a par with Romulus, the founder of Rome.) Lawson believed that the Babylonians, as direct descendants of the Sumerians, were also black, but he noted that the Babylonians had developed more variety in their physical appearance than most other black Middle Eastern groups. He described them as “beautiful to behold, being a mixture of many Negro complexions and shades.” Rounding off his tour of the major civilizations of the ancient world, Lawson claimed that Egypt was a black empire as well. The name itself was proof of this facet; he said that Egypt had originally been called “Kimet or Kem . . . [meaning] black and swarthy.” If any doubt remained, Lawson directed people to simply look at the art of the empire. He said that the face of the Sphinx was clearly that of “a black Negro Pharaoh,” the mask of “Neferet [had] the nose and lips of a Zulu,” and the bust of Tutankhamen showed that he was “unmistakably a Negro.” As a kind of appendix to this list, Lawson also argued that the Canaanites (the original inhabitants of Palestine before the Israelite invasion) were also “negroes . . . children of Canaan who was the youngest son of Ham.”17 For Lawson, the chronological priority of these black civilizations was not the only thing that was signi¤cant; their enduring legacy was also crucial. In essence, he claimed that the building blocks of all future civilizations had been laid down by these great African empires of the past; black people had created the cultural practices that still de¤ne the social order. He argued that it was the descendants of Ham who invented writing, developed agriculture, and produced the ¤rst great architects and engineers. Directly or indirectly, Africa provided the world with its ¤rst soldiers, philosophers, statesmen, and basic structures of government. One ¤nal aspect of culture that caught Lawson’s eye was religion. In a certain sense, he credited the black civilizations of antiquity with the invention of religion. He wrote with some pride that it was in these civilizations that “the ¤rst temples and the ¤rst priest rulers that we know of among mankind” had appeared. In making this argument, Lawson merged the JudeoChristian tradition of faith with the larger history of human religious practice in a manner that both reinforced his claims of black cultural creativity and showed signi¤cant respect for other religions. Lawson’s ¤nal historical conclusion was that in almost every imaginable way “our white
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brethren are indebted to us [the black race]” rather than the other way around. Far from providing evidence to support claims of white racial superiority, a true account of history revealed that if any race was naturally superior to the others, it was the children of Ham.18 Lawson’s ultimate goal was not, however, to prove the superiority of any one race over the others but to show how all the races had fallen short of God’s just and righteous demands. Lawson believed that the black race had been the ¤rst to dominate the world and it deserved special respect because of that, but in God’s providence each of the three races had been given an opportunity to rule and each, in turn, had demonstrated its inability to live up to God’s standards. Lawson explained: Each of the three branches of the human race with many of their rami¤cations of nationalities have been great in their day of ruling the world. Ham ¤rst; Babylon, Egypt, Ethiopia, then Shem with Palestine, and adjacent nations with his Davids and Solomons, Japhetite with Europe and all of the present Anglo-Saxon civilization. Ham went down because of pride and arrogancy [sic] and forgetting God. . . . Shem, the Jew, his kingdom fell and his rule was overthrown because he forgot his God and turned to idols. . . . This is Japheth’s day, and the indications are, that he with his civilization are doomed to go the same way, because of his pride arrogancy [sic] and the present drift away from God.19
In each of these cases, the reason for failure was the same: haughtiness before God mixed with abuse of the poor. Lawson said that “instead of lifting up one another,” each race eventually “made slaves of the weak [and] hating them, they have kept them down.” Not surprisingly, Lawson was particularly critical of the white racial dominance that existed in his own day. He said that despite the self-assurance with which white civilizations currently ruled the globe, they too would soon fall into ruin, and it was with a certain sense of satisfaction that he wrote: “The scriptures prophesy of [ Japheth’s] downfall with graphic outlines. He shall be overturned as others were, for so sayeth the scriptures, I shall overturn it, overturn, overturn: Three times there shall be an overturning [pertaining to] Shem, Ham and Japheth’s reign over the earth.” The end of white global dominance was near and Lawson’s implication was that the end of white rule would correspond with the return of Christ, who would end the cycle of civilizational failure for all time and show the races of the world “how they should have governed.”20 But Lawson could see the good as well as the bad; all was not failure. He believed that each of the three races had been endowed with certain
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distinctive gifts and talents to enrich humanity as a whole. Lawson’s comments on these race-linked qualities were quite brief, but they are instructive nonetheless. He believed, for example, that the Shemites ( Jews) had been given heightened “spiritual and psychic emotional” powers which made them the appropriate people to receive God’s special promises and revelations on behalf of humanity as a whole. One of the special talents of the Hamitic race was its natural ability to treat all people with fairness and love. Lawson said that members of the black race were innately disposed to be “merciful, warm-blooded [and] tender-hearted” toward everyone. It is perhaps not surprising that Lawson had a considerably harder time ¤nding anything positive to say about the white race—he remained virtually silent on that point—but the reason seems clear enough: Lawson believed that the racism of white culture had so deformed most Caucasians that their better traits were largely, if not entirely, obscured by their prejudice toward and hatred of the darker races.21 Lawson hoped that his ruminations on the world’s racial history and the special gifts and talents of the different races would eventually help foster a new sense of complex equality among the races. God had made the races different from each other but not qualitatively better or worse. The task of humanity—the task Lawson had imposed on himself—was to ¤gure out how to “esteem [each] race properly” so that people from the different races of the world could love each other worthily. A truthful and accurate sense of history was a necessary piece of that puzzle. History, when properly understood, leveled the playing ¤eld by knocking the supports out from underneath the racist ideologies that white people were using to oppress people of color all around the world. But to arrive at the goal of genuine love between the races, something more was needed, and Lawson found that additional element in the atoning person and work of Jesus Christ.22 An Anti-Racist Theology of the Atonement A discussion of the atonement, the area of theology that explains the way in which God has redeemed humanity from sin, is usually considered a necessary aspect of any well-rounded systematic theology. It is necessary because how one understands the atonement dramatically shapes many other theological concerns. Any meaningful explanation of the atonement requires some description of humanity’s lost condition, some commentary on the divine character traits that prompted God to desire humanity’s redemption, some analysis of the speci¤c means God used to effect that redemption, and some speculation concerning the dimensions of human
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existence that are affected by God’s atoning actions. During the history of Christianity, different theologians have put forward different theories about these key issues, using different root metaphors to explain their views. Legal and ¤nancial metaphors have predominated. Legal theories of the atonement have emphasized the fact that somehow Christ became humanity’s juridical substitute on the cross, receiving in his own person the legal punishment humanity deserved for its sin. Financial theories have typically presented Christ as a wealthy benefactor, one willing and able to pay off the debts humanity has accrued because of its sin. Some theories describe this debt as owed to God; other theories indicate that it is Satan who must be paid a ransom to free humanity from bondage. Lawson did not use either of these traditional metaphors when trying to explain the key aspects of the atonement. Instead, he chose the much more personal metaphor of God as humanity’s “kinsman redeemer”—an idea based largely on the Old Testament book of Ruth. The book of Ruth is a love story and, following its plot lines, Lawson understood redemption itself to be a love story involving God and humanity. The biblical tale of Ruth begins with the widow Naomi returning home to Israel from Moab with her widowed daughter-in-law Ruth at her side. They settle in the town of Bethlehem, and Ruth is soon forced to glean in the ¤elds so that she and her mother-in-law will have something to eat. Ruth is especially well treated by a local farmer named Boaz, and when she returns home at the end of the day, Naomi tells her that Boaz is actually a close relative—close enough to qualify as her kinsman redeemer if he should choose to ¤ll that role. Ruth is overjoyed, and since Boaz himself seems smitten with her, she boldly slips into his tent one night and proposes that he become her kinsman redeemer—her husband’s replacement who will save her from a life of widowed poverty and provide her with children to preserve her late husband’s name from extinction. Lawson said that despite the personal costs involved, which included “the forfeiture of the kinsman’s own family name” and the loss of his inheritance, Boaz agrees to marry her and become her redeemer. Only one obstacle stands in the way: Another person is a closer relative, and he has the ¤rst right to redeem Ruth if he wants to do so. In quick order, Boaz convinces that person to relinquish his rights, he marries Ruth, he purchases her late husband’s family farmland, and he settles down with Ruth to live in wedded bliss. The marriage is soon blessed with children. Ruth’s ¤rst child is a son named Obed. Obed will later become the father of Jesse, and Jesse will have a son named David who will become the second king of Israel. The ¤nal conclusion to this biblical love story is thus much big-
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ger and grander than anyone could have suspected at the beginning: Because of Boaz’s love for Ruth, an impoverished widow becomes the greatgrandmother of Israel’s greatest king.23 Lawson saw a similar dynamic of love and blessing at work in the atonement. He wrote: “In this wonderful romance [of Ruth] and in the laws of Moses are imbedded and interwoven a wonderful mystery of the principal [sic] of our redemption through Christ.” The history of redemption, like the story of Ruth, was a tale of separation, love, marriage, and blessing beyond anything that could ever have been imagined. And at the center of that story stood Jesus Christ, the one and only kinsman redeemer of humankind.24 As Lawson told the story of humanity’s fall and redemption in light of the story of Ruth, he stressed the fact that humanity had been created for a life of fellowship with God. The original relationship between God and humanity was like the relationship between lovers. Lawson said that “God delighted in the fellowship of man” and frequently came “down on the wind of the day” to converse with Adam. Observing that special relationship between God and humankind, the wicked spirits of the world (i.e., holy angels who had been thrown out of heaven with Lucifer) became enraged by jealousy and plotted to destroy the ties of love that bound God to Adam and Eve. Using “the subtility [sic] of the serpent” to trick Eve into sinning, they then convinced Adam that he had to willingly sell his divine inheritance to Satan if he wanted to maintain any kind of bond with his wife. As a result of this “horrible transaction,” Adam and Eve together fell from grace and lost all “fellowship with God, and purity of heart.” They became slaves of Satan, cut off from God and deprived of their former lordship over the world. Like Ruth and Naomi, they found themselves alone and impoverished in a fallen world.25 But they were not fully alone, Lawson said. God refused to give up on them and actually came to earth to look for Adam. Hearing God approach, Adam hid himself out of shame, but God tracked him down where he stood “trembling in the inter-recess of the garden” and confronted him with the enormity of his sin. After Adam had acknowledged the heinousness of his actions, God promised him that eventually all things would be restored. God said that a “seed of the woman” would be sent to redeem humanity from its bondage to Satan and to restore Adam’s divine inheritance. This promised redeemer would be able to save humanity because he would himself be a fellow human being, a kinsman redeemer like Boaz.26 Lawson said that almost as soon as God had spoken these words,
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people began to hope that the redeemer would appear. Adam and Eve thought that perhaps their son Abel was the promised seed and that the world would soon return to normal. Obviously that did not happen; Abel was not the promised redeemer. Nonetheless, with every birth that followed, hope “blazed brighter and brighter” that the redeemer would soon appear. Lawson wrote that whenever “a great man arose, the question would be asked, ‘Is this he?’” And sometimes these great men actually seemed to believe that they might be the promised deliverer. Unfortunately, each time that happened, disappointment quickly followed as God revealed their weaknesses to them. Thus, Lawson argued that even though Moses, Joshua, David, and Solomon had each hoped that he might be the promised deliverer, each ¤nally had to acknowledge that the redemption of the world was beyond his reach. Then John the Baptist appeared with the startling message that the promised seed of the woman had ¤nally been born. And just as startling was the fact that he was not the child of a great king but the son of a lowly virgin named Mary.27 Lawson believed that something like the virgin birth of Christ had been implied in the strange wording of God’s ¤rst promise to Adam and Eve that redemption would come through “the seed of the woman.” His reasoning was scienti¤c, though his science was more medieval than modern. Lawson argued that the critical phrase “the seed of the woman” signaled something unusual as soon as it was spoken because he didn’t believe that women possessed “seed.” According to Lawson, seed came from the male—men implanted their seed in women through intercourse—and that seed of the male eventually became the fetal child growing in the mother’s womb. Lawson seems to have agreed wholeheartedly with the medieval and ancient view that each male sperm contained a tiny, but fully formed, human being inside it (a “homunculus”). This little spermatic human being was in a sense merely planted in the soil of the womb during intercourse. The mother had nothing to do with the creation of that human being; she merely provide the environment in which the fetal child could grow. From this point of view, it made no sense whatever to speak of the “seed of the woman” unless something like the traditional view of the virgin birth was involved. Lawson thus argued: “The promise of the seed of woman was not simply the seed of Eve, but the Woman here, is to be understood in a larger sense, that is, the Seed of the Human race. . . . The very phrase, ‘the seed of the woman’ has no basis in the biological philosophy of man. Woman hath not seed, man is the progenitor, therefore we must look to a higher law than Nature for the production of this seed of woman. This is a revelation.”28
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But the virgin birth explained something else to Lawson. It explained how the promised redeemer could be the kinsman of both humanity and God. He wrote: “In the hoary ages of time, God, [foresaw] that, to redeem man justly, according to his own principles of righteousness, it was necessary that he should become man’s kinsman. Being higher than man, it was not possible to be begotten of man. He therefore, conceived the mystery of the miraculous conception and virgin birth.” Only through something very much like the virgin birth could God himself become humanity’s promised kinsman redeemer—that is, only through something like the virgin birth could the God of all creation somehow take on human existence while still remaining fully God.29 Many theologians have pondered the mystery of the incarnation—the idea that the human and divine cohered in Christ—but Lawson placed special emphasis on a particular dimension of this process that many other theologians had often ignored or denied: the way in which the incarnation changed God. Lawson said that the incarnation permanently changed the character of the godhead. Whereas Christ had once held a position “of dignity and right on yonder throne, where he was known as God and God alone,” Christ would be known eternally thereafter “as man.” Lawson did not think that the incarnation required Christ to give up his divine status, but he did believe that for all eternity after the incarnation Christ would be known as still divine, “but not exclusively divine . . . united to the person, ®esh and form of a created being.” In a certain sense, Lawson presented the incarnation itself—the divine choice to become human for the purpose of becoming humanity’s kinsman redeemer —as the nub of God’s saving work. The cross was also necessary, but it was in the willingness to become incarnate that God most dramatically revealed how costly it was to redeem lost humankind. Lawson said that as a result of the incarnation, Christ’s “whole inheritance [was] merged with ours” in the same way that the inheritance of a human kinsman redeemer in ancient Israel would have been fully merged with the inheritance of any widow he agreed to redeem. God’s decision to save humanity was a costly and irrevocable decision to alter the divine nature forever and to link God’s future indissolubly with the future of humanity.30 In Lawson’s theology, it was precisely this point—God’s merging of his inheritance with ours—that was the key to understanding redemption. Precisely because God had “come down into our nature,” it was possible for human beings to be taken “up into his person in the wondrous betrothal which is to reach its consummation in the marriage of the Lamb.”
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Just as Ruth’s marriage to Boaz had brought her prosperity and blessing beyond anything she could have imagined, the Christian’s betrothal to Christ brought prosperity and blessing to the believer. Explaining the bene¤ts of redemption, Lawson said: God has brought back for us all that was lost in Adam, and added to it in¤nitely more—all the fulness of His grace, all the riches of His glory, all that the ages to come are yet to unfold in his mighty plan, victory over death, the restoration of the divine image, sonship with God, triumph over Satan, a world restored to more than Eden blessedness and beauty, the crowns and thrones of the coming kingdom, and all the exceeding riches of His grace and kindness toward us which in the ages to come He is to show. All this and more is the purchase of his Redemption.31
Lawson wrote that “every victory costs a venture and the blessing is in proportion to the cost.” Christ’s victory over sin and Satan was costly beyond measure. Christ had had to lay aside all his own rights and honors and “invest everything in us” to the point that he now possessed “nothing but his people.” But the blessings that had been made available by Christ’s actions were equally immeasurable. The proper response to God’s offer of redemption was thus for believers to boldly claim all the blessings that Christ had made available to them as their kinsman redeemer. Anything less than that, any hesitancy to claim all that Christ had made available, would show disrespect to Christ. Lawson said that the blessings of salvation and the Christian life were “not . . . bestowed as mercy to a pauper, but [were] to be claimed in Jesus name.” He emphasized: “God has given us the right to take this place of boldness. We are not presuming, but we are honouring His word. We are not entering beyond our rights, but we are showing our con¤dence in our Father’s truth and love by daring to take all He has dared to give.”32 A question remained, however, concerning precisely who had the right to exercise this kind of boldness in God’s presence. The obvious answer was that everyone for whom Christ had become kinsman redeemer could and should claim the riches of their spiritual inheritance in this way. But Lawson asked one further question: Exactly who had become kin to Christ in the incarnation? He felt compelled to ask that question because the actions of most white Christians, including the actions of most white pentecostals, re®ected an implicit belief that black Christians were somehow less included in the gifts and promises of God than white Christians were, and he wanted to destroy that false sense of spiri-
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tual superiority once and for all. His simple question was whether Christ truly was the kinsman redeemer of all three races of humanity or if Christ was somehow a redeemer of only some race or races and not others. The theological concern that underlay Lawson’s questions had a long lineage within the church. Very early in the development of doctrine— within the ¤rst few centuries—Christians had arrived at the general consensus that whatever Christ had “assumed” in the incarnation (whatever aspects of human nature had been included in Christ’s humanity) had been redeemed as a result. Conversely, what Christ had not assumed in his incarnate human nature, he had not redeemed. Having agreed on this basic principle, however, Christians quickly discovered that they had different opinions about just which aspects of human nature had been assumed in the incarnation and which ones had not, and they discovered that their different opinions could lead to dramatically different practical conclusions. If, for example, it was believed that Christ had assumed and redeemed the human mind, it would seem logical to conclude that Christians could rightfully engage in philosophical speculation: Some might conclude they were required to do so. On the other hand, if Christ had not assumed and thereby not redeemed the human mind, it would seem proper for Christians to abstain from philosophical discussions of their faith. In a similar manner, if it was believed that Christ had assumed and redeemed human sexuality, it would undoubtedly be seen as proper and good for Christians to marry and raise families. If, on the contrary, one believed that Christ’s human nature was nonsexual in character, celibacy would logically be seen as the better Christian option. Lawson’s basic question was related to this line of thinking. He asked whether all the different varieties of humanity had been assumed by Christ in the incarnation. In particular, he asked if Christ had assumed and therefore redeemed all three races of humanity. If Christ was the divine redeemer of all the races, racism would necessarily have to be seen as unchristian. If, on the other hand, Christ was anthropologically linked to only one race or perhaps two, that might actually require Christians to treat different races differently. Some races might rightly be seen as inherently less worthy of grace or less capable of responding to grace than others. For Lawson, the answer was clear. He had no doubt whatsoever that Christ was the kinsman redeemer of all humanity and that all three races had equal access to God’s grace. The issue was how best to prove that fact to other Christians and, as a good pentecostal, he turned to the biblical text to make his case. He said that any fair and unprejudiced reading of
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the Bible would show that it was God’s plan to mix “the bloods of all three branches of the human race” in Christ so that “upon the basis of kinship, He might have [the] right—so to speak—to redeem all.” Even more than that, the Bible taught that the physiological mixing of the races in Christ was part and parcel of the perfection of his human nature. Lawson said that in preparing a body for Christ to inhabit, God had chosen “to mingle and to intermingle the blood of the three branches to produce the best and most perfect man.” The racially mixed character of Christ’s humanity was thus no minor add-on to his identity. Christ’s blended racial identity was a model of what human existence in general should be like at its best.33 The providential work of preparing the racially blended line of humanity—what Lawson called “the physical virgin stalk” from which Christ would be born—was a long and complicated process. God started with the selection of Abraham, and this was not a chance selection. Abraham was a descendant of Shem. The Shemite race as a whole was specially gifted with spiritual wisdom and insight, and Abraham possessed those talents in greater abundance than most. Abraham also inherently possessed “those fundamental qualities that make for the highest spiritual attainments and developments, namely, faith and a spirit of obedience.” God then took those natural abilities and “through the obedience of Abraham, by his wanderings and journeys, developed those psychic forces and ideals of faith . . . to the stage of spiritual development that [Abraham became] a worthy progenitor of the seed that would afterward bruise the serpent’s head.” The end result was that Abraham became “the father of faith and the reservoir of psychic forces, the inheritor of Adam’s lost inheritance: the possessor of the covenants and promises of God.” And, according to Lawson, this was just the beginning of the process. Rather than allowing Abraham’s talents and gifts to be diluted in his children and grandchildren, God directed Abraham and his sons to pursue a pattern of familial intermarriage that actually further concentrated Abraham’s abilities in his descendants. Abraham himself married his half-sister and later arranged for his son Isaac to marry his own ¤rst cousin. Isaac, in turn, oversaw the marriage of his son, Jacob, to Jacob’s second cousins, Rachel and Leah, who would give birth to the twelve patriarchs of Israel. Lawson said that as a result of this incestuous line of descent, there was an “intensifying of [Abraham’s] psychic qualities along with the renewing of the promises and covenants of God to each succeeding generation.”34 Lawson said that once God had solidi¤ed the “Semitic contribution to the anthropological development of Jesus Christ,” God then began the
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process of adding a second layer of racial identity to that line of humanity, and that second layer was Hamitic. Judah was the key ¤gure here, and his decision to marry “a certain Canaanite—negro-woman-whose name was Shuar” set the process in motion. Once again, however, this was not to be a simple and singular addition. God’s clear intention was to intensify the Hamitic element in Christ’s bloodline in much that same way that Abraham’s spiritual powers had been intensi¤ed in his heirs, Lawson argued. Thus Judah selected another black Canaanite woman, whose name was Tamar, to be the wife of his oldest son, Er. Unfortunately Er fell into sin, and God punished him with death before he could father a child, so according to the custom of kinsman redemption, it then fell to the next son in line to marry Er’s wife. Judah’s second son was Onan; however, Onan refused to perform his required sexual duties and instead chose instead to “spill his seed on the ground” rather than impregnate Tamar. The Bible says that Onan refused to have intercourse with Tamar because he knew that any child he would bear with her would not be considered his own. However, Lawson said that Onan’s real sin was that he “refused and resisted the will and purpose of God in the mingling of the blood of the Hamitic or negro race, with Shem and that of Japheth in the anthropological development of Jesus Christ.” (Lawson added that “the spirit of Onan today lives in many of his children who still resist the truth and purpose of God.”) When Judah’s third son, Shelah, also refused to act in the role of kinsman redeemer for Tamar, God allowed Judah himself to be seduced by Tamar so that the Hamitic contribution to Christ’s humanity would continue and be strengthened in Judah’s descendants. Lawson’s commentary on this somewhat sordid affair emphasized God’s positive intentions rather than the moral failures of Judah and his sons. He wrote: “Thus was born to Judah by two negro women the children who were the progenitors of the tribe of Judah. If any race have whereof to boast as touching things of the ®esh, relative to our Lord Jesus Christ, the colored race has more, for they gave to the world the two mothers of the tribe of Judah out of which Christ came.”35 According to Lawson, two other Hamitic women also made signi¤cant contributions to the anthropology of Christ. The ¤rst was Rahab, the prostitute from Jericho who is identi¤ed in the Gospel of Matthew as the great-great-grandmother of King David. Lawson described her as “a black woman who had a warm sympathetic heart for the foreigners who came to her house,” and he added that “perhaps, it was this . . . warm loving, peaceful, sympathetic trait and blood that the Lord desired to mingle with the highly developed spiritual and psychic emotional nature of the Shemites” in the humanity of Jesus. The second woman mentioned by
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Lawson was Bathsheba and her son Solomon. Rather than make any genealogical point, however, Lawson used Solomon’s mixed-race identity to launch into a critique of the racist practices of the American South. Lawson wrote that Solomon was both “the wisest man that ever lived . . . [and] he was a Negro, that is a half-breed who according to the laws of the south and the standard of the Ku Klux Klan of whom [a] lot of our white brethren seems to be under the in®uence, he was a Negro, for he had more than one-sixteenth Negro blood in him, and according to that standard, if our Lord would return to earth again in the ®esh and would go down South incognito, he would be jim-crowed and segregated, for he himself had more than one-sixteenth of Negro blood in him.”36 As for the racial contribution to Christ’s human nature from whites, Lawson had little to say because he believed that the Bible was relatively silent on that point. The only person mentioned in this regard was Ruth, whom Lawson took to be a “representative of the Anglo-Saxon, the Japhethic-branch of the human race.” Lawson provided no analysis of precisely what Ruth and the white race in general may have contributed to Christ’s anthropology.37 Lawson’s conclusion was simple and straightforward: “Christ had Negro blood in him,” indeed, Christ had the blood of all the world’s people ®owing through his veins. Theologically the implications of this fact were twofold. First, since Christ was anthropologically equally related to all the races of the world, all three races had been taken up into Christ’s humanity and all three races thus had the same level of access to salvation and all its blessings. The second implication was moral rather than salvi¤c in character, focusing explicitly on racial prejudice in the church. Lawson wrote: The Lord through uniting our human natures by the process of miscegenation—the mixing of the blood of Ham, Shem and Japheth—forever abolished the basis and principle of race prejudice, because if he is a kinsman to all having their blood in his veins, then whosoever hateth his brother, hateth his Lord, because whatever race that one whom he hateth maybe of, our Lord is of that race, whether Semitic, Hamitic, or Japhethic, although he is not wholly of any, he is not a Jew, a Negro, not a white man, that is, an Anglo-Saxon Saviour, but a human universal Savior, (our kinsman) by virtue of the fact, that the blood of Shem, Ham, Japheth, representatives of the entire human race, ®ows in his veins, therefore, all have the same interest and right in Him and none can say to another, “You have no part in Him.”38
In Christ’s own ®eshly body—a body that, according to Lawson, Christ somehow still possessed even after the ascension—the differences
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of race had been obliterated. Christ’s physiologically multiracial body, a body that had been specially prepared as the most perfect specimen of humanity through generations of God-ordained miscegenation, was a living condemnation of all who would make race a continuing cause for division within the church, the present-day body of Christ on earth. Lawson said that all Christians, regardless of their race, were members of one household of God. They were no longer strangers or foreigners to each other—they were no longer racial enemies or opponents—but fellow citizens in Christ’s one undivided kingdom. Lawson summed things up by saying that Christians simply “cannot make a difference between ®esh, for we be brethren.” He concluded his book with the following heartfelt “prayer for freedom from race prejudice”: O God, who has made man in thine own likeness, and who doth love all whom Thou hast made, suffer us not because of difference of race, color or condition to separate ourselves from others and thereby from Thee; but teach us the unity of Thy family and universality of Thy Love. As Thou Savior, as a Son, was born of an Hebrew mother, who had the blood of many nations in her veins; and ministered ¤rst to Thy brethren of the [Israelites], but rejoiced in the faith of a Syro-Phoenician woman and of a Roman soldier, and suffered your cross to be carried by an Ethiopian; teach us, also, while loving and serving our own, to enter into the communion of the whole human family; and forbid that from pride of birth, color, achievement and hardness of heart, we should dispise [sic] any for whom Christ died, or injure or grieve any in whom He lives. We pray in Jesus precious Name. AMEN.39
Lawson’s writings on race and theology are, for the most part, not distinctively pentecostal at all. He was writing to and for Christians in general, especially for black Christians. Nonetheless, he hoped that pentecostals would hear and heed his message, and he did so because he expected pentecostals to be exemplary models of how Christians should live. Like William Seymour and the other leaders of the Azusa Street Mission, Lawson believed that people whose lives were ¤lled with racial hatred
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could not possibly be ¤lled with the Spirit. He had, of course, run into many people who modeled precisely that impossible stance: white pentecostal believers who treated people of color with scorn and disgust. That fact made him question the long-term viability of the movement and, to some degree, tempered his sense of pentecostal self-identity, moving him toward the borderlands of pentecostal theology discussed in the next chapter. Lawson had no doubt that the Spirit of God was presently miraculously at work in the pentecostal movement, but whether pentecostalism would remain God’s chosen conduit of the Spirit was as yet undecided. The key issue was how pentecostals would handle the issue of race. Lawson saw the publication of The Anthropology of Jesus Christ Our Kinsman as one of the last chances to turn developments in the right direction.
6 Theology at the Boundaries of the Pentecostal Movement
鵷鵸 Many early pentecostals thought their new pentecostal faith was a distinct package of Christian belief, practice, and experience that was clearly different from any other Christian option that existed. In their minds, one either was a pentecostal Christian or one was not. The boundary line between pentecostalism and other forms of Christian faith was obvious. Fuzziness was simply not part of the picture. Pentecostals who possessed this kind of clear-boundary-line vision of the movement—and the majority of pentecostal believers seem to have ¤t into that category—might not have agreed with all their pentecostal colleagues about precisely where that boundary line should be drawn, but they were adamant that such a line existed. They were convinced that the boundaries of pentecostal identity needed to be patrolled and protected from anyone and everyone who might try to blur the de¤ning edges of pentecostal identity. After all, pentecostal faith was about knowing that one had indeed entered a new and qualitatively superior state of Christian existence. Pentecostalism was predicated on the fact that one could have a new sense of certainty about one’s relationship with God, a new sense of unmediated intimacy with Christ through the Spirit. How then could pentecostal identity be unclear? How could there be any question regarding who had and who had not received a truly pentecostal experience of the Holy Spirit? Many contemporary pentecostals continue to think of the movement in either/or terms; many still believe that the only options are to be either fully pentecostal or not pentecostal at all. But the boundaries of pentecostal faith have not always been as clear and precise as many within the movement would like them to be. This was certainly the case in the 1960s and 1970s, when the charismatic movement erupted on the religious scene. The charismatic movement emphasized a number of historic pen-
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tecostal doctrines and practices such as the baptism of the Spirit and speaking in tongues, but charismatic Christians quite self-consciously adopted a different style of faith than classical pentecostalism. Most notably, many charismatic Christians refused to leave their own denominations, preferring to remain Episcopalian, Catholic, Methodist, or Baptist rather than break with those churches and formally join one or another of the classical pentecostal denominations. Many charismatic Christians also refused to adopt the legalistic rules of behavior that had become standard in most pentecostal circles. And some charismatic Christians began to deemphasize the centrality and/or the necessity of speaking in tongues. All in all, many older-style pentecostals found the charismatic movement profoundly disturbing precisely because of the way charismatic Christians seemed to blur the edges of pentecostalism by adopting some, and not all, of the items they had come to assume were essential to pentecostal faith. Even before the rise of the charismatic movement, however, a host of other pentecostal or pentecostal-like religious leaders had begun to raise questions about just what constituted the sine qua non of pentecostal faith, practice, and experience. For example, many of the grand healing revivalists of the late 1940s and after (individuals such as Oral Roberts and T. L. Osborne) preached a gospel of healing and miracles, sprinkled with tongues and prophecy, that felt very much like pentecostalism to most people who attended their meetings. Despite that fact, a good number of old-guard pentecostals were leery of the movement because, while these healing revivalists did indeed seem quite pentecostal in a number of ways, they also seemed too lax to be considered fully and unequivocally pentecostal. And it is true. Most of these mid-century healing revivalists were much too anti-institutional to de¤ne the boundaries of Spirit-¤lled faith with the kind of precision older-style pentecostals wanted. They pitched their tents and invited everyone to come and experience God’s saving and healing grace regardless of their theology or church af¤liation. These itinerant preachers were not interested in staking out boundaries that divided people; rather, they wanted to bring people together loosely in the jubilation of revival and the experience of the Spirit. After that, they left their followers in God’s hands.1 In more recent years, in the 1980s and 1990s, the ranks of the nearly pentecostal, the semi-pentecostal, and the quasi-pentecostal have swelled. Hosts of Christian groups now emphasize the work of the Spirit as a central teaching of Christian faith. Speaking in tongues, expressions of prophecy, services of healing, and various other gifts of the Spirit are now welcomed in all sorts of Christian settings where they were formerly ques-
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tioned or forbidden. Pentecostalism, or at least certain aspects of pentecostal faith and experience, now seems to be present almost everywhere. The dividing line between “real” pentecostal faith and other forms of Spirit-conscious Christian faith is no longer clear at all. If we reexamine the early years of the pentecostal movement with these later developments in mind, it is not hard to ¤nd evidence that pentecostal boundary lines were not always clear at the beginning of the movement, either. Donald Dayton, one of the leading historians of the pentecostal movement, has made the point that early pentecostalism inherited almost all of its theological categories from the radical holiness movement. Dayton argues that there was only a “hairsbreadth” of difference that separated pentecostal theology from the theology of radical holiness.2 According to Dayton, that hairsbreadth of difference was the assertion that tongues was the necessary marker that one had truly received the baptism of the Spirit. While this chapter will disagree somewhat with Dayton’s assessment, arguing that even tongues can be called into questioned as the distinctive feature of pentecostalism, there is much to be gleaned from Dayton’s analysis. In particular, it helps explain the overheated manner in which many pentecostal theologians tried to draw a sharp line between true pentecostal faith and the heretical teachings of non-pentecostal holiness. That line had to be drawn sharply and harshly precisely because the theological frameworks of the two movements were so nearly, but not quite, identical. If pentecostals had not rhetorically separated their message from the theology of radical holiness in this way, they would have had nothing distinctive to say, and that, in turn, might have sapped their energy to the point where they could never have gotten their new religious movement off the ground. For pentecostalism to succeed—that is, for pentecostalism to establish itself as a sociologically distinguishable category of Christian faith—it was necessary to draw clear boundaries lines around the movement, even if those boundaries almost inevitably overstated the actual differences that existed. This sociological dynamic became even more pronounced as various pentecostal communities began to organize themselves into formally de¤ned denominations. Minute shades of difference blossomed into clashes of seemingly cosmic proportion. This tendency to draw sharp lines of difference between pentecostal faith and other forms of Christian faith emerged quite early in the movement. For example, Charles Parham felt that the biblical sign of speaking with other tongues under the control of the Spirit was the one and only necessary and indisputable evidence that one had indeed experienced the
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baptism of the Spirit. If one had spoken in tongues, one was a truly pentecostal Christian; if one had not spoken in tongues, one was not. But this clear sense of division weakened in Parham’s later writings. At a certain point in his career, he had to admit that many incidents of speaking in tongues were fake. They were counterfeit manifestations, imitations of the real thing rather than genuine evidence of the baptism of the Spirit. As soon as Parham admitted that fact, however, the real marker of pentecostal identity had to be moved back a notch or two. Tongues by themselves could no longer be deemed an infallible sign of the baptism of the Spirit; only genuine tongues were the sign. But how was one to judge whether a given incident of speaking in tongues was genuine or not? Any and all answers to that question involved some kind of discernment, and that necessarily interjected a degree of fuzziness into the process. Despite the fact that many early pentecostals sincerely and eagerly wanted to draw clear lines of demarcation around their movement, they often found those lines harder to maintain than they ¤rst thought would or should be the case. Not all pentecostals felt the same need or desire to stake out boundaries. Some early pentecostal leaders seemed to assume that the borders of pentecostal faith would always have a certain amount of ambiguity to them. David Wesley Myland had a very hard time saying precisely when he became a pentecostal. He described his baptism in the Spirit as a drawn-out process that involved an initial partial in¤lling of the Spirit followed seventeen years later by his reception of the “residue” of that experience. Whatever Myland’s precise spiritual state during that seventeenyear period, his gradual experience of pentecostal initiation would seem to require a somewhat ®exible understanding of precisely who was and who was not a pentecostal Christian—or it would, at least, need to allow for something like varying degrees of pentecostalism. In his own theology that is what Myland prescribed. He almost always spoke of the pentecostal experience in terms of degrees of fullness. The baptism of the Spirit was an ongoing experience of entering ever-more deeply into the fullness of God. Some people progressed rather quickly in the spiritual life, others more slowly, and Myland made room for them all in his free-®owing vision of God’s latter-rain revival. Despite their differences of opinion, most pentecostals and most contemporary scholars of pentecostalism have had no problem including both Parham and Myland, and a host of other divergent thinkers, within the contours of the pentecostal movement. This chapter examines two theologians who have been the exception to that general rule of inclu-
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sion: Fred Francis Bosworth and Esek William Kenyon, who have often and routinely been described as de¤nitely not pentecostal. It may well be that Bosworth and Kenyon do not deserve to be called full-®edged pentecostals—and many have argued that Kenyon, in particular, was not a pentecostal Christian in any sense of the term—but that judgment seems both too harsh and too rigid. Like it or not, the borderline between pentecostal and non-pentecostal faith was often as fuzzy during the early years of the movement as it is today. The most we can thus say is that Bosworth and Kenyon played out their theological careers within the fuzzy penumbra of the movement. They were neither fully inside nor fully outside of the pentecostal community. Their in®uence on the movement was signi¤cant, however, and thus their theologies need to be examined alongside other unambiguously pentecostal theologians. Fred Francis Bosworth’s Theology of Divine Love At one point in his long career, Fred Francis Bosworth had been a fully credentialed member of the pentecostal community—indeed, he had been seen by many as a pillar of the movement. Around 1915, however, Bosworth began to have doubts about the stridency with which some were promoting tongues as the necessary physical evidence of the baptism of the Spirit. He was particularly troubled when the newly formed Assemblies of God which, after initially promising not to draw up any written statement of faith, adopted a Statement of Fundamental Truths in 1916 that included a section on tongues as the initial physical sign of the baptism of the Holy Ghost. Not wanting to engage in a public ¤ght with his friends in the Assemblies of God, Bosworth graciously withdrew from the organization. But while Bosworth may have severed his denominational connections with the pentecostal movement, he never fundamentally changed who he was—a pentecostalistic healing revivalist. As an independent revivalist he would continue to have a strong in®uence within many pentecostal circles even after he left the Assemblies of God. It would not be wrong to call Bosworth the founder of a whole new borderline subtradition of pentecostal theology. That is, Bosworth not only lived his own life in the borderlands of pentecostal faith himself, he passed that penumbral understanding of pentecostal faith down to others, most notably to the mid-century healing revivalists mentioned above. Spiritual Biography Fred Francis Bosworth was born in 1877 on a farm near Utica, Nebraska. In his younger years he was unusually accident prone, to the point
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that it is almost a miracle that he survived. Once he was viciously attacked by bees, on a different occasion he fell out of the haymow and seriously hurt his back, another time he sliced himself badly with a scythe, and he seemed to routinely run pitchforks through his feet. A sarcastic response might be to say he was clearly not cut out to be a farmer, but his daughter (and somewhat hagiographical biographer), Eunice Perkins, commented instead that “God was permitting him, even as a child, to have such an experience of suffering as to develop a sympathy with it”—a trait that would serve him well in his future ministry. When Bosworth was in his early teens, his family moved to University Place just outside Lincoln, Nebraska, and about that same time he took up the cornet. Bosworth had an aptitude for music, and he was soon playing in the state band. His family seems to have given Bosworth considerable freedom to pursue his interests and to seek work. Thus, at age sixteen he set out with his brother, Clarence, to sell stereoscopic viewers all over Nebraska and Kansas. The two brothers wandered from town to town hawking their goods, stealing rides “hobo fashion” on the trains, and sometimes skipping out on their rooming bills. Bosworth’s biographer said they had a “®ourishing but unlawful business,” and that seems an apt description.3 Bosworth’s morally questionable life as a salesman was soon to be challenged by an encounter with God. It was 1894, and he was in Omaha when a friend, Maude Green, invited him to accompany her to a revival service at the local Methodist Church. Bosworth had been raised a Methodist, and he came under conviction at the meeting. He felt like God was offering him a once-in-a-lifetime chance to accept Christ and reform his life or to reject Christ forever. Bosworth decided to give in to God’s call, and as soon as he did he was overcome with joy, so much so that he fell into a ¤t of laughter and couldn’t stop laughing until sheer embarrassment helped him get himself under control. Knowing that he could no longer continue his dishonest sales activities, Bosworth headed home to University Park to seek more legitimate forms of employment and a more settled way of life. He ran through a host of odd jobs, from working at a windmill factory to clerking at a grocery store to house painting to a shortlived position at a local sawmill, as if experimenting to see what line of work he might ¤nd most enjoyable. In the middle of all this activity he also met a young woman and the two were soon engaged to be married. In the winter of 1896, Bosworth contracted a lung ailment of some kind (most likely tuberculosis) that persisted and slowly worsened. He was too sick to work, and for a while he went to live with his mother’s extended family in Prophetstown, Illinois, hoping the change of location would help him convalesce. Rather than improving, however, his condi-
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tion deteriorated. Fearing he would soon die, he booked passage on a train to Fitzgerald, Georgia, where his parents had recently moved. He arrived weak and worn and grateful to see his family before he died. But Bosworth did not die. The southern air seemed to do him good, and slowly his health began to improve. Able to get out and about to some degree, Bosworth wandered into a Methodist church where a person named Mattie Perry was conducting healing services. After hacking away with a painful cough throughout the service, Bosworth went forward to the altar at the end of the meeting. Mattie Perry laid her hands on him and prayed for his healing. From that point on, his condition improved rapidly, and within a few days he was completely well. For Bosworth, the reality of divine healing had been indelibly grafted into his consciousness, and it would eventually become a major concern of his maturing theology. The next few years were hectic and emotionally dif¤cult, but critical, for Bosworth’s spiritual development. The woman from Kansas to whom he had been engaged wrote to him shortly after his healing to call off the wedding. Bosworth was despondent but threw himself into a variety of activities in his new locale. He ran a barbershop for income, and organized a band on the side which quickly came to be recognized as one of the best amateur musical organizations in the state. He was quite popular in town and was soon elected to public of¤ce as city clerk. What’s more, he fell in love for the second time in his life and after a short courtship married Estella Hayde in 1900. Almost immediately the new couple decided to relocate to Zion, Illinois. Bosworth had heard of Alexander Dowie and his new city of Zion through Dowie’s publication, Leaves of Healing. He was attracted to Dowie’s healing ministry and restorationist ideas. He was especially interested in Dowie’s musical ministry, and he hoped to become involved in that part of the work. Within weeks of arriving in Zion City, Bosworth was heading up the musical division of Dowie’s religious empire. Dowie’s ministry helped attune Bosworth to the possibilities of new spiritual advances, and when Charles Parham arrived in Zion City in September 1906, Bosworth was ready to hear his message of pentecostal faith. The very ¤rst night that Parham spoke, Bosworth was baptized in the Spirit. Parham and Dowie were by nature leaders who brooked no opposition, and the two were soon acting as competitors for the hearts and minds of the people of the city. As tensions grew, Bosworth’s position in Zion City became somewhat uncomfortable. Still, he remained in Illinois for almost four years before relocating to Dallas in 1910. Almost immediately, Bosworth started his own pentecostal mission
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and by 1912 had become fast friends with the famous holiness-turnedpentecostal evangelist Maria Woodworth-Etter. That year WoodworthEtter led revival services at Bosworth’s church which attracted masses of people from all across the country. Folks poured into Dallas seeking to be part of this new work of God. Many believed that Bosworth’s church in Dallas might become the new center of the Spirit’s work as the power faded from Los Angeles and the Azusa Street Mission. The Dallas revival was not, however, a mere reduplication or continuation of the Azusa revival. Evangelism and healing played a much larger role at Dallas than had been the case in Los Angeles, where most participants in the meetings had been previously converted Christians who were seeking the additional blessing of the baptism of the Holy Spirit. When the Assemblies of God called its First General Council, Bosworth was invited to take part, and he was soon appointed to be one of sixteen members of the leadership board of this new organization. Bosworth was becoming an internationally known pentecostal leader, and his involvement in the organization helped raise the prestige of the group. Bosworth was not one to be molded by groupthink, however, and as the Assemblies of God moved away from its original ideal of having no creedal test of faith toward the adoption of a rather creedlike Statement of Fundamental Truths, Bosworth felt compelled to express his concerns about at least one of the articles included in the proposed confession. Article eight of the Statement of Fundamental Truths declared that “the baptism of believers in the Holy Spirit is witnessed by the initial physical sign of speaking with other tongues as the Spirit of God gives them utterance.” Bosworth had a different theological opinion and, hoping to initiate a serious discussion of the issue, he published his dissenting views in a pamphlet entitled, “Do All Speak with Tongues?” His simple answer was “no.” But Bosworth’s point of view was not shared by the majority of those who had joined the new denomination. Only a few supported his position and rather than take on the role of unwanted critic, he resigned from his position with the Assemblies of God in July 1918. Bosworth never wavered in his own position. He wrote that “if I had a thousand souls, I would not be afraid to risk them all on the truth of my position,” but he was simultaneously convinced that a bitter public ¤ght over this feature of pentecostal doctrine would harm the work of God. Bosworth wanted his ministry to be known for the things he positively embraced rather than for the things he opposed. Given that stance, he had few options other than to leave the organization.4 Shortly after his break with the Assemblies of God, Bosworth left his
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Dallas congregation as well, starting out on what would become a lifelong ministry as an itinerant evangelist. Bosworth began his new career in Pittsburgh in 1919, where it was reported that almost 5,000 people were converted and many hundreds were healed. Later he would visit scores of cities in the United States and Canada to share his message of God’s love and healing power, and where he couldn’t visit in person he beamed his message over the airwaves via his radio broadcast, the National Radio Revival Missionary Crusaders. Bosworth had nearly retired from this itinerant work by the time World War II broke out, but when the healing revivals began in the postwar years under the leadership of people such as William Branham, Oral Roberts, and T. L. Osborne, Bosworth came out of his semiretirement and joined with these young preachers as a mentor of sorts, offering advice and sharing his expertise. T. L. Osborne, in particular, said that “old F. F. Bosworth used to share a lot of secrets with us. . . . I always loved to talk with him.” In these young revivalists, Bosworth had at last found a group of like-minded pentecostal leaders who were devoted to evangelism and healing but at the same time quite ®exible in their attitudes about the baptism of the Spirit and speaking in tongues. Having lived a full and fruitful life, Bosworth died in 1958 at the age of 81.5 Bosworth wrote a fair number of tracts and pamphlets during his long career. In terms of his own theological development, however, almost all of his basic ideas had been formulated by the mid-1920s. Two works stand out as particularly important. These are his little booklet Do All Speak in Tongues? which was published in 1917 or 1918, and his longer book Christ the Healer: Sermons on Divine Healing, which was published in 1924. God’s Compassion and the Human Condition Bosworth’s theology revolved around the conviction that God is love. In his own unequivocal prose he wrote: “God is not anything so much as He is Love.” According to Bosworth, God’s loving character was re®ected on virtually every page of the Bible. What is more, he believed that biblical declarations of God’s love for humanity were among the most blunt and conspicuous statements made in the Scriptures. If Christians knew anything about God, they knew that God was loving, merciful, and compassionate.6 Bosworth’s own experience of God had convinced him that God’s love and compassion for humankind was active and energetic. God yearned to redeem humanity from sin and the curse imposed at the fall. God was
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constantly wooing humanity to accept the grace that was so freely available in Christ. Bosworth likened God to a “tender-hearted mother” caring for a sick child. God embodied that kind of mother-love in concentrated form; God was love with a depth and richness humanity could scarcely comprehend. He wrote: “Could all the love that ever dwelt in the hearts of all the mothers that ever existed be united in one mother’s heart, and that concentrated love be ¤xed on her only child, it would not compare with the love of God for His people, any more than a candle would compare with the sun.” Unlike many of his peers, and especially in contrast to E. W. Kenyon, Bosworth happily described God using feminine imagery.7 For the most part, Bosworth’s message and theology was positive, but the prominence he placed on love as the de¤ning characteristic of God’s character led him to criticize Christians who downplayed the wonder of God’s love. In particular, Bosworth was disturbed with “modern theology” for its seeming blindness to the importance of love. He said that modern theologians—including many pentecostal theologians—invariably emphasized God’s power more than God’s love, and that mistaken ordering of priorities meant that their portrait of God was fundamentally ®awed. God was painted as a great potentate—as power personi¤ed— which made God appear both more distant from humanity than God actually was and less willing to come to humanity’s aid. In contrast, Bosworth said that the Bible consistently magni¤ed God’s “willingness to use His power more than it [did] the power itself,” and he repeatedly stressed that God’s power was directed “usward ”—for humanity’s bene¤t and salvation, not for mere demonstration or display. He wrote: “In no place does the Bible say that ‘God is power,’ but it does say, that ‘God is love.’” Bosworth believed that by ¤xating on God’s power rather than God’s love, modern theology had actually placed itself in the position of doing the devil’s work. He said that Satan was more than willing to “magnify the Lord’s power” if attention to God’s awesome power could be used as a means of distracting believers from the much more important fact of God’s love. By contrast, Bosworth’s God was always near at hand, gracious, compassionate, loving, and ready to help those in need. He said that the one “glorious fact that shines with such brilliancy throughout the Scriptures” is that God is a God who is always “disposed to show favors” to frail humankind.8 Bosworth was not one to engage in needless or overly detailed speculation regarding the ¤ne points of theology. He summed up his basic understanding of human frailty and God’s saving grace in twelve words:
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“Through the Fall we lost everything. Jesus recovered all through His atonement.” Bosworth rarely wavered from that simplicity of perspective, but every once in a while he did take time to spell out his ideas in slightly expanded form, and these passages can help us understand the background beliefs that supported the more concise formulas of faith that characterized most of his writings.9 One of the subjects on which Bosworth expanded his comments was the nature of the fall and its consequences for humankind. In his work Meditations on the Twenty-Third Psalm, Bosworth described the fall as involving two dimensions of human existence. First of all, the fall involved the death of the soul. Bosworth understood the soul to be the Godlike character (the image of God) that God had breathed into humanity at the time of creation. When Adam sinned, this divine likeness was lost. He wrote: “Adam was created in the image of God, possessing in this soul glorious elements and graces and attributes of the Divine nature. When Adam sinned, his soul died, and with it those Divine graces and faculties. Just as physical life includes eyesight, hearing and many other valuable faculties which die with the body, so those beautiful graces which Adam possessed before the fall, died when he became dead in trespasses and in sin.” The second consequence of the fall was the death of the body, and Bosworth believed human sickness and disease were included under this rubric as the primary means by which death came to individuals. Turning from the results of human sin to the divine promises included in the redemption, Bosworth argued that virtually everything that had been lost in the fall could be recovered in Christ. He said that not only could the soul be restored “to its original purity, regardless of how sinful it [had] become,” but the body could be made fully whole as well. For Bosworth, forgiveness for sin and healing of the body were always connected. They were ®ip sides of the all-inclusive redemption available in Christ.10 Because of the prominence of sickness and healing in Bosworth’s theology, it is important to be clear about how he understood the nature of disease and death. He said unequivocally that “disease reached us through the power of Satan.” Sickness was part of “the oppression of the devil,” part and parcel of the way that the curse of death was played out in the fallen world. In one passage, Bosworth actually called sickness and disease “incipient death.” Disease was death on the way; it was death stalking its desired prey. Having said all that, however, Bosworth was quick to admit that, happily, disease did not always result in death. He attributed this fact largely to the human body’s innate ability to heal itself—an ability programmed into the human body by God at the time of creation and not
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fully lost despite the fall. He wrote: “Nature everywhere is healing, or at least doing her best to heal. As soon as disease germs enter our bodies, nature begins to expel them. Break a bone, or cut a ¤nger, and nature will do her utmost to heal, and usually succeeds.” In a similarly positive manner, Bosworth was quite willing to admit that medicine had a role to play in human health. People had the right and obligation to ¤ght disease in every way possible. Thus Bosworth said: “I truly thank God for all the help that has ever come to sufferers through the physician, through the surgeon, the hospital and the trained nurse.” But despite the natural powers of the body to heal itself and despite the best cures of modern medicine, diseases still often killed. Bosworth said that at a certain point in the progress of a disease, the degeneration of health “advanced beyond the power of nature to recover us,” and when that happened the result was “death in every case unless removed by the power of God.” While disease did not always kill, sickness was a constant reminder of both our fallen state and the curse of death.11 To be more precise, the real problem for Bosworth—the curse of sin—was not death per se, but untimely death. The death of the body was something that every person would experience. If something else did not do them in ¤rst, everyone would eventually die of old age. In a certain sense, however, Bosworth considered death in old age to be a natural death and not the result of sin. He said God had never “[promised] that we shall never die.” Rather, what the Bible taught was that humanity could in the normal course of things expect to live for about seventy years. Once people reached that allotted life span, their subsequent deaths could not be attributed to the curse of sin; it was merely part of being mortal. What Bosworth wanted to protest was “premature death”—death that came to a person well before their seventy years were up. That kind of untimely death and the diseases that caused it were unquestionably a result of sin’s curse, and it was precisely that kind of death and disease that was preventable by God’s grace through the atonement.12 While Bosworth allowed that some incidents of disease might be an expression of God’s chastening love,13 he believed that the overwhelming majority of human sicknesses were directly linked to sin’s curse of death. Sickness was a part of humanity’s fallenness. Bosworth believed that it was an unnatural state derived from the fall and that the remedy for sickness necessarily had to be included within God’s plan to save and restore humanity to its state before the fall. Bosworth argued that because “disease is part of the curse, its true remedy must be the cross.” He explained: “The Bible teaches . . . that disease is the physical penalty of iniquity, but
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that Christ has borne in His body all our physical liabilities on account of sin, and that therefore our bodies are released judicially from disease.” The result, as Bosworth put it, was that “sin and sickness have passed from me to Calvary—salvation and health have passed from Calvary to me.” Elsewhere he wrote: “The best results of rigid exegesis show that the bearing and removal of human disease is an integral part of redeeming work, a provision of the Atonement, a part of the doctrine of Christ Cruci¤ed; that Jesus is the Savior of the body as well as of the spirit.” Bosworth said that when God redeems us, “we are redeemed from the entire curse, body, soul and spirit.” Bosworth’s vision of God as a God of love led him to believe that when God acted on humanity’s behalf, God did not do things halfway. For Bosworth, the bene¤ts of the atonement “opened the way for mercy to reach every phase of human need. [God] was then, and is now, moved with compassion toward all who need His Presence as ‘Provider,’ ‘Peace,’ Victory,’ ‘Shepherd,’ ‘Righteousness,’ and ‘Physician,’ which,” Bosworth said, “are the seven blessings secured by the tragedy of His Cross.”14 According to Bosworth, all the bene¤ts of the atonement were available to believers in the present. Salvation and healing were gifts from God that were to be enjoyed today. He did not doubt that in the future Christians would have an even more glorious experience of God’s grace, but the “¤rstfruits” of that glorious future were accessible right now. Repeating the scriptural adage that this was the “acceptable year of the Lord,” Bosworth declared that humanity was already living in the “dispensation of the Holy Spirit” and that people should take full advantage of the blessings available to them. He said that healing was an “earnest” of the glori¤ed bodies Christians would someday possess, a taste of what could be expected in the future. Switching the time frame around and arguing from history rather than eschatology, Bosworth said that healing was nothing less than what should be expected, given God’s actions in the past. Bosworth said that all through the Old Testament era, God had healed those who called on God’s name. If God had responded so favorably in that ancient “darker age” of faith, why would God withhold the blessings of bodily healing from Christians living under the better and brighter covenant of the New Testament? Finally, as if to seal his case, Bosworth described healing as little more that the continuation of the healing ministry Christ had begun during his days on earth. Bosworth said that “during His humiliation” (Christ’s days on earth rather than in heaven), Christ had healed people willingly and universally, and he wondered why anyone would think Christ would change his behavior “during
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His exaltation.” What would have been problematic would have been for Christ to have suddenly changed his healing ways after he ascended into heaven, for the Bible says that Christ will always be “the same yesterday, today and forever.” Bosworth argued that unless one wanted to challenge that biblical promise of consistency, one had to believe that Jesus was just as willing to heal the sick today as he had been during the ¤rst century while he was on earth.15 It was this conviction about the fact of present-day healing that led Bosworth to fulminate against various fundamentalist preachers and others who seemed intent on denying that bodily healing could and should be part of the Christian’s present experience of Christ’s atoning work. He was especially irritated by ministers and theologians who taught that bodily healing would not become a standard experience for Christians until the millennium. Bosworth seemed exasperated by the sheer stupidity of such suggestions, but he patiently explained that “none in the Church will need healing during the millennium, because they will receive glori¤ed bodies before the millennium, when they are ‘caught up to meet the Lord in the air,’ when this mortal puts on immortality.” He added that if Christians were going to relegate healing to the millennium, they would have to do the same thing with all the other gifts and endowments of the Spirit, including teaching, preaching, and prophecy. No Christian was willing to do that, and Bosworth believed similarly that no Christian should deny God’s continuing power and desire to heal those who were sick.16 From Bosworth’s perspective, there seemed to be literally no grounds on which anyone could deny the fact that divine healing was available in the present age or that healing was part and parcel of God’s loving provision in the atonement. The full redemption of our human bodies would have to await the resurrection, but “the ‘¤rstfruits’ of our physical salvation”—just like “the ‘¤rstfruits’ of our spiritual salvation”—were available now. Seen in that light, it is easy to understand why Bosworth made healing such a central part of his ministry and theology. Healing was the visible objective proof that God’s promise to restore both body and soul had already begun to take hold in one’s life. In a sense, healing could be seen as the ¤rst step of the complete process of salvation because the healing of the body was clearly a less awesome feat than the divine restoration of the human spirit and soul. Because that was the case, Bosworth believed that learning how to receive healing from God set the stage for all future spiritual growth. He wrote: “When we have learned the process of faith for receiving healing, we have learned how to receive
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everything else God promises us in His Word.” Knowing how to receive a healing was the gateway to full salvation and the pathway to deeper Christian life.17 The Nature of Appropriating Faith Bosworth believed that healing was readily available from God. God wanted to make people whole; God longed to heal those who were sick and worn down by disease. But God was also a God of order and principle and had set down certain conditions that had to be met if one was actually to receive healing. These conditions were relatively simple, but many Christians were either ignorant of them or failed to follow them and the reception of healing was delayed, sometimes for many years. Bosworth said that he had known people “who had prayed for healing for as long as 40 years without receiving it; and then, as soon as they were told how to appropriate, the healing has come sometimes in a moment.” He believed that healing was not the only blessing Christians were missing because they did not know the rules of what he called appropriating faith; a similar pattern of unnecessary delay was evident in other realms of the Christian life. For example, Bosworth speculated that “most of us could have been saved ¤ve years earlier than we were. God was not making us wait, but we were making Him wait.” Bosworth’s great desire—the core of his ministry and message—was to tell Christians, and indeed all people, how to appropriate God’s blessings, and how to do so without any delay. As he put it in Christ the Healer: “I challenge you, Reader, to place yourself where God’s mercy can reach you without His having to violate the glorious principles of His moral government, and then wait and see if you don’t experience the most overwhelming demonstration of His love and mercy, and the blessing will ®ow until you have reached the limit of your expectation.”18 As Bosworth understood it, “appropriating faith”—the kind of faith that could unlock the treasure troves of heaven—moved through three progressive steps toward completion. The ¤rst step was a matter of knowledge. Bosworth said: “Faith begins where the will of God is known.” He said that “the power of God can be claimed only where the will of God is known.” One could approach God with appropriating faith only if one truly believed that one’s prayers were fully consistent with God’s alreadyannounced will. The prayers of people who were uncertain of God’s will in any given matter were almost by de¤nition wavering and tentative. Rather than boldly claiming the promises of God, these uncertain prayers often sounded like little more than polite suggestions about what God
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might consider doing “if it be Thy will.” Bosworth thought that such prayers were hardly prayers at all—they were fanciful wishes directed toward God with little or no expectation of being answered. They focused on what the believer thought God could do (i.e., on God’s potential power to act) rather than on what God had already said God wanted to do, and thus they misconstrued God’s character in the same way that modern theology misunderstood the relationship between God’s power and God’s love. Bosworth thought such prayers were utterly useless as means of obtaining God’s blessings, and he urged Christians to stop using “faith-destroying, qualifying [phrases]” in their prayers. What was needed to obtain God’s blessings was not belief in God’s power but knowledge of God’s will. Bosworth wrote: “Appropriating faith is not believing that God can but that He will. . . . Faith is expecting God to do what we know it is His will to do. It is not hard, when we have faith, to get God to do His will. When we know it is His will, it is not dif¤cult for us to believe that He will do what we are sure He wants to do.”19 Appropriating faith, as Bosworth understood it, focused directly on God’s universal promises in scripture—on those particular matters where by divine revelation anyone could know precisely what the will of God was. Healing was one such matter. He said that the Bible was clear and unequivocal in communicating that it was “the will of God to heal all.” People could anticipate that God would heal this person or that person because God had promised to heal everyone. There was no presumption involved in such an attitude, there was no claim of special insight or power, for the only signi¤cant factor—knowledge of God’s will—was equally available to all.20 Bosworth argued that if it was God’s will to heal only some, no one could “pray the prayer of faith” until they had received a personal revelation from the Spirit that God intended to heal that particular person, and he was very uncomfortable with that proposition. If that was the case, he said, “We must close our Bibles and get our revelation direct from the Holy Spirit, before we can pray for the sick. . . . This would be virtually teaching that the whole of the Divine activity on the line of healing would have to be governed by the direct revelation of the Spirit, instead of by the Scriptures.” Bosworth’s own position was very different. Appropriating faith was based on God’s public revelation in the Bible and not on private revelation through the Spirit. Appropriating faith was rooted in truths that all Christians could and should know from reading their Bibles; it was not predicated on any special gifts or insights.21 The second step of appropriating faith was to be “right with God.”
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While appropriating faith focused on the universal promises of God, those promises were for the most part offered to humanity by God on a conditional basis. In the matter of healing, in particular, Bosworth said: “Divine healing is not unconditionally promised to all christians [sic], regardless of their conduct. It is for those who believe and obey.” He wrote: “Jesus may, but He has not promised to, destroy the works of the devil in our bodies while we are clinging to the works of the devil in our souls.” This principle applied to all the divine promises. God’s gifts and grace were reserved for those who were seeking to walk uprightly as Christians. God’s promises were reserved for those who, when they sinned, were willing to repent, to confess their faults and to seek forgiveness. This was not simply a test of purity—Bosworth was not saying that only the morally spotless could expect God to answer their prayers—instead, it was a matter of honest self-examination, openness with God and others, and striving to be obedient. As Bosworth put it: “It is when our hearts condemn us not that we have con¤dence toward God.”22 There was also another principle embedded within this second aspect of appropriating faith: It was impossible, or at least improper, to seek God’s blessings in one area of life while rejecting God’s will and in®uence in another area of life. Bosworth wrote: “It is not proper to seek His mercy while rejecting His Will. Do not ask for a little blessing while rejecting a big one. It is impossible to receive and reject Divine blessings at the same time.” According to Bosworth, God did not bargain with sinners for their health. A little repentance did not guarantee that God would provide a little healing. God did things whole. Healing was part and parcel of the atoning work of God, and the purpose of the atonement was the total restoration of the whole person—heart, soul, and body. God was not interested in healing people and then allowing them to wallow in sin. Bosworth wrote: “Asking for healing while refusing to be led by the Spirit is like asking a carpenter to repair the house while refusing to let him in the house.” He explained: “It is not apart from Him, but ‘in Him’ that ‘ye are complete.’” The conclusion was that if one needed healing, the only sure means of obtaining that healing was to yield one’s entire person to the will of God. Bosworth said, “Present your bodies to Him if you want it healed. It is not until after it becomes His property that He promises to repair it.”23 Getting right with God could be seen as merely one aspect of appropriating faith—a means to the end of obtaining a healing. Bosworth was also quite conscious that being right with God was also the ultimate goal of the entire Christian life. He said that “the blessing of being right with God” was itself “a thousand times more desirable and enjoyable than the
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healing itself.” This fact was evident in the lives of the faithful, who, Bosworth said, were typically “radiantly happy” even when sorely af®icted by disease. By contrast, he said that “sinners in perfect health have been so unhappy as to commit suicide.”24 Things could also work the other way around, however. While the ¤nal goal was full union with God, the desire for healing was precisely what started some people down the road toward God in the ¤rst place. This had been the case even during Christ’s life, when many of the people who crowded around him seeking his healing touch suddenly discovered that Jesus was not content to only heal them. The same held true in the present. The healing touch of Christ brought union with God as well as health. Bosworth wrote: “As the sick touched Him and were made whole when Christ walked upon earth, so, now, it is the privilege of all to actually touch Him, and the touch now unites us to Christ in a closer union than it did then. Not mere contact, but union as real as the branch and the vine. All that is in the Vine, including both spiritual and physical life, belongs to us—the branches. The touch by faith can now bring us under the full control of the Holy Spirit.” While being right with God was thus, in one sense, a condition for healing, being more broadly and deeply right with God—more connected to God’s powerful love—was also the natural result of divine healing.25 The third and ¤nal aspect of appropriating faith, as Bosworth understood it, was to expect God to act when one asked for any promised blessing. He wrote: “Faith is to receive the written promise of God as His direct message to us” and then to act as if that promise had, in essence, already been ful¤lled. Faith meant taking God literally at his word— “treating Him like an honest Being” who was going to follow through on what had been promised. Bosworth was adamant that this was much more than mere hope. He said: “By expectation I do not mean hope.” Hope had to do with what might occur; faith was a kind of “expectancy that shuts out doubt or fear of failure, and shows unshakeable con¤dence.” Bosworth wrote: “Faith never waits to see before it believes. . . . Faith always blows the ram’s horn before, not after, the walls are down. Faith never judges according to the sight of the eyes, because it is the evidence of things not seen but promised. Faith rests on far more solid ground than the evidence of the senses, and that is the Word of God which ‘abideth forever.’” He used the story of Noah as an example of what this kind of faithful expectation should look like. “There was no ®ood in sight when Noah built his ark,” but he undertook that boat-building task because he trusted God’s word despite the seemingly contradictory weather conditions. Bosworth said that contemporary Christians should
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act in precisely the same way, believing in God’s promises despite any sensory evidence to the contrary.26 Bosworth likened faith to a game of divine checkers in which God and humanity had to take turns moving their pieces on the board. God had made the ¤rst move by promising health and salvation, and Bosworth explained that it was now humanity’s turn to respond by seizing that promise with expectant faith. He wrote: Getting things from God is like playing checkers, when, after one person moves, he has nothing to do until the other player moves. Each man moves in his own turn. So, when God has provided healing, or any other blessing, and sent us His Word, it is our move before He will move again. Our move is to expect what He promises when we pray, which will cause us to act our faith before we see the healing; because the healing comes in the next move, which is God’s move. God never moves out of His turn, but He always moves when it is His turn.27
Many ¤rst-generation pentecostals believed that one needed to spend time in God’s presence—tarrying at God’s throne, imploring God to act—in order to receive saving faith, healing, the baptism of the Spirit, or any other blessing. Bosworth disagreed. He said that any and all delays in receiving any of God’s promised gifts were the result of human de¤ciency, not divine hesitancy. God was more than willing to act as soon as any individual moved his or her own checker piece by exercising a proper sense of faithful expectation. Bosworth explained that “the truth of the matter” was that: God gave us this part of our inheritance nearly 2,000 years ago and He is the waiting one—waiting for us to appropriate the blessing by faith. Two thousand years ago God “put away sin”; 2,000 years ago “God laid on Christ the iniquity of us all”; 2,000 years ago “Himself took our in¤rmities, and bare [sic] our sicknesses.” God is the waiting party, waiting for us to be shown how to appropriate the blessing He has already given. . . . In other words, he is not slow concerning His promises, but we are slow and He is patient with us.28
While Bosworth was insistent that healing, and all other gifts of God, were received in the instant one took hold of them by faith, he also knew that the change in the recipient was not always immediately visible. He wrote: “Even when we do act our faith, symptoms do not always disappear instantly.” Bosworth argued that usually the empirical evidence of divine healing took quite some time to become fully visible. This attitude is perhaps not surprising, given Bosworth’s understanding of the natural
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healing ability of the human body. From that perspective, divine healing could be seen as a dramatic intervention by God which simultaneously stopped the deteriorating trajectory of a disease and strengthened the body’s natural healing powers. The actual process of recovery from that point forward, however, still took time. Following that same line of reasoning a bit further, Bosworth suggested that the typical slowness of recovery from any disease or ailment was one of the characteristics that set the gift of healing apart from the gift of miracles. He argued: “The Bible differentiates between the ‘gifts of healing’ and the gift of ‘miracles.’ . . . If every one were to be made perfectly whole instantly, there would be no place for the gifts of healing; it would be all miracles.”29 Bosworth believed that people needed to be instructed in the difference between healing and miracles so that they would not “miss healing by trying to con¤ne God to miracles.” He said that some people, after being healed by God, began almost immediately to doubt that they had been healed because their physical symptoms lingered on. Bosworth said that such folks needed to mentally set those symptoms aside and cling to God’s promise of healing, and he suggested that praise might be a key factor. He said that it was sometimes necessary to verbally praise God for one’s healing, even while the symptoms of sickness or injury remained, so that one could maintain one’s expectant faith and assure the result of full recovery. Bosworth wrote: “Instead of your listening to the ‘Father of lies,’ make him listen to your praising God for His promise!” He said: “Without praise we are up against a solid wall with no gate; but when we begin praising, and appropriating, we hang our own gate, and walk through.”30 The bottom line for Bosworth was that Christians needed to develop a much stronger understanding of the immediacy of answered prayer. When Christians asked God to do something that God had already clearly promised to do, they needed to discipline their minds to believe that their prayer had been answered despite any and all evidence to the contrary. He summed up his thoughts by saying: “The condition of receiving what we ask God for is to believe that He answers our prayers when we pray, and that we ‘shall recover’ according to His promise. In other words, when you pray for healing, Christ authorizes you to consider your prayer answered. . . . When God’s Word alone is our reason for believing that our prayer is answered, before we see or feel, this is faith!”31 The Baptism and Manifestations of the Spirit Bosworth’s little 23-page pamphlet Do All Speak with Tongues? is a heartfelt lament written by a faithful pentecostal preacher who believed that the movement was beginning to self-destruct over the issue of speak-
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ing in tongues as the necessary physical evidence of the baptism of the Spirit. Bosworth’s main assertion was critical and straightforward: The doctrine of tongues as evidence of the baptism of the Spirit was mistaken; one could, and many did, receive the baptism of the Spirit without the accompanying experience of speaking in other tongues. Bosworth was not opposed to tongues in general; in fact, he tried to make it clear he was not “depreciating God’s glorious gift of tongues.” He said that he prayed in tongues daily, and he was pleased to report that “in every revival I am privileged to conduct, God graciously bestows upon many the gift of tongues.” But he was troubled by the teaching that speaking in tongues was necessary to prove that one had received the baptism. He explained his concern with precision: “The error to which I refer is the doctrine held by so many, that the Baptism in the Spirit is in every instance evidenced by the initial physical sign of speaking in other tongues as the Spirit gives utterance, and that this is not the gift of tongues referred to in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians.” This seemed to Bosworth an extreme position that was guaranteed to cause trouble. He called it “wild and unreasonable.” He said it was “a serious doctrinal error” re®ecting a “hard, harsh, critical, censorius spirit.” And it was doomed to result in “strife and anarchy.”32 Bosworth said that the most outspoken proponents of the necessarytongues doctrine had already begun creating havoc among seekers and pentecostal believers. He claimed that Satan was using the doctrine “to turn aside thousands of hungry souls,” and he suggested that many other “good people . . . [had] stumbled and been held back” because of this “fanatical” teaching. Bosworth believed the promoters of necessary-tongues theology were also driving a divisive wedge between pentecostal Christians and other devout, sincere, and Spirit-empowered Christians who could not or would not call themselves pentecostals. Bosworth thought that his pentecostal colleagues were using the doctrine to set up a twotiered spiritual hierarchy with themselves on top, and he would have none of it. He said that the real fact was that “hundreds of the greatest soulwinners of the whole Christian era, without the gift of tongues . . . had a much greater enduement of power and have been used to accomplish a much greater and deeper work” than many of the most prominent pentecostal preachers. Bosworth refused to place those Spirit-empowered soulwinners outside the circle of those who had been baptized by the Spirit. He rejected the notion that a sharp line of demarcation could be drawn between pentecostal and non-pentecostal believers on the basis of tongues as the necessary initial physical evidence of the baptism of the Spirit. Bosworth was intent on blurring the line separating pentecostal Christians
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from non-pentecostal Christians. He said that the doctrine of necessary tongues would “split any church on earth wide open, separating equally devout Christians” from each other, and he was convinced it would divide the pentecostal movement itself if left unchecked.33 Despite the intensity of his feelings, Bosworth did not rush into a confrontation with the promoters of the necessary-tongues position. Instead, he said, he had been hoping and “waiting for some of the other pentecostal brethren to come out with some literature on this line.” Eventually, however, he felt compelled to speak. He knew he would lose friends over the issue, but he believed the stakes were too high to remain silent. Nonetheless, he seemed full of typical pentecostal optimism when he wrote: “I am sure if this movement could be free of this one error in teaching and would preach the greater things about the baptism our opportunities for usefulness would be increased many fold. The way would then be opened for more of the manifestations or gifts of the Spirit, and consequently the revivals would be greater and deeper. May God speed this day is my prayer.”34 Bosworth offered a somewhat meandering argument against tongues as the necessary physical evidence of the baptism of the Spirit, but four issues were key. First, he discussed the nature and purpose of the baptism of the Spirit. Second, he argued that the gifts of the Spirit were diverse in character and were to be used together for the common good. Third, he criticized the hermeneutical error of trying to discover two kinds of tongues (i.e., tongues as a gift of the Holy Spirit and tongues as the evidentiary sign that one had received the baptism of the Spirit) in the biblical text. Finally, and perhaps most important for him, he described how the doctrine of the necessary physical evidence of tongues invariably undermined the role of faith in the Christian life.35 Like many other early pentecostal leaders, Bosworth used a variety of phrases to refer to the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Perhaps most frequently he called the experience simply “the baptism,” but he also called it variously a baptism for service, a baptism of power, and coming “under the full sway of the Spirit of God.” It was always a mighty experience, but some people experienced it more powerfully than others. Regardless of the dynamism of the event itself, the baptism invariably brought one deeper into God and more strongly into “loving sympathy with Christ in His great work of saving a lost world.” The last point was especially crucial for Bosworth. He said that the real mark of the Spirit’s presence in a person’s life was that the person developed both a new compassion for others (especially manifest in intercessory prayer) and an increased ability to min-
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ister to others. He remarked: “Surely those who have the greatest love and compassion for souls and the greatest spirit of prayer have the most of the Holy Spirit, whether they speak in tongues or not.” For Bosworth, the point of the baptism of the Spirit was mission. It was a calling to and empowerment for service and evangelism much more than it was a personal leap in spiritual maturation (though spiritual growth was surely involved in the experience). In essence, Bosworth believed that the fundamental change brought about by the baptism of the Spirit was to make the recipient more like God—more loving and more able to demonstrate that love for others in powerful and effective ministry.36 Given this mission-oriented view of the baptism of the Spirit, it is not surprising that Bosworth stressed the fact that the baptism of the Spirit empowered people for service. What Bosworth really wanted to underscore, however, was that God gifted people in many different ways and that no particular spiritual gift or talent (i.e., tongues) should be isolated and valued above all the others. Along with pentecostals in general, Bosworth thought it was perfectly appropriate and perfectly biblical to call this gifting which took place as part of one’s baptism in the Spirit a manifestation of that experience. He believed that any of the nine spiritual gifts listed in the New Testament could appropriately be labeled “the manifestation of the Spirit.” This was simply a matter of de¤ning terms, and, in this case, he thought God had de¤ned the term with great clarity. He bluntly and boldly declared: “God’s de¤nition of a gift is ‘THE MANIFESTATION OF THE SPIRIT.’” Bosworth believed that although tongues could be considered the manifestation of the Spirit, so could any newly acquired spiritual gift—healing, interpretation, wisdom, and so forth—and he was quite frankly amazed that his pentecostal colleagues could miss this point. He said that the Bible could hardly have been clearer, claiming that “Paul teaches the exact opposite of what many today are teaching, endeavoring to show them that all are not to expect the same manifestation of the Spirit. . . . Paul is distinctly saying that all are NOT teachers, and all do NOT speak in tongues.” For Bosworth, the Spirit gave different gifts to different people for the complementary building up of the whole; “God . . . [manifested] Himself to and through the saints in divers ways for the common good.”37 Of course, most pentecostals would more or less have agreed with Bosworth on this point. Virtually all pentecostals believed that God sprinkled various gifts of the Spirit among the people of God to be used in concert for the overall bene¤t of the church and the effective presentation of the gospel. Where many pentecostals differed from Bosworth was on the mat-
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ter of how to interpret speaking in tongues in conjunction with the baptism of the Spirit. The position of most pentecostals was that tongues during the baptism of the Holy Spirit was a different kind of speaking in tongues than the gift of tongues. The pentecostal majority agreed that only some received the gift of tongues, but they believed that everyone should expect to speak in tongues at the time of his or her baptism of the Spirit. These people assumed that for many the experience of tongues during the baptism would be the only time they would ever speak in tongues in their lives. Bosworth heartily disagreed with this two-tongues theory and believed that pentecostals had to engage in some highly questionable hermeneutical moves in order to make their case. He was quite ready to concur that if the two-tongues “theory [was] right, with its necessary distinction between tongues and tongues, then [he agreed] that it is the most important doctrine of the New Testament,” but he thought the two-tongues doctrine was nowhere to be found in the Bible. He was “absolutely certain that it [was] entirely wrong and UNSCRIPTURAL.” He asked his opponents if they did not think it was “strange . . . that not one of the inspired writers of any of the epistles to any of the New Testament Churches, preachers and saints scattered abroad, ever made the slightest passing reference to that kind of speaking in tongues which is the evidence of the baptism” as opposed to the gift of the Spirit. He said, “Think of it, and then think again, all the New Testament epistles, and not a single mention of this doctrine.” Pentecostals who supported the twotongues thesis argued their case from the book of Acts. What Bosworth wanted to know was why, if that was the correct interpretation of Acts, the doctrine was never mentioned anywhere else in the New Testament— not in the Gospels and not in any of the epistles. And as far as Bosworth was concerned, it was not just silence that argued against the two-tongues doctrine—not just the fact that there was “not a solitary passage of Scripture upon which to base this doctrine”—it was that “the Scriptures ®atly deny it.”38 So where had this new theory come from? In print, Bosworth laid the blame on Charles Parham, and he criticized Parham for introducing unwarranted novelty into the ancient proclamation of the gospel. In actuality, Bosworth’s main opponent was likely Warren Faye Carothers, another leader of the Assemblies of God who was also the most outspoken supporter of the two-tongues theory in that organization. Taking a stance somewhat unusual in pentecostal circles, Bosworth criticized the twotongue theory for being a new revelation. Many pentecostal theologians
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gloried in their new insights and revelations, but Bosworth took a quite different stance. He said that the pentecostal movement was not about anything new; instead it was about bringing “the church back to her ancient moorings.” The pentecostal movement was a restoration movement pure and simple. The goal was to restore the church to its New Testament glory—a glory that had become partly visible in other revivals before the pentecostal awakening and that was now being pushed to the forefront by this “most wonderful and far-reaching [of all] revivals of the Christian era.”39 Bosworth believed in the continuity of the Spirit’s work, and in that light he was troubled by the fact that “not one of the inspired apostles or prophets ever taught it [the necessity of tongues], and not one of the world’s greatest soul winners ever taught it.” Bosworth had no doubt that God wanted to do a mighty work in the world through the pentecostal revival, but he did not believe that that work involved the creation of new doctrines which had never previously been taught in the church. Bosworth was happy to report that many pentecostals had never been taken in by the two-tongues theory and that opposition to the doctrine seemed to be increasing as “many Bible students and teachers in the pentecostal movement” were now coming to see just how mistaken two-tongues theology was.40 Bosworth’s underlying concern was that the doctrine of tongues as the necessary evidence of the Spirit’s baptism had the potential to damage the pentecostal movement in a number of very signi¤cant ways; indeed, it had already damaged the movement to some degree. One of his chief concerns was the way in which the doctrine of necessary tongues forced people to take their eyes off God and pay more attention to their own physical reactions than to the miraculous work of the Spirit in their souls. Bosworth said that he had spoken with numerous people who had received a powerful baptism of the Holy Spirit at some meeting—people who were “rejoicing with joy unspeakable and full of glory with every ounce of [their] ®esh quivering under the power of the indwelling Spirit”—and who had then had someone come up to them and tell them their experience was false because they had not spoken in tongues. Many of the people Bosworth spoke with said that they had left those meetings discouraged and doubting the baptism they had received from God. Instead of stepping forward in faith, these people began “seeking for a physical manifestation” that they did not need, when, having already been baptized by the Spirit, “they ought to be witnessing and laboring for souls.” Bosworth said that because of this negative in®uence of the necessary-
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tongues doctrine, many people had been robbed of their “testimony for months and even years.” Not only were these folks “delaying the revival” by their unnecessary repetitive seeking for the baptism, they were literally “[wearing] out the workers at the altar” who were “praying for weeks and even months for [these people] upon whom the Lord [had already] poured His Spirit many times.”41 The opposite problem was also evident: Some people who had not really been baptized in the Spirit believed that they had, in fact, been Spirit-baptized because they had spoken in tongues at some revival meeting. Bosworth had seen what went on in such meetings, and he had seen the shallow results. In fairly scathing tones, he reported: “It is a notable fact that many of the deepest and best teachers and preachers in the pentecostal movement have the poorest success in getting the seekers through to speaking in tongues. The reason is they are too conscientious to use the ‘Glory-glory-glory-say-it-a-little-faster’ and other similar methods, which have made some of the shallowest and most fanatical workers apparently the most successful.” Bosworth said he was disturbed by “the shallowness and instability of many of the converts who profess the baptism under the tongues evidence teaching” at hyped-up meetings of that sort. He indicated that many pentecostal believers who had supposedly received the Spirit under such circumstances later asked him to pray for them because even though they had spoken in tongues at the time of their supposed baptism, they were not satis¤ed with their subsequent Christian walk or experience. They felt that somehow they had not really gotten the baptism, and Bosworth agreed. Having the sign did not mean that one had had the experience.42 Bosworth’s greatest concern was that the doctrine of evidentiary tongues fundamentally misconstrued both the nature of faith and the character of God. He said that the notion of physical evidence was suspect from the beginning because “the word ‘EVIDENCE’ in the Scriptures is never used in connection with a spiritual gift, or manifestation, making faith to depend upon any sign or physical manifestation, but the Apostle distinctly states that ‘FAITH is the evidence.’” He said: “Anything that is to be received in answer to prayer is to be received by faith.” Just as healing could only be obtained by faith and sustained by faith (even in the face of sometimes contradictory physical evidence), in the same way faith was the only means of obtaining and of proving that one had received the baptism of the Spirit. Faith was the key to the whole Christian life, the bedrock on which everything else had to be built, but Bosworth said that “the tongues evidence teaching reverses this, not only
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destroying faith, but making it impossible until the gift of tongues is received.” For the sake of pentecostal unity, Bosworth might have been able to tolerate what he believed were certain faulty teachings about tongues within the movement, but his concern that the necessary-tongues teaching was actually destroying faith made it impossible for him to remain silent. He simply had no choice; he had to speak out.43 Bosworth’s own position, very much like his position on healing, was to “insist that when a consecrated seeker has been correctly instructed, he should receive the Holy Ghost the ¤rst time the Spirit falls on him.” God wanted to baptize devout Christians with the Spirit; God wanted to do that more than any seeker wanted to receive the baptism. The job of the Christian was to believe that God would do what God already wanted to do. He cited the example of the time when Peter was preaching about Jesus and everyone present “received the baptism, even to the astonishment of Peter himself.” In that case, no one had explicitly sought the baptism of the Spirit; instead, God gave it freely without warning. Bosworth believed that God was ready and willing to act in precisely the same way in his own time.44 Bosworth believed that the manifestation of the Spirit—the new appearance of one or another spiritual gift as a result of one’s baptism in the Spirit—was the natural outcome of God’s newly intensi¤ed presence in the person’s life. It was the usual and expected result that would eventually become evident. What the manifestation of the Spirit was not was a mechanical signal from God that a person had ¤nally experienced the full and real baptism of the Spirit after perhaps years of tarrying for that experience. Bosworth said: “Personally, I am determined never to try to get any seekers to speak in tongues until after I see God tries to get them to, and then if they are not yielding or co-operating properly, I will instruct them to yield and obey the Spirit.” He added that “this will leave the proper place for faith, and I have found that it will bring the real speaking in tongues much quicker, for where any sign is placed before faith, it always hinders the Spirit, and lessens the power.”45 In the end, it is impossible to see how Bosworth could have come to a different conclusion about tongues and the baptism of the Spirit than he did, given his unwavering commitment to the centrality of faith and the loving character of God. Did Bosworth’s rejection of tongues as the necessary initial physical evidence of the baptism of the Spirit place him outside the realm of pentecostal faith and identity? Somehow that seems like an inappropriate conclusion. He never wavered in his commitment to a full Spirit-¤lled pentecostal vision of Christian faith and life, and
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throughout his entire ministry he encouraged Christians to exercise all the gifts of the Spirit. There is no doubt that he had his own vision of how best to articulate and prioritize his pentecostal beliefs, but Bosworth was only one among many in doing that. Rather than seeing Bosworth as a kind of pentecostal apostate because of his views on tongues, it seems more appropriate to use his theology to broaden our vision of the diversity that existed within the ¤rst generation of the pentecostal movement. Esek William Kenyon’s Theology of Identi¤cation with Christ Kenyon’s story is somewhat different from Bosworth’s. He was never formally part of the pentecostal movement, but he liked pentecostals and many pentecostals seemed to like him. Kenyon was older than many people who became involved in the early pentecostal movement; he was born in 1867 and was thus fully middle-aged when the pentecostal revival broke on the scene. It is perhaps not surprising then that he tended to see the new pentecostal movement as something that could be ¤tted into his own worldview rather than the other way around. He respected pentecostals, but he thought that many were misguided in various ways and believed that his own views could help straighten them out. Throughout the course of Kenyon’s long career he was welcomed into many pentecostal pulpits, and his writings were popular with many pentecostal believers. His book The Wonderful Name of Jesus actually came to be viewed as a classic of sorts in some Oneness pentecostal circles. The pentecostal leader who impressed him the most seems to have been William Durham, whom he once said represented “the highest and most scriptural type” of pentecostalism. Later in his life, Kenyon also developed a friendly personal relationship with Bosworth. Their views on a number of issues were quite similar, and they may have felt a kinship with each other as fellow travelers in the borderland of pentecostalism. His understanding of the need for Christians to boldly claim all the blessings of salvation is also quite similar to R. C. Lawson’s understanding of this topic. Kenyon’s historical connections with the pentecostal movement have been questioned by a number of scholars. Some of that scholarship, however, seems more driven by contemporary concerns to distance pentecostalism from the so-called word of faith movement (associated with Kenneth Hagin and others, and based to some degree on Kenyon’s ideas) than it does by fair and careful analysis.46 No one would argue that Kenyon was a 100 percent pentecostal preacher—he probably wasn’t even a
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75 or 50 percent pentecostal preacher—but just as certainly he was not a zero percent pentecostal theologian. He, like Bosworth, lived somewhere in the murky borderland that divided pentecostalism from other forms of Christian faith. Kenyon was undoubtedly closer to the outside edge of that zone than Bosworth, but his historic and continuing in®uence on pentecostal theology in the United States and around the world has been stronger than Bosworth’s. Because of that, his theology is necessarily part of the story that needs to be told here.47 Spiritual Biography Esek William Kenyon was born in 1867 in Hadley, New York.48 His family was poor and seems to have been only modestly interested, if at all, in matters of faith and education. Because of his family’s economic needs, Kenyon was forced to start working for the local carpet mill when he was only twelve. The life of a blue-collar factory worker did not appeal to him, however, and he dreamed of someday getting a job where he could rely on his mind rather than his hands. At age eighteen he had his ¤rst chance to escape the factory: He wandered into a revival service one evening and received what he called “a wonderful experience” of God and a call to ministry. Kenyon quickly sought a preacher’s license and launched out on his own as a Methodist exhorter. While his conversion seems to have been genuine, this was also his ¤rst opportunity to transcend the drudgery and limitations of his impoverished childhood. It is thus not surprising that he soon left the ministry to explore other employment options that did not involve physical labor. He had a knack for sales, and he also discovered that he was good at acting. Within a short time he was making a comfortable living in the theater. No longer feeling any immediate need for God’s assistance, he set his faith aside and declared himself an agnostic.49 In 1892, Kenyon moved to Boston and entered the Emerson School of Oratory as a means of furthering his acting career. The next year he met and married Evva Spurling, a 35-year-old divorcée. Faith was not a signi¤cant part of their marriage, but for some reason the two attended a gathering at A. J. Gordon’s church in Boston which prompted both of them to rededicate their lives to God and Kenyon to renew his commitment to the ministry. After surveying the church options available to them, Esek and Evva ¤nally decided to link up with the Free Will Baptists, and they were soon off to Elmira, New York, and their ¤rst pastorate. Less than a year later, the couple moved farther west to a smaller town, but to a larger church, in Springville, New York (located thirty miles
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south of Buffalo). Kenyon served the Springville church for three successful years, but then, following a normal trajectory of ministerial advancement, Kenyon left his New York congregation to accept an offer from a more prestigious church in Worchester, Massachusetts. The move to Massachusetts proved to be a turning point in Kenyon’s life. His new home was near Dwight L. Moody’s campground in North¤eld, and Kenyon frequented the place, interacting with the variety of leaders in the higher-life movement that came and went through the camp. Through his North¤eld association, Kenyon was introduced to the ideas of George Müller, Charles Cullis, and Frank W. Sanford. From Müller’s writings, Kenyon picked up the notion of total dependence on God—most notably ¤nancial dependence—and he soon felt compelled to give up his pastoral salary as a demonstration of his own full faith in God. From reading Cullis and meeting Sanford, he became convinced that the age of miracles was not over, and soon he added a healing dimension to his own ministry. About this same time, Kenyon also said that he had received the Holy Spirit, though he did not explain the experience in any detail.50 As part of his new vision of Christian faith, Kenyon decided, in 1898, that he had to resign from his church if he was faithfully going to follow God’s calling, wherever that might lead. His ¤rst initiative was to gather together a new congregation called the Tabernacle, which met in rented space in the local YMCA. Later that year, he launched a school called Bethel Bible Institute, and he tried to organize his own new denomination as well. By this point, Kenyon’s increasingly radical faith was beginning to put real stress on both his wife and his marriage. One of Kenyon’s new convictions was that in order to be a faithful Christian he had to care for the poor. He felt compelled to invite indigents into his home on a regular basis, and then his wife had to care for them. Kenyon’s guests were not the most genteel, and he said that soon most of his furniture was damaged and his ¤ne china was smashed. Esek and Evva stretched their budget as best they could and squeaked by, but Kenyon said that this was one of the most dif¤cult times of his life—he said it was “like sleighing when the snow is gone.” If anything, Evva felt the deprivation even more. She had come from a relatively prosperous family and was not used to the subsistence conditions under which she was now forced to live.51 Somehow the Kenyons’ marriage survived, and by 1900 their circumstances were beginning to improve. The Bible Institute was relocated to a farm in Spencer (about ten miles west of Worcester), and this provided more room for everyone and a source of home-grown food for the students. Kenyon’s speaking tours were also beginning to bring in some in-
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come, and that helped. But beneath the surface, tensions between Esek and Evva were growing. During the two years since he had resigned from his salaried pastorate, they had spent hardly any time together. Kenyon was frequently on the road, and even when he was home the two often lived apart, one at their house in town and the other at the farm. While Evva tried to be supportive, it seems obvious that her own faith had not necessarily led her to the same conclusions as Esek on matters of lifestyle and economics. It may well have come as no surprise to anyone that Evva ¤nally left Esek in the fall of 1902. The two would remain separated for the next seven years, but they never divorced. When Evva eventually did return to Esek, her health was badly in decline. She lingered on for several years and died in 1914. Kenyon’s crumbling marriage had little visible impact on his ®ourishing ministry. If anything, he increased the pace and diversity of his activities during this time. His preaching tours were going well, and he added a host of other commitments to his schedule, including a new printing operation called the Reality Publishing Company. Bethel Bible College (the institute’s new name) was running smoothly, too. In 1907, Kenyon had convinced Francis Bernauer to become the college’s president, and under his leadership the school was transformed from being a decidedly amateur institution to a genuinely respectable educational organization. Freed from his duties at the school, Kenyon decided to set off on a working vacation that took him on a preaching tour through Chicago and all the way to the West Coast.52 It was during this two-year stint (1907–1908) that Kenyon made his ¤rst acquaintance with the new pentecostal movement. In Chicago, he was especially impressed with the ministry of William Durham, and in Los Angeles he spent a good deal of time with George B. Studd of the Azusa Mission. Later he would develop working relations with, among others, Maria Woodworth-Etter, Aimee Semple McPherson and F. F. Bosworth. Kenyon’s connections with the emerging pentecostal movement were never simple, but it must be remembered that the pentecostal movement itself was a highly complex phenomenon during these early years. Kenyon felt a strong attraction to parts of the movement—even to the point of once seeking (but not receiving) ministerial credentials from the Assemblies of God—but at the same time, he was decidedly critical of other aspects of pentecostal faith and life. That kind of ambivalence was, of course, not unusual among pentecostals. Virtually every major pentecostal leader had harsh things to say about other pentecostal leaders. Many pentecostal leaders were so critical of their peers that they won-
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dered from time to time if the movement as a whole would survive its own errors. Kenyon made similar remarks. Those negative comments need to be understood within this broader context, however, and should not automatically be taken as evidence that Kenyon was anti-pentecostal in a way that placed him totally outside the movement. His critical rhetoric was not necessarily any more strident than that of anyone else. At the same time, no one would ever suggest that Kenyon was just one more cardcarrying pentecostal preacher. He was his own leader with his own ideas, and it very hard to imagine that Kenyon would ever have adopted a religious brand name for himself that he had not invented. Taking all that into account, it still seems fair to say that from 1907 onward Kenyon was a pentecostal fellow traveler of some sort. In 1909, Kenyon returned to New England, resumed control of Bethel Bible College, and launched a number of new business ventures— including a custom-made shirt company, a ladder-attachment manufacturing company, and a publishing press—to expand his ¤nancial base. He also became more directly involved in the placement of the school’s graduates in various New England congregations, and to that end he worked hard to build good relations with the denominations of the region even though he remained personally ambivalent about many of them. Kenyon was fairly successful, and many churches began to seek out Bethel graduates when looking for pastors. It was about this time that Evva returned home. The estranged couple seems to have been working out their differences when their home burned down in the spring of 1913. The strain of the ¤re proved to be too much for Evva to handle, and she fell into a depression. She had been in poor health anyway, and after the ¤re she seemed to lose her will to live. When she died in February 1914, Kenyon was in Canada. He returned brie®y to Massachusetts for the funeral, but then immediately headed back to Nova Scotia, where he met and quickly married Alice M. Whitney. By 1918, Kenyon’s new wife had given birth to two children, making him a father for the ¤rst time. During these years, Kenyon seemed more at peace with himself than he had been for a good while. His itinerant evangelistic work was going smoothly, his publishing company (Reality Press) was doing ¤ne, and his Bible college was humming along nicely. It was in the midst of this tranquil time that he wrote and published his ¤rst full-length theological text: The Father and His Family (1916). Kenyon was never one to simply go with the ®ow, however, and by the mid-1920s he seemed bored and ready for change. In 1924, he suddenly decided to resign from Bethel Bible College and move to California.
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His ministerial efforts when he reached the West Coast were frenetic. After a very short stay in San Jose, Kenyon and his family moved to Oakland, where he founded a congregation called the Pilgrim Church. Less than a year later, they left Oakland for Los Angeles, where Kenyon organized another new congregation called the Church of the Living Word. Soon he abandoned that work, however, to take charge of the Figueroa Baptist Church. While at Figueroa, he started a radio program and wrote two more books: The Wonderful Name of Jesus and Two Kinds of Knowledge. During this time, Kenyon was becoming increasingly troubled by what seemed to him to be a massive apostasy among Christians in the United States. He complained that many Christians were turning away from the true gospel to a bloodless religion of comfort and ease, while others, in a pathetic search for religious experience, were losing themselves in a variety of heretical sects and cults. Kenyon honed his message to combat these twin errors. At the seeming height of his career, Kenyon’s ministry suddenly collapsed. In the fall of 1930, his wife ¤led for divorce amid rumors that Kenyon had made sexual advances toward his secretary and several other women in the congregation. He was dismissed from his church and was left with little more than his destroyed reputation to keep him company. Finding it untenable to stay in Los Angeles, Kenyon moved north to Seattle, where he decided to forge ahead with his ministry despite his circumstances. He launched another new radio ministry (called Kenyon’s Church of the Air) and began to send out a related newsletter. Quite soon he organized another new congregation, and eventually he started a new Bible school as well. As if determined to get his thoughts on paper before he died, Kenyon also began writing at a furious pace. During the 1940s, he pumped out an average of more than one new book each year, including Jesus the Healer (1940); Identi¤cation: A Romance in Redemption (1941); Two Kinds of Faith (1942); In His Presence: The Secret of Prayer (1944); What Happened from the Cross to the Throne (1945); and New Creation Realities: A Revelation of Redemption (1945). Kenyon died in 1948, but the Kenyon Publishing Society has kept many of these titles in print. Kenyon developed his basic theological views during the early years of the twentieth century, and he never fundamentally altered those beliefs. Kenyon’s ¤rst book, The Father and His Family (1916), provided an outline of his theological convictions, and his many subsequent books expanded and re¤ned that vision. Despite this continuity of beliefs, it would be wrong to assume that Kenyon’s theological emphases never varied. As
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a general rule, Kenyon’s earlier publications (pre-1930) are somewhat more traditional in their theological emphases, while his later works (and especially those from the 1940s) are a bit more dramatic in tone and more strident in their claims. These differences should not be overdrawn, but at the same time it is important to allow his earlier publications to speak for themselves, and one should not automatically interpret them in the light of his somewhat more exuberant later writings. The following exposition of Kenyon’s theology is based almost entirely on his earlier works, which circulated within the pentecostal community side by side with many of the other books discussed in this volume. Kenyon was broader and more systematic in his approach to theology than most pentecostals. His goal was to provide his readers with a grand overview of creation, sin, and redemption rather than just dwell on a few particular items of doctrine. Because that was the case, his writings do not deal excessively with what might be considered the distinctive elements of pentecostal theology (i.e., the baptism of the Spirit, tongues, healing, etc.). Kenyon actually downplayed some of these themes in his books. Despite that, a certain pentecostal aura still hovers around Kenyon’s writings, and his in®uence within pentecostal circles (both while he was living and after his death) is proof of the fact that many pentecostals sensed an af¤nity with him. Nonetheless, trying to situate Kenyon within the context of the early pentecostal movement is no easy task. Despite the many similarities, there is a simultaneous sense of discontinuity. A sports analogy comes to mind. Placing Kenyon within the pentecostal community is like watching a soccer game where everyone is playing by the normal regulations, except that one player has decided to follow the rules of rugby. The two sports are similar in many ways, but they are far from identical. Within the orbit of pentecostal faith, Kenyon was like that rugby player: He was playing on the same ¤eld as everyone else and was using the same ball, but he was more or less following his own rules. On the one hand, that analogy reaf¤rms the notion that ultimately Kenyon has to be placed outside the pentecostal camp. On the other hand, his behavior and ideas are precisely what one would expect from a person who had sidled up to the boundaries of the pentecostal movement from the outside—and that is what Kenyon had done (as opposed to Bosworth, who had moved to the edges of pentecostalism from inside the movement). So while Kenyon may be seen as residing mostly outside the pentecostal movement, there can be no question about his inclusion in the story of early pentecostal theology. Kenyon’s in®uence within early pentecostalism was too signi¤cant, and
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his shadow over pentecostalism (at least over certain groups of pentecostals) has been too long, to leave him out. He is part of the story of borderland pentecostal theology even if he never did have both feet fully in the pentecostal world. Ways of Knowing At the beginning of The Father and His Family, Kenyon said that his goal was to produce a theology that would appeal to the “thinking men and women of this age [who had] been rebelling against the orthodox interpretations of the Bible as presented in denominational creeds.” As he understood the situation “there [was] almost no coherence of doctrine in any of [the] great denominational bodies” of his day. In response to various liberal critics, those churches had reformulated their doctrines with the intention of making Christian faith more acceptable to modern people, but the result had been disastrous. Rather than shoring up the walls of Christian faith and practice, the new doctrines had shattered “the old landmarks of the Faith.” Kenyon said that with nothing available to replace those landmarks, the churches were now “wandering in the byways of unbelief ” and as a result they had deservedly lost their “grip on the imagination of the age.” The traditional denominations had little, if anything, to offer a world desperately seeking truth.53 Kenyon’s remedy was to propose his own new and more enduring system of theology that would better meet the spiritual needs of modern people. What was required was a theology that was both scienti¤c and more than scienti¤c—a theology that could provide answers to the questions that modern science raised but could not itself answer. In Kenyon’s view, Christianity when rightly understood was exactly that kind of faith. He said that while Christian faith was “not a science . . . it [was] based upon scienti¤c facts.” Properly explained and genuinely demonstrated, Christianity was precisely the kind of metascienti¤c faith modern humanity was seeking.54 When Kenyon spoke in this way, of course, he was using the notion of science in a decidedly early-twentieth-century and distinctly American manner. Like many of his peers, Kenyon had adopted a Baconian, common-sense–realist understanding of science that argued that genuine science was the study of “facts” unalloyed with opinion. The key to good science was never to assert more than the facts allowed and never to engage in speculation about the meaning of those facts. This view of science had become quite popular in many conservative Christian circles, but a fairly similar view was also coming to dominate the academy, where the
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philosophy of logical positivism was winning the day. Logical positivism argued that statements about the world were meaningful only to the degree that they could be potentially either validated or proven false by empirical means. Here too the notion of pure facts was seen as the key to good science. Presupposing that factual ideal of science, Kenyon believed many of the greatest scientists of the day were actually doing something other than real science. Instead of limiting themselves to the facts alone (and to logically unassailable deductions that could be derived from those facts), Kenyon said, these individuals were engaging more and more in what could only be called guessing. Charles Darwin was Kenyon’s favorite whipping boy in this regard. He said that Darwin’s frustration with the simple facts of the earth’s fossil record had prompted him to engage in wild speculation leading to the theory of evolution, a theory that went well beyond anything the facts could prove. In Kenyon’s mind, Darwin ceased being a real scientist the moment he started down that road of creative speculation. Darwin was not alone in this endeavor—Kenyon thought many other modern scholars and scientists were doing the same thing—but he said no other scienti¤c “guesser [was] in the class with Darwin.”55 Kenyon was not surprised, however, that many scientists found themselves feeling a need to speculate about the deeper signi¤cance of the facts they studied. He said that this was the case because the facts of nature really did point beyond themselves toward something else. Scienti¤c inquiry invariably raises what some theologians today would call “limitquestions.” That is, if one follows a ¤eld of scienti¤c inquiry to its logical conclusion, that study will eventually exhaust the range of questions for which science can provide good, empirical, scienti¤c answers. But questions don’t necessarily stop at that point. What happens is that other questions arise—questions of meaning, signi¤cance, and value that science cannot answer because they fall beyond the limits of strict science. These new questions intrude into the realms of ethics, aesthetics, and religious faith. Kenyon was saying something quite similar in form if not in exact content: that scienti¤c research, if it is pursued with scienti¤c rigor, will always eventually bump into mystery.56 Using his own terminology, he said “Sense Knowledge” (scienti¤c or empirical knowledge of the world) had “serious limitations” in that “Sense Knowledge” could never provide “the Reason for Creation, nor the Reason for man.” He wrote: “We cannot ¤nd in all our searchings the source of Light, of Life, of Motion, of Gravity, and a hundred other things before which the world stands baf®ed and confused.” Kenyon argued that in the natural order of things, “when-
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ever a man has reached [this] limit of Sense Knowledge, he at once turns philosopher or guesser.” That was Darwin’s problem. But Kenyon believed that there was a different, better way of understanding this common human experience of bumping into the limits of “Sense Knowledge.”57 Kenyon’s answer was to postulate two separate and distinct realms of facts: “Sense Knowledge” facts about the material world and “Revelation Knowledge” facts about the spiritual realm. In order to be truly scienti¤c, one needed to have access to both kinds of facts. Once both kinds of facts were known, however, the need for guessing would be eliminated. The point at which science ran into the wall of its own limitations was not the place where speculation had to take over, it was the point at which the focus had to shift to spiritual facts. Similar to the way in which Thomas Aquinas (and many other Catholic theologians following him) linked the realms of nature and grace, Kenyon linked “Sense Knowledge” with “Revelation Knowledge.” Aquinas said that grace completed nature while nature served as the foundation for grace. Kenyon argued much the same thing about his two kinds of knowledge, saying that “Revelation Knowledge” and “Sense Knowledge” “should never be separated one from the other.” Both kinds of knowledge were necessary and both needed each other in order to be complete.58 Kenyon believed that in humanity’s original state people had full access to the spiritual realm. They could ascertain the facts of the spiritual world as naturally and effortlessly as people can see, hear, taste, feel, and smell the material world today. But humanity’s original abilities were destroyed by the fall. As a result, humanity had become spiritually dead. That meant that people no longer had natural access to the spiritual realm. In their fallen state, they were deaf, dumb, numb, and blind to the spiritual aspects of reality. But Kenyon believed that despite this spiritual catastrophe, an inkling of humanity’s former abilities still survived in the form of humankind’s deep-seated longing for God. Kenyon said that virtually every human being had a “spirit hunger for God”; everyone was “God-hungry.” In this inchoate way, fallen humankind knew instinctively —though perhaps only unconsciously—that there was more to reality than the material world. Spiritual realities of vast proportions and power existed just beyond the grasp of human knowing.59 The question before Kenyon was how knowledge of the spiritual could be restored. On the surface, it seemed impossible—it would be like trying to teach a blind person to see—but Kenyon believed that God could ¤nd a way. He hypothesized that “if God should wish to communicate with [man]. He would need to come to man’s level.” If God wanted
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to communicate spiritual truths to humanity in its fallen state, it would have to be done through “a communication that the Senses could understand. It would be in the realm of Sense Knowledge.” And, according to Kenyon, that was what God had done in the Bible. The Bible was God’s way of “[meeting] man on the level of the medium through which he gained his knowledge.” The Bible was a material object. It was something that could be known and studied through the senses. But it was also a spiritual revelation. The Bible answered the questions that “Sense Knowledge” raised but could never answer. The Bible provided “the Reason for Creation, its Origin, [and] the sources of Life and Light.” It was “Revelation Knowledge” in a form that was accessible to humans.60 Kenyon’s fundamentalist colleagues would have readily agreed with much of the above. They too believed that the Bible was a needed revelation from God, a sourcebook of spiritual truths that were unavailable through any other means. Most fundamentalists would have stopped at that point, however, since they tended to see the Bible as a straightforward book of facts that anyone could understand. For example, fundamentalist spokesperson R. A. Torrey said: “The Bible is one of the easiest books in the world to understand if men really wish to understand it and ¤nd out what it actually teaches, and do not wish to read into it their own notions and speculations.” Most fundamentalists believed that as long as one was not intentionally seeking to misread the Bible, the meaning of scripture would be clear to any genuinely interested reader.61 Kenyon had a rather different view, however. He said that the Bible provided only a slight opening to the spiritual for most of humanity. It heightened a sense of spiritual longing and pointed the reader toward God, but for individuals in their natural sinful state, the real meaning of the Bible remained largely hidden. In contrast to R. A. Torrey, Kenyon repeatedly said that ordinary people could not read the Bible aright even if they truly were trying their best not to read their own notions and speculations into the text. In order to read the Bible properly, the human nature of the reader had to be transformed; in order to read the Bible with insight and clarity, one had to be reborn. Kenyon declared bluntly that “only a man whose mind has been illumined by the New Birth can know God or understand His revelation.” According to Kenyon, the real meaning of the Bible could be grasped in detail only by those who possessed God’s Spirit within them. Because of this hermeneutical perspective, Kenyon was never bothered by the negative comments made by some modern critics of the Bible, and he said that no other Christians should have been bothered either. He wrote: “The church should not have taken so seriously
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the criticisms of the Bible by men of great scholarship who had never been Born Again. Some of these men have even translated the Bible. We do not question their honesty or scholarship. They did the best that a man with mere Sense Knowledge could do. We would not feel like criticizing a blind man for his attempt to interpret one of the great masterpieces of art.” Kenyon was not about to take the musings of any of these spiritually blind persons as normative for the spiritually sighted Christian community, but he thought that fundamentalist ravings against biblical criticism were pointless and a waste of time.62 In Kenyon’s epistemology, interactions between “Sense Knowledge” and “Revelation Knowledge” could go both ways. “Sense Knowledge,” properly understood, led people to seek and obtain “Revelation Knowledge,” and “Revelation Knowledge,” properly understood, grounded “Sense Knowledge” in the soil of spiritual wisdom and creativity. Kenyon thus argued that it was only among the Christian nations of the world—those nations where “Revelation Knowledge” had been united with “Sense Knowledge”—that science and invention had ®ourished, while “the nations that [had] not embraced Jesus Christ [had] steadily sunk lower and lower since his birth nineteen hundred years ago.” While they would not have put things in precisely that way, many early-twentiethcentury mainstream historians of science would have said something fairly similar. They tended to imply that the rise of science in the West was linked to the Christian worldview and that the failure of science to emerge in other regions of the world was due in some sense to the antiscience prejudices of the religious philosophies that ®ourished in those other locations.63 Of course, Kenyon pushed things far beyond what any mainstream thinker would say, especially in his later writings. At one point he even went so far as to argue that “no heathen nation ever had any inventors or creators until Eternal Life came to them.” In another passage he stated that “Anglo-Saxon superiority” could be explained in the same way. Kenyon ultimately reformatted this dictum into what he believed was a pithy fact of life: “Only the people who have received eternal life in the New Birth have been creative people.” As outrageous as this claim may be and as much as it may seem to drip with Christian triumphalism, it was not necessarily racist. Kenyon believed that once the other peoples of the world had accepted “Revelation Knowledge,” they too would have the potential to become great creators and inventors. What is more, he believed that the world as a whole was on the verge of entering into a new era of progress where “Sense Knowledge” and “Revelation Knowledge”
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would be joined in a more powerful alliance than ever before. With that global transition, Christianity itself would emerge from what Kenyon called its “dotage.” A new and advanced form of Christian faith was about to come into existence simultaneous with the emergence of a new mode of human existence in general.64 Creation, Fall, and Redemption Like many theologians, Kenyon’s vision of redemption was based to a large degree on his understanding of the past. The wonders of the original creation de¤ned what was to be reclaimed, and in Kenyon’s theology the wonder of all wonders in God’s original creation was humankind. Humanity had been created by God to ful¤ll God’s own deep desire for fellowship. Kenyon said that before the world was created, God literally “longed for sons and daughters.” It was God’s “primordial passion for children” that drove God to create.65 Kenyon said that when God created Adam, God made him “as near like Deity as it was possible for Deity to create him.” God then bestowed on him the highest rank of power and status, placing him well above the angels and demons that already inhabited the cosmos. Adam was also given “the legal authority to rule the Universe” as God’s co-regent. In some of his later writings, he even went so far as to say that humanity in its original form was “in the same class with God,” though care needs to be taken not to overstate what he meant by that. Kenyon was usually quite cautious about keeping the categories of the human and the divine apart, and he had no patience whatsoever with those who suggested everyone “had a spark of the Deity or any part of the Deity abiding in them.” What he meant by putting humanity and God in the same class was that they were both spiritual beings: “God is a spirit. Man is a Spirit.” Spelling out the implications, Kenyon taught that “man is a spirit” but by contrast “possesses” a body and a soul. He said that “the real Man” is spirit; the body and soul are secondary components of human nature. The human “spirit [operated] through the soul, and it in turn [operated] through the physical body,” but the essence of the human being was spiritual in the same way that God was spiritual.66 But there was another way in which God and humanity were connected, and that was through the work of ongoing creation. The universe existed for the sake of human beings, and human beings existed for the sake of fellowship with God. Humanity was the highest pinnacle of creation. But when it came to the creation of humanity, God stopped after Adam and Eve and gave up the power of creating new humans, turning
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that most important work of ongoing creation over to humanity itself. Things could have been different. Kenyon said God could have “[created] the whole human race by one word of His power,” but God did not do that. Instead, “He created one man and one woman and permitted them to be the father and mother of [all] His [other] children.” God essentially took “humanity into partnership with Himself “giving human beings the power to create through the means of normal sexual reproduction “eternal personalities . . . who will live as long as God.” Kenyon thus said that “man’s real business was to give birth to children”; in doing so, humanity actually took on the role of being “the Custodian of God’s joy.” God’s joy came through fellowship with human beings, and by creating and nurturing more children with whom God could have fellowship, human mothers and fathers increased God’s joy with each child they brought to life. By divine plan and desire, the quality of God’s own inner life was inextricably linked to human life and history.67 One could hardly have painted a more glowing picture of the original state of creation, and that description set the dramatic backdrop for Kenyon’s depiction of the horrors of the fall. In his view, the fall of Adam, and all of humanity with him, was a catastrophe beyond measure, rocking the entire universe and sending a shudder of pain even to the throne of God. Adam’s fall severed humanity’s fellowship with God and jerked the rudder of history to the side so that humanity suddenly plunged into a disastrous spiral toward destruction. The fall destroyed harmonious relations throughout the entire creation. In virtually every corner of the universe, violence took the place of peace and hatred displaced love. How and why did humanity fall from its original state of privilege and bliss? Kenyon insisted that even though Eve sinned ¤rst, the responsibility for the fall rested squarely on Adam’s shoulders. Kenyon believed in patriarchy and he was convinced that Eve did not control the destiny of humankind; it was Adam, the man, who had charge of history and it was his sin that changed the world. Eve was duped by Satan; Adam was not. Kenyon said that Adam made his decision to turn against God “in the white light of absolute knowledge.” Adam knew what he was doing and knew what the result would be. As Kenyon put it: “He knew God; he knew Satan; he knew the result of the unthinkable crime he committed.” Adam’s conscious act of sin severed humanity from God and handed the world over to Satan’s control.68 Kenyon’s view of the fall followed an interpretation made popular by seventeenth-century poet John Milton. According to both Milton and Kenyon, Adam’s real sin was uxoriousness—that is, being overly submis-
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sive to his wife’s wishes and desires. Adam broke fellowship with God to maintain fellowship with his fallen wife. Kenyon explained: “There is only one reason why Adam could have sinned. His wife, who had yielded to the temptation, had fallen. Adam [saw] the great gulf between himself and his precious wife . . . [and] for the sake of the woman, in order to regain her companionship, Adam deliberately committed high treason against God.” But while the sin was Adam’s, Kenyon was not about to let either Eve or women in general off the hook. Kenyon argued that if Eve had held fast, the world would not have been plunged into satanic shambles; Adam would not have fallen. In light of that fact, Kenyon felt free to remind women of their tremendous in®uence in the world for good or for ill. He warned: “No nation rises above its womanhood. . . . We know that the motherhood and the wifehood of the land give us our homes. Men may turn drunkards and debauchers and defame their marriage vows, but if the wives and mothers stand true, the home remains inviolate and children grow up clean, pure and reverent; but where the mother is a careless woman, few of her children ever stand the test of the world’s temptations.”69 Like many of his day (and today), Kenyon believed that men were in charge of the world but women were ultimately to be blamed when and if things went wrong—clearly a no-win situation for women. Kenyon de¤ned Adam’s act of sin as a kind of “High Treason” against God in the form of handing control of the world over to Satan, control that Adam himself had exercised only as a deputy of sorts under God’s higher authority. That act by itself would have been bad enough, but it was made worse—that is, it was high treason—because Satan was God’s greatest enemy. Despite the horror of the act, however, it was all in some sense perfectly legal. Kenyon explained that “God had conferred upon [Adam] the legal authority to rule the Universe” and it was that “Legal Dominion” that Adam knowingly and willingly placed in “the hands of God’s enemy, the Devil.” Adam’s transaction with the Devil was, in fact, so much within the bounds of legality that even God had to respect it. Kenyon said that God had “been obliged through the long period of human history to recognize Satan’s legal standing, and legal right and authority” over the created order. There was nothing God could do about it. Adam’s treason was so utterly horrible precisely because it was so utterly legal.70 As far as the identity of God’s great enemy, Satan, Kenyon cited the standard passages from the Old Testament (i.e., Isaiah chapter fourteen and Ezekiel chapter twenty-eight) to indicate that the devil was a fallen
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angel of great magnitude. He said that originally Satan had been “greater than any angelic being in Heaven, “ranking right behind “God and Jesus Christ” in the heavenly order of power and status. When he was cast out of heaven for his prideful insurrection, he lost none of his gifts and abilities, and since then he had used those formidable talents against God and God’s human companions. According to Kenyon, Satan’s “chief desire and design [has been] to destroy the human race and thereby bring sorrow to the heart of the Father God.” Kenyon said that Satan was specially gifted in the areas of the arts and music and suggested that the “passion music” performed in “brothels, dance-houses, theaters, and operas” across the world was one of Satan’s main means of continuing to snare people into sin. Given his wily talents, Satan found Eve easy prey when he set out to trap her and then use her to coerce Adam into handing the universe over to him.71 The impact of the fall was immediate and traumatic; the entire creation shuddered in response. Humanity became mortal in an instant. Kenyon said that as originally created, “man physically had the power of rejuvenation, of physical recreation so that he would have eternally existed in the body,” but after the fall, humanity’s regenerative powers began to fail. As a perfect specimen of humanity, Adam was able to hold off the inevitability of physical death for nearly 1,000 years, but after him the human race quickly degenerated to the point where seventy years was considered a full life span and many of those years were spent in sickness and pain. The most important change to humankind was not physical, however, but spiritual. Kenyon said that at the moment of the fall, humanity was “born again” in a negative sense. Adam and Eve’s almostdivine nature was taken away and was replaced by a new satanic nature. Kenyon explained: “The moment Man sinned His Nature underwent a complete change. This change has no parallel in Nature except in that which is known as the New Birth. . . . Man was actually Born Again when he sinned. That is, he was born of the Devil. He became a partaker of Satanic Nature.”72 Kenyon called this satanic nature “spiritual death.” To a certain degree, this spiritual death was de¤ned in terms of loss. The image of God that had been stamped on Adam and Eve’s being was ¤rst obscured and then slowly obliterated from the human race. Kenyon said: “Since the fall of man the human has steadily been sinking lower and lower intellectually, morally, and spiritually.” But spiritual death was not merely a loss. It was also an active force, a new power of evil that actually replaced the image of God with the image of humanity’s new father and master, Satan.
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Kenyon said that spiritual death was “the nature of the Devil that was imparted to man at the Fall.” In a mock reversal of creation, this new spirit was literally “breathed into [Adam] by the Devil.” Kenyon believed that as a result, all of humanity was “now united with the Devil”—each and every human being was “vitally unioned” with the Devil. The destruction was total. All ties with God were severed. Human beings were left as “broken helpless [slaves] without resources and in the hands of an Enemy who [ruled them] . . . without mercy.”73 It was not only humanity that suffered, however. When Adam handed control of the universe over to Satan, all of reality was changed. In the same way that the satanic spirit had been breathed into fallen humankind, it was also imposed on the animal world. Previously the earth’s animals had “lived in the atmosphere of love,” but now a new “spirit of hatred, of cunning, of fear, and revenge” was programmed into animal nature. The gentle lion became a ferocious killer that terrorized the forest with its “awful war-call.” The earth was “turned into a great battle¤eld” where animal had to ¤ght animal merely to survive. “Fear and death [stalked] in the shadows of every night.” The plant world was affected as well. Kenyon said that Satan “brought a blighting Curse upon the . . . Vegetable Kingdom,” leaving nothing of God’s original good and fair creation untouched. All was tarnished and deformed. Satan ruled supreme, and the very air became “pregnant with evil spirits.” Kenyon believed Satan divided the world into a host of separate “kingdoms and states, and communities” and gave various demons control over those territorial domains. Virtually every community was assigned a territorial demon to oppress and control all forms of life in that region of the planet.74 Given the horrors that had taken place as a result of the fall, Kenyon knew that some people questioned whether God had always know what would occur. He defended God’s foreknowledge, saying that even though God had known what might happen, God had decided to create humankind “in the face of that fact” anyway. Kenyon even implied that God had taken certain precautions in case Adam might fall that helped ensure that the damage would not be irreparable. He suggested that God had imposed some kind of time limit on Adam’s dominion over the universe and because of that, Satan’s rule over the world was also in some way bound by time. That possibility provided Kenyon with a glimmer of hope: If Satan’s rule was limited in time, that meant that the ravages of the fall might one day be reversed.75 And Kenyon did believe that the world not only might, but most certainly one day would, be saved from Satan’s grip. He was convinced
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that God would someday reverse the effects of the fall and restore the universe to its full Edenic glory. He was also convinced, however, that that process of restoration would be painful and hard. His clue was the blood covenant that God initiated with Adam and Eve as they were being driven out of the Garden of Eden. The Bible says that as Adam and Eve were being forced out of the Garden, God made clothes from the skins of animals for them to wear to cover their nakedness. Kenyon took this act of divine aid—killing an animal and making a coat out of the skin—as a symbol of the fact that someday God would provide a redemptive covering for everyone “through the blood of His Son.” Kenyon believed that while neither Adam nor Eve nor any of their descendants necessarily understood what God had promised in this act, they nonetheless continued the practice of animal sacri¤ce, handing down the symbolic promise of the blood covenant from generation to generation. Kenyon said that vestiges of it were still visible in some parts of the world in his own day. In the traditional ritual of animal sacri¤ce, the details of redemption were quite obviously hidden from view, but Kenyon thought the general symbolism was clear. At least it was clear to him: Redemption involved pain and death; humanity could only be saved through suffering and blood. What he said no one could know until after the death and resurrection of Christ was just how much pain and suffering would be required to pay the penalty of sin and redeem humanity from Satan’s power.76 Redemption from Sin and the Defeat of Satan Kenyon’s theology of redemption had two foci. First, God’s provision of salvation had to include an appropriate recompense for Adam’s treason and its awful legacy of human sin and separation from God. Kenyon asserted in fairly traditional Christian terms that if that sin was to be forgiven and fellowship with God was to be restored, somehow God himself would have to set things right. It was beyond the ability of humankind to undo the effects of the fall. But secondarily, redemption also had to deal with Satan. Creation needed to be freed from Satan’s deadly grip. According to Kenyon, the devil had obtained control of the world by legal means, and this fact circumscribed God’s options. God could not simply grab the world back from Satan, even though God had the power to do that. Instead, God had to wait until the devil somehow overstepped his bounds and then God could legally intervene and reclaim control of the universe. So that became God’s strategy: to try to trick Satan into overstepping his legal rights so that the he would then be force to meet God in “honorable open combat” where all of God’s omnipotent power could legally be un-
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leashed against him. These two strands of redemption—God’s actions on behalf of humanity and against the devil—were woven together in the person and work of Jesus Christ, whom Kenyon also called “the Hero Christ, the Hero Man, our princely Saviour God.”77 In Kenyon’s understanding of things, the process of redemption involved genuine risk on God’s part. He argued that present-day Christians had a hard time grasping that fact, for they lived after the fact of Christ’s victory. But Kenyon assured them that Christ’s victory had not been a sure thing. God’s engagement with Satan had been genuine combat. Something could have gone wrong, and victory was ¤nally achieved only at great cost. One of Kenyon’s main concerns was to convince his readers that God had risked all for them and that they, in turn, should risk all for God. Looking ¤rst at the human side of redemption, Kenyon said it was only reasonable to assume that redemption from sin needed to involve human action in some way because it was human transgression that caused the problem in the ¤rst place. Kenyon argued that on some level “humanity must be delivered by a human.” But that was impossible. The debt humanity owed God was so immense that no merely human person could pay it; it was so large that only an in¤nite being such as God could truly make recompense. Kenyon’s conclusion, as had been the conclusion of so many Christians before him, was that something like the incarnation was therefore “absolute necessity.” The only person who could possibly champion humanity’s cause was God incarnate in human form.78 Kenyon said that for the incarnation to occur, two miracles had to take place. The ¤rst was the internal division of the godhead. Kenyon said that if God was to become incarnate, it was necessary for the redeemer aspect of God somehow to be separated “out of the Godhead or from the Godhead in Heaven.” This seems to imply that Kenyon thought that God’s nature had been undivided prior to the incarnation and that only in the process of preparation for the incarnation did God’s triune nature begin to emerge. If this is an accurate interpretation of his views, Kenyon’s theology would seem to represent a middle ground between the Oneness and Trinitarian positions. Perhaps this is part of the reason Kenyon’s writings were so valued within Oneness pentecostal circles. In any instance, Kenyon believed that something unique and dramatic occurred within the godhead at the time of the incarnation. The implication is that God existed, at least to some degree, within time and that God was thus capable of change.79 The second miracle that needed to occur in order for redemption to
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take place was that the divine redeemer—that is, the separated redemptive aspect of God’s being—had to become human in a manner that involved absolutely no taint of sin. If any kind of sin was involved, the redeemer would be just as subject to the devil as everyone else. This stipulation eliminated the possibility that God could become human through the means of normal human reproduction. Kenyon argued that “if Jesus had been born of natural generation and God had [later] come into Him, he would [still] have been a fallen spirit” and would have been subject to Satan’s rule. What was needed was a miraculous process that would produce a new specimen of humanity that was identical in nature and substance to Adam’s condition before the fall. A virgin birth was the only way this could happen, and Kenyon had a fairly extreme view of what that entailed. Given his patriarchal views, it is not surprising that Mary’s role was minimal. Kenyon argued that Christ was conceived by the Holy Spirit independent of any human action and was then merely placed in the Virgin Mary as “the receptacle of that Holy thing until the day it [was] brought forth.” According to Kenyon, Mary was little more than the incubating womb in which the fetal Christ bided his time until the moment he was to be born.80 Kenyon showed only minimal interest in Christ’s earthly life. The only thing that really mattered was that Christ remained free from sin so that Satan would have no legitimate claim over his life. As far as Kenyon was concerned, the life of this “strange Galilean,” as he called Jesus, was little more than a necessary prelude to his death and resurrection. Kenyon took pains to emphasize what Christ did not do rather than what he accomplished during his earthly sojourn. He argued that Christ never explained his real mission to anyone. Kenyon said that Christ “never asked anyone to believe in Him as a Savior who was to give men Eternal Life. . . . He did not ask them to believe in what we call His Substitutionary Sacri¤ce. He never mentioned it. . . . Jesus never demanded that anyone believe in Him as a Savior who was going to die and rise again for their justi¤cation.” Kenyon said that Christ’s powers were “limited to physical things.” He had the power to “heal the sick, feed the multitudes, raise the dead, and turn water into wine,” but, Kenyon said, “He could not Recreate anyone” because the work of redemption had not yet been completed.81 Kenyon believed that before the redemption of humanity had actually been accomplished—before Christ had suffered and risen again to win human forgiveness and freedom—not even Christ himself could presume upon the outcome. In this opinion, Kenyon set himself decidedly against
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those who suggested that Christ had somehow borne the sins of humanity eternally—that is, that even before the world was created, salvation was an accomplished fact (Haywood’s view, for example). Kenyon rejected that view as a distortion of the biblical text, saying that when the Bible spoke of “the Lamb’s being slain from the foundation of the world, [the Bible] really says that our names are written in the Book of Life from the foundation of the world [but] our Savior did not bear sin for us as a substitute until He went on the cross.” For Kenyon, redemption took place in real time. People who lived before and after the death and resurrection of Christ were thus in radically different situations. Following that time-sensitive logic, Kenyon even suggested that Christians, who had full access to all the bene¤ts of redemption, had more spiritual power than Jesus possessed before the cruci¤xion. Calvary was the turning point of history, and even Christ, the primary actor in that drama, was affected by the outcome.82 Kenyon’s view was that Jesus spent most of his time on earth merely waiting for the moment when his suffering for humanity would begin, and that suffering was primarily spiritual, not physical. At one point Kenyon said that “the physical death of Jesus did not touch the sin issue at all.” If Christ’s physical suffering did matter, it was only the smallest tip of the iceberg. The great bulk of Christ’s redemptive suffering took place out of view in the spiritual realm. Kenyon said: “The vision I want you to have is not of the physical suffering of Jesus, not what man has done[,] as that is only a means to an end, but come behind the scenes and see the agony of the Son of God.” What mattered for Kenyon was “the divine side of the Cruci¤xion,” not the human side. Kenyon sometimes came close to treating Christ’s humanity as if it was little more than a robe draped over the divine being. What happened to that robe did not concern him. Kenyon repeatedly argued that it was “not the physical suffering of Jesus, but His soul travail” that won human redemption.83 Kenyon explained that what actually happened on the cross was that “the Father took our sin nature, spiritual death, and laid it upon the spirit of His Son.” Christ willingly accepted that burden—this was why he had come to earth—but as soon as the burden of sin was laid on him, Satan seized Christ and breathed into him his own diabolical spirit. At that moment, Christ experienced the same spiritual death that had befallen Adam. He also became physically mortal. (Kenyon said that when Christ was nailed to the cross he still possessed an immortal physical body exactly like Adam’s. Because that was the case, the soldiers “could not kill Jesus until He became our sin substitute” and became mortal.) Kenyon
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believed that this “Dual Death,” ¤rst of the spirit and then of the body, cut Christ off from God the Father fully and that he descended dejectedly “into the dreaded regions,” where he would have to stay and suffer until he had paid the full “penalty of our sinful nature.” This was what Kenyon meant by the spiritual cruci¤xion of Christ. In Kenyon’s mind, it was in¤nitely more torturous than any kind of physical pain—he said that Christ suffered “agony beyond description”—but when it was ¤nally over, the claims of justice had been met. At that moment, God immediately brought Christ’s spiritual suffering to an end and rewarded him with eternal life. Christ was in a very real sense “born again” in Hell, and he then rose from the grave and ascended to Heaven. As a result of Christ’s ¤nished work, humanity was freed forever from the penalty of sin.84 Christ’s suffering had one additional function in Kenyon’s theology: It justi¤ed God’s right to send unrepentant sinners to hell. Kenyon said that because God in Christ had himself gone to hell and suffered for the human race, humanity now had to remain silent before God and accept whatever God offered. There could be no carping that somehow God was responsible for human sin and that therefore humanity should be spared punishment in Hell. God had already accepted the responsibility of humanity’s sin and had paid the awful cost of setting things right. Kenyon argued that if God had not done this, “God [could] not send any man to Hell who rejects Him as a Savior,” but precisely because Christ had gone to hell and had absorbed the full penalty for humanity’s sin, God was now actually required to send those who rejected Christ to hell. Kenyon said that because of Christ’s sacri¤ce, “every man who rejects Jesus must legally go to Hell regardless of God’s feeling.” For God to do anything else would be to commit an injustice “towards Jesus the Substitute.”85 As far as Kenyon was concerned, the issue was clear and simple. After the completion of the redemptive work of Christ, the choice of going either to heaven or hell was a straightforward matter of human volition. One either accepted the work of Christ on one’s behalf or one rejected that work and, in essence, declared Christ’s suffering pointless. According to Kenyon, that kind of minimization of Christ’s suffering was a crime worse than any other. It was the one and only sin that necessarily sent one to hell in light of the otherwise ¤nished work of redemption. Christ’s suffering was thus a double-edged sword for sinful humankind. Those who accepted Christ’s work were offered glories untold—Kenyon said that they “must legally go to Heaven.” Those who rejected Christ’s efforts on their behalf sealed their own awful doom, and legally they had to be sent
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to hell. Not even God could alter that eternal destiny. Kenyon summarized the matter by saying: “Man goes to Hell on purely intellectual grounds; he can evade [Hell] if he wishes. . . . He goes there because he has served Satan, and because he prefers Satan as his god to the God and Father of our Jesus Christ. Sin is more attractive to him, and Hell, more desirable than Heaven is.”86 In Kenyon’s theology, the human side of redemption was, of course, only half the picture. The other dimension of redemption had to do with the devil, and the chief question there was how God was going to regain control of the world. This was tricky business, because Satan had obtained his power over the world through a legal, albeit shady, deal with Adam. In some sense God’s hands were tied. He could not simply overpower Satan and take the world back. That would be illegal, and, to Kenyon, God was a God of legality, justice, and order. If God was going to regain control of the world in a godly manner, God had to treat Satan fairly. But being fair did not necessarily mean being straightforward. The divine plan involved tricking the devil into overstepping his legal rights so that God’s omnipotent powers could then legally be used against him. This aspect of Kenyon’s theology of redemption parallels quite closely what Gustav Aulen has called the Christus victor model of the atonement. This particular way of understanding redemption, which was very popular during the early centuries of church history, identi¤ed the key turning point in the drama of redemption as Christ’s defeat of Satan and victorious resurrection from the grave rather than focusing on Christ’s death on behalf of or in place of sinners. One of the most popular ancient articulations of this theology described Christ as the bait God used to lure Satan beyond his legal rights so that God could crush him. Thus, in the incarnation, the divine aspect of Christ was kept hidden and out of view so that Satan would think Jesus was merely another human being—a stubbornly holy person to be sure, but a mere human nonetheless. When Christ died on the cross, Satan thought he had ¤nally defeated this pure and pious individual. But Satan was eventually to discover that he had bitten off more than he could chew. He had dragged a morally perfect man into hell, a person over whom he had no legal rights; even worse, he had unwittingly dragged God himself into hell. Throwing off the mask of his humanity, Christ grabbed Satan by the throat and pummeled him into submission. After binding the Devil and setting humanity free, Christ rose from the dead as the restored lord of the universe.87 Kenyon’s view was quite similar. Like the Christus victor approach,
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Kenyon believed that the divine aspect of Christ had been carefully disguised in Jesus of Nazareth. Those who met Jesus may have sensed something slightly different in this “strange Galilean,” but they did not suspect divinity. In Kenyon’s version of things, Christ himself remained virtually silent about both his divine identity and his redemptive mission. Not even the disciples, his closest friends and associates, knew who he really was. Following the Christus victor narrative of events, Kenyon said that when Christ descended into hell, Satan believed he had scored a remarkable victory over this unusual human being. In hell, Satan smiled as he watched Christ suffer under the pains of judgment God poured down on him, but then suddenly the suffering stopped and Satan grew rightfully apprehensive. Christ was not who he had appeared to be. In an instant, Christ was brought back to life from spiritual death and Satan found himself facing his most dangerous foe with no legal shield to protect him. The devil had overstepped his bounds and Christ was free to take his revenge. “In His new, omnipotent strength,” Kenyon said, Christ hurled back the hosts of darkness and pummeled Satan, leaving “him paralyzed, whipped and defeated” on the ®oor of Hell. The devil’s trickery of Eve had been repaid in full by Christ’s trickery of Satan. Satan’s stranglehold on humankind was undone, and God was once again in charge of the world.88 Kenyon’s theology and Christus victor theology both af¤rmed the total victory of God over Satan; thus, both needed to address the fact that in ordinary human experience, Satan’s dominion over the world did not seem as fully dissolved as those theologies implied. At least on the surface of things, Satan still seemed in control. Humanity was still mortal. People still got sick. Animal behavior was still governed by the law of hatred and fear. Plants still struggled to survive in the face of various blights, molds, and pests. Kenyon’s response to this problem was twofold. First, he said that even though Satan’s potentially eternal stranglehold on creation had been broken by Christ’s salvi¤c work, God still had to respect the time limits that were part of the world’s lease that Satan had obtained from Adam. But Kenyon said that a second rule also applied; even though for the time being the world in general remained under Satan’s lame-duck rule, Christians were no longer ordinary people in that ordinary world. Christians, like Christ, had been born again out of spiritual death into eternal life. Therefore they had a spiritual and legal right to live on a plane above Satan’s reach. They had a right to claim Christ’s victory over Satan and the powers of death. They had all the rights and bene¤ts of redemption available to them right now. At least, Christians had all those rights and bene¤ts available to them if they knew what they were and how to
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claim them, and Kenyon’s goal was to make sure Christians were properly instructed in those matters. The New Birth (or the Baptism of the Spirit) Kenyon believed that the power to claim God’s promised rights and bene¤ts began with a right understanding of the “New Birth,” which he also called “the baptism of the Holy Spirit.” A note on terminology is obviously necessary here. In Kenyon’s lexicon, the new birth was the divine act by which an individual was suddenly and fully immersed in the Holy Spirit. The result of this immersion was that “the Nature of God” rushed into the individual, driving out the forces of spiritual death and making the recipient newly “alive in Christ” for the very ¤rst time. Kenyon minced no words when discussing this point; he sometimes described the new birth as “the real Baptism of the Spirit” to make absolutely certain his readers got the point.89 Kenyon’s use of the phrase “the baptism of the Holy Spirit” to refer to the initial experience of the Christian life set him at odds with many early pentecostal leaders who wanted to make a clear distinction between the new birth as the initial step of salvation and the baptism of the Spirit as a subsequent act of divine grace and blessing. Kenyon had no argument with that two-step description of the Christian life, and he freely admitted that Christians ought to have a separate post-conversion experience in which the Holy Spirit actually took up permanent abode in the human body. However, Kenyon wanted to call that second experience the ¤lling or indwelling of the Spirit, not the baptism of the Spirit. (Kenyon understood this in¤lling of the Spirit to be one of the legal rights of the believer.) On this point, as on many others, Kenyon clearly thought that his own use of theological language was better and more accurate than the patterns of language that were emerging within the mainstream pentecostal movement. Although his own language was out of sync with the pentecostal mainstream, Kenyon had no doubt that the best solution was for the pentecostal majority to change their terminology to agree with his own and not vice versa. Of course, that attitude was in its own way a really quite pentecostal mindset. According to Kenyon, the new birth was a complex phenomenon involving what he called both “vital” and legal dimensions. Kenyon likened it to marriage, which also involved these two dimensions. He said the vital aspect of marriage was the love and mutual attraction that drew a man and a woman together for life. But marriage was also a legal institution. Marriage was not simply living together; it was living together within the
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con¤nes of a legal agreement that gave each partner certain rights and privileges in relation to the other. The new birth was the same kind of thing. It involved a vital (affective and experiential) relationship with God, but it also included a legal dimension that needed to be understood and exercised. Kenyon discussed these two facets of the new birth separately. He said that the vital aspect of the new birth brought about the ontological undoing of the fall. Humanity’s original spiritual nature had been lost in Adam’s deal with the devil, who had then breathed his own spirit of death into the void that remained. Kenyon said that “the moment Man sinned His Nature underwent a complete change. . . . Man was actually Born Again when he sinned. . . . He was born of the Devil.” In the new birth, God reversed that process. Humanity’s satanic nature was removed, and the individual believer was given back the eternal spiritual life that God had originally intended for all of humankind. This transformation took place in the blink of an eye. In precisely the same instantaneous manner that the fall had changed human nature from godly to satanic, the process was reversed. In the very moment when a person turned in saving faith to Jesus as Savior and Lord, that person was immediately born again of God and became a “partaker of the Divine nature.”90 The vital experience of new birth involved several different dimensions, but these were blended together in the simple yet complex act of accepting God’s offer of reconciliation. First, one had to hear and understand God’s message, then one had to believe that message, and ¤nally one had to act on that message by “[taking] Jesus Christ as his Savior and [confessing] Him before the world as his Lord.” Some Christians tried to separate these different aspects of saving faith into a series of different and discrete actions that had to be followed in order, and many Christians stressed how dif¤cult the process of salvation could be. The holiness movement, in particular, had underscored the dif¤culty of true repentance and the struggle involved in turning one’s life fully over to God’s control. But Kenyon would have none of that. He said that the new birth was both “easily understood” and “very simple” to experience. The new birth was not hard work; in fact, it was almost effortless.91 If marriage was an appropriate parallel, the new birth in its vital aspect was like falling in love. Falling in love involves a complex and total transformation of one’s focus of attention, but it is also a transformation that can happen with virtually no effort in a moment of time. To Kenyon, the blossoming of saving faith was similar. All a person had to do was simply let go of his or her resistance to God and turned expectantly to-
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ward Christ. In response to that shift of affections, the Holy Spirit would immediately “overshadow” the individual and make him or her a “New Creation” in Christ. No lengthy or painful process of renunciation was required; Kenyon argued that “nowhere does [God] tell us to go out and club the sinner, tell him what he must give up, what he must surrender.” Instead, Kenyon said the new birth was a process of divine addition that involved no painful subtraction at all. Critiquing the negativity of so many evangelists, Kenyon wrote: “We have given a wrong message to the world. Our message to the world has been one of ‘giving and putting away’; we have told them what they must do, while the truth is that God does not ask the world to give up anything. . . . It is not subtraction. It is addition. It is not taking from, it is adding to. God is the giver. We are the receivers. . . . How it grips our hearts. This is not the message that they have taught us to preach. This is the reverse of it.”92 Kenyon was insistent that the new birth in its vital dimension produced complete results. He said that when sinners were born again, they were born again as full children of God, not as “hybrids or half breeds” that were by nature only partly divine and partly still sinful. He contrasted this view of the new birth with what he called the “dual theory,” which postulated “that when a man is born again he receives Eternal Life but . . . the old nature is not removed, and . . . these natures war with each other in the new creation.” Kenyon believed that the new birth involved the eradication of sin within the believer. The sin nature of fallen humanity was “all done away when [the Christian] was recreated” by the Holy Spirit. He argued that “if sin has a habitation in the believer and the believer is a subject of it, then God is united to sin, or in other words, to the Devil,” and that simply could not be. God and the devil were enemies of each other, and the human soul was the chief battleground. There was no middle ground in this warfare. One was either in love with God or the devil. One had either a fully satanic nature or a fully divine nature. The divine and the demonic could not coinhabit the same person.93 Kenyon said that the new birth was God’s way of reconstituting the divine family that had been God’s original vision of humanity. One by one, as individuals were born again they were being adopted into God’s “Family of Faith.” The intended goal was the restoration of complete fellowship between God and humanity. In Kenyon’s words, the purpose of redemption was to call humanity “out of the discord, bitterness, and unhappiness of Spiritual Death into Fellowship with the Great FatherGod of the Universe.” He explained that this was the “heart secret of the New Creation. . . . God could not Fellowship with the old creation that
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was ruled by the adversary, so He recreated it [and] imparted to it His own nature so that there could be a perfect Fellowship.” The ideal of fellowship is what Kenyon thought set Christianity apart from all other religions. He never tired of saying: “Christianity is not a religion; it is a family, a Father and his children. . . . It is not a creed, nor a set of Doctrines, nor a body of Ethics. . . . Christianity is not a Theology, it is the reality of man’s Redemption and union with God.”94 While fellowship with God was in one sense the ultimate goal of redemption, restored fellowship with God also had a certain instrumental value in Kenyon’s theological system. In his terminology, “Fellowship [was] the parent of Real Faith.” When one was living in vital, selfconscious fellowship with God, all things were possible, but as soon as one fell out of experiential fellowship with God, one’s faith inevitably became cramped and restricted. As Kenyon put it, “The instant fellowship is broken, you go into the dark.” But why and how could this happen? Once fellowship with God had been restored through the new birth, how could it be broken? Kenyon replied that fellowship with God could be broken in the same way that fellowship in a marriage could be broken by thoughtless acts or unkind words. It was the careless act of sin, looking away from God, or trusting one’s “Sense Knowledge” rather than divine revelation, that caused fellowship with the Father to be broken. Kenyon believed that many Christians were living in this condition. They had lost their ¤rst love of God, had fallen out of fellowship, and were now trying to carry on the best they could based on their sense of duty alone. But Kenyon said that duty was a poor replacement for vitality and joy, and such people would be locked into a low grade of faith until real fellowship could be restored.95 Kenyon believed that even while one was out of fellowship, however, there were limits on how bad things could get for any reborn Christian. In particular, he said that broken fellowship after the new birth did not break one’s fundamental relationship with God any more than broken fellowship in a marriage automatically dissolved the relationship between husband and wife. Kenyon said: “When you break your fellowship; it does not mean you have broken your relationship; you are still [God’s] son.” Kenyon believed, in somewhat Calvinistic fashion, that one’s relationship with God could never be broken—not by any act of human volition nor by any attack from Satan. He said: “The believer belongs to Christ. It is a once for all union.”96 But despite that spiritual safety net, there were still great risks in-
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volved with being out of fellowship. Kenyon wrote: “It is not safe to be out of fellowship a moment, for when you are out of fellowship, you are in Satan’s fellowship, without protection.” It was thus imperative that full and vital fellowship with God be restored as soon as possible and, in typical Kenyon fashion, he said that that was easily done. All one had to do was ask for forgiveness, and fellowship was restored on the spot. Kenyon wrote: “The instant we ask the Father’s forgiveness, Jesus takes up our case before the Father and our fellowship is restored.” The human response to the Father’s forgiveness was to accept it as a fact and immediately get back to living as a con¤dent child of God. In Kenyon’s estimation, any continued remorse became nothing more than sel¤sh indulgence. He wrote: “For you to continually remind yourself of your past errors and sins is to deny the ef¤cacy of His forgiveness and the value of His word.” Christ’s saving work granted humanity the ability and responsibility “to stand in the presence of God without the sense of sin, guilt, or inferiority.” Christians who were intent on holding onto their consciousness of sin were, in essence, undercutting that very foundation of faith. Kenyon’s brusque advice to such persons was “to forgive yourself and forget your sins and go on in love with Him.”97 While it is obvious that Kenyon placed tremendous emphasis on the vital side of the new birth, he was equally adamant that Christians also needed to understand what he called the legal side of that experience if they were to have a complete grasp of Christian truth and a full experience of the Christian life. He said that many Christians were deeply confused because they had “not differentiated between the Legal and Vital sides of the New Birth.” In a certain sense, the contrast was simple: The vital side of the new birth focused on love and relationship; the legal side focused on justice and power. In another sense, however, the two concepts were intertwined. The legal aspects of redemption “sandwiched” the vital in that they both preceded and completed the vital new birth. The preceding aspect of legality emphasized justice and centered on the ¤nished work of Christ. Kenyon said that it was Christ’s death, suffering, and resurrection that provided the legal foundation that allowed God to justly offer the new birth to humankind. After one had obtained the vital experience of the new birth, the subsequent aspect of legality focused on power. It was knowing one’s legal rights as a reborn child of God that allowed one to claim all the rights and privileges that were included in the new birth. Without that knowledge, individuals who had experienced the vital new birth would necessarily remain spiritually weak and imma-
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ture. Once those believers learned how to legally claim their full rights as reborn members of God’s family, however, they could and would immediately become powerful adult sons and daughters of God.98 In Kenyon’s view, God’s love was surrounded by God’s sense of justice. Even though God wanted to redeem his errant children as soon as they fell into Satan’s control, God had to wait until the legal groundwork had been laid for that redemption. Kenyon argued that “justice [was] the foundation of the Throne of God,” and because that was the case, God’s dignity would have been compromised “if God had in any wise allowed Love to usurp the place of Justice.” Thus, it was only after “God sent His Son down here to pay humanity’s claims to Justice” that God could allow “love . . . to reach her hand out” to help erring humankind. Kenyon said that if God had tried to save humankind apart from this kind of justice, that offer would have been a sham. He said that love without justice was mere sentimentality, and sentimentality could not break Satan’s iron grip on humanity’s fate. Legal action—legal justice—was required if Satan was to be subdued and if the new birth was to be validly offered to humankind. Kenyon also suggested that God’s emphasis on the priority of justice over love gave Christianity “a dignity and beauty . . . that no other religion has” and that it underscored the manliness of Christian faith. Like many other Christian leaders of his day (most of whom were male), Kenyon advocated a “muscular,” male-gendered version of the gospel.99 Kenyon once enumerated seven separate actions that had to take place in the “Court House of Heaven” for the legal dimensions of the new birth to be complete. He said that ¤rst of all, the sins of the person being born again had to be legally “remitted, wiped out as though they had never been.” He continued: “Second, he is legally justi¤ed or set right with God. Third, his name is written in the Book of Life, the Family Birthday Book. Fourth, he is legally Adopted into the Family and this has to be done in the court house. Fifth, Jesus publicly Confesses him before the Father and the Holy Angels. Sixth, he is legally Reconciled to the Father. Seventh, he is declared and made righteous.” According to Kenyon, the new birth was rooted and grounded in this set of objective legal actions undertaken by God. Apart from this legal foundation, the vital experience of the new birth could never have been offered to fallen humankind.100 All of this preparatory work was only half of what was involved in the legal aspect of the new birth, however. The second part of what Kenyon had to say about the legal dimensions of the new birth focused on what took place after one had received the vital experience of being born again, and the emphasis here was on rights and power. Once again,
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Kenyon found it helpful to construct a checklist of what was involved, and, once again, seven items were on that list. He said that the post-vitalnew-birth legal privileges of the Christian included “¤rst, a legal right to his Father’s protection. Second . . . a legal right to Jesus’ intercession. Third . . . a Legal Right to the Advocacy of Christ, the great Family Lawyer. Fourth . . . a Legal Right to the gift of the Holy Spirit. Fifth . . . a Legal Right to a son’s place in the Royal Family. Sixth . . . a Legal Right to a son’s inheritance. Seventh . . . a Legal Right to the use of Jesus’ Name.” All of these rights automatically became part of the Christian’s spiritual treasure trove as soon as he or she was reborn by God’s Spirit. Christians didn’t need to struggle to receive these privileges; all Christians needed to do was ¤gure out how to access the powers God had already legally put at their disposal.101 The Filling of the Spirit and the Use of Jesus’s Name While in a certain sense Kenyon believed that all the legal powers and privileges of faith became the believer’s in the instant of new birth, he also knew that in actual experience it took time for believers to learn how to access all those gifts. In that process, two particular items stood out as marking critical stages of advance. The ¤rst step was to claim the ¤lling of the Spirit; the second was to learn how to properly use the power of Jesus’s name. In Kenyon’s theology, the ¤lling of the Spirit was an experience that followed the new birth in which God took up permanent residence in the believer’s life. He said that prior to the new birth it was impossible for the Holy Spirit to “make His permanent abode in the body of man . . . because man was spiritually dead.” After the new birth, however, one became automatically “eligible to receive the Holy Spirit.” Three important changes took place as a result of the Spirit’s ¤lling. The indwelling Spirit of God strengthened the Christian’s resolve to resist the temptations of the devil; the Spirit became the believer’s inner “Teacher, Guide, and Comforter”; and the Spirit provided the recipient with new power for testimony and service. Clearly Kenyon thought that this was a valuable experience, and he said that every Christian needed it if he or she was to mature in faith.102 The real question, of course, was how one actually received the Holy Spirit. Kenyon, like his penumbral pentecostal colleague F. F. Bosworth, believed that the process was easy. He said that all one had to do was to ask the Holy Spirit to enter one’s body and immediately the Spirit would
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do that. Kenyon explained: “Receiving the Holy Spirit is simply inviting the person of the Holy Spirit to come into these bodies of ours after we have been Born Again to make them His permanent abode.” The very moment that request was made, the Spirit immediately ®ooded into the body of the petitioner. The person involved might actually not feel anything—unlike most pentecostals, Kenyon said that God could sneak into a believer’s life without creating even the slightest ripple of emotion —and that was just the way Kenyon thought things should be. The ¤lling of the Spirit was a matter of fact, not of feeling. His dictum was simple and straightforward: “I have the Holy Spirit because I have asked the Father for Him, and He has promised to give the Holy Spirit to them that ask Him.” There was no need for any accompanying feelings or evidential signs.103 Kenyon was well aware that his description of the ¤lling of the Holy Spirit put him at odds with many in the pentecostal movement. First, there was the issue of terminology. Most pentecostals wanted to call this kind of experience the baptism of the Spirit. That linguistic difference would have been problematic enough, but even more signi¤cant was the fact that many pentecostals insisted that the baptism (or, in Kenyon’s terms, the ¤lling) of the Spirit had to be certi¤ed by some accompanying physical evidence, most notably speaking in tongues. Kenyon disagreed vehemently with that proposition. He was not opposed to speaking in tongues in general. Kenyon said that speaking in tongues was a valuable and valid Christian practice. He declared that “when the Holy Spirit speaks through you it is beautiful.” Kenyon’s belief was that when a person spoke in tongues, the Spirit actually took over that person’s “vocal chords to speak His own message,” and that was always glorious. What troubled him was not the practice of speaking in tongues, but the insistence that the physical act of speaking in tongues somehow proved the spiritual fact that the Spirit had taken up permanent abode in the believer. To Kenyon’s way of thinking, that was a profound reversal of priorities. Spiritual facts always trumped physical facts; it never worked the other way around. What mattered was the biblically de¤ned legal rights of the believer, and those had nothing to do with the physical realm of the senses. He argued that seeking experiences such as tongues as proof of some deeper spiritual reality was “always dangerous for it [was] trusting in the arm of the ®esh rather than in the Word.”104 Kenyon could understand why some people would want to cling to tongues as a physical sign of the baptism of the Spirit. He said that many
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Christians who sought physical con¤rmation of the Spirit’s work were honest folks who were just trying to be good Christians, but he warned that their addiction to “Sense Knowledge” was opening them to the deceptions of the devil. He explained: “They wish to speak in tongues. They desire to go under the power. They wish to have their body vibrate and shake. They wish to see some physical demonstration of the Spirit’s power.” But he then stated abruptly that “the Holy Spirit never grati¤es them. The only spirit that will gratify them is dangerous to play with.” Seeking tongues as a sign of the baptism or ¤lling of the Spirit was, in Kenyon’s view, not only bad theology, it was theology that placed the believer at signi¤cant spiritual risk.105 Kenyon thought that most pentecostals were sorely in need of better teaching regarding this area of the Christian life. God had promised to send the Spirit freely. There was no need to tarry for hours, days, or months waiting for this to happen. There was no need to seek any physical con¤rmation of the fact that the Spirit had actually entered one’s life. The Christian already had a legal right to be ¤lled with the Holy Spirit, so no special pleading was necessary. Kenyon advised: “You have invited the Holy Spirit to make His home in your body; and He said if you did, He would come in and occupy it. Well, you have only one thing to do: that is to accept that statement of His as absolutely true, and thank Him— feeling or no feeling—that He has come into your body to make His home. Now . . . act as though He were there. Plan your work with a consciousness that greater is He that is in you than he that is in the world.”106 The purpose of the ¤lling of the Spirit was to make Christians more effective agents of God in the world. Like Taylor, Kenyon believed that God had no other way of acting in the world other than through the bodies of Spirit-¤lled believers. He said that Christ had “no contact with the world today except through his Body” (the company of all Spirit-¤lled believers), and he added that “if our lives are not ¤lled with the Holy Spirit so that He can work freely through us, we tie the hands of the Deity.” One had to know how to use the full powers of the Spirit of God in order for God’s will to be accomplished in the world, and the key to unlocking that power was knowing how “to use the Name so that all authority that is in that Name can be exercised by you.”107 Like many turn-of-the-century pentecostals, Kenyon had an almost mystical attraction to and veneration of the name of Jesus. He said that the name of Jesus was above all other names and that it had been specially reserved in heaven until it could validly “be conferred upon someone who should merit it.” That name was the ancient and honorable title of the
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uni¤ed essence of the entire godhead, and it was that hallowed and sacred name that was formally awarded to the human-divine Jesus after the work of redemption had been completed. The name itself was a symbol of full divinity, and in that regard it worked like any other great name or title, conferring on the recipient all the powers and prerogatives of that status or of¤ce. Christ received the name from the Father, and Christ in turn gave believers the right of full access to all the powers and privileges of that name. Kenyon wrote: “When we are baptized into the Name of the Lord Jesus, all that that Name stands for in heaven is ours; all the mighty victories that Jesus won in His death, and resurrection are ours.” He said: “We believe ON the Name for salvation [and] we believe IN the name for power in service.”108 Kenyon used marriage (understood in a very traditional manner) as a metaphor throughout his writings, and he turned to that image once again in his attempt to explain the Christian’s right to use the name of Jesus. He said: “When the wife puts on marriage she takes her husband’s name and enters into her husband’s possessions and has legal rights in her husband’s home.” Kenyon believed that in the same way, when the believer took on Christ’s name, he or she automatically received all the rights and privileges that went with that name. Elsewhere he used a legal analogy, saying the believer was given “Power of Attorney” with regard to the name. When the believer spoke or acted in the name, it was the equivalent of Christ doing the same thing. Kenyon thought that potentially all the powers of Christ—all the powers of the godhead—were at humanity’s disposal, and he lamented the paucity of vision that prevented so many believers from exercising those powers to the full. He cried out: “Oh that our eyes were open; that our souls would dare rise into the realm of Omnipotence where the Name would mean to us all that the Father has invested in it; that we would act up to our high privileges in Christ Jesus.” He said: “He made us for victory. You have the use of Jesus’ Name. Use it.” Kenyon noted that sadly, however, that kind of victorious spirituality was “practically an unexplored tableland in Christian experience.”109 Kenyon said the use of Jesus’s name did not require faith. It was not a matter of hoping or trusting that God would honor the name. Instead, what was important was knowing one’s rights and using them. He said concerning Peter’s ability to heal the sick: “You will notice he does not stop even to pray for a sick one: all he does is say ‘In Jesus’ Name, rise and walk.’ There is no hint that he attempted to exercise what we call ‘faith’ in any manner; it reduced itself to a simple business proposition with the Early Church—they remembered what the Master said and what He said,
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was true, to them. . . . They did not argue about it; they did not worry about it; they did not stop to analyze what it meant—all they did was act on the Words of Jesus.” When one was acting in the name of Jesus, even one’s prayer took on a different tone. Kenyon said: “Men who have been mighty in prayer have always reminded God of His promises and laid the case legally before Him. When you pray, stand before the throne and plead your case as a lawyer. . . . You do not command in tones of arrogance, but as a partner . . . [and] He will make good His Word, if you dare stand by it.”110 But how did one learn how to use the name of Jesus in that way? How did that change of attitude take place? Kenyon answered those questions in an almost Zen-like manner by saying that the key to using the name of Jesus successfully was to stop working so hard at trying to use it. Human effort had nothing to do with the name. What was needed, in fact, was non-effort. He instructed his readers: “It is not trying to believe; it is not trying to take healing. Believing becomes unnecessary in the modern sense of that term. . . . Do not try; do not struggle—just use it. Use the Name with the same freedom that you use your check book.” Kenyon went on to explain that the only kind of faith that was required was “unconscious faith”; “any other kind of faith is abnormal.”111 The greatest obstacle in the way of using Jesus’s name was doubt— and Kenyon believed that doubt was often demon-inspired. The kind of doubt that bothered him most was not the cognitive doubt of the atheist or agnostic but rather the pragmatic doubts of Christians who were supposed to know better. These kinds of doubters said that theoretically they believed that God’s Word was absolutely true, but they virtually never acted on the basis of that supposed belief. Kenyon called these people “Mental Assenters,” and he said that they were “in the gravest of danger.” They had placed themselves “where Satan can enter into [their] inner counsel,” and they automatically lost power with God. This sorry plight was the result of their own doing, and it was an unacceptable mode of Christian existence. Kenyon said that it was a “criminal” offense against God for Christians to live in the poverty and weakness of doubt when God had given them “the Legal Power of Attorney to use the Might, Authority, and Power of His Name.” God had a right to expect much more from his children, and God demanded more.112 In the end, Kenyon said that it was “not trying to have Faith, but knowing the Legal Rights that are yours” that counted. Christians had been re-created by the Spirit to live in “the realm of the Omnipotent,” and Christ had given them the power to live in that manner through the
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use of his name. Nothing was beyond their reach. If Christians knew their rights in Christ, they could speak in new tongues at will, they could take up serpents and not be harmed, they could lay hands on the sick and heal them, they could renounce their bad habits and be done with them in an instant. Kenyon said that the believer did not even “need to ask the Father to heal him. . . . All we need to do is to rebuke the enemy in Jesus’ Name, order him to leave our bodies, and thank the Father for perfect healing.” Christians could also trust God for ¤nancial security and for all the material needs that confronted them. Kenyon predicted that whenever Christians took “the Name of Jesus Christ for ¤nances to meet an obligation that as sure as the Father sits on His throne the money [would] come.” Finally, Christians could even bind the power of territorial demons— “bind the power of Satan over a community, making it easy for men to accept Christ.”113 In summation, Kenyon proclaimed: “What power we have! Let’s use it!” The Christian’s sole responsibility was to set his or her “WILL to do the will of God” and to push up “through every obstacle the enemy may place in your way.” Kenyon said: “The size of your inheritance depends upon how much land you have trodden underfoot, really stood on, or walked over.” He declared: “You can claim as many promises, (and hold them as your property), as you have tested and found true. So march up to this mountain and make it yours. . . . Then with a knowledge of your privileges, as a Son of God, and a will to have them for yourself and others, coupled with a persistent spirit that will not admit defeat, you can cast into the sea any mountain that stands before you. Go in this thy might and God will get glory and you victory.”114 Identi¤cation The ultimate foundation of Kenyon’s theology of redemption was what he called the “law of identi¤cation.” This theme, which led Kenyon to some of his more extreme positions, was especially prominent in his later writings, but it was also present in his earlier works. “Identi¤cation” was Kenyon’s term for the ontological connection between God and humanity that made salvation possible. The law of identi¤cation as Kenyon understood it was double-sided. It included both Christ’s identi¤cation with us and our subsequent identi¤cation with Christ. In Kenyon’s words, the Christian had “a two-fold oneness” with Christ that encompassed both “His oneness with our sin on the cross [and] our oneness with Him in His glory on the throne.” Explaining the concept in more depth, Kenyon wrote: “He became as we were, to the end that we might become one
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with Him in Righteousness. He became as we were, to the end that we might be as He is now. He became one with us in death, that we might be one with Him in life. . . . He became as we were, so that we might become as He is.”115 The law of identi¤cation was such that Christ’s identi¤cation with humanity automatically entailed humanity’s identi¤cation with Christ, and this sense of identi¤cation encompassed the whole of each. This notion had always been part of the Christian tradition, but Kenyon pushed the idea harder than most. Thus he could declare: “I died with Christ. I was buried with Christ. I suffered with Christ. I was made alive with Christ.” But it was not just that humanity was identi¤ed with Christ in the positive sense; according to Kenyon, Christ was also fully identi¤ed with humanity in the negative sense. He argued that Christ had to become “one with Satan in spiritual death, to make us one with God in spiritual life.” Elsewhere he wrote: “He became one with Satan when he became sin, as we are now one with Him when we are Recreated.” In his identi¤cation with humanity, Christ was “made sin. . . . He was spiritually dead, ¤lled with sin, [and] Satan ruled over Him.” The point of these passage, and others like them, was not to blur the line of difference between God and Satan but to try to communicate the full depth of Christ’s identi¤cation with humanity. The more vividly Kenyon could connect Christ with humanity’s sin and subjection to Satan, the more expansively he could describe the bene¤ts that resulted from Christ’s victory.116 Stressing the victorious side of identi¤cation—focusing on humanity’s identi¤cation with Christ in victory rather than on Christ’s identi¤cation with humanity in death—Kenyon declared: “When He [Christ] conquered the adversary and stripped him of his authority, in the mind of the Father it was as though you had done it. . . . When He defeated Satan, it was our victory.” And Christ’s victory over Satan extended right up into the present. Kenyon exhorted his reader: “Just as Jesus conquered the adversary during His earth walk, you can conquer him today. . . . We are now the Righteous victors. We are Satan’s masters. We now reign as kings in the realm of life through Christ, our risen Lord.” Christians were to identify with Christ’s victory so much that they were actually to “go out and do the work that Jesus began to do when He was here.” They were called “to take Jesus’ place” in the present world. Kenyon said that his own goal was to become so “Jesusized” that others would become “Jesusconscious” just by being in his presence.117 The law of identi¤cation as Kenyon taught it was not a matter of mere symbolism or metaphor. Quite the contrary; he believed that it was
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based on the physical fact that God was literally inside the believer’s body, concretely identifying with the believer’s experiences and constantly encouraging believers to use the power of God within them. Kenyon wrote: “We have God’s life in us.” “Locked up in you today is the ability of God.” The challenge before every Christian was “letting God loose in you, liberating the ability of God that is within you.” Kenyon said that “the secret [power] that shook the world through the apostles” was still at work in the world and in the lives of believers.118 Kenyon thought that the world had not yet seen all that could be done by Christ’s Spirit-¤lled followers as they learned how to plumb the depths of their identi¤cation with Christ. The lives of the apostles did not illustrate the ideal; Kenyon thought that Christians ought to aim higher than that. He believed that in his own lifetime God was bringing into existence a whole new species of Christian. Kenyon called them “spiritual giants,” “supermen indwelt of God,” and members of “the miracle class.” These super-Christians would be “in the Jesus class,” possessing all “the fulness of Christ.” Their achievements would far surpass the accomplishments of all the Christians who preceded them, and their special role would be to carry the burdens of those weaker than themselves. Kenyon said that they would be “the Burden-bearers, the Comforters, and [others] could depend upon their wisdom and protection in all of life’s hard struggles.” Kenyon hoped that he and many of his readers would soon join that select company of saints; he wrote that “our Identi¤cation with Him puts us on the throne. His identi¤cation with us puts us in the place of leaders, teachers, comforters, helpers, burden-bearers. We bring God to man, just as He came to us. We boldly say, ‘Look on us.’ We are Love as He is Love. We are Love’s lips, Love’s hands and feet.” He continued: “We are the Masters. We have arrived. We have the thing the human spirit has craved. . . . We are the God-created, the God-indwelt, the Godempowered, the God-guided. We are the ones in whom love never faileth. Come, let us go up and take the land! We are well able!”119 Kenyon’s rhetoric could clearly become grandiose when discussing the notion of identi¤cation with Christ. Because of that, it is very important to understand his language in historical context. It is helpful to remember that Kenyon’s basic notion of identi¤cation has been part of mainstream Christian teaching since at least the fourth century. That was when Athanasius of Alexandria coined the phrase “God became man that we might be made god.” Even before that time, the idea that God had become human so that humanity could somehow become divine was a well-established doctrine of the church. For some, the idea of becoming
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divine meant little more than the restoration of the image of God that had been lost by humanity at the time of the fall; however, others believed that the divinization made possible by Christ’s death and resurrection opened up entirely new realms of human experience.120 The language of being “made god” as a result of Christ’s redeeming work did not ®ourish in the Western Church in either the Middle Ages or the Reformation, and today most American and Western European churches, whether Catholic or Protestant, continue to favor more modest metaphors of redemption. Within the Eastern Orthodox churches, however, the ideal of dei¤cation became the key for understanding the ultimate goal of salvation. The life of faith was de¤ned as a process of becoming increasingly identi¤ed with Christ and of becoming more and more immersed in the life of the divine being. The ¤nal hope was complete union with God, and some of the language used by Orthodox theologians reaches right up to the edge where the human and the divine began to blur. John of Damascus, for example, said that the goal was for human beings to be assimilated into the godhead and suggested that ultimately a Christian might be so ¤lled with and surrounded by the divine presence that he or she could become a kind of “second god” or a “god by grace.”121 Kenyon’s language may or may not be more extreme than that of John of Damascus, just as it may or may not be more extreme than some other pentecostal leaders discussed above. (Charles Parham and George Taylor, among others, did make some fairly wild claims!) What does seem clear is that Kenyon knew what he was doing: He was using words to shock and shake his readers. He knew that words mattered and that words had power. At one point he mused: “It is a strange thing that we have not been taught that our words can be ¤lled with either faith or unbelief, or cold speculation; we have not realized their effect on the hearer! It is our words that build up great organizations and institutions. It is our words that destroy or build. It is words that are ¤lled with faith or unbelief.” He added that “faith words are constructive,” inspiring those who heard them, and he wanted his own words to have a constructive impact on all who heard them or read them.122 Kenyon’s rhetoric was designed to evoke faith and hope in a world where he felt those spiritual commodities were in all too short supply. He may have overstepped the bounds of traditional orthodoxy in doing that, but he likely would have been untroubled by that fact. Kenyon was much more concerned with what he called “reality” than he was with doctrine. For that matter, he believed that many doctrines had outlived their helpfulness and that many others had perhaps never been helpful in the ¤rst
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place. He wrote: “Dogmas and Doctrines have lost their signi¤cance. They are the worn-out shells of the yesterdays. They have held us in bondage for years.”123 In those sentiments, Kenyon was not alone. Virtually every person discussed in this book would have had some sympathy with them. In that sense, the theologians of the early pentecostal movement, Kenyon included, were all trying to do the same thing. They were trying to put into words spiritual truths that every one of them believed were ultimately beyond the power of any words or all words to capture. They were trying to stretch language and reform it so that it could capture something of the true wonder of the Spirit as they understood it. They were trying to enlarge the vocabulary of faith so that it would more accurately communicate what they believed was the full scope of God’s being and love for humanity. In that task, they bent language and sometimes they broke it, but despite (or perhaps because of ) their wild musings and exaggerations, they left the world a legacy of spiritual insight and hope that ever-increasing millions of believers around the world ¤nd profoundly meaningful.
Conclusion
鵷鵸 Early pentecostal theology is best understood when the most articulate spokespersons of that era are allowed to speak to us with their own voices, and what they say is not necessarily the same things that pentecostals might say today. The past stands on its own and has its own character. Thus historical study is in some ways like a cross-cultural experience where in the midst of a seemingly ordinary situation one can become disoriented when familiar objects, words, and gestures suddenly take on new and unexpected meanings. In light of that fact, the driving force behind this book has been to represent the voices of ¤rst-generation pentecostalism with as much clarity and authenticity as possible. Those ¤rstgeneration voices tell us that early pentecostalism was a movement of considerable diversity and creativity. Pentecostalism appeared on the scene accompanied by a blast of cacophonous theological music—a pluralistic score of spiritual insight that could not be, and still has not been, reduced to a simple and singular shared religious tune. On re®ection that fact is not surprising, for, unlike many other theological traditions, pentecostalism is by its very nature a work in progress that cannot be brought to any neat sense of closure. Pentecostalism’s focus on the person and work of the Holy Spirit makes this an almost inevitable characteristic, for, as the Bible says, the Spirit blows where it will, and no one can predict where the effects of the Spirit might be felt next or what might be revealed. The early pentecostal theologians knew that their theological writings were at best groping attempts to de¤ne the dramatic work of God in the world. As certain as they were that their own perspectives were closer to the truth than anyone else’s, none of these theologians would have claimed that they had gotten everything right. Their faith in God was too lively and open-ended for that kind of comprehensive conclusion. In one sense, of course, these early pentecostal theologians did see
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themselves as having already arrived at the goal they sought. Pentecostalism was God’s ¤nal truth for this age, the last message from God before Christ’s return. And not only that—as a result of the baptism of the Spirit, they believed that God had come to dwell eternally in their souls and in their bodies and, in return, that they had themselves determined to settle down and dwell in God’s presence forever. In another sense, however, almost all of these pentecostal leaders thought the baptism of the Spirit was really only the beginning of a life of endless advance into the fullness of God’s being. When new revelations of truth came their way, they felt they had to incorporate those new understandings of God, the world, and themselves into their theological vision of life; to do less would have been unfaithful to God and undeserving of their theological calling. Sometimes new insights could be included quite smoothly and gradually, as when William Seymour slowly inserted more and more of an emphasis on love, wisdom, and holiness into his explanations of what constituted evidence of the baptism of the Spirit (while simultaneously and incrementally downplaying the signi¤cance of tongues all by themselves). In other cases, the reception of new insight required a much more decisive break with past views and old friends. This alternative is illustrated dramatically in William Durham’s rejection of the classic Wesleyan-holiness view of second-work sancti¤cation, and of all his pentecostal friends who held that view, after he became convinced that the ¤nished work of Christ disallowed that theological position. It is illustrated in a somewhat less intense form in Andrew David Urshan’s need to choose between his Oneness and Trinitarian friends and in F. F. Bosworth’s decision to leave the Assemblies of God over that association’s de¤nition of tongues as the necessary physical evidence of the baptism of the Spirit. As unfortunate as some of these divisions may seem in retrospect, it is dif¤cult to see how they could have been avoided. In the early years of the movement, pentecostal believers often found it impossible to separate what now appear to be relatively minor points of difference from major disagreements. Each new insight seemed to present itself draped with eternal signi¤cance. God was to be found in the smallest details of the Christian life, and thus every nuance mattered. Even tiny shifts of emphasis or expression could call forth a ¤ght (despite the fact that most pentecostal believers also felt called to seek unity with their brothers and sisters in the faith). Hence, theological creativity led to division, and division slowly led to the institutionalization of doctrinal and denominational differences, so much so that by the 1920s when the narrative of this book ends many
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pentecostals were no longer talking to each other. And by then the dynamism of the ¤rst generation had come to an end. In the last two decades the situation has changed, and pentecostal theologians from divergent subtraditions have begun to engage each other in serious theological dialogue. Pentecostal theologians have only recently begun to resume debate (as opposed to mere denunciation) about a number of the important issues that were raised almost a century ago by the founding generation. My hope is that this book will help contemporary pentecostal theologians and church leaders engage each other in constructive ways, reminding them that a vigorous diversity of opinion has been part of the pentecostal heritage from the very beginning of the movement. But the signi¤cance of the pentecostal movement extends well beyond the ranks of those who call themselves pentecostals. Pentecostalism is, after all, one of the most vibrant and rapidly growing religious movements the world has ever seen. So the question that needs to be raised is: How can we make sense of early pentecostal theology in a manner that explains its success? What does the study of early pentecostal theology tell us about American Christianity, or religion in general, in the contemporary world? Why should scholars of religion and other people be interested in this topic? One of the most commonly offered interpretations of pentecostalism is that, underneath it all, pentecostalism is really only a variant of fundamentalism. When asked to explain pentecostalism within the big picture of modern religious developments, many scholars—perhaps most—still typically de¤ne pentecostalism as an expression of conservative Christian protest against the routinization of modern life and the emergence of liberal Christian thought. The success of pentecostalism as a movement is thus linked to the resurgence of conservative fundamentalist faith around the world.1 It may seem logical and simple to characterize pentecostalism as a kind of fundamentalism that just happens to include the baptism of the Spirit and speaking in tongues, but that representation of the movement misinterprets both the genius and genesis of pentecostalism. Virtually none of the theologians discussed in this book would have accepted the label of fundamentalist as an accurate self-description, and they would have been justi¤ed in resisting that label. Of course, they were not modernists either. What they were was something else: They were pentecostals. This is not to say that scholars (both inside and outside the movement) who have linked pentecostalism with fundamentalism have done so
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groundlessly. It is true that most early-twentieth-century pentecostal theologians, like most of their fundamentalist peers, enjoyed railing against the way modern Christian thinkers seemed to devalue the supernatural while simultaneously overvaluing the powers of rationality and natural human agency. Most pentecostals, like their fundamentalist counterparts, rejected scholarly criticism of the Bible and described their approach to it in terms of a literal hermeneutic. Most pentecostal theologians also agreed with their fundamentalist colleagues that the physical return of Christ to earth was near at hand. Finally, both groups decried the lax morals of the day and hoped for a worldwide revival of Christian faith and purity. These similarities are signi¤cant and they deserve notice, but they do not constitute the entire picture. In fact, pentecostals differed from fundamentalists in many ways. Their views regarding the supernatural provide a case in point. Fundamentalists, for the most part, wanted to ensconce the supernatural in the past and bracket it off from the present. They emphasized the historical factuality of things such as the virgin birth, the miracles of Jesus, and the bodily resurrection and ascension of Christ. In contrast, pentecostals wanted to af¤rm the present-day miracleworking presence of God in the world. Of course, pentecostals believed that God had also been supernaturally involved in the past, but what really mattered for them was the fact that God was still acting in the world in that very same way. That difference made fundamentalists suspicious of what they saw as pentecostal fanaticism, and it made pentecostal believers just as suspicious of fundamentalism’s opposition to supernaturalism. William Durham took special notice of this difference. There is an irony here, for while Durham was perhaps the most fundamentalistic of all early pentecostal theologians in the tone of his writings (i.e., the most feisty in his anti-modernist rhetoric), he was also the most antifundamentalist in terms of the content of his theology. He saw modernism and fundamentalism as, in essence, conspiring together to eliminate the supernatural from the present-day experience of Christian faith, and of those two he probably viewed fundamentalism as the greater threat. Fundamentalists af¤rmed the supernatural in theory but denied it in practice, the least remediable attitude possible. True skeptics could sometimes be knocked off their feet by the Spirit, but fundamentalists had a theological system that rendered them virtually immune to the miraculous powers of the Spirit that were being poured out on the modern world. Fundamentalists believed that most of the gifts of the Spirit were no longer operative in the world, so they refused to seek them. They believed that God only rarely healed people, if God did so at all, so they did not
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seek healing. Finally, fundamentalists believed they already possessed the Spirit in as full a manner as possible, so they did not seek the life-changing, body-shaking soul-¤lling experience of the pentecostal baptism of the Spirit. Pentecostalism as a whole was just too physical and too lacking in philosophical rationality for most fundamentalists to give it a positive look. Underneath it all, fundamentalists and pentecostals held markedly different understandings of God and God’s relation to the world. For fundamentalists, the relationship between God and the world was constant and unchanging; for pentecostals, that relationship was dynamic and progressive. Fundamentalists believed that God had delivered truth to the world once and for all in the Bible. There was nothing more to be revealed by God while human history endured. The full truth had already been given to humankind, and thus any change of beliefs could only be seen as an erosion of faith. The primary task of fundamentalist theology was construed as the defense of truths already in hand against the attacks of modern skepticism and doubt. Pentecostals saw things differently. They believed that even though God’s essential character was constant and unchanging, God’s interactions with the world were not. God had not simply spoken truth into the world and then withdrawn to heaven. Instead, God remained passionately involved in the history of the world and human affairs, actively wooing individual believers and the world as a whole into deeper truth and toward greater holiness. For pentecostals, the supernatural and dynamic presence of God in the world meant that truth was still unfolding. There was yet more to be revealed—right now, today, tomorrow, and next week. Pentecostals had tremendous respect for the Bible as the bedrock of revealed truth, but the Bible functioned for them as a foundation for things yet to be revealed and as a touchstone for evaluating the veracity of new claims of revelation. Pentecostal attitudes toward orthodox theology and the historic creeds of Christendom differed even more starkly from fundamentalist views. While fundamentalists held classical theology in high regard and greatly valued many of the historic confessions of faith, pentecostals often derided those formulations of Christian belief as inadequate and in error. Charles Parham, for example, offered the opinion that “the best of creeds are but the sawdust of men’s opinions, stuffed in skins and feathers of truth to give them a pleasing and attractive appearance; to draw people into the support of an organized ecclesiasticism, or an individualistic propaganda.” For Parham, the language of traditional theology was little
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more than a fence of words that prevented Christians from ever truly having to confront the living God of the universe, who surpassed and often contradicted the neat formulas that were repeated in the churches. Parham actually liked to poke fun at those he called “orthodox theologians” for the bizarre interpretations of scripture they had to invent to keep their systems of thought all neatly organized and intact.2 Richard G. Spurling shared Parham’s view, saying he was glad that the pentecostal movement was ¤nally “[shaking] off the bonds of men-made creeds.” The leadership of the Azusa Street Mission argued similarly that even though there had been a time in the past “when we were fed upon the theological chips, shavings and wind,” they were glad that the long night of theological dryness was now past and that new pentecostal light was dawning. The Oneness theologians, Gar¤eld Thomas Haywood and Andrew David Urshan, went so far as to reject the traditional Christian doctrine of the Trinity as mistaken and in need of correction. E. W. Kenyon summed things up by saying that the dogmas and doctrines of the past were but “the worn-out shells of yesterday,” thankfully discarded after holding Christians “in bondage for years.” Any fundamentalist worth his or her salt would have interpreted these kinds of comments as theological lunacy, but pentecostal theologians of the early twentieth century believed that they were living in an age when God was calling them forward into new light and that to cling to the theological past was a sure way to miss God’s blessing. The advance of truth, not its defense, was what mattered.3 Of course, innovation was not the only word. Some pentecostal theologians dug in their heels at different points along the way and put up a ¤ght against change. Most noticeably, many pentecostals eventually came to believe that their Oneness colleagues had gone too far when they rejected the historic doctrine of the Trinity. Once they arrived at that conclusion, many of these Trinitarian theologians began to reexamine and reclaim certain aspects of the non-pentecostal orthodox theology of the past as part of their own theological heritage. This pattern was especially evident in the Assemblies of God, which, by the middle years of the twentieth century, had become the most evangelically oriented denomination within the pentecostal world. But it is instructive to note that when the Assemblies of God made this move toward developing a more evangelical and respectful-of-the-past style of systematic theology in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, they largely ignored the major fundamentalist spokespersons of the early twentieth century and reached farther back in history to a group of moderate late-nineteenth-century thinkers to help them
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make their case—to Baptist theologian Augustus Strong and to Methodist theologians John Miley and William Burton Pope. Thus, even when pentecostals shared some of fundamentalism’s concerns regarding the defense of biblical truth and historic orthodoxy, there was never a simple merging of the two.4 If one error has been to identify pentecostalism with fundamentalism too quickly, another parallel error has been to ignore the interesting ways in which early pentecostalism can be related to a number of other contemporaneous theological movements. Pentecostalism was complexly enmeshed in the large-scale pattern of theological developments that were taking place in the early decades of the century. Its overlap with some aspects of fundamentalism is just one example of how pentecostal ideas paralleled themes emanating from a variety of theological schools of thought. It could be argued, for example, that there was a signi¤cant degree of overlap between the thinking of at least some pentecostal theologians and certain aspects of the social gospel. The key insight of the social gospel was that sin and redemption were social as well as personal phenomena, and many early pentecostal theologians agreed that both sin and salvation had a social dimension. For example, when George F. Taylor inveighed against the forces of “COMMERCE” and against the “few moneyed men” of the age who, he believed, were trying to control the world economy for their own bene¤t and to the detriment of the poor, he gave clear evidence that he understood the fact that sin involved social, public, and economic factors as well as personal and private decisions. When Charles Parham similarly denounced America for the way it had shed “the blood of thousands of human sacri¤ces upon the altar of her commercial and imperialistic expansion,” he revealed the same awareness that sin could inhabit social structures as well as human hearts. It is no surprise that Parham’s portfolio of ministries included a soup kitchen and shelter for the homeless as well as a range of evangelistic programs. Other pentecostal theologians and denominational leaders made the same kinds of observations and participated in the same kinds of social ministries. Even if pentecostalism did not fully embrace all aspects of the social gospel movement, many pentecostal leaders assumed that social Christianity was part of the gospel.5 Parallels also existed between pentecostalism and the beginnings of what is called the empirical movement in American theology, a precursor of process theology. One of the most important ¤gures in this movement was Douglas Clyde Macintosh of Yale University, whose book Theology as
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an Empirical Science (1919) more or less launched this school of thought. Macintosh believed that certain laws of religious behavior and belief could be discovered through the careful observation of world and that those laws could then be modi¤ed and re¤ned through various forms of experiential testing. He asserted that the best “technique for investigating the religious Object is prayer, or religious adjustment with a view to results.” His rule was that “we discover God as divinely functioning reality when we ¤nd what we can always get by praying for it.” Once one’s prayers were being routinely answered in the af¤rmative, it was a sure “sign that one has struck Reality in religion.”6 Macintosh’s attitude is in many ways almost identical with the theology of F. F. Bosworth, who asserted that if a person prayed for something that was clearly within the will of God and offered that prayer assuming God would respond favorably, then it would be answered. Bosworth said that if God seemed not to answer a particular request it was either because the person had prayed for the wrong thing or had offered the prayer to God with a wrong attitude. Bosworth’s advice, like that of Macintosh, was for an adjustment on the part of the one doing the praying so that those prayers could be answered. When one ¤nally got it right and all prayers seemed to get answered in the af¤rmative, that was a clear sign that one’s hopes and prayers were, in fact, completely in tune with God’s own deepest desires for the world. It is not just this formulaic similarity that is at stake, however. The underlying point is that pentecostalism was thoroughly empirical from the very beginning of the movement. Pentecostals were interested in discovering what God was actually doing in the world, rather than being interested in what traditional theology said God was supposed to be doing. This is what Joseph King meant when he said his experience was his creed. The facts of spiritual experience took precedence over the hypotheses of mere reason. And that is why D. Wesley Myland said that sometimes “hard headed fellows” had to have their “heads put to soak” before they could receive the Spirit. He meant that they had to set aside their narrowly rational de¤nitions of faith and reality so that they could empirically, experientially discover what God’s Spirit was trying to accomplish in their lives and in the world around them.7 A commitment to empiricism was also implicit in the assertion that the baptism of the Spirit had to be signi¤ed by an outward, visibly observable, action such as speaking in tongues. In fact, George F. Taylor thought that all spiritual experiences had to include a physical empirical dimension. While the scholarly empiricism promoted by Macintosh and
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others involved in the empirical theology movement was different from the more folksy forms of empiricism that ®ourished within pentecostal circles, the similarities between the two movements are real and worth noting. As odd and unexpected as it might ¤rst seem, the case can even be made that some pentecostal theologians embraced certain ideas or values that paralleled the concerns of classic turn-of-the-century liberal Christianity. Perhaps the most blatant example is that of Bishop R. C. Lawson, who repeatedly appealed to the liberal ideal of the “fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.” Lawson valued honest scholarship as an aid to faith, and he considered the ideas of the more avant-garde thinkers of his day to be closer to the truth than those of their conservative colleagues. The southern holiness-pentecostal leader Joseph King also exhibited certain liberal attitudes, especially in his discussion of the potential salvation of those who had never heard the name of Christ. He said that there were people in the world who might well “have the essential Christ that know nothing of the historical Christ. They may have pressed, in heart, up through the mists of heathenism, and prayed to the God that made heaven and earth, and in this way touched Christ and found peace.”8 Lawson and King were far from being stereotypical liberal theologians, but they serve as reminders that pentecostal theology was complexly situated in the midst of a range of different contemporaneous schools of theology. Interesting parallels can be drawn between pentecostal theology and almost all of these other views, but the basic point is that pentecostalism cannot be de¤ned as falling wholly within any one speci¤c group or another. Pentecostalism was, in that sense, sui generis. It was its own movement, and the style and con¤guration of its theology was distinctively its own. But what exactly was it that made pentecostalism different? How is the genius of pentecostalism and the secret of its growth to be understood? Pentecostals themselves would likely say that the Holy Spirit is what is different and that the global blossoming of the movement represents nothing more and nothing less than the power of God’s Spirit manifested on earth. That may be so, but historians, social scientists, and scholars of religion will want to probe those questions in other ways, seeking more this-worldly answers or partial answers to pentecostalism’s phenomenal success. Harvard theologian Harvey Cox has been one of the most thoughtful commentators, and his conclusion is that pentecostalism has succeeded so
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well because it has somehow reached “beyond the levels of creed and ceremony into the core of human religiousness,” into the realm of what he calls “primal spirituality.” Cox argues that a similar pattern of seeking to connect with the precognitive core impulses of human life has been evident a number of other in®uential twentieth-century cultural movements. This has been especially the case in art and in certain schools of philosophy. Speaking in metaphorical language, Cox says that “the people who call themselves ‘pentecostals’ are only the visible crest of a very large wave” of primal religionists. He says pentecostals “know how to ride” that wave, “but they did not create it, and it is much bigger than they are.”9 According to Cox, the world population is currently dividing into four large spiritual/ideological blocks: scienti¤c modernists, conventional (mainstream) religious believers, fundamentalists, and proponents of experimentalism. He places most pentecostals and other primal religionists in the last category. What Cox calls experimentalism others might well call religious postmodernism. He says that folks who fall into this category have a natural “penchant for experience” and an almost knee-jerk reaction against the notion that religion can provide believers with a coherent and comprehensive vision of God, themselves, and the world. For religious experimentalists, faith takes the form of a “spiritual bricolage”— an eclectic, pulled-together bundle of ideas and practices that pragmatically help people traverse the slippery spiritual terrain of the contemporary world.10 It is a form of faith that reaches beneath, or around, currently available language in a way that helps people deal with deep human experiences that may always and forever defy translation into rational speech. Cox argues that it is this substrata of recently developed religious experimentalism that has allowed pentecostalism to ®ourish. Another, perhaps more positive, way of putting this same basic point is to say that pentecostal theology embraces a holistic style of spirituality that places equal value on the affective, moral, and doctrinal dimensions of faith. In a world where those facets of life are often cared for by different religious providers (i.e., one church or Christian organization providing an emotional outlet for believers, another focusing on moral activism, and still another stressing “solid theological training”), pentecostalism presents itself as a full-service movement that preaches and seeks to embody a full gospel of feeling, action, and belief. For pentecostals, theology has been rede¤ned to include much more than the intellectual, which must surely be an attractive option for many contemporary spiritual seekers.
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There is at least one other reason for pentecostalism’s success, and that is the movement’s unique blend of theological freedom and order. The freedom comes from pentecostalism’s radical egalitarianism. The deep roots of pentecostalism can be traced back to the churches that dominated the American frontier during the early and mid-nineteenth century— especially the Baptists and the Methodists. In contrast to their East Coast predecessors (the Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Anglicans), these frontier churches placed little stress on education, dogma, or hierarchy and church order. What was important for them was religious experience— that is, conversion—and how one made sense of Christian faith after conversion. The founders of the pentecostal movement upped the ante of what was involved in this frontier style of faith by increasing the energy of the religious experience and by severing Christian theological re®ection from earlier Christian tradition even more thoroughly than the Baptists and Methodists had done. Charles Parham spoke for most pentecostal theologians when he said he was glad he had been spared any formal religious training in his youth so that he could formulate his own theology “with no preconceived ideas [and] with no knowledge of what creeds and doctrines meant.”11 This sense of theological freedom was one of the main things that helped pentecostalism ®ourish in the early years of the twentieth century, and it is still helping pentecostalism ®ourish around the world today. Pentecostal theology at its best is not spoon-fed to people or crammed down their throats but is constantly being rearticulated at the local level in ways that ring true to people’s life experiences and the experiences of their communities. Today we might call that kind of theology postmodern, meaning that it acts like it can freely mix and match ideas and insights from many different sources and paste them into a new collage of faith at will. In many ways, that is exactly what happened in some ¤rst-generation pentecostal theology. But not everything was or is up for grabs in the pentecostal world. If pentecostal faith is in some sense quite ®exible and postmodern, it is in another sense still ¤rmly grounded in a bedrock commitment to religious truth. Pentecostals, for all their openness to new revelation, remain solidly committed to the Bible as the word of God. For all their freedom to explore new ways of making sense of Christian faith, most pentecostals also remain linked to communities of discernment (denominations, congregations, small groups, and families) that act as hedges on unfettered spiritual creativity. And it is precisely this dual sense of freedom and groundedness
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that has made pentecostalism so appealing to so many people in the twentieth century. Pentecostalism represents spiritual freedom mixed with oldtime religious assurance, and that is a powerful package of faith for an age like our own that is both leery of dogma and hungry for certainty.
NOT ES Preface 1. The number of pentecostal/charismatic Christians in the contemporary world, as estimated by David B. Barrett, George T. Kurian, and Todd M. Johnson in their World Christian Encyclopedia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), is 525 million out of a global Christian population of 2 billion and a total world population of just over 6 billion. They predict continued growth for the movement and estimate that fully 35 percent of the world’s Christians will be pentecostal/charismatic by 2050 (that would be almost one-eighth of the globe’s total population). These numbers maybe a bit in®ated, but they unquestionably re®ect an impressive reality. 2. See Ann Swidler, “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies,” American Sociological Review 51 (1986): 273–286. 3. Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2001). With regard to the relatively strange views of the thinkers discussed in The Metaphysical Club, William James can serve as an example. Menand catalogues some of his idiosyncrasies as follows: “He [ James] used hypnotism regularly in his work as a psychologist; he experimented with almost every drug he could lay his hands on; he submitted himself to the ministrations of a ‘mind-cure’ therapist (who ‘disentangled’ his mind while he slept) when he was suffering from insomnia; and he publicly defended mind-cure practitioners, magnetic healers, Christian Scientists, and osteopaths when the Massachusetts Board of Health proposed a bill making it illegal to practice medicine without a license” (90). With regard to human nature, James believed in “a kind of extrapersonal consciousness with which individual minds [were] subliminally connected,” and he thought that psychics and mind readers were “people that could penetrate the boundary that ordinarily isolates one mind from another and that separates all individual minds from this panpsychic realm” (91). Menand also indicates that James “hated the idea of undifferentiated oneness; he didn’t even like the fact that everyone was expected to spell the same way. He thought the universe should be called a ‘pluriverse’” (88). There is an interesting parallel between James and many of the pentecostal theologians discussed in this book in terms of his lack of formal and systematic training regarding many of the subjects he discussed. Like their pentecostal contemporaries, James and many of the other thinkers discussed in The Metaphysical Club were, in a certain sense, amateurs in their ¤elds of expertise. Of James, in particular, Menand writes: “William’s lack of systematic education gave him one distinct advantage: it permitted him to approach intellectual problems uninhibited by received academic wisdom. . . . The consciousness that he was not a product of a particular school or academic tradition, or even a practitioner of a particular scholarly discipline, meant that in whatever he did, James could honestly feel that he was responsible for his beliefs to no one but himself ” (94–95). This description of William
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James is very similar to the self-description of the early pentecostal theologian Charles Parham, who took pride in the fact that he had grown up with little or no formal religious training and felt that that allowed him to be truly unbiased and independent in his own theological re®ection. Introduction 1. William H. Durham, “Personal Testimony of Pastor Durham,” Pentecostal Testimony 1, no. 3(?) (1909?): 7. The only extant copy of this issue of Durham’s paper is missing the front page so there is no way to know exactly what number it was. 2. David Wesley Myland, The Latter Rain Covenant and Pentecostal Power with Testimony of Healings and Baptism (Chicago: Evangel Publishing House, 1910), 15, 23–25, 55–56. 3. “To the Baptized Saints,” The Apostolic Faith 1, no. 9 ( June–September 1907): 2. 4. Donald W. Dayton, Theological Roots of Pentecostalism (Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press, 1987), 178. See also Lewi Pethrus, A Spiritual Memoir (Plain¤eld, N.J.: Logos International, 1973). 5. The holiness movement emerged in the middle years of the nineteenth century as the American revivalist tradition (which began with the Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s) was blended together with the historic Wesleyan idea of Christian perfection. What Wesley meant by the term “Christian perfection” was that an individual could at some point after conversion undergo a second experience of grace in which God removed all taint of sin from the person’s life. This experience was also sometimes referred to as “total sancti¤cation” or “perfection in holiness.” In the Wesleyan movement as a whole, this emphasis on the need for a second experience of Christian cleansing (sancti¤cation) following conversion began to wane in the early years of the nineteenth century. The holiness movement arose to resist that declension of faith and, like most anti-declensionist movements, it tended to restate the original ideal in terms even more adamant than the founder of the movement. A somewhat similar concern to strive for Christian perfection also emerged in a range of non-Wesleyan churches, especially in Baptist circles. In these higher-life groups, a distinction was often made between those who were “fully committed to God” and those who were merely “saved,” and the transition from being merely saved to being fully committed to God was understood to be a process of growth in sancti¤cation (rather than following the holiness view that sancti¤cation was received all at once in a single experience). Most higher-life groups also recognized, however, that some religious experiences could produce quantum leaps of progress in sancti¤cation and thus the practical differences between many holiness and higher-life groups were often less than their different theologies might imply. The most wellknown nineteenth-century higher-life movement was the Keswick movement. These holiness and higher-life understandings of Christianity paved the way for the emergence of pentecostalism, which proposed a similar theory of Christian maturation. Some pentecostal theologians favored the holiness stage theory of spiritual advance; other pentecostal theologians preferred the more process-oriented approach of the higher-life perspective. In many ways, it was the closeness of pentecostalism to holiness and higher-life theology that made the tension between these movements so intense. In many realms of life, close competitors are seen as the most threatening of all, and that was the case here. For academic treatments of the holiness and higher-life movement, see Robert M. Anderson, Vision of the Disinherited: The Making of American Pentecostalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); Edith L. Blumhofer, Restoring the Faith: The
Notes to pages 4–17
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Assemblies of God, Pentecostalism, and American Culture (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993); David Bundy, “Keswick and the Experience of Evangelical Piety,” in Modern Christian Revivals, ed. Edith L. Blumhofer and Randall Balmer (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993); Melvin Easterday Dieter, The Holiness Revival of the Nineteenth Century (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1980); Charles Edwin Jones, Perfectionist Persuasion: The Holiness Movement and American Methodism, 1867–1936 (Metuchen, N.J. Scarecrow Press, 1974); and Vinson Synan, The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition: Charismatic Movements in the Twentieth Century, 2d ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997). 6. See James R. Goff, Jr., Fields White unto Harvest: Charles F. Parham and the Missionary Origins of Pentecostalism (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1988), 74. 7. See, for example, Felicitas D. Goodman, Speaking in Tongues: A Cross-Cultural Study of Glossalalia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972); William J. Samarin, Tongues of Men and Angels: The Religious Language of Pentecostalism (New York: Macmillan, 1972); and Watson E. Mills, ed., Speaking in Tongues: A Guide to Research on Glossolalia (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986). Regarding glossolalia speci¤cally within early pentecostalism, see Grant Wacker, Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), especially Chapter 2, “Tongues,” 35–57. See also R. P. Spittler, “Glossolalia” in The New International Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements, ed. Stanley M. Burgess and Eduard M. van der Maas (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 2002), 670–676 (hereafter cited as NIDPCM ). 8. Myer Pearlman, Knowing the Doctrines of the Bible (Spring¤eld, Mo.: Gospel Publishing House, 1937), 10. 9. See Steven J. Land, Pentecostal Spirituality: A Passion for the Kingdom (Shef¤eld: Shef¤eld Academic Press, 1993), especially Chapter 1, “Pentecostal Spirituality as Theology: A Theoretical Introduction,” 15–57. 10. Harvey Cox, Fire from Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1995), 71. 11. Ibid., 201. 12. See W. B. Gallie, Philosophy and the Historical Understanding (New York: Schocken Books, 1964), Chapter 8, “Essentially Contested Concepts,” 157–191. 1. Original Visions 1. Maria Woodworth-Etter, A Diary of Signs and Wonders (1916; reprint, Tulsa, Okla.: Harrison House, n.d.), 117; D. Wesley Myland, The Latter Rain Covenant and Pentecostal Power with Testimony of Healings and Baptism (Chicago: Evangel Publishing House, 1910), 211. Myland is discussed below. On Woodworth-Etter, see Wayne Warner, The Woman Evangelist: The Life and Times of Charismatic Evangelist Maria B. Woodworth-Etter (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1986). On Dowie, see Grant Wacker, Chris R. Armstrong, and Jay S. F. Blossom, “John Alexander Dowie: Harbinger of Pentecostal Power,” in Portraits of a Generation: Early Pentecostal Leaders, ed. James R. Goff, Jr., and Grant Wacker (Fayetteville, Ark.: University of Arkansas Press, 2002), 3–20; and Edith L. Blumhofer, “John Alexander Dowie,” in NIDPCM, 586–587. On Sanford, see Frank S. Murray, The Sublimity of Faith: The Life and Work of Frank W. Sanford (Amherst, N.H.: Kingdom Press, 1981); Shirley Nelson, Fair, Clear, and Terrible: The Story of Shiloh, Maine (Albany, N.Y.: British American Publishing, 1989); and Shirley and Rudy Nelson, “Frank Sanford: Tongues of Fire in Shiloh, Maine,” in Portraits of a Generation, 51–70. See also H. V. Synan,
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“Benjamin Hardin Irwin,” in NIDPCM, 804–805; and C. M. Robeck, Jr., “Frank Sanford,” in NIDPCM, 1037–1038. 2. Aimee Semple McPherson, This Is That: Personal Experiences Sermons and Writings (Los Angeles: Echo Park Evangelistic Association, 1923), 749. 3. See D. William Faupel, The Everlasting Gospel: The Signi¤cance of Eschatology in the Development of Pentecostal Thought (Shef¤eld, England: Shef¤eld Academic Press, 1996), 167–168. 4. Charles F. Parham, Kol Kare Bomidbar: A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (1902; reprint, Baxter Springs, Kans.: Robert L. Parham, 1944), 66, 118. 5. Charles F. Parham, The Everlasting Gospel (Baxter Springs, Kans.: Charles F. Parham, n.d.), 68. Parham’s Kol Kare Bomidbar and The Everlasting Gospel have been reprinted in facsimile style by Garland Press. See Sermons of Charles F. Parham (New York: Garland, 1985). Donald W. Dayton is the editor of the series in which this appears, the title of which is The Higher Christian Life: Sources for the Study of the Holiness, Pentecostal, and Keswick Movements. 6. On Parham’s life, see James R. Goff, Jr., Fields White unto Harvest: Charles Parham and the Missionary Origins of Pentecostalism (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1988); and James R. Goff, Jr., “Charles Fox Parham,” in NIDPCM, 955–957. 7. Parham, Kol Kare Bomidbar, 12–13. 8. Ibid., 14–15. 9. Ibid., 11–12. 10. Ibid., 15–16. 11. Ibid., 18–19. 12. Ibid., 19. See also Goff, Fields White unto Harvest, 32, 35, 38. 13. Goff, Fields White unto Harvest, 40, 45, 48–49. 14. Ibid., 59–60. 15. Parham, Kol Kare Bomidbar, 61, 67–68. 16. Ibid., 30–32. 17. Ibid., 32. 18. Ibid., 31–32; see also Agnes N. Ozman La Berge, What God Hath Wrought (Chicago: Herald Publishing Company, 1921); and Goff, Fields White unto Harvest, 66–74. 19. Goff, Fields White unto Harvest, 84–86. 20. Goff, “Charles Fox Parham,” 956. 21. On this incident, see Goff, Fields White unto Harvest, 136–142. A passage from Kol Kare Bomidbar that was written years before the incident sheds some light on Parham’s general attitude toward sin within the community of believers and speci¤cally his attitude toward sexual sins. Parham said that in general “a brother who is guilty of an offense is not to be cut off from our affections, though we go to him personally, or send two or three of the brethren, or call him before the church; yet we are not to ostracize him, but treat him with the same love as we would a sinner, with such love as God manifested when He gave His only begotten Son; if necessary laying our own lives down for them.” The speci¤c example Parham cited to illustrate this point was King David and his adultery with Bathsheba. Parham said that once David repented, God forgave him. He added, however, that most churches would have been much less forgiving and more judgmental than God. He wrote: “If David had been a member of some modern churches or so-called holiness movement, though God did forgive him, his brethren would not, or would ever give him a chance to reform, but would have followed him from city to city, becoming the peddlers of foulest scandal” (57–58). Parham’s words seem almost prophetic with
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regard to his own life and especially with regard to his alleged relationship with Jourdan. 22. Parham, The Everlasting Gospel, 31–32, 55, 71–72. 23. Goff, “Charles Fox Parham,” 956. 24. Parham, Kol Kare Bomidbar, 81. 25. Ibid., 82–83. Parham’s thinking with regard to his two-race/two-species theory of human origins, while somewhat unique in its interpretation of Genesis, was not entirely foreign to the American scienti¤c world. In fact, various theories of human polygenesis, which asserted that the different human races represented separate and different species, vied with theories of human monogenesis in the scienti¤c community until near the end of the nineteenth century. Louis Menand discusses this situation in The Metaphysical Club: “Two theories of racial difference predominated in Western science in the century before Darwin; neither was egalitarian. People who believed that all humans are descended from a common origin (a position known as monogenism) attributed racial inequalities to differing rates of degeneration. The entire species had declined since creation, monogenists thought, but some groups, due (usually) to the effects of climate, had declined farther than others.” Menand said that in contrast to this position, a good number of scholars adhered to a different, more complex theory of human origins. He said that these “polygenists . . . believed that the races were created separately and that they had been endowed with different attributes and unequal aptitudes from the start” (104). Parham obviously agreed with this latter group of theorists. Parham’s social views overall could be quite racist at times, but in this regard, he was unfortunately not necessarily out of sync with the larger American scienti¤c and political establishments. Regarding Parham’s views on race, see Wacker, Heaven Below, 231–232. Also see Walter J. Hollenweger, Pentecostalism: Origins and Developments Worldwide (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1977), 18–24; and Leslie Dawn Callahan, “Fleshly Manifestations: Charles Fox Parham’s Quest for the Sancti¤ed Body” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2002), especially Chapter 3, “Azusa’s Shame: Racial Boundaries and Apostolic Faith,” 101–140. 26. Parham, Kol Kare Bomidbar, 82–83. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid., 82–84. Parham seemed decidedly confused on the matter of the health and strength of the children of interracial marriages. In an oddly anachronistic comment in the middle of his account of creation, Parham argued that “were time to last and inter-marriage continue between the whites, the blacks, and the reds in America, consumption and other diseases would soon wipe the mixed bloods off the face of the earth” (83). It seems impossible to reconcile this statement with Parham’s comment that the descendants of these mixed marriages were unusually virile and strong. The ultimate connection between these two contradictory assertions was almost surely racist rather than logical. Racism virtually always projects a mix of exaggerated strength and exaggerated (and sometimes incompatible) weaknesses onto the race(s) against which it is directed. That certainly seems to be the case with Parham’s racism. 30. Ibid., 84–85. 31. Ibid., 84. 32. Ibid., 85. 33. Ibid., 105–106. Parham’s views of history conform closely at points to the school of thought call British Israelism. This view of history was cobbled together as a kind of grassroots myth in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The
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movement had no founder as such. This theory asserts that various Anglo-Saxon peoples are the ten lost tribes of Israel. Typically those who have favored this view have also supported a white-supremacist understanding of history and culture. In the twentieth century it has been championed most strongly by Herbert W. Armstrong and his Worldwide Church of God. Parham seems to have assumed that the basic tenets of this theory were true; in fact, his treatment of history follows the views of British Israelism more closely at points than it does the biblical text. On British Israelism in general, see Michael Friedman, Origins of the British Israelites: The Lost Tribes (San Francisco: Edwin Mellen Research University Press, 1993); and Michael Barkun, Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement, rev. ed. (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). 34. Parham, Kol Kare Bomidbar, 92. 35. Ibid., 92–93. In this passage, Parham follows the standard narrative of British Israelism more closely than he followed the Bible. According to II Kings 24:18, Hamutal was King Zedekiah’s mother. Parham identi¤es her as Zedekiah’s wife. TeaTephi is not mentioned in the biblical text. 36. Ibid, 106–107. 37. Ibid., 62–63, 107. 38. Ibid., 92, 105–111, 118, 122. 39. The scenario outlined here is based on Parham’s speculations as they appear in Kol Kare Bomidbar. As was the case with many prophecy buffs, Parham’s views changed and evolved over the years. In The Everlasting Gospel, Parham presented a somewhat different chronology of future events. 40. Parham, Kol Kare Bomidbar, 102, 109–114. 41. Ibid, 119–123. 42. Ibid., 31–32, 125; Parham, The Everlasting Gospel, 31. 43. Parham, Kol Kare Bomidbar, 117–118. 44. This vision of Washington is discussed in Grant Wacker, Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 241–242. Wacker indicates that this vision was picked up and used by several other pentecostal leaders during and after World War I, but he makes no mention of Parham’s use of the text. 45. Parham, Kol Kare Bomidbar, 115–118. 46. Ibid., 130–133. 47. Ibid., 137–138. 48. Parham, The Everlasting Gospel, 50–51, 94. 49. Ibid., 112. 50. Ibid., 52. 51. Ibid., 104. 52. Ibid., 13–14, 102, 108. Parham believed that sancti¤cation and healing were closely connected. Like sin, disease came in two different forms, he argued: inbred disease and acquired disease. Inbred disease was the natural or congenital predisposition to get sick; acquired disease was the illness itself. This division of disease into two categories paralleled the distinction between original sin, which referred to the hereditary human propensity to sin, and actual sins, which referred to particular sinful acts. One could be healed from acquired diseases by a simple prayer of sincere faith, but the only cure for inbred disease was sancti¤cation. Parham believed that healing was provided in Christ’s atonement in the same way that forgiveness for sins was provided. Healing was made available through Christ’s bodily wounds and bruises; forgiveness through Christ’s shed blood (see Kol Kare Bomidbar, 48). With regard to his attitude toward health and medicine in general, Parham
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claimed that he had “no controversy” with medical science, but that is not quite accurate. He did believe that certain medical practices such as “quarantine laws, coupled with cleanliness” had done some good, and he was also generally supportive of nurses, who, he said, “had done a great deal for humanity.” Beyond that limited range, however, he was very negative in his evaluation of modern medicine and was especially critical of modern drugs and pain relievers, which he called “poisons.” Parham actually argued that “the more pro¤cient in relieving pain a system becomes, the more anti-Christian is its in®uence; for man has ever been prone to wander to seek help from any and every source—whatever the cost—before he will humble himself in the sight of God, [and] accept the deliverance freely purchased for him on calvary” (Kol Kare Bomidbar, 40). 53. Parham, The Everlasting Gospel, 10–11, 13–14. 54. Ibid., 13, 17. Parham noted that this gift would be especially helpful to sancti¤ed Christian parents, who would now be able to “have an in®uence over sons and daughters never dreamed of before” (13). 55. Parham, Kol Kare Bomidbar, 124–126. 56. Ibid., 25, 103. 57. Ibid., 74–78; Parham, The Everlasting Gospel, 102. Parham said he once had a physical vision of the redemption which he related as follows: “One time, while feeling the presence of God and dwelling in the heavenlies, in vision or dream, I can not say which, there was in my room a beautiful ¤gure, neither male nor female; the ®esh looked like the beauty of driven snow; beneath this ¤gure stood the person of which it was the exact picture, or counterpart. I beheld this until this casement descended and clothed upon the individual who stood beneath; and I said: ‘Lord, what is this?’ And He said: ‘Redemption’” (The Everlasting Gospel, 101). 58. Parham, Kol Kare Bomidbar, 80, 86, 102; Parham, The Everlasting Gospel, 62. 59. Parham, Kol Kare Bomidbar, 88–89, 102. 60. Ibid., 90. 61. Parham, Kol Kare Bomidbar, 31; Parham, The Everlasting Gospel, 66. 62. Parham, The Everlasting Gospel, 63. 63. Parham, 16–17, 63. 64. Parham, Kol Kare Bomidbar, 30. 65. Parham, The Everlasting Gospel, 63, 66. 66. Parham, Kol Kare Bomidbar, 28, 38. 67. Ibid., 35. 68. Parham, The Everlasting Gospel, 66–67, 69. 69. Parham, Kol Kare Bomidbar, 28; Parham, The Everlasting Gospel, 66–68. 70. Parham, The Everlasting Gospel, 68. 71. C. W. Conn, “Church of God (Cleveland, Tenn.),” in NIDPCM, 530–534. 72. The original handwritten manuscript of what would later become The Lost Link is housed in the Hal Bernard Dixon Jr. Pentecostal Research Center at Lee University in Cleveland, Tennessee. This untitled text is twenty-two pages in length and is dated May 4, 1897. The published version of 1920 reproduces the main themes of this earlier document, but the material is expanded and is considerably more polished. 73. Richard G. Spurling, The Lost Link (Turtletown, Tenn.: R. G. Spurling, 1920), 22, 44. 74. Ibid., 13–15. 75. Ibid., 8, 15–16. 76. Ibid., 23. 77. Ibid., 23–24, 36–37.
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78. Ibid., 17, 20–21, 25. 79. Ibid., 29–30, 39–40. 80. See, for example, Charles W. Conn, Like a Mighty Army: A History of the Church of God, 1886–1976 (Cleveland, Tenn.: Pathway Press, 1977). 81. Spurling, The Lost Link, 12, 22, 45. On at least one point, their attitudes toward creeds and Christian unity, Parham and Spurling actually were quite similar. Despite the fact that he had some of the same basic sympathies as Spurling on these matters, Parham was unable to incorporate them into his grand theological narrative in a manner that might have toned down his power-oriented, hierarchical vision of the church of the last days. 82. The landmark movement was founded by the Southern Baptist leader James R. Graves (1820–1893). It was a conservative movement that emphasized, among other things, the local autonomy of individual congregations and the notion of “the true church.” See James E. Tull, “Landmark Movement,” in Encyclopedia of Religion in the South, ed. Samuel S. Hill (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1984), 399–401. 2. Theologies of the Azusa Era 1. Cecil M. Robeck, Jr., will argue in a forthcoming book that while the Azusa revival looked like an unplanned event from the outside, underneath surface appearances a considerable amount of planning was involved. There is no question that everyone was surprised by the sudden explosion of the revival, but once the thing was underway it was not run in a haphazard manner. Seymour held weekly staff meetings, and the daily meetings were probably more planned than many weekly pentecostal church services—or, for that matter, than many Baptist church meetings. None of that means, of course, that the whole thing was either choreographed or fully controlled. Trying to lead the Azusa revival must have felt somewhat like trying to ride an only partially broken stallion. The “horse” of the Azusa revival could sometimes be directed to some degree, but at other times the only thing to do was hold tight and try to stay on top. 2. On Lum’s role at the Azusa Mission, see Edith L. Blumhofer and Grant Wacker, “Who Edited the Azusa Mission’s Apostolic Faith?” Assemblies of God Heritage 21, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 15–21. 3. Extant issues of The Apostolic Faith have been collected and published in E. Myron Noble, ed., Like As of Fire: Newspapers from the Azusa Street World Wide Revival (Washington, D.C.: Middle Atlantic Regional Press, 1991); and William J. Seymour, The Doctrines and Discipline of the Azusa Street Apostolic Faith Mission of Los Angeles, Cal. with Scripture Readings (Los Angeles: William J. Seymour, 1915) (hereafter cited as Doctrines and Discipline). 4. George F. Taylor, The Spirit and the Bride: A Scriptural Presentation of the Operations, Manifestations, Gifts and Fruit of the Holy Spirit in His Relation to the Bride with Special Reference to the “Latter Rain” Revival (Dunn, N.C.: George F. Taylor, 1907), 5. See also his The Second Coming of Jesus (Falcon, N.C.: Falcon Publishing Company, 1916) and The Rainbow (Franklin Springs, Ga.: Advocate Press, 1924). 5. D. Wesley Myland, The Latter Rain Covenant and Pentecostal Power with Testimony of Healings and Baptism (Chicago: Evangel Publishing House, 1910); D. Wesley Myland, The Revelation of Jesus Christ: A Comprehensive Harmonic Outline and Perspective View of the Book (Chicago: Evangel Publishing House, 1911). 6. “The Lord Leads,” The Apostolic Faith 1, no. 1 (September 1906): 4. 7. On the life of Seymour, see C. M. Robeck, Jr., “William Joseph Seymour,” in NIDPCM, 1053–1058. See also Douglas Nelson, “For Such a Time As This: The
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Story of Bishop William J. Seymour and the Azusa Street Revival” (Ph.D. diss., University of Birmingham, United Kingdom, 1981); Robert R. Owens, Speak to the Rock: The Azusa Street Revival (New York: University Press of America, 1998); Vinson Synan, The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition: Charismatic Movements in the Twentieth Century, 2d ed. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1997); and David Bundy, “G. T. Haywood,” in Portraits of a Generation, 241. 8. “The Pentecostal Baptism Restored,” The Apostolic Faith 1, no. 2 (October 1906): 1. 9. Untitled, The Apostolic Faith 1, no. 4 (December 1906): 2; “Signs of His Coming,” The Apostolic Faith 1, no. 6 (February–March 1907): 6; untitled, The Apostolic Faith 1, no. 6 (February–March 1907): 6; Seymour, “The Baptism of the Holy Ghost,” The Apostolic Faith 2, no. 13 (May 1908): 3. 10. Doctrines and Discipline, 12, 49–50. 11. See Blumhofer and Wacker, “Who Edited the Azusa Mission’s Apostolic Faith?” 12. Untitled, The Apostolic Faith 1, no. 7 (April 1907): 3; untitled, The Apostolic Faith 1, no. 10 (September 1907): 3. 13. “To the Baptized Saints,” The Apostolic Faith 1, no. 9 (September 1907): 2. 14. “The Apostolic Faith Movement,” The Apostolic Faith 1, no. 1 (September 1906): 2; Seymour, “Christ’s Messages to the Churches,” The Apostolic Faith 1, no. 11 (October–January 1908): 3; untitled, The Apostolic Faith 2, no. 13 (May 1908): 2. 15. “Pentecost with Signs Following,” The Apostolic Faith 1, no. 4 (December 1906): 1; “The Church Question,” The Apostolic Faith 1, no. 5 ( January 1907): 2. Many of the theological issues that concerned the mission were more practical and pastoral than philosophical and systematic. Thus, for example, the mission decided that “shouting and leaping as the New Testament endorses” was allowable, but “the doctrine of the arti¤cial dancing that lots of people are calling the Holy Ghost dancing” was denounced. Similarly, the mission accepted the practice of singing in tongues as a foretaste of “heaven below” but disallowed “writing in unknown languages” as a form of tongues because no passages of Scripture could be found that explicitly endorsed it. At Azusa, doctrinal decisions were often tied quite closely to issues of order and decorum in worship—trying to allow freedom but trying simultaneously to set some limits on acceptable behavior. See untitled, The Apostolic Faith 1, no. 4 (December 1906): 2; untitled, The Apostolic Faith 1, no. 10 (September 1907): 2; and Doctrines and Discipline, 13. 16. “The Apostolic Faith Movement,” 2. 17. Ibid.; Doctrines and Disciple, 90. 18. “Pentecost Has Come,” The Apostolic Faith 1, no. 1 (September 1906): 1; “The Apostolic Faith Movement,” 2; untitled, The Apostolic Faith 1, no. 7 (April 1907): 3; Seymour, “Letter to One Seeking the Holy Ghost,” The Apostolic Faith 1, no. 9 ( June–September 1907): 3. 19. Untitled, The Apostolic Faith 2, no. 13 (May 1908): 3; Doctrines and Discipline, 30, 35, 92. The pages quoted here from the Doctrines and Discipline are part of the text that Seymour lifted directly out of the Book of Discipline of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. It is thus appropriate to ask how much it represents Seymour’s own views. It is safe to assume that Seymour had read and agreed with the sections of the A.M.E. Book of Discipline that he decided to include in the manual for his own congregation. There is no doubt that some of the material appropriated from the A.M.E. text for inclusion in the Azusa book of Doctrines and Discipline seems somewhat out of keeping with what one might assume would de¤ne the beliefs and practices of a holiness-oriented pentecostal church, but that sense of dissonance
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might be rooted in false assumptions about what the Azusa Mission must have stood for as a pentecostal congregation as opposed to what the mission had actually become by 1915. We need to be careful not to project onto the mission, or onto Seymour, beliefs and practices that we merely assume, without historical warrant, to have been part of the mission’s religious worldview. 20. Doctrines and Discipline, 27, 32, 35. 21. “The True Pentecost,” The Apostolic Faith 1, no. 4 (December 1906): 2; “Questions Answered,” The Apostolic Faith 1, no. 11 (October–January 1908): 2; “The Baptism with the Holy Ghost,” The Apostolic Faith 1, no. 11 (October–January 1908): 4. 22. Doctrines and Discipline, 28; untitled, The Apostolic Faith 1, no. 10 (September 1907): 2; “Questions and Answers,” The Apostolic Faith 1, no. 11 (October– January 1908): 2. 23. For a detailed discussion of the historical development of the idea of the baptism of the Spirit, see Donald W. Dayton, Theological Roots of Pentecostalism (Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press, 1987), especially Chapter 4, “The Triumph of the Doctrine of Pentecostal Spirit Baptism,” 87–114. 24. “Tongues as a Sign,” The Apostolic Faith 1, no. 1 (September 1906): 2; “The Enduement of Power,” The Apostolic Faith 1, no. 4 (December 1906): 2; “Speaking in Tongues,” The Apostolic Faith 2, no. 13 (May 1908): 4. 25. “Pentecost with Signs Following,” 1; Seymour, “The Baptism with the Holy Ghost,” The Apostolic Faith 1, no. 6 (February–March 1907): 7; “Questions Answered,” 2. 26. “Questions Answered,” 2. 27. Seymour, “The Baptism with the Holy Ghost,” 7; “Unlocked by Prayer,” The Apostolic Faith 1, no. 8 (May 1907): 3; untitled, The Apostolic Faith 2, no. 13 (May 1908): 2. 28. “To the Baptized Saints,” 2; “Questions Answered,” 2; “Character and Work of the Holy Ghost,” The Apostolic Faith 2, no. 13 (May 1908): 2. 29. “The Pentecostal Baptism Restored,” 1; “Marks of Fanaticism,” The Apostolic Faith 1, no. 2 (October 1906): 2. See also James R. Goff, Jr., Fields White unto Harvest: Charles Parham and the Missionary Origins of Pentecostalism (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1988), 130–134; and Charles F. Parham, The Everlasting Gospel (Baxter Springs, Kans.: Charles F. Parham, n.d.), 70–73. 30. Doctrines and Discipline, 5, 8, 39–40, 91. 31. Seymour, “Gifts of the Spirit,” The Apostolic Faith 1, no. 5 ( January 1907): 2; untitled, The Apostolic Faith 2, no. 13 (May 1908): 2; Doctrines and Discipline, 51–52. 32. “Bible Pentecost,” The Apostolic Faith 1, no. 3 (November 1906): 1; untitled, The Apostolic Faith 1, no. 6 (February–March 1907): 7; untitled, The Apostolic Faith 1, no. 7 (April 1907): 3; Doctrines and Discipline, 13. 33. Untitled, The Apostolic Faith 1, no. 10 (September 1907): 3; “Who May Prophesy?” The Apostolic Faith 1, no. 12 ( January 1908): 2; Seymour, “To the Married,” The Apostolic Faith 1, no. 12 ( January 1908): 3. 34. “Pentecost Has Come,” 1; untitled, The Apostolic Faith 1, no. 7 (April 1907): 4. 35. Seymour, “Rebecca: Type of the Bride of Christ,” The Apostolic Faith 1, no. 6 (February–March 1907): 2; untitled, The Apostolic Faith 1, no. 11 (October– January 1908): 2; “Electric Messages from the Field,” The Apostolic Faith 2, no. 13 (May 1908): 2.
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36. Seymour, “Behold the Bridegroom Cometh!” The Apostolic Faith 1, no. 5 ( January 1907): 2. 37. “Full Overcomers,” The Apostolic Faith 1, no. 12 ( January 1908): 2. 38. “The Millennium,” The Apostolic Faith 1, no. 1 (September 1906): 3. 39. Ibid. 40. George F. Taylor, The Spirit and the Bride: A Scriptural Presentation of the Operations, Manifestations, Gifts and Fruit of the Holy Spirit in His Relation to the Bride with Special Reference to the “Latter Rain” Revival (Dunn, N.C.: George F. Taylor, 1907), 138. 41. Ibid., 92–93, 94–96, 98. 42. Ibid., 5–6, 8–9. 43. This biographical section is based largely on Vinson Synan, “George Floyd Taylor: Con®icts and Crowns,” in Portraits of a Generation: Early Pentecostal Leaders, ed. James R. Goff and Grant Wacker (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2002), 325–346. 44. Taylor, The Spirit and the Bride, 19–23. It is interesting to note that Taylor does not include healing as a separate and distinct operation of the Spirit, as many Wesleyan holiness theologians might have done. While Taylor believed that God could and sometimes did physically heal people, healing was not a major part of his theology. Rather than emphasizing the radical holiness belief that healing was available to all in the atonement, Taylor—who was crippled his whole life—emphasized that God helped Christians in their in¤rmities as often as (or more often than) they were healed. 45. Ibid., 19, 21. 46. Ibid., 21–22, 133. 47. Ibid., 82–85. 48. Ibid., 21. Although Taylor may have been less willing than the leaders of the Azusa revival to allow for lost and regained salvation, sancti¤cation, and the baptism of the Spirit, he was still adamantly Arminian in his view of the role of human choice in these matters. At the beginning of his book The Second Coming of Jesus (Falcon, N.C.: Falcon Publishing Company, 1916), he explicitly rejected the notion that “God ordered everything from the beginning; and that some men are born to be lost, while others are predestined to eternal life” (15). Taylor believed that human volition—human seeking—was clearly a necessary precondition to receiving almost any blessing from God. 49. Ibid., 88. See also Frank M. Boyd, The Kenosis (Self-Emptying) of the Lord Jesus Christ (San Francisco: Frank M. Boyd, 1947). 50. Ibid., 21–22, 88. 51. Ibid., 115–117. 52. Ibid., 24–25. 53. Ibid., 13–14. 54. Ibid., 25. 55. Ibid., 36, 50. 56. Ibid., 50–52. 57. Ibid., 37, 57, 135. 58. Ibid., 37, 45–46. 59. Ibid., 101. 60. Ibid., 73–74. 61. Ibid., 60–63. 62. Ibid., 63, 67.
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Notes to pages 101–114
63. Ibid., 62–63, 104–105. 64. Ibid, 65, 96, 104–105. 65. Ibid., 91, 98, 138; Taylor, Second Coming of Jesus, 54. 66. Taylor, The Spirit and the Bride, 97–99; Taylor, Second Coming of Jesus, 11, 53. 67. Taylor, The Spirit and the Bride, 22, 128–129. 68. Ibid., 121. 69. Taylor, Second Coming of Jesus, 22–23. 70. Taylor, The Spirit and the Bride, 110; Taylor, Second Coming of Jesus, 23, 70. 71. Taylor, The Spirit and the Bride, 109, 116; Taylor, Second Coming of Jesus, 11. 72. Taylor, The Spirit and the Bride, 109. 73. Taylor, Second Coming of Jesus, 230. 74. George F. Taylor, The Rainbow (Franklin Springs, Ga.: Advocate Press, 1924), 139–140. 75. Taylor, The Rainbow, 140–143. 76. Taylor, Second Coming of Jesus, 107–110, 172–177. 77. Taylor, The Rainbow, 165. 78. Taylor, Second Coming of Jesus, 111–121. 79. Ibid., 123, 132, 135, 141. 80. Ibid., 215–216. 81. Ibid., 230, 239, 261–262. In arguing for the eternality of the earth, Taylor at times stretched his hermeneutical limits in ways that seemed to require him to move beyond the plain meaning of scripture. For example, he suggested that when the Bible spoke, in the Second Epistle of Peter, of the world someday being “burned up,” this really means that “the primary state of the earth will be discovered.” Similarly, when it was written in the last book of the Bible that in the new earth “the sea will be no more,” Taylor interpreted this to mean that the sea would be “made over anew.” See Taylor, The Second Coming of Jesus, 245, 249. 82. Taylor, The Spirit and the Bride, 70. 83. D. Wesley Myland, The Latter Rain Covenant and Pentecostal Power with Testimony of Healings and Baptism, 27. 84. Ibid., 7, 36. 85. Myland, The Latter Rain Covenant, 13–14, 64, 211; Myland, The Revelation of Jesus Christ, 132. 86. Myland, The Latter Rain Covenant, iii. 87. Ibid., 177. For a brief overview of Myland’s life, see E. B. Robinson, “David Wesley Myland,” in NIDPCM, 920–921. 88. Myland, The Latter Rain Covenant, 176–177. 89. Ibid., 178–179, 183. 90. The Christian Alliance was founded in the 1880s by Albert Benjamin Simpson. It was a voluntary society dedicated to evangelism, healing, and the higher Christian life. John Salmon, who is mentioned in Myland’s account, was the leader of this group in Canada. The Christian Alliance was later subsumed into the Christian and Missionary Alliance (CMA), which was incorporated in 1897. The Christian and Missionary Alliance began as a holiness/higher-life organization but remained open to the new teaching on tongues and the baptism of the Spirit when the pentecostal movement emerged in the early years of the twentieth century. The initial position of the CMA was that while speaking in tongues was a valuable experience, it was not a necessary and required element of the baptism of the Spirit. The CMA tried to stake out a moderate middle ground between the pentecostal movement and the holiness and higher-life movements, but eventually that compromise
Notes to pages 115–132
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position became impossible to maintain and the organization slowly became less open to pentecostal experience and behavior. 91. Ibid., 186–192. 92. Ibid., 192–194, 211. 93. Ibid., 194–211. 94. Ibid., 7, 207, 212–213. 95. Ibid., 2, 18–19, 63, 111, 117. 96. Ibid., 18, 28, 109–110. 97. Ibid., 135. 98. Ibid., 68, 135. 99. Ibid., 135, 167–168. 100. Ibid., 18, 41, 135, 151, 167–168. 101. Myland, The Latter Rain Covenant, 167; Myland, The Revelation of Jesus Christ, 169. 102. Myland, The Latter Rain Covenant, 19, 21, 64. 103. Ibid., 14–16, 29–30. 104. Ibid., 15, 24, 55–56. 105. Ibid., 23–26. 106. Ibid., 13, 16; Myland, The Revelation of Jesus Christ, 69. 107. Myland, The Latter Rain Covenant, 168; Myland, The Revelation of Jesus Christ, 161, 203–204. 108. Myland, The Latter Rain Covenant, 145. 109. Myland, The Revelation of Jesus Christ, title page and iv, 17, 22, 55. 110. Myland, The Latter Rain Covenant, 27, 36, 95, 101. In a chart included at the end of the book, Myland graphed annual rainfall amounts, demonstrating an increase from an average of twenty-one and a half inches in the 1860s to twentyfour and a half in the 1870s to over twenty-eight in the 1880s and twenty-nine in the 1890s; see 220–221. 111. Myland, The Revelation of Jesus Christ, 115–116, 127, 132, 144. 112. Ibid., 143–145, 157, 191–193. 113. Myland, The Latter Rain Covenant, 105; Myland, The Revelation of Jesus Christ, 144–145, 251. 114. Myland, The Revelation of Jesus Christ, 56. 115. Ibid., 167, 241. 116. Myland, The Latter Rain Covenant, 108. 117. Ibid., 112–113. 118. Ibid., 113, 120. 119. Ibid., 107–108, 113, 115, 118. 120. Ibid., 108–109. 121. Ibid., 92, 174. 122. Ibid., 12, 64, 79, 115–116. 123. Ibid., 85, 106, 116. 124. Ibid., 86–87. 125. Ibid., 106–107, 111, 136; Myland, The Revelation of Jesus Christ, 78. While Myland was quite clear about his egalitarian views on race, ethnicity, and cultural differences, his opinions on gender were somewhat more equivocal. He was quite supportive of the work of women in the church. He estimated that women outnumbered men by a ratio of 4 to 1 in the pentecostal movement. He exclaimed: “Where would the church be today without the women. God bless them.” He then cited the Indian pentecostal leader Ramabai as an example of women in positions of
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Notes to pages 132–136
leadership (The Latter Rain Covenant, 64–65). But Myland believed there were limits on the kinds of leadership roles women should be allowed to have. In some of the strongest language he used on any subject, Myland wrote: “The Word of God tells us how assemblies are to be formed, and who the of¤cers shall be. Women may be deaconesses, but not elders; they may be evangelists; they may proclaim the Word; they may prophesy, but they can not be pastors and never should be. When they are[,] they go beyond the Word of God. The Kingdom of God suffers [allows] a good many things that are the exception and not the rule. You can not get any vision or prophecy or utterance in tongues to tell me that a woman is to be an elder of the church, because I decline to receive it. I had a revelation superior to that long ago— the Word of God.” These remarks were made in the context of criticizing “spiritualism, worship of angels, theosophy and Christian Science, etc.” as new religious movements that had all been founded by women; and they were also written in reaction to Myland’s belief that those groups were “getting more women today than any other church.” He disliked these religious groups in part because all were based on what he called “sentimental ®eshly love” (The Revelation of Jesus Christ, 86). One can only assume that Myland thought his own views of love were much less sentimental and ®eshly; given the emphasis on women in the passages cited, he undoubtedly felt his own views were more manly. This attitude is evident in certain of Myland’s comments on the so-called imprecatory Psalms. He wrote, “The imprecatory Psalms . . . are righteous prayers, but Christians are too timid today to pray them. Christians have a right to pray for God to be avenged on the enemies of His church and His people in these Gospel days. You have a right to do it . . . but we are too insipid; we haven’t the courage and the boldness; too much sentimentalism in our religion yet” (The Revelation of Jesus Christ, 136). Precisely how this manly strand of Myland’s thought ¤t together with his theology of love, unity, and yieldedness to the Spirit is hard to decipher. 126. Myland, The Latter Rain Covenant, 181. 3. Holiness and Finished-Work Options 1. For general treatments of the ¤nished-work versus holiness dispute, see Vinson Synan, The Holiness-Pentecostal Movement in the United States (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1971), Chapter 7, “Criticism and Controversy”; Robert M. Anderson, Vision of the Disinherited: The Making of American Pentecostalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), Chapter 9, “The Sancti¤cation Schism”; and D. William Faupel, The Everlasting Gospel (Shef¤eld: Shef¤eld Academic Press, 1996), Chapter 7, “Growth: De¤ning the Parameters of Pentecostal Thought.” 2. William H. Durham, “The Progress of the Work in General” and “The Finished Work of Calvary,” Pentecostal Testimony 2, no. 1 ( January 1912): 1. 3. Durham provided two slightly different autobiographical accounts of his life in his journal, Pentecostal Testimony. The ¤rst is found in one of the early issues of this publication; the second appears in the third issue of Volume 2, which was printed and distributed posthumously in July 1912. Copies of Pentecostal Testimony never listed the dates of publication, so the best we can do is estimate when the various issues were distributed. What makes things more dif¤cult is that the only known copy of the issue in which his ¤rst autobiographical account appeared is missing the ¤rst four pages, so we don’t even know the number of that issue. Based on other information, it seems that this particular issue had to have been one of the ¤rst three published and it will be cited as Pentecostal Testimony 1, no. 3 (1909?). The quotations above come from an article in this issue entitled “Personal Testimony of Pastor Durham,” 5–7.
Notes to pages 137–142
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Durham seems to have begun publishing Pentecostal Testimony in late 1908 or early 1909. The ¤rst volume contained eight issues, of which only 1, no. 5 (likely distributed during the summer of 1910) and 1, no. 8 (published in late spring or early summer of 1911) have been preserved in full. The second volume of Pentecostal Testimony, which began in late 1911, contained only three issues, and publication ceased with Durham’s death in mid-1912. Several articles from missing issues of Pentecostal Testimony have been preserved in a separate anonymously edited volume entitled Articles Written by Pastor W. H. Durham Taken from Pentecostal Testimony (n.p., n.d.). For more information about Durham’s life and ministerial career, see Edith L. Blumhofer, “William H. Durham: Years of Creativity; Years of Dissent,” in Portraits of a Generation: Early Pentecostal Leaders, ed. James R. Goff and Grant Wacker (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2002), 123–142. 4. Pentecostal Testimony 1, no. 3 (1909?): 5. 5. “Personal Testimony of Pastor Durham,” Pentecostal Testimony 1, no. 3(1909?): 5–6. 6. Blumhofer, “William H. Durham: Years of Creativity; Years of Dissent,” 127–129. 7. “Personal Testimony of Pastor Durham,” 7. 8. “The Great Chicago Revival,” Pentecostal Testimony 2, no. 2 (1912?): 13. 9. Blumhofer, “William H. Durham: Years of Creativity; Years of Dissent,” 135. 10. “An Open Letter to My Brother Ministers In and Out of the Pentecostal Movement. A Strong Appeal,” Pentecostal Testimony 1, no. 8 (1911?): 13. 11. “The Great Battle of Nineteen Eleven,” Pentecostal Testimony 2, no. 1 (1911?): 6. 12. “The Great Revival at Azusa Street Mission—How It Began and How It Ended,” Pentecostal Testimony 1, no. 8 (1911?): 3–4. 13. “Our Book and Other Personal Matters,” Pentecostal Testimony 1, no. 8 (1911?): 6; Blumhofer, “William H. Durham: Years of Creativity; Years of Dissent,” 139. 14. “In Memoriam,” Pentecostal Testimony 2, no. 3 (1912?): 1. 15. “Our Pentecostal Book,” Pentecostal Testimony 1, no. 5 (1910?): 16; “False Doctrines,” Pentecostal Testimony 2, no. 2 (1912?): 7. 16. “The Great Crisis,” reprinted in Articles Written by Pastor W. H. Durham, 29. This article was originally published in Pentecostal Testimony 1, no. 4 (1910?); see “The Great Crisis Number Two,” Pentecostal Testimony 1, no. 5 (1910?): 1. 17. “The Great Crisis,” 30; “The Great Crisis Number Two,” 2. The term “higher criticism of the Bible” refers to the scholarly study of the Bible undertaken in the same way one would examine any other set of historical writings. This means that higher critics felt free to question the traditional authorship of various books of the Bible, to hypothesize about the historical origins and meaning of the text, and to scrutinize the text for inconsistencies, errors, and odd characteristics that may or may not be religiously edifying. Many early-twentieth-century so-called higher critics (their opponents tended to use this term more than they used it themselves) considered themselves devout Christians but were convinced that the Bible needed to be examined and interpreted in the same way that any other ancient text would be studied. In contrast to higher criticism, the lower criticism of the Bible (which is sometimes called “text criticism”) focuses entirely on the process of manuscript transmission—that is, how the completed text of the Bible has been handed down from generation to generation with certain copying errors occasionally introduced into
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Notes to pages 143–154
that process. The task of lower criticism is to reconstruct as best it can the original wording of the biblical text through analysis and comparison of the various manuscript evidence that is available. 18. “The Great Crisis Number Two,” 2. 19. Ibid.; “The Church,” Pentecostal Testimony 2, no. 1 (1911?): 13–14. 20. “The Great Crisis,” 31. Durham’s longest sustained critique of the fundamentalist position came in a four-page article entitled “Doctor Dixon Answered.” A. C. Dixon was the pastor of The Moody Church in Chicago. See Pentecostal Testimony 1, no. 5 (1910?): 12–15. 21. “The Great Crisis,” 31. 22. Ibid., 29. 23. “The Finished Work of Calvary. Identi¤cation with Jesus Christ Saves and Sancti¤es,” Pentecostal Testimony 2, no. 1 (1911?): 2–3; “The Great Battle of Nineteen Eleven,” 7–8. Also see “The Finished Work of Calvary—It Makes Plain the Great Work of Redemption,” Pentecostal Testimony 2, no. 2 (1912?): 1–4. 24. “The Great Crisis,” 30. 25. Ibid., 32–33; “The Great Crisis Number Two,” 3. 26. “The Great Crisis,” 33–35; “Speaking in Tongues Is the Evidence of the Baptism in the Holy Spirit,” Pentecostal Testimony 2, no. 2 (1912?): 10. 27. “The Great Crisis Number Two,” 4. 28. “The Second Work of Grace People Answered,” Pentecostal Testimony 1, no. 8 (1911?): 9. 29. “Manifestations Number II,” Pentecostal Testimony 1, no. 5 (1910?): 7–8. 30. Ibid. 31. “The Second Work of Grace People Answered,” 9. 32. “The Great Crisis Number Two,” 4. 33. “Bible Schools and Training Homes,” in Articles Written by Pastor W. H. Durham, 35–36. 34. Ibid. 35. “False Doctrines,” Pentecostal Testimony 2, no. 2 (1912?): 6–7. 36. “An Open Letter to My Brother Ministers In and Out of the Pentecostal Movement. A Strong Appeal,” 12–13; “False Doctrines,” 6. 37. “The Second Work of Grace People Answered,” 9. 38. “An Open Letter to My Brother Ministers In and Out of the Pentecostal Movement. A Strong Appeal,” 12–13. 39. Ibid.; “The Finished Work of Calvary—It Makes Plain the Great Work of Redemption,” 3; “The Great Crisis: The Finished Work Is Hastening It,” Pentecostal Testimony 2, no. 2 (1912?): 6. 40. “Editorial,” Pentecostal Testimony 1, no. 5 (1910?): 1. 41. “Bible Schools and Training Homes,” 37; “The Gospel of Christ,” Pentecostal Testimony 2, no. 1 (1911?): 9. See also “The Great Revival at Azusa Street Mission—How It Began and How It Ended,” 3; and “The Finished Work of Calvary—It Makes Plain the Great Work of Redemption,” 2. 42. “Two Great Experiences or Gifts,” Pentecostal Testimony 1, no. 8 (1911?): 6. Dale Simmons has suggested that E. W. Kenyon had a signi¤cant in®uence on the development of Durham’s theology. Kenyon had taught the ¤nished work of Christ before Durham announced that message, and he had also stressed the importance of identi¤cation with Christ as the key to victorious Christian living. In other words, the two men held views of salvation rather similar to each other. Simmons has proved that Durham met E. W. Kenyon as early as 1907, and he has documented Kenyon’s personal belief that he exerted a shaping in®uence on Durham’s thought and hoped that Durham would soon adopt even more of his views. While I think
Notes to pages 155–161
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there undoubtedly was some cross-fertilization of ideas between these two leaders, and Kenyon may well had a stronger in®uence on Durham than vice versa, I am a bit less willing than Simmons to take Kenyon’s report of the relationship as simply the way things were. Durham was an independent thinker and while he may have borrowed some concepts from Kenyon, this does not mean he was ready and/or willing to swallow Kenyon’s entire worldview. What is more, Durham never mentioned Kenyon in any of his publications, not even in his two brief autobiographical accounts where he mentioned a number of people who had signi¤cantly in®uenced him. See Dale H. Simmons, E. W. Kenyon and the Postbellum Pursuit of Peace, Power, and Plenty (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1997), 292–293. More recently, Edith L. Blumhofer has traced the close connections that existed between Durham and the World’s Faith Missionary Association, a northern Midwest group that taught a doctrine called “the ¤nished work of Calvary” that disagreed with the doctrine of the second work of grace. See Blumhofer, “William H. Durham: Years of Creativity; Years of Dissent,” 126–127. What seems clear is that Durham was not launching out wholly on his own new ideas when he began preaching the ¤nished work of Christ in 1910. Instead, he was bringing together and popularizing a theme that had already been ®oating around various pentecostal and radical evangelical groups. 43. “Sancti¤cation: The Bible Does Not Teach That It Is a Second De¤nite Work of Grace,” Pentecostal Testimony 1, no. 8 (1911?): 2; “The Finished Work of Calvary: Identi¤cation with Jesus Christ Saves and Sancti¤es,” 1–3; “The Gospel of Christ,” 9. 44. “The Finished Work of Calvary—It Makes Plain the Great Work of Redemption,” 2; “Sancti¤cation: Is It a De¤nite, Second, Instantaneous Work of Grace?” in Articles Written by Pastor W. H. Durham, 17. 45. “Sancti¤cation: Is It a De¤nite, Second, Instantaneous Work of Grace?” 18. 46. “Sancti¤cation: The Bible Does Not Teach That It Is a Second De¤nite Work of Grace,” 2; “Sancti¤cation: Is It a De¤nite, Second, Instantaneous Work of Grace?” 19. 47. “The Second Work of Grace People Answered,” 7. 48. “Sancti¤cation: The Bible Does Not Teach That It Is a Second De¤nite Work of Grace,” 2; “The Second Work of Grace People Answered,” 7; “Sancti¤cation: Is It a De¤nite, Second, Instantaneous Work of Grace?” 19. Durham never discussed precisely how water baptism operated within this process of losing and reclaiming one’s salvation. Since he did not use the term “reconversion” to refer to this process, I assume that he saw these experiences of reclamation as similar to, but slightly different from, one’s original conversion; one would not need to be rebaptized each time one underwent a falling away from salvation and a regaining of salvation. 49. “The Great Crisis,” 6. 50. “Personal Testimony of Pastor Durham,” 7; “Two Great Experiences or Gifts,” 6; “The Great Need of the Hour,” Pentecostal Testimony 2, no. 1 (1911?): 10; “Some Other Phases of Sancti¤cation,” Pentecostal Testimony 2, no. 2 (1912?): 7. 51. “The Great Need of the Hour,” 10. 52. “The Second Work of Grace People Answered,” 8; “The Great Need of the Hour,” 10; “Some Other Phases of Sancti¤cation,” 9. 53. “The Great Crisis: The Finished Work Is Hastening It,” 5–6; “Some Other Phases of Sancti¤cation,” 9. 54. “The Two Great Experiences or Gifts,” Pentecostal Testimony 1, no. 8 (1911?): 7; “Speaking in Tongues Is the Evidence of the Baptism in the Holy Spirit,” 10. 55. “The Two Great Experiences or Gifts,” 6; “Speaking in Tongues Is the Evidence of the Baptism in the Holy Spirit,” 9–10; “The Great Crisis,” 34–35. 56. “Speaking in Tongues Is the Evidence of the Baptism in the Holy Spirit,”
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Notes to pages 162–166
10–11; “What Is the Evidence of the Baptism of the Holy Ghost?” in Articles Written by Pastor W. H. Durham, 26. 57. “Speaking in Tongues Is the Evidence of the Baptism in the Holy Spirit,” 10; “Sancti¤cation: Is It a De¤nite, Second, Instantaneous Work of Grace?” 22. 58. “Restoration,” in Articles Written by Pastor W. H. Durham, 47. 59. “The Great Need of the Hour,” 10; “The Great Crisis,” 35; “Restoration,” 47. 60. “Sancti¤cation: The Bible Does Not Teach That It Is a Second De¤nite Work of Grace,” 2; “Some Other Phases of Sancti¤cation,” 9. 61. “The Great Need of the Hour,” 9–10. 62. On “the Lost Cause,” see Charles Reagan Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865–1920 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980). The “Lost Cause” is the name that is give to the attitude of de¤ant defeat that characterized much of the South after the Civil War. This cultural phenomenon is described by Charles Reagan Wilson in Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1980). The summary on the back cover of the paperback edition reads: “Southerners may have abandoned their dream of a political nation after Appomattox, but they preserved their cultural identity by blending Christian rhetoric and symbols with the rhetoric and imagery of the Confederate tradition. Out of defeat emerged a civil religion that embodied the Lost Cause.” Elsewhere Wilson wrote: “The implications of the Lost Cause for racial relations were disturbing. . . . The Klan represented the mystical wing of the Lost Cause.” Though King was a southerner by birth and habitation, he never allowed the myth of the Lost Cause to negatively de¤ne his personality or his Christian faith. 63. Joseph H. King and Blanche L. King, Yet Speaketh: Memoirs of the Late Bishop Joseph H. King (Franklin Springs, Ga.: The Publishing House of the Pentecostal Holiness Church, 1949), 13–14. King also held his father in high regard, writing at one point that he had as a child considered him “the greatest man in the world,” but he was disappointed that his farther treated his mother as little more than a slave in his household. 64. King and King, Yet Speaketh, 19, 33–34. 65. Ibid., 37–38; Joseph H. King, From Passover to Pentecost (Senath, Mo.: F. E. Short, 1914), 151–152. Unless otherwise speci¤ed, citations to this work are to this ¤rst edition. 66. King, From Passover to Pentecost, 148–149, 154–156; King and King, Yet Speaketh, 49. 67. It is hard to interpret what King thought along these lines. In From Passover to Pentecost, he wrote: “Ever since I had decided in 1897 that I had lost the experience of Sancti¤cation, I began seeking it again, and had not ceased up to this time [1898]. I had claimed it several times, but because I did not receive the baptism of the Holy Ghost at the time I would conclude that I did not have it. What in¤nite harm is done by wrong teaching” (164). He repeats essentially the same ideas in Yet Speaketh (81–82). His point seems to be that while he believed at the time that he had lost his sancti¤cation, when he looked back on that period he concluded that most likely he had not lost his sancti¤cation during those years. He was never fully certain, however, how best to explain this phase of his life. 68. King, From Pentecost to Passover, 157; King and King, Yet Speaketh, 52–54. Vinson Synan says that “because of his convictions against divorce and remarriage, King vowed to remain celibate as long as his ¤rst wife lived.” See H. V. Synan, “Joseph Hillery King,” in NIDPCM, 822–823. King’s own writings did not say whether he actually obtained a divorce from his wife or simply separated from her.
Notes to pages 167–173
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69. King, From Passover to Pentecost, 160–161, 165; King and King, Yet Speaketh, 55, 73, 78–80. 70. King, From Passover to Pentecost, 165; King and King, Yet Speaketh, 78–79, 83, 86–87, 102–104. 71. King, From Passover to Pentecost, 167–173; King and King, Yet Speaketh, 86. 72. King, From Passover to Pentecost, 173–175, 179–182; King and King, Yet Speaketh, 115–124. 73. King and King, Yet Speaketh, 294–295, 318. 74. King and King, Yet Speaketh, 7, 315–316. 75. Joseph Hillery King, “The Foundation Eternal,” editorial in the Pentecostal Holiness Advocate, May 27, 1937, reprinted in B. E. Underwood, ed., Christ—God’s Love Gift: Selected Writings of Joseph Hillery King (Franklin Springs, Ga.: Advocate Press, 1969), 155. 76. King’s respect for institutional organization was connected with and rooted in an equally strong respect for middle-class values. In an article entitled “The Condescension of Christ,” published in 1928 in the Pentecostal Holiness Advocate, King wrote: “The movement of the Messiah was such as to gather to Himself permanent disciples from that good, dependable middle class, not governed by pride as from the highest, nor base passion, as from the lowest. This class by virtue of honesty, industry and intelligence will win respect from the highest, or many in that station; and also command the respect from the lowest.” King believed that the wealthy were often “af®icted with the incurable disease of carnal softness.” People in the lowest class, he said, were prone to “wild extravagance and frenzied zeal.” He concluded that in the work of evangelism, it was best to “begin with the substantial middle class and you can work up to the highest and win some; and down to the lowest class and save many. This is wisdom. . . . The middle class are [sic] the balancing class in the gospel scheme.” Reprinted in Underwood, Christ—God’s Love Gift, 34–35. 77. King and King, Yet Speaketh, 86. 78. King, From Passover to Pentecost, 6, 88, 91. 79. Ibid., 6, 24, 29. 80. King, “Introduction” in Taylor, The Spirit and the Bride, 7. 81. King, From Passover to Pentecost, 109, 111, 116. 82. King, “Introduction,” in The Spirit and the Bride, 7–8; King, From Passover to Pentecost, 110, 112. 83. King, From Passover to Pentecost, 131. 84. At one point King listed various false doctrines that had invaded the pentecostal movement either earlier in church history and in the present as follows: “In the early ages there was the false doctrine of Legalism in many forms, Gnosticism in different sects, Nicolaitanism, Baalamism, Jezebelism, Arianism, Pelagianism, Augustinianism, and in modern times it is Russellism, Free Lovism, Spiritual marriages, Christian Science, Translationism, Suppressionism, Anti-Sancti¤cationism, and many others. And all these forms of . . . false doctrine have found acceptance by many that have and do profess the baptism of the Holy Ghost. They work havoc and ruin wherever accepted.” Ibid., 93. 85. Ibid., 75–77, 81, 83. King was not optimistic about turning people back from error through theological training. At the very end of Yet Speaketh, he bemoaned the fact that his “straightforward expositions of truth” had never met with the same numerical success as the many emotional revivalists who traversed the land. He wrote: “I have been engaged in this line of work about forty years, and have conducted nearly three hundred Bible Conferences, and . . . I have rarely seen more than one hundred persons in attendance at these gatherings. . . . Not withstanding all
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Notes to pages 174–176
that I have received and done on this line, I have failed to draw and interest multitudes in the exposition of the Word of God. If a large audience is the criterion by which to judge the importance, value and worth of the work done, then I am an utter failure. My work is empty and vain” (327–328). 86. The subject matter of From Passover to Pentecost follows the natural order of Christian experience, discussing conversion ¤rst, then sancti¤cation, and ¤nally the baptism of the Spirit. King actually treats conversion quite quickly, devoting only twelve pages to the topic. He spends signi¤cantly more time documenting the Old and New Testament bases of sancti¤cation and the baptism of the Spirit, giving each about sixty pages of text. 87. King, From Passover to Pentecost, 8–9. 88. Ibid. 89. Ibid., 9. 90. King never discussed the subject of Christology in any great detail, but a few of his remarks are intriguing and indicate that he held a rather dualistic view of how the human and divine natures of Christ were related to each other. Given that theological disposition, his emphasis on the similarity between the Christian’s experience of sonship received in conversion and Christ’s human experience of sonship makes sense. In an article entitled “The Mind of Christ,” published in the Pentecostal Holiness Advocate in 1933, King focused on how the human aspect of Christ only slowly came to understand the nature of his divine nature and calling. He said that Christ’s “coming to consciousness ranged over many years of human development.” This consciousness included an awareness of Christ’s human identity as well as his divine nature. King explained: “With no depravity to shade His spiritual apprehension, He, in the fullness of human consciousness, came to understand what it meant to be a man, what was the proper attitude and position of a man before God, and as a result He humbled Himself to the level of perfect submission to the will of God.” Reprinted in Underwood, Christ—God’s Love Gift, 128–129. In another article entitled “The Testimony of the Lord,” which was published in the Pentecostal Holiness Advocate in 1936, King stressed the difference between Christ’s human (son of man) and divine (son of God) dimensions. King wrote: “We know that He as the Son of God never left heaven, since He as God ¤lleth the heaven and earth. As Son of man He is in heaven, and if so He must have ascended there in some mysterious sense, there to learn of the in¤nite things of the eternities. He made these things known to the sons of men to a very limited extent while on earth, but far more gloriously when He sent the Holy Ghost to lead men into all truth.” Reprinted in Underwood, Christ—God’s Love Gift, 67. King’s ideas seem to lean toward what would historically be called a Nestorian Christology, which stressed the duality of Christ’s human-divine identity, as opposed to the Chalcedonian formulation of Christology, which presented Christ’s two natures as strongly united in one person. In the Nestorian tradition, Christ’s human experience, understood relatively apart from his divine nature, provided a reasonable and realistic model of what the perfected Christian life could look like. Each individual believer could thus seek to become, in essence, a little Christ—a reproduction of the human side of Christ’s person. King seemed sympathetic to that view. At one point, he wrote: “The same Spirit that formed the humanity of Jesus in righteousness forms the life of Christ in us in the new birth. Christ is, so to speak, born again in us by the Spirit, and we are created anew in him.” King, Passover to Pentecost, 103. None of these ideas were developed in any great detail, so it is improper to speculate too much, but it seems clear that King was not locked into traditional Chalcedonian
Notes to pages 176–190
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theology when it came to understanding the person of Christ and the implications that understanding might hold for formulating a doctrine of salvation. 91. Ibid., 9–15. 92. Ibid., 147; King and King, Yet Speaketh, 33–35. 93. King, From Passover to Pentecost, 11, 15–17. 94. Ibid., 78–79. 95. Ibid., 11, 78. 96. Underwood, Christ—God’s Love Gift, 82, 124. 97. King, From Passover to Pentecost, 17. 98. Ibid., 18. 99. Ibid., 18–19, 66. 100. Ibid., 18. 101. Ibid., 21–22. 102. Ibid., 50. 103. Ibid., 69. 104. Ibid., 58–59. 105. Ibid., 59. 106. Ibid., 77, 81. King’s phrase “Antinomian, Darbyism dressed up in Zinzendor¤an garb” is obviously not a fair description of Durham’s ¤nished-work theology. It is not designed to be. Instead, it is a string of words King hoped would scare people off from Durham’s views before they ever examined them. I am not even sure he really wanted to assign the speci¤c meanings of these words to Durham. It may be he was just looking for some evil-sounding theological terms to insert as a symbolic warning. In terms of the actual meanings of the terms, antinomianism centers on the proposition that Christians can do whatever they want since the law no longer applies to them, Darbyism can refer either to a particular style of ecclesiology (the doctrine of the church) or to a dispensational style of eschatology (the theology of future events), and Zinzendor¤anism is a rough synonym for pietism. Since most pentecostals were eschatological dispensationalists and since the Zinzendor¤an movement was related quite closely to Wesleyanism, it is dif¤cult to understand what King intended when he used these as negative labels. His objection to antinomianism is much clearer. 107. Ibid., 100. 108. Ibid., 99–100. 109. Ibid., 150. 110. Ibid., 150; King and King, Yet Speaketh, 38. 111. King, From Passover to Pentecost, 79, 92. 112. When he used the older terminology, King sometimes made a distinction between the Holy Spirit and ¤re as follows: “The [baptism of the] Holy Spirit sets forth the personal element in Pentecost, and the [baptism of ] ¤re sets forth the mighty energies and re¤ning process of this in¤nite personality.” For the most part, however, King used the phrase the “baptism of the Holy Ghost and ¤re” as simply synonymous with the “baptism of the Holy Ghost.” Ibid., 88. 113. Ibid., 92, 94, 97, 119, 122, 182. 114. Ibid., 105–106; King, “Fellowship,” Pentecostal Holiness Advocate (August 23, 1917), reprinted in Underwood, Christ—God’s Love Gift, 100. 115. King, From Passover to Pentecost, 114. 116. Ibid., 141–142. 117. Ibid., 142, 165. 118. Ibid., 89, 101, 139, 142, 182. 119. Ibid., 142.
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Notes to pages 190–204
120. King, From Passover to Pentecost, 2d ed. (Franklin Springs, Ga.: Publishing House of the Pentecostal Holiness Church, 1934), 211. 121. Ibid., 201, 203–204. 122. Ibid., 219. 123. King, From Passover to Pentecost, 1st ed., 94; Underwood, Christ—God’s Love Gift, 138. 124. King, From Passover to Pentecost, 1st ed., 98. 125. Underwood, Christ—God’s Love Gift, 61. 126. Ibid., 67. 127. Process theology emerged as a distinct school of theology in the 1930s and 1940s and continues to have a strong in®uence in theology today. One of the key insights of process theology, derived from the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, is that the world (and to some degree God) exists in a state of becoming rather than in a static state of merely being. Rather than de¤ning God as existing outside of the created order, process theology situates God in intimate relationship with the world, and rather than picturing God as mechanically controlling the world or coercively pushing the world toward a predetermined end, process theology portrays God as a lover who seeks to in®uence the world for good in a variety of powerful but noncoercive and (to some degree) open-ended ways. God’s in®uence in the world is sometimes described as a “lure,” enticing the world and individual human beings forward into a better future. King’s picture of God contains some of these same emphases. 128. Ibid., 60. 4. Oneness Options 1. Gar¤eld T. Haywood, “Foreword,” The Birth of the Spirit in the Days of the Apostles (Indianapolis: Christ Temple Book Store, n.d.); Gar¤eld T. Haywood, The Finest of the Wheat (Indianapolis: Christ Temple Book Store, n.d.), 51; Gar¤eld T. Haywood, Feed My Sheep, reprinted in Haywood, God’s Word Exhorted—Revealed —Prophesied (n.p., n.d.), 361. 2. Haywood, The Birth of the Spirit, 32–33. 3. See Gar¤eld T. Haywood, The Victim of the Flaming Sword (Indianapolis: Christ Temple Book Store, n.d.), 57. 4. Haywood, The Finest of the Wheat, 2. 5. Ibid., 2–3. 6. Ibid., 13–14. 7. Ibid., forward; G. T. Hay wood, Ezekiel’s Vision: The First Chapter of Ezekiel (Indianapolis, Ind.: Christ Temple Book Store, n.d.), 13; Feed My Sheep, 334. 8. Haywood, The Victim of the Flaming Sword, 62; Haywood, The Birth of the Spirit, 1. 9. Haywood, The Birth of the Spirit, 1; Haywood, Ezekiel’s Vision, 17. 10. Gar¤eld T. Haywood, Before the Foundation of the World: A Revelation of the Ages (n.p.: G. T. Haywood, 1923), 2; Haywood, Feed My Sheep, 362. 11. Gar¤eld T. Haywood, Resurrection of the Dead (Indianapolis: Christ Temple Book Store, n.d.), 3–5; Haywood, Before the Foundation of the World, 4, 6–7, 35–36; Haywood, The Birth of the Spirit, 22; Haywood, The Victim of the Flaming Sword, 40. Haywood believed that the convergence of science and the Word of God extended beyond the natural sciences. In particular, it was also evident in the realm of ¤nance. Haywood was one of the ¤rst pentecostals to argue that an immutable law of giving and blessing was built into the deep structures of the world. Tithing was a case in point. In his short book Christian Stewardship: A Story of the Tenth, reprinted
Notes to pages 204–214
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in God’s Word Exhorted—Revealed—Prophesied, Haywood argued that the law of tithing and blessing was part of revealed truth, but it was also easily proved true by empirical observation apart from revelation. He also believed that this natural law of ¤nance applied to everyone regardless of whether or not they were believers. He wrote: “Sinners who have no experimental knowledge of God, pay tithes and are blessed” (292). Haywood believed that the rule of tithing and blessing was one of the ¤rst spiritual laws of the universe to be discovered by humanity; in fact, it seemed almost innate since even Cain and Abel knew of it (295). Haywood’s application of this law was broad, presaging later developments in pentecostal/charismatic belief and practice. He argued that the way to get “liberal physical and ¤nancial blessings and success . . . [was] to do right in God’s sight in money matters at all times” (306). He believed that what applied to the individual was true of the nation as well. He wrote that “if all the Christians in America would truly and faithfully accept and carry out this plain challenge of God’s, there would be no more boll weevil, no more Hessian ®ies, no more green bugs, no more dropping of unripened fruits, no more blind staggers, no more black-leg bloody murrian [sic] or cholera—indeed, all nations would rise up and call us blessed and we would become a delightsome land” (300). 12. Haywood, Before the Foundation of the World, 6–7. 13. Gar¤eld T. Haywood, The Marriage and Divorce Question, reprinted in God’s Word Exhorted—Revealed—Prophesied, 95; Haywood, Before the Foundation of the World, 4, 70–71; Haywood, The Birth of the Spirit, 2. 14. Gar¤eld T. Haywood, Divine Names and Titles of Jehovah (Indianapolis: Christ Temple Book Store, n.d.), 12; Haywood, The Victim of the Flaming Sword, 55. 15. Haywood, Divine Names and Titles of Jehovah, 15; The Finest of the Wheat, 35; Haywood, The Victim of the Flaming Sword, 12. 16. Haywood, Divine Names and Titles of Jehovah, 18. 17. Ibid., 18–19. 18. Ibid., 9–10. 19. Ibid., 11, 19; Haywood, The Finest of the Wheat, 28; Haywood, The Victim of the Flaming Sword, 12. 20. Haywood, The Victim of the Flaming Sword, 12, 17, 51, 53. 21. Haywood, Divine Names and Titles of Jehovah, 12–13. 22. Cyril C. Richardson, The Doctrine of the Trinity (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1958), 14, 148; Dorothy L. Sayers, Creed or Chaos? (Manchester, N.H.: Sophia Institute Press, 1949), 22–23. For examples of social Trinitarianism, see Jürgen Moltman, The Trinity and the Kingdom (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981) and Mary LaCugna, God for Us: The Trinity and Christian Life (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991). 23. Haywood, The Victim of the Flaming Sword, 65; Theodoret is quoted in Richardson, The Doctrine of the Trinity, 120. 24. Haywood, The Victim of the Flaming Sword, 17. 25. Ibid., 16, 18. 26. Ibid., 17. 27. Ibid., 11. 28. Haywood, The Finest of the Wheat, 33–34; Haywood, Victim of the Flaming Sword, 11–12, 71. 29. Haywood, The Victim of the Flaming Sword, 44; Haywood, Feed My Sheep, 379. 30. Haywood, The Victim of the Flaming Sword, 18, 45, 48. 31. Ibid., 14, 18, 23, 30. 32. Ibid., 6.
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Notes to pages 214–226
33. Ibid., 6–9. 34. For a detailed description of the Christus victor theory of the atonement, see Gustaf Aulen, Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of Atonement, trans. A. G. Herbert (New York: Macmillan Company, 1957). 35. Haywood, The Victim of the Flaming Sword, 10, 48. 36. Haywood, The Finest of the Wheat, 12; Haywood, Before the Foundation of the World, 44. 37. Haywood, Before the Foundation of the World, 14. 38. Haywood, The Finest of the Wheat, 12. 39. Haywood, Feed My Sheep, 381; Haywood, The Finest of the Wheat, 12. 40. Haywood, The Victim of the Flaming Sword, 5. 41. Elsewhere Haywood seemed to say that all of humanity had sinned. In particular, he argued that the Apostle Paul “shows the whole human family had sinned, and if all sinned, all were condemned” (The Birth of the Spirit, 36). It is hard to reconcile that kind of comment with other statements that imply that at least some people in the early stages of human history avoided sin. Perhaps Haywood believed there was a difference between the kind of active and self-aware sin that Adam committed and other more passive or unconscious forms of sin that were somehow less damning. If so, I know of no place in his published works where he made that distinction. Perhaps Haywood was simply inconsistent on this point. 42. Haywood, The Finest of the Wheat, 8; Haywood, The Victim of the Flaming Sword, 6. 43. Haywood, The Finest of the Wheat, 12. 44. Ibid., 12–13, 52. 45. Ibid., 13. 46. Haywood, Feed My Sheep, 350–351; Haywood, The Finest of the Wheat, 13–14. 47. Haywood, The Birth of the Spirit, 36. 48. Ibid., 22. 49. Ibid., 10, 35; Haywood, Feed My Sheep, 356, 359. 50. Haywood, The Birth of the Spirit, 2–3, 38; Haywood, Feed My Sheep, 333, 376; Haywood, The Finest of the Wheat, 52. 51. Haywood, Feed My Sheep, 381; Haywood, The Finest of the Wheat, 17, 40; Haywood, The Marriage and Divorce Question, 100; Haywood, The Victim of the Flaming Sword, 55. 52. Haywood, The Birth of the Spirit, 23–24, 29; Haywood, The Finest of the Wheat, 48–49. 53. Haywood, The Birth of the Spirit, 14, 25, 39–40; Haywood, The Victim of the Flaming Sword, 14. 54. Haywood, The Birth of the Spirit, 16, 21. 55. Haywood, Feed My Sheep, 383; Haywood, The Victim of the Flaming Sword, 38–39. 56. Haywood, Feed My Sheep, 352; Haywood, The Finest of the Wheat, 10, 18, 20. 57. Haywood, The Birth of the Spirit, 38; Haywood, Feed My Sheep, 330, 333, 377, 382. 58. Haywood, Before the Foundation of the World, 62; Haywood, Feed My Sheep, 324; Haywood, The Finest of the Wheat, 22, 29, 31. 59. Haywood, Feed My Sheep, 376–377. 60. Haywood, Before the Foundation of the World, 1–2, 59. 61. Ibid., 3, 8–9, 59.
Notes to pages 227–232
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62. Ibid., 11, 71. 63. Ibid., 11; Haywood, The Victim of the Flaming Sword, 32. 64. Haywood, Before the Foundation of the World, 19, 22. 65. Ibid., 23–25. 66. Ibid., 27. 67. Ibid., 29. 68. Ibid., 34–42. 69. Ibid., 43–46. 70. Ibid., 45–47. 71. Unlike some other pentecostal theologians, Haywood gave relatively little attention to the notion of the “sealing” of the Holy Spirit. He did broach the topic brie®y, however, in The Resurrection of the Dead. Citing the seventh and ninth chapters of the book of Revelation, he said that in the future time of tribulation believers could be “assured that God has a manner of protection and ‘a way of escape’ for His people.” He added that “it is in the interest of every true child of God to know what this seal is, and what to do to obtain it.” For Haywood the seal was identical with the full baptism of water and the Spirit, the Holy Ghost new birth. He wrote: How are we to know if we get the seal? . . . They were ‘baptized in water in Jesus name’ and afterwards Paul laid hands on them, and they were ¤lled with the Holy Ghost. HAVE YOU EVER HAD AN EXPERIENCE LIKE THIS? If not, then you are not sealed” (19–20). 72. Haywood, Before the Foundation of the World, 45–47, 50. 73. Ibid., 52; Haywood, Resurrection of the Dead, 13. 74. With regard to Christians of the past, especially the most prominent reformers of church history, Haywood was somewhat ambivalent about who had truly been born of the Spirit and who had not. On the one hand, he wrote in The Birth of the Spirit that “there has always been somebody ¤lled with the Spirit, ever since the day of Pentecost. . . . No doubt some did not know just what they had. Luther had it. Wesley, Finney and Fox had it” (35). But on the other hand, he suggested in The Finest of the Wheat that “many who followed Luther and the reformers held fast to what knowledge they had and refused to return to paganism, although they did not have the spirit of life in them. They stood fast on negative faith alone” (25). Haywood said that despite their lack of the Spirit and their merely negative faith they would be honored by God nonetheless because they had lived up to all the light available to them. He wrote: “Even though they did not have the fullness of the Spirit, yet because they walked in all the light that they had, He who had the seven Spirits (fullness) of God, declares ‘they shall walk with me in white,’ and counts them acceptable, saying, ‘for you are worthy’” (25). According to Haywood, all the saints of the past who had received the fullness of the Spirit would participate in the ¤rst resurrection; that is, the rapture of the saints before the beginning of the millennium. All other Christians who lived up to the light they had would be brought back to life after the millennium, ¤rst to live on the new earth and later to join the raptured saints in the celestial city of the New Jerusalem. Haywood believed that one way or another, Luther and the other great reformers would eventually end up in heaven with the Spirit-¤lled saints of all the ages. 75. Haywood, Before the Foundation of the World, 50–52; Haywood, The Finest of the Wheat, 49. 76. Haywood, Before the Foundation of the World, 53–54. 77. Ibid., 57, 59, 66–68. 78. Andrew D. Urshan, The Doctrine of the New Birth or the Perfect Way to Eternal Life (Cochrane, Wis.: Witness of God, 1921), 2.
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Notes to pages 233–242
79. Andrew D. Urshan, The Almighty God in the Lord Jesus Christ (Los Angeles: Andrew D. Urshan, 1919), 20, 31, 55; Andrew D. Urshan, Timely Messages of Comfort (n.p: 1918; reprint, Portland, Ore.: Apostolic Book Corner, 1973), 96; Andrew D. Urshan, The Supreme Need of the Hour and the Source of Mighty Revivals (n.p., 1923; reprint, Portland, Ore.: Apostolic Book Publishers, 1990), 110–111; Urshan, The Doctrine of the New Birth, 1. 80. Urshan, The Doctrine of the New Birth, 47; Urshan, The Supreme Need of the Hour, 72; Urshan, Timely Messages of Comfort, 19, 36. 81. Andrew D. Urshan, The Life Story of Andrew bar David Urshan (Stockton, Calif.: Apostolic Press, 1967), 84–85. 82. Ibid., 19, 32. 83. Ibid., 84–88. 84. Ibid., 91, 99, 100, 102. 85. Although Urshan had Presbyterian roots, he indicated that the group of Persian boys he “led to Christ in Chicago” included members of the Catholic and Nestorian Churches. Urshan was never overly concerned with denominational boundaries (Ibid., 173). 86. Ibid., 109, 114–116. 87. Ibid., 124, 126–128. 88. Urshan believed that the heresies of the time fell into basically two broad categories: liberalism and spiritualism. He said the ¤rst of these heresies, liberalism, denied “the inspiration of the Bible; the deity of our Lord and the utter depravity of man; hence the necessity of the shed blood”; the second, spiritualism, de¤ned God merely as “a higher or supreme in®uence or mind which is in every man and also in animals and in everything” (The Almighty God in the Lord Jesus Christ, 62). 89. Urshan, The Life Story of Andrew bar David Urshan, 119–120; Andrew D. Urshan, My Study of Modern Pentecostals (n.p., 1923; reprint, Portland, Ore.: Apostolic Book Publishers, 1981), 61. 90. Urshan, The Life Story of Andrew bar David Urshan, 139–141. 91. Ibid., 234. 92. Ibid., 254. 93. Urshan, The Almighty God in the Lord Jesus Christ, 55, 73–74; Urshan, My Study of Modern Pentecostals, 63. 94. Urshan, The Almighty God in the Lord Jesus Christ, 74; Urshan, My Study of Modern Pentecostals, 69. 95. Urshan, The Life Story of Andrew bar David Urshan, 256, 260. 96. Andrew D. Urshan, Apostolic Faith Doctrine of the New Birth (n.p., n.d.), 3. 97. Urshan did not devote much ink to explaining precisely how the new birth righted the wrongs of the fall or, for that matter, how the atonement itself was connected to the new birth. In My Study of Modern Pentecostals, he alluded to the fact that salvation was made possible through the “red hot blood of the man Christ Jesus” (86) which was shed at Calvary, but he provided little, if any, explanation of exactly how the shedding of Christ’s human blood effected redemption. But in some of his other writings, he entirely ignored the cross in his explanation of how Jesus saved fallen humanity from sin. In Timely Messages of Comfort, one of Urshan’s most extended attempts to explain the divine dynamics associated with redemption, he totally ignored the death of Christ and focused on the gift of the Holy Spirit instead. Using the biblical story of the good Samaritan (Luke 10:30–37), a metaphor for salvation, King said that fallen humanity was like the traveler left bruised and bleeding by the side of the road. Jesus was the good Samaritan. King explained: “He came, thank God, to our help. The old law, the Pharasaical law, could not save us, nor plead
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for us. They left us. But Jesus came down from His high throne, from His glorious standing, traveled that road for us; ¤nding us bleeding, dying. He took us, washed us, put the oil of His grace upon our wounds, and Gave the Inn-Keeper (the Holy Spirit) the command to take care of us until He comes for us again” (88). 98. Urshan, Apostolic Faith Doctrine of the New Birth, 3, 5, 7. 99. Ibid., 10; Urshan, The Almighty God in the Lord Jesus Christ, 33; Urshan, The Doctrine of the New Birth, 41. 100. Urshan, Apostolic Faith Doctrine of the New Birth, 4. 101. Ibid., 11, 14; Urshan, The Almighty God in the Lord Jesus Christ, 33. 102. Urshan, Almighty God In the Lord Jesus Christ, 67; Urshan, The Doctrine of the New Birth, 14, 46–47; Urshan, My Study of Modern Pentecostals, 42, 75. 103. Urshan, Timely Messages of Comfort, 53. 104. Urshan, My Study of Modern Pentecostals, 49. 105. Urshan, The Doctrine of the New Birth, 7. 106. Urshan, Apostolic Faith Doctrine of the New Birth, 13. 107. Urshan, The Supreme Need of the Hour, 26. Urshan’s emphasis on human effort in the process of salvation raises the issue of Arminian versus Calvinist views of salvation. Urshan wrote relatively little about the issue of election versus free will; however, he did discuss that subject in one section of Timely Messages of Warning. In that passage, Urshan identi¤ed himself with the Arminian position, though in his typical ecumenical fashion he tried to say something nice about the Calvinist view. He argued that in a certain sense Calvinism re®ected “God’s side of this blessed doctrine,” while Arminianism better described the human experience of salvation. But despite this attempt at evenness, his main point remained that “man is a free, moral agent,” and because of that “there is a terrible future awaiting the sinner who deliberately rejects God’s free salvation.” Regarding the issue of eternal security, Urshan likened the relation between the believer and God to a marriage, saying that “there is nothing that can lawfully break the bonds of marriage between husband and wife except the sin of committing adultery.” He reasoned therefore that, following that logic, Christians should “keep in the bonds, rules and promises we made when we gave our life to Christ, and accepted Him, not only as our Saviour, but as our Owner, Lord” (78). Urshan believed that as long as Christians remained faithful, they were assured of eternal security, but eternal security did not mean that once one was saved, one was always saved regardless of continuing faith or lifestyle. 108. Urshan, The Life Story of Andrew bar David Urshan, 117–118; Urshan, My Study of Modern Pentecostals, 43, 51. 109. Elsewhere he con¤rmed the validity of this three-step trajectory of pentecostal faith development, calling the three experiences the “three loaves of the Spirit.” In this same passage he added the opinion, however, that one could and ideally should receive all three of these experiences at the same time. He wrote that “the importune man” who was willing to prevail in prayer would get the “three loaves all at once and in one course” (The Supreme Need of the Hour, 22–24). Urshan’s comments in this regard sound somewhat similar to D. Wesley Myland’s belief that one could move into the experience of the fullness of God either through a three-stage pattern or instantly in a single evening. Myland believed the all-at-once experience was relatively rare; Urshan clearly wanted to label the combined experience the normal Christian pattern, even if it was not necessarily the most common occurrence. 110. Urshan, The Life Story of Andrew bar David Urshan, 100, 124; Urshan, My Study of Modern Pentecostals, 10, 44–45; Andrew D. Urshan, Timely Messages of Warning (n.p., 1917; reprint, Portland, Ore.: Apostolic Book Corner, 1973), 19. 111. Timely Messages of Warning, 39.
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112. Urshan, Apostolic Faith Doctrine of the New Birth, 7; Urshan, The Doctrine of the New Birth, 2, 42. 113. Urshan, The Doctrine of the New Birth, 42. 114. Urshan, Timely Messages of Comfort, 53. 115. Urshan, The Supreme Need of the Hour, 102–103; Urshan, Timely Messages of Comfort, 20. 116. Urshan, The Life Story of Andrew bar David Urshan, 159; Urshan, My Study of Modern Pentecostals, 94–99. Urshan believed that evangelism was the crucial work of the church, and he wrote in The Supreme Need of the Hour that if Christians would truly learn the “secret of prayer and fasting” they would have enough divine power available to them that they could “convert this world in six months” (81). He also believed that Christ could not return to earth until the globe had been fully evangelized. According to God’s preferred timing, both the evangelism of the world and Christ’s return were supposed to have taken place shortly after Pentecost. Urshan explained that it had been “God’s programme . . . that this world should have been brought to Christ, after the order of things on the day of Pentecost. And the Second Advent would have followed as Paul and others . . . expected.” The reason Christ’s second advent had not occurred was not that Paul was “mistaken at all as some suppose.” He said that “the Savior was near at hand” during Paul’s day. What had happened was that the church had failed at its task of evangelism. The result had been that “God has been frustrated, and worse than limited, not for forty years but for two thousand years” (83). Urshan prayed for God to send a new Joshua in his own day who could lead the global revival that would set the stage for the return of Christ. This perspective on global evangelism was a far cry from Haywood’s opinion that it was false teaching to say that the world could and should be fully converted to Christ during the gospel age. 117. Urshan, Timely Messages of Comfort, 61, 66–67. 118. Urshan, Timely Messages of Warning, 19, 51. 119. Ibid., 51–52. 120. Ibid., 52. 121. Urshan, The Supreme Need of the Hour, 114, 138–139. 122. Urshan, The Almighty God in the Lord Jesus Christ, 56, 68; Urshan, The Supreme Need of the Hour, 117, 139–140. 123. Urshan, Timely Messages of Warning, 35. 124. Most of the time Urshan’s references to “lukewarm” Christians were relatively general in nature. Lukewarm Christians were those who had in one way or another turned away from the hot ¤re of faith God expected to see in any truly reborn Christian. At one point in The Almighty God in the Lord Jesus Christ (65–68), however, he provided a more re¤ned typology of lukewarm Christians. He indicated that lukewarm believers fell into two separate groups: “post-millennialists and the ‘foolish virgins.’” These two groups were actually quite similar in that they shared a rejection of tongues as the sign of the baptism of the Spirit. Urshan called them “anti-Holy-Ghost-Tongues people.” Of the two groups, Urshan quite obviously felt a greater sense of attachment to the foolish virgins than to the post-millennialists. For the most part, the term “foolish virgin” was simply Urshan’s way of referring to non-pentecostal fundamentalists. He said that foolish virgins believed in the atonement, clung to the Bible as God’s revealed truth, and looked forward to Christ’s return. For the most part, they also lived morally pure lives. The one thing they lacked was “oil” for their lamps—that is, the ¤lling of the Holy Spirit. Post-millennialists, by contrast, were basically modern liberal Christians. Urshan accused them of having a high view of human nature and a low view of the Bible. In particular, he
Notes to pages 254–265
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said that they believed in an encultured form of Christianity and that they “[worked] hand in hand with the higher critics on the theory of the development of the world by the power of the present-day civilization and Christianity.” While he acknowledged that post-millenialists “[believed] in many Bible fundamentals,” he said that they also did “away with hundreds of scriptures which speci¤cally and clearly speak of the thousand years’ reign of Jesus Christ with His church on this very earth. . . . These people tear the Bible into small pieces while the higher critics tear it into big pieces.” Urshan said both of these groups of quasi-Christians, the post-millenialists and the foolish virgins, would miss the rapture and would have to go through the tribulation period that followed. 125. Urshan, Apostolic Faith Doctrine of the New Birth, 9–10; Urshan, Timely Messages of Warning, 38–43. 126. Urshan, Apostolic Faith Doctrine of the New Birth, 9–10; Urshan, Timely Messages of Warning, 37, 43. 127. Urshan, Apostolic Faith Doctrine of the New Birth, 7; Urshan, The Doctrine of the New Birth, 42. 128. Urshan, The Almighty God in the Lord Jesus Christ, 10, 90. 129. Ibid., 20, 22. 130. Urshan, The Almighty God in the Lord Jesus Christ, 31. 131. Urshan, The Life Story of Andrew bar David Urshan, 14–16. 132. Urshan, The Almighty God in the Lord Jesus Christ, 77. 133. Ibid., 42–44. 134. Urshan, The Life Story of Andrew bar David Urshan, 140. 135. Urshan, The Almighty God in the Lord Jesus Christ, 23; Urshan, The Doctrine of the New Birth, 11. 136. Urshan, The Almighty God in the Lord Jesus Christ, 23; Urshan, Apostolic Faith Doctrine of the New Birth, 5. 5. Theology and Race 1. “Pentecost Has Come,” The Apostolic Faith 1, no. 1 (September 1906): 1; “Bible Pentecost,” The Apostolic Faith 1, no. 3 (November 1906): 1; untitled, The Apostolic Faith 1, no. 6 (February–March 1907): 7. 2. See Robert M. Anderson, Vision of the Disinherited: The Making of American Pentecostalism (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson Publishers, 1979), especially Chapter 10, “Trinitarian Controversy and Racial Separation,” 176–194; see also Charles W. Conn, Like a Mighty Army: A History of the Church of God, 1886–1976 (Cleveland, Tenn.: Pathway Press, 1977), 132–133, 199–201. 3. Biographical information on Lawson is sketchy and sometimes con®icting. See Anderson, Vision of the Disinherited, 132; Hans Baer and Merrill Singer, AfricanAmerican Religion in the Twentieth Century: Varieties of Protest and Accommodation (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992), 153; Sherry Sherrod DuPree, Biographical Dictionary of African-American, Holiness-Pentecostals 1880–1990 (Washington, D.C.: Middle Atlantic Regional Press, 1989), 119–120; Vinson Synan, The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition: Charismatic Movements in the Twentieth Century, 2d ed. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1997), 162; and Alexander C. Stewart and Sherry Sherrod DuPree, eds., The Silent Spokesman: Bishop Robert Clarence Lawson (Gainesville, Fla.: Displays for Schools, 1994), 14–15. On relations with the Church of God in Christ in Columbus, see Lillian Brooks Coffey, ed., Year Book of the Church of God in Christ for the Year 1926 (Chicago: n.p., n.d.), 31–32. 4. DuPree, Biographical Dictionary of African-American, Holiness-Pentecostals 1880–1990, 120.
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5. Robert Clarence Lawson, The Anthropology of Jesus Christ Our Kinsman (New York: R. C. Lawson, 1927), 1–2, 29. 6. Ibid., i–ii, 28, 42. 7. Adolf Harnack, What Is Christianity? with an introduction by Rudolf Bultmann (New York: Harper and Row, 1957). 8. See Howard D. Gregg, History of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (Nashville: AMEC Sunday School Union, 1980), 12–29. See also Randall K. Burkett, Garveyism As a Religious Movement (Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press, 1978), 5. Lawson shared a number of concerns with Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). In particular, Lawson and Garvey both believed the times were ripe for Africa to take a new lead in world affairs, that Christ was black, and that religion in general was to be respected. On numerous points, however, including UNIA’s back-to-Africa message, Lawson seemed to disagree with Garvey. 9. Lawson, The Anthropology of Jesus Christ Our Kinsman, 29. 10. Ibid., ii, 28. 11. Ibid., ii, 28–29. 12. Ibid. The reference to Psalm 69 is a mistake. The verse Lawson refers to is actually Psalm 68:31. 13. Ibid., i. 14. Malcolm X, “Black Man’s History,” in The End of White Supremacy: Four Speeches by Malcolm X, ed. Benjamin Goodman (New York: Merlin House, 1971), 26–28. 15. Lawson, The Anthropology of Jesus Christ Our Kinsman, 2. 16. Ibid., 7–8, 13. 17. Ibid., 6, 9–11, 13, 17. Lawson did not believe that the great African civilizations of the world were limited to these ancient examples. He argued that a number of grand African civilizations continued to ®ourish after the end of antiquity. He mentioned in particular a “Negro empire” of more than 8 million people that ®ourished in the fourteenth century “around Lake Chad . . . [that] was the Rome of her day” and he added that “Melie and Sanghay, in Northwest Africa, and Yorula, Bernin of Banghirimi, Wadea, Darfur, Zeg-Zeg and Bornu” were also “great African States, whose civilizations were remarkable in their day” (10). However, he believed the great age of black rule was to be found in earliest antiquity. 18. Ibid., 3–4, 17–18. 19. Ibid., 13–14. 20. Ibid., 14–15. 21. Ibid., 21, 26. 22. Ibid., i. 23. Ibid., 30–32, 38–39. 24. Ibid., 32. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid., 21–22, 33. 27. Ibid., 34. 28. Ibid., 33. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid., 39. 31. Ibid., 39–40. 32. Ibid., 39–41. 33. Ibid., 34. Lawson knew that his mixed-race ideals were “out of gear with the philosophical and pseudo-scienti¤c teaching of the day, especially relative to the colored races in regard to miscegenation,” but he suggested that contrary to the
Notes to pages 281–297
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theory that interracial marriage “would deteriorate the white races . . . the Bible infers that it would be just the opposite.” Lawson was not simply proposing that Christ had to be multiracial in identity because of his special redemptive role, he was also suggesting that racial mixing and intermarriage was the best way to produce the strongest human beings. For many white Christians, the second part of Lawson’s argument would have been harder to accept than the ¤rst. 34. Ibid., 21–22. 35. Ibid., 23–25. 36. Ibid., 26–27. 37. Ibid., 26. 38. Ibid., 30, 41. 39. Ibid., 42. 6. Theology at the Boundaries of the Pentecostal Movement 1. See David Edwin Harrell, Jr., All Things Are Possible: The Healing and Charismatic Revivals in Modern America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975). 2. Donald W. Dayton, Theological Roots of Pentecostalism (Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press, 1987), 176. 3. Eunice M. Perkins, Joybringer Bosworth: His Life Story, 2d ed. (Detroit: Eunice M. Perkins, 1927), 17, 22. My biographical recounting of Bosworth’s life is based primarily on this work. Perkins was Bosworth’s daughter. 4. See R. M. Riss, “Fred Francis Bosworth,” in NIDPCM, 439–440; and Edith L. Blumhofer, Restoring the Faith: The Assemblies of God, Pentecostalism, and American Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 135–136. Blumhofer indicates that a number of other pentecostal leaders who had formerly been part of the Dowieite movement also resisted the notion that speaking in tongues was the necessary initial physical evidence of the baptism of the Spirit. She cites, in particular, William Hamner Piper, who was pastor of the famous Stone Church in Chicago (141n89). 5. Riss, “Fred Francis Bosworth”; and Harrell, All Things Are Possible, 15. 6. F. F. Bosworth, Christ the Healer: Sermons on Divine Healing (River Forest, Ill.: F. F. Bosworth, 1924), 63. 7. F. F. Bosworth, Meditations on the Ninety-¤rst Psalm (n.p., n.d.), 49–50. 8. Bosworth, Christ the Healer, 63–65. 9. Ibid., 4. 10. F. F. Bosworth, Meditations on the Twenty-Third Psalm (n.p.: F. F. Bosworth, n.d.), 20–21. 11. Bosworth, Christ the Healer, 1–2, 56–57. 12. Ibid., 34–35. Bosworth believed that Jesus’s own ministry re®ected the distinction between untimely death of the young and death at the end of a full life. Quoting Rev. P. Gavin Duffy, Bosworth said: “He has allotted to man a certain span of life, and His will is that that life shall be lived out. I want you to recall that all those [Christ] called back from the dead were young people who had not lived out their fulness of years” (Christ the Healer, 35). 13. Bosworth believed that God sometimes used sickness as a means of chastening believers. He wrote: “Does not God sometimes chasten His people through sickness? Decidedly yes! When we disobey God, sickness may be permitted, through the Father’s loving discipline; but God has told us just how it may be avoided and averted.” According to Bosworth, the way to avoid chastening illness was to judge oneself and follow a straight path of obedience to God’s will. He explained that illnesses of this kind were really means of grace, and they were removed as soon as
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Notes to pages 298–313
their corrective purpose had been accomplished. He wrote: “These chastenings come to save us from ¤nal judgment; but when we see the cause of the chastening, and turn from it, God promises it shall be withdrawn” (Christ the Healer, 57–58). 14. Ibid., 2, 16, 18, 23, 81–82. 15. Ibid., 7–8, 20. 16. Ibid., 6–7. 17. Ibid., 2; F. F. Bosworth, How to Receive Healing from Christ (n.p.: F. F. Bosworth, n.d.), 24. 18. Bosworth, Christ the Healer, 66, 103–105. 19. Ibid., 33, 41, 85. 20. Ibid., 33. 21. Ibid., 41–42. 22. Ibid., 58, 91. 23. Ibid., 92, 95–96. 24. Ibid., 98. 25. Ibid., 97–98. 26. Ibid., 99–101, 103. 27. Ibid., 98–99. 28. Ibid., 104. 29. Ibid., 102. 30. Ibid., 102, 108–109. 31. Ibid., 105. 32. F. F. Bosworth, Do All Speak in Tongues? (New York: The Christian Alliance Publishing Company, n.d.), 3–4, 20. 33. Ibid., 3, 5, 17. 34. Ibid., 23. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid., 1–2, 4, 14, 20, 22. 37. Ibid., 3, 6, 12–13. 38. Ibid., 4, 8–9. 39. Ibid., 1–2. I am dependent on the insights of Cecil M. Robeck, Jr., for the connection with Warren Faye Carothers (personal correspondence, December 18, 2002). 40. Ibid., 4, 17. 41. Ibid., 13, 15, 22. 42. Ibid., 15, 20. 43. Ibid., 13–14. 44. Ibid., 14–16. 45. Ibid., 16. 46. The “Word of Faith” movement is also called the “positive confession” movement or the “health and wealth” gospel. Its history goes back not only to Kenyon but also to some of the more extreme healing revivalists of the early and middle years of the twentieth century—people such as John G. Lake and William Branham. Its deepest roots go all the way back to the Phineas P. Quimby (1802–1866), who was the fountainhead of a variety of nineteenth-century healing movements. The basic premise of this movement is that God wants Christians to prosper in every aspect of their lives, including the areas of health and personal ¤nance, and that if Christians have suf¤cient faith to claim the divine promises in these areas of life they will never be sick or in need. Kenneth E. Hagin (b. 1917) began an itinerant ministry in 1949 espousing these views. What sets his position apart is that he has also claimed to have had a series of visions of Jesus Christ and that as a result of these
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visions he received new insight into the nature of God and new powers of spiritual discernment and healing. Hagin also stresses the importance of “personal prophecy” (also called “rhema”), by which he means that he has the power to convey special prophetic revelations from God to speci¤c individuals regarding what God wants those people to do or what God is going to do for them. Since 1978, Hagin has centered his work in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma (just outside Tulsa), where his Rhema Bible Training Center is also located. Hagin’s friends the televangelists Kenneth and Gloria Copeland are probably the most well-known contemporary promoters of this positive-confession style of Christian faith. 47. Scholarship dealing with the relationship between Kenyon and the pentecostal movement is both relatively thin and highly contested. Judith A. Matta’s The Born-Again Jesus of the Word-Faith Teachings (Fullerton, Calif.: Spirit of Truth Ministries, 1984) and D. R. McConnell’s A Different Gospel: A Historical and Biblical Analysis of the Modern Faith Movement (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1988) set a polemical tone that continues to echo throughout this scholarship. Seeking to distance the modern faith movement (led by people such as Kenneth Hagin) from the mainstream pentecostal movement, McConnell formulated a double argument: ¤rst, that Hagin and others relied on Kenyon for their basic theology and, second, that Kenyon was a heretical, cultic religious leader rather than an orthodox Christian or a pentecostal of any kind. According to McConnell, the only kind of in®uence Kenyon could have had on the pentecostal movement would have been decidedly negative. In his take-no-prisoners style of argument, McConnell stated: “Kenyon’s life and ministry were in®uenced heavily by his personal background in the metaphysical cults. Contrary to popular opinion, Kenyon was not a pentecostal, nor is the Faith gospel just another Pentecostal perversion. The gospel of the Faith movement is, in fact, a cultic in¤ltration of the Pentecostal and charismatic movements” (16). The most detailed scholarly treatment of Kenyon is Dale H. Simmons’s E. W. Kenyon and the Postbellum Pursuit of Peace, Power, and Plenty (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1997). Simmons’s presentation of Kenyon is rather more nuanced than McConnell’s and is well documented. The book’s basic argument is that Kenyon’s ideas were formed by “the interplay between the various evangelical and ‘cultic’ subcultures” (vii). As for his relationship to pentecostalism, Simmons says “although Kenyon was never a Pentecostal, his in®uence on this segment of Christianity is extensive” (ix), and he implies that Kenyon’s in®uence was not always negative. For example, Simmons argues that Kenyon in®uenced the theology of William Durham. He writes that “the earliest and most profound split among Pentecostals came as the result of William Durham’s sermons on ‘the Finished Work of Christ’—teachings that he apparently had received from Kenyon” (ix–x). While this is an interesting thesis and may well have merit, the evidence for this in®uence is not incontestable. The basis for Simmons’s contention is that Kenyon had been preaching a ¤nished-work view of the atonement for more than a decade before he ran into Durham during his visit to Chicago in 1907. Kenyon had a very positive reaction to Durham, describing him as “the highest and most scriptural type” of pentecostal he had ever met (quote on 292), and apparently Kenyon kept track of Durham’s rapidly rising career during the following years. However, it is dif¤cult to know exactly what friendship the two men had or precisely what kind of in®uence Kenyon exerted on the younger Durham. Simmons assumes that Kenyon, the older of the two men, exercised an obvious in®uence on Durham. He also says that Durham, who came from a Baptistic background similar to Kenyon’s, would likely have found it easy “to accept Kenyon’s emphasis on the Finished Work of Christ as op-
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posed to the Wesleyan second work of grace” (293). But Simmons offers no explanation about why Durham waited until 1910, three years after meeting Kenyon, to announce his ¤nished-work views. Simmons surmises that Kenyon and Durham actually had a continuing relationship, implying that Kenyon must have convinced Durham over time to accept his theological interpretation of the atonement, but there is scant evidence that such was the case. Simmons writes that “Kenyon returned to Chicago the following year [1908], spending the better part of the year preaching at Willard Hall, the Gospel Tabernacle, and so on” and adds that “although Kenyon does not mention it, he undoubtedly renewed his acquaintance with Durham during this period” (310). Simmons’s hunch in this matter may be correct, but I ¤nd it unnecessary either to make Kenyon’s in®uence on pentecostalism as direct and explicit (i.e., through Durham’s formal adoption of parts of Kenyon’s theology) or as narrow (seeing Durham as the primary gateway through which Kenyon in®uenced the early pentecostal movement) as Simmons does. R. M. Riss’s entry on Kenyon in the NIDPCM (819–820) suggests precisely that kind of broader and more diffuse in®uence, and he also interprets Kenyon’s theology in a more kindly light than most pentecostal commentators. While clearly declaring that Kenyon “was not a Pentecostal,” Riss says that Kenyon’s works were widely read by pentecostals, especially by Oneness pentecostals. As for Kenyon’s theology, Riss says that although Kenyon did hold some unusual, even unorthodox, views, overall he seems to have been quite orthodox, af¤rming the physical resurrection of the Christ, the preexistence of Christ, the virgin birth, and so forth. Riss implies that the negative label “cultic” should not be applied to Kenyon. We know very little about the relationship between Kenyon and Bosworth. Dale Simmons reports that Kenyon’s daughter told him that the two men met during one of Kenyon’s visits to Chicago, but she was unclear about when that meeting took place. Simmons suggests it was likely before 1910, since that was the year that Bosworth left Chicago for Dallas, though it could have been later. Simmons has also shown that several of Bosworth’s associates in Dallas had connections with Kenyon, so there clearly was some kind of relationship between the two men. How close or distant that relationship may have been we simply do not know. The only explicit reference to Kenyon in Bosworth’s works appears in the 1948 version of his Christ the Healer. At the end of Chapter 10, which is entitled “Our Confession,” Bosworth wrote: “Most of the thoughts expressed in this sermon I have brought together, by permission, from the writings of Rev. E. W. Kenyon, Author of ‘The Father and His Family,’ ‘The Wonderful Name of Jesus,’ ‘Two Kinds of Life,’ ‘Jesus the Healer,’ ‘In His Presence,’ ‘Two Kinds of Love,’ ‘Two Kinds of Faith,’ ‘Two Kinds of Righteousness,’ and ‘Kenyon’s Living Poems.’ Mr. Kenyon’s P.O. Address is, Box 145, Seattle, Wash.” F. F. Bosworth, Christ the Healer, 7th ed., revised and enlarged (Miami: Florence N. Bosworth, 1948), 156. Since we do not know when the two men met, it would be fruitless to speculate about how much Bosworth’s early theological writings might have been in®uenced by Kenyon’s views. It may also be the case that the two men simply discovered a similarity in their thinking at some point in their careers and that very little actual “in®uence” took place one way or another. 48. The bibliographical information in this section is drawn largely from Simmons, E. W. Kenyon and the Postbellum Pursuit of Peace, Power, and Plenty. 49. Ibid., 2. 50. George Müller (1805–1898) was born in Prussia but spent most of his adult life in England, where he was especially known for the orphanage he ran at Ashley Downs. One of the key points of Müller’s ministry was his decision to run his ministries wholly “on faith,” meaning that he refused to actively solicit funds to
Notes to pages 315–325
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support his work. See George Müller, The Life of Trust: Being a Narrative of the Lord’s Dealings with George Müller (New York: T. Y. Crowell, 1898). Charles Cullis (1833– 1892) was a New Englander holiness minister who specially stressed healing as part of his message. He operated Faith Training College in Boston and published numerous works related to healing, including Faith Cures: Or, Answers to Prayer in the Healing of the Sick (Boston: Willard Tract Repository, 1879). 51. Ibid., 22. 52. In 1923, the Bethel Bible College was relocated to Dudley, Massachusetts, and was renamed the Dudley Bible School. In 1929, the school moved to Barrington, Rhode Island, and eventually became Barrington College. In the early 1990s, Barrington College was forced to close its doors because of ¤nancial woes and a declining student body. Technically the school merged into Gordon College, located in Wenham, Massachusetts, but basically it ceased to exist. Today the old campus of Barrington College houses Zion Bible College, a pentecostal school founded by Ben Crandell. 53. E. W. Kenyon, The Father and His Family, 11th ed. (n.p.: Kenyon’s Gospel Publishing Society, 1964), 9. 54. Ibid., 11. 55. E. W. Kenyon, The Two Kinds of Knowledge (n.p.: Kenyon’s Gospel Publishing Society, 1942; originally published in the late 1920s), 7. 56. On the issue of limit-questions, see David Tracy, Blessed Rage for Order: The New Pluralism in Theology (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), especially Chapter 5, “The Religious Dimension of Common Human Experience and Language,” which deals with limit-questions in science. 57. Ibid., 6–7. 58. Ibid., 9. 59. Ibid., 8. 60. Ibid., 7–9; Kenyon, The Father and His Family, 16. 61. Reuben A. Torrey, The Christ of the Bible (New York: George H. Doran Co., 1924), 14. 62. Kenyon, The Father and His Family, 15, 17. 63. Ibid., 94. 64. E. W. Kenyon, New Creation Realities (Seattle: E. W. Kenyon, 1945), 30; E. W. Kenyon, What Happened from the Cross to the Throne (Seattle: E. W. Kenyon, 1945), 11, 146. 65. Kenyon, The Father and His Family, 10. Following the logic that humanity was the reason for creation, Kenyon argued that the earth existed only to be humanity’s home. Because humanity is important, humanity’s home planet was designated both the literal and symbolic center of the universe. Kenyon waxed almost poetic on this point, saying: “How it thrills the heart to realize that this Earth of ours, so small that one thousand of them can be lost in the sun, is the center and reason for the Universe” (The Father and His Family, 22). Kenyon said that God had taken millions of years to create the world and mold it to perfectly ¤t the needs of humanity. “Ages and ages He . . . worked storing up treasures of all kinds of wealth for His Man” (23). God deposited “uncounted varieties of metals, chemicals and resources” near the surface of the earth so that humankind could easily ¤nd them and extract them for its needs. He also provided domestic animals and a wide variety of plants, shrubs, vegetables and fruits to support human life (24–26). According to Kenyon, everything that existed did so for humanity’s sake. 66. Kenyon, The Father and His Family, 32, 46, 100; Kenyon, What Happened from the Cross to the Throne, 62. Emphasis mine.
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Notes to pages 326–334
67. Kenyon, The Father and His Family, 35, 181. 68. Ibid., 36. 69. Ibid., 114. 70. Ibid., 36, 38. 71. Ibid., 59–61, 63. 72. Ibid., 48. 73. Ibid., 41, 51, 85, 99, 111, 115, 141–142. Sometimes Kenyon did talk about Satan and spiritual death in a merely negative way, as an “absence of reality” rather than as a positive force for evil. (See, for example, What Happened from the Cross to the Throne, 61.) For the most part, however, Kenyon’s language clearly stated or implied that evil was a God-opposing force, a power that needed to be reckoned with, not a mere absence of godliness or goodness. 74. Kenyon, The Father and His Family, 36–37, 71, 196. 75. Kenyon, What Happened from the Cross to the Throne, 21. 76. Kenyon, The Father and His Family, 112–113, 115. 77. Ibid., 136, 192. 78. Ibid., 106. 79. Ibid., 104. 80. Ibid., 98, 104. Kenyon’s view of the virgin birth is very similar to that of R. C. Lawson. 81. Ibid., 124; E. W. Kenyon, Two Kinds of Faith: Faith’s Secret Revealed (Seattle: Kenyon’s Publishing Society, 1942), 110–112; Kenyon, New Creation Realities, 35. 82. Kenyon, The Father and His Family, 135. 83. Ibid., 118, 125–126. 84. Ibid., 130, 132, 135, 137, 212–213. In some of his later writings, especially in What Happened from the Cross to the Throne (which was written almost thirty years after The Father and His Family), Kenyon presented the story of Christ’s redeeming work in somewhat more dramatic terms. He described Christ’s agony in the Garden of Gethsemane as part of the dawning awareness that he would soon be “united with the Adversary” in spiritual death (33, 45). Kenyon said that this “anticipation of union with Spiritual Death was so hideous, so utterly unthinkable, that if the angels had not ministered, we do not know what would have happened” (34). Christ was well aware of the fact, however, that “He, and He alone must pay the penalty, or humanity would be eternally lost, and God, through eternity, would be childless” (33). He ¤xed his resolve and braced himself for the assault. Kenyon said that this “was not a weak submission to the inevitable. It was the Heroic Son of God facing humanity’s great need and crying to the Father, ‘Carry this thing through to completion and save the human race’” (33–34). Jesus approached the cross as humanity’s champion, ready to suffer everything necessary for humanity’s redemption. Kenyon declared: “He was there by Divine choice. He actually was made Sin with our Sin. He was God’s Substitute for the human race. When he was made Sin, He was turned over by God to the Adversary. . . . When Jesus died, His spirit was taken by the Adversary, and carried to the place where the sinner’s spirit goes when he dies” (47). In Hell, Christ “sank to the lowest depths. . . . The human mind cannot grasp it. There is not language that will describe” what Christ endured. Kenyon said: “We have nothing by which we can compare it.” When it was all over, however, Christ had survived, and the mighty spirit of God gave him new life and then raised him from the dead (63–64). Finally, Christ ascended to heaven, carrying “His blood into the Holy of Holies and [pouring] it out there as the red seal upon the documents of our redemption” (51). This rendition of redemption’s central drama does not necessarily contradict Kenyon’s earlier view, but it certainly ratchets up the emotional con-
Notes to pages 334–342
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401
tent and expands the details. It would be wrong to automatically read this more sensational version of things back into Kenyon’s earlier writings, but it does show the direction of his thought. Rather than becoming more mellow with age, he tended to become more radical. The consistent theme in all his writings, however, was that Christ’s spiritual suffering in hell, not his physical pain on the cross, won forgiveness for humanity. 85. Kenyon, The Father and His Family, 119. 86. Ibid., 119, 222. Kenyon explained that hell was also mandated by the fact that human beings were eternal by nature and that hell was an eternal prison to keep those eternal beings in check. He wrote: “Man is an Eternal Being. . . . If he dies a criminal, then he enters Eternity as an eternal criminal. There must be a prison; the criminals must be segregated. If they were permitted to roam indiscriminately through Eternity, they would demoralize the New Heavens and New Earth” (The Father and His Family, 74). Following the logic that people were sent to hell only on the basis of their explicit rejection of Christ, Kenyon believed that babies, who were not yet ready to make such a decision on their own, automatically went to heaven (The Father and His Family, 82). He was silent about the eternal fate of those who had never heard the gospel. 87. Gustaf Aulen, Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of Atonement, trans. A. G. Hebert (New York: Macmillan Company, 1957), 4. 88. Kenyon, The Father and His Family, 117, 124; E. W. Kenyon, The Wonderful Name of Jesus (n.p.: Kenyon’s Gospel Publishing Society, 1927), 9. 89. Kenyon, The Father and His Family, 150–151. 90. Ibid., 48, 116. 91. Ibid., 151, 222. 92. Ibid., 88–90, 150–151; Kenyon, Two Kinds of Faith, 90. 93. Kenyon, The Father and His Family, 153–154. 94. Ibid., 11, 225–226. 95. E. W. Kenyon, In His Presence, the Secret of Prayer: A Revelation of What We Are in Christ (Seattle: Kenyon’s Gospel Publishing Society, 1944), 86–87. 96. Kenyon, The Wonderful Name of Jesus, 74–75; Kenyon, What Happened from the Cross to the Throne, 103, 108. 97. Kenyon, The Wonderful Name of Jesus, 74; Kenyon, In His Presence, 88; Kenyon, The Father and His Family, 219. 98. Kenyon, The Father and His Family, 149. 99. Ibid., 138–139. The emphasis on virile Christianity in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American Christianity has been well documented. From the earliest years of the nation, women had outnumbered men in church membership. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, however, that lack of balance in numbers suddenly struck many male Christian leaders as a problem. One of the most common responses to this situation was for preachers and revivalists to emphasize the masculinity of Christianity in an attempt to attract more males to church, and to shy away from the sentimental language of faith that had been popular earlier. This masculinization of rhetoric affected virtually all sectors of Protestant Christianity, from the most conservative to the most liberal. Kenyon’s language is part of that larger pattern. On this development see Margaret Lamberts Bendroth, Fundamentalism and Gender, 1875 to the Present (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993), especially Chapter 1, “Revivalism and Masculinity in Early Fundamentalism,” 13–30. While the focus of Bendroth’s work is fundamentalism, she properly notes that “liberalism had no shortage of masculine rhetoric. The ideals of ‘muscular
402
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Notes to pages 342–355
Christianity’ transcended theological boundaries” (19). It should be added that a new emphasis on maleness was evident in almost all sectors of society at this time and was not limited to the churches. 100. Ibid., 150. 101. Ibid. 102. Ibid., 165–168. 103. Ibid., 161; E. W. Kenyon, The Bible in the Light of Our Redemption, edited and compiled by Ruth Kenyon Houseworth (n.p., n.d.), 263. 104. Kenyon, In His Presence, 124–125; Kenyon, New Creation Realities, 149. 105. Kenyon, In His Presence, 125. 106. Ibid., 126. 107. Ibid. 108. Kenyon, The Wonderful Name of Jesus, 48, 57. 109. Ibid., 11, 59; Kenyon, New Creation Realities, 114. 110. Kenyon, The Wonderful Name of Jesus, 20, 26; Kenyon, Two Kinds of Faith, 77–79. 111. Kenyon, The Wonderful Name of Jesus, 28. 112. Ibid., 55; Kenyon, The Father and His Family, 197. 113. Kenyon, The Wonderful Name of Jesus, 1, 55; Kenyon, The Father and His Family, 197–198; Kenyon, Two Kinds of Faith, 37, 60. 114. Kenyon, The Wonderful Name of Jesus, 66–67; Kenyon, The Father and His Family, 198. 115. E. W. Kenyon, Identi¤cation: A Romance in Redemption, 16th ed. (Seattle: Kenyon’s Gospel Publishing Society, 1968; originally published in 1941), 7. 116. Ibid., 6, 18, 23, 29–30. 117. Ibid., 31–33, 63; Kenyon, New Creation Realities, 73. 118. Kenyon, Identi¤cation, 41, 47; Kenyon, The Wonderful Name of Jesus, 50. 119. Identi¤cation, 60–61, 65–68; The Father and His Family, 182. 120. See Timothy Ware, The Orthodox Church (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1963), 29. 121. Ibid., 224. 122. Kenyon, In His Presence, 179. 123. Kenyon, Identi¤cation, 63. Conclusion 1. The literature on twentieth-century fundamentalism is immense, but in terms of the linkage between conservatism and church growth, a good place to start is Dean M. Kelly’s Why Conservative Churches Are Growing: A Study in the Sociology of Religion (New York: Harper and Row, 1972). Kelly’s basic thesis is that the primary appeal of religion is found in the meaning of life it provides and that more exclusive churches which require greater cognitive and moral demands from their members can provide this sense of meaning much more effectively than inclusive churches that are more liberal and less demanding in orientation. Kelly places pentecostals near the tip of the exclusivist end of the continuum of relative exclusivity versus relative inclusivity, in the same basic category as Black Muslims and Jehovah’s Witnesses. It is important to note that most scholars who describe pentecostalism as a form of fundamentalism do so because they are operating, consciously or not, within what can be called a “two-party” theory of American Protestantism. According to this view, virtually all Protestant thinkers and organizations represent one of two distinct Protestant subgroups. Some groups ¤t within a fundamentalist/evangelical/ conservative paradigm; others are de¤ned as falling more or less into the modernist/
Notes to pages 358–364
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403
liberal/progressive camp. If it is assumed that those are the only two categories available, it might make sense to locate pentecostals on the conservative, fundamentalist side of things, but there is no need to be locked into that kind of restrictive twoparty thinking. For a detailed analysis and critique of the two-party model, see Douglas Jacobsen and William Vance Trollinger, Jr., eds., Re-Forming the Center: American Protestantism, 1900 to the Present (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1998). 2. Charles Fox Parham, Kol Kare Bomidbar: A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (1902; Reprint, Baxter Springs, Kans.: Robert L. Parham, 1944), 66. 3. Richard G. Spurling, The Lost Link (Turtletown, Tenn.: R. G. Spurling, 1920), 22; untitled, Apostolic Faith 1, no. 7 (April 1907): 3; Esek William Kenyon, Identi¤cation: A Romance in Redemption, 16th ed. (Seattle: Kenyon’s Gospel Publishing Society, 1968), 63. 4. See Douglas Jacobsen, “Knowing the Doctrines of Pentecostals: The Scholastic Theology of the Assemblies of God, 1930–55,” in Pentecostal Currents in American Protestantism, ed. Edith L. Blumhofer, Russell P. Spittler, and Grant Wacker (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 90–107. 5. George Floyd Taylor, The Second Coming of Jesus (Falcon, N.C.: Falcon Publishing Company, 1916), 121; Parham, Kol Kare Bomidbar, 118. 6. Douglas Clyde Macintosh, The Problem of Religious Knowledge (New York: Harper and Row, 1940), 195–196. 7. David Wesley Myland, The Latter Rain Covenant and Pentecostal Power with Testimony of Healings and Baptism (Chicago: Evangel Publishing House, 1910), 56. 8. Robert Clarence Lawson, The Anthropology of Jesus Christ Our Kinsman (New York: R. C. Lawson, 1927), ii; Joseph Hillary King, From Passover to Pentecost, 2d ed. (Franklin Springs, Ga.: Publishing House of the Pentecostal Holiness Church, 1934), 292. 9. Harvey Cox, Fire from Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1995), 81, 117. 10. Cox, Fire from Heaven, 304–305. Grant Wacker’s insightful analysis of early-twentieth-century pentecostal culture supports this view. Wacker suggests that the genius of pentecostalism was to be found precisely in its unique blend of what he calls “the primitive and the pragmatic.” He explains: “The genius of the pentecostal movement lay in its ability to hold [these] two seemingly incompatible impulses in productive tension.” See Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 10. 11. Parham, Kol Kare Bomidbar, 12.
BIBLIOGR A PH Y Anderson, Robert M. Vision of the Disinherited: The Making of American Pentecostalism. Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson Publishers, 1979. Barkun, Michael. Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement. Rev. ed. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Barrett, David B., George T. Kurian, and Todd M. Johnson. World Christian Encyclopedia. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Bendroth, Margaret Lamberts. Fundamentalism and Gender, 1875 to the Present. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993. Blumhofer, Edith L. Restoring the Faith: The Assemblies of God, Pentecostalism, and American Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Blumhofer, Edith L., and Randall Balmer. Modern Christian Revivals. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Blumhofer, Edith L., Russell P. Spittler, and Grant A. Wacker, eds. Pentecostal Currents in American Protestantism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999. Bosworth, F. F. Christ the Healer: Sermons on Divine Healing. River Forest, Ill.: F. F. Bosworth, 1924. 1. Do All Speak in Tongues? New York: The Christian Alliance Publishing Company, n.d. 1. How to Receive Healing from Christ. n.p.: F. F. Bosworth, n.d. 1. Meditations on the Ninety-¤rst Psalm. n.p., n.d. 1. Meditations on the Twenty-Third Psalm. n.p.: F. F. Bosworth, n.d. Boyd, Frank M. The Kenosis (Self-Emptying) of the Lord Jesus Christ. San Francisco: Frank M. Boyd, 1947. Burgess, Stanley M., Gary B. McGee, and Patrick H. Alexander. Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1988. Burgess, Stanley M., and Eduard M. van der Maas. The New International Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements. Rev. and expanded ed. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 2002. Callahan, Leslie Dawn. “Fleshly Manifestations: Charles Fox Parham’s Quest for the Sancti¤ed Body.” Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2002. Cullis, Charles. Faith Cures: Or, Answers to Prayer in the Healing of the Sick. Boston: Willard Tract Repository, 1879. Dayton, Donald W. Theological Roots of Pentecostalism. Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press, 1987. Dieter, Melvin Easterday. The Holiness Revival of the Nineteenth Century. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1980. DuPree, Sherry Sherrod. Biographical Dictionary of African-American, Holiness-Pentecostals, 1880–1990. Washington, D.C.: Middle Atlantic Regional Press, 1989.
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1. From Passover to Pentecost. 2d ed. Franklin Springs, Ga.: Publishing House of the Pentecostal Holiness Church, 1934. King, Joseph H., with Blanche L. King. Yet Speaketh: Memoirs of the Late Bishop Joseph H. King. Franklin Springs, Ga.: Publishing House of the Pentecostal Holiness Church, 1949. LaBerge, Agnes N. O. What God Hath Wrought. Chicago: Herald Publishing Company, 1921. Land, Steven J. Pentecostal Spirituality: A Passion for the Kingdom. Shef¤eld: Shef¤eld Academic Press, 1993. Lawson, R. C. The Anthropology of Jesus Christ Our Kinsman. New York: R. C. Lawson, 1927. Mason, Charles H. Year Book of the Church of God in Christ for the Year 1926. Compiled by Lillian Brooks Coffey. n.p.: Chicago, n.d. McConnell, D. R. A Different Gospel: A Historical and Biblical Analysis of the Modern Faith Movement. Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1988. McPherson, Aimee Semple. This Is That: Personal Experiences, Sermons and Writings. Los Angeles: Echo Park Evangelistic Association, 1923. Matta, Judith A. The Born-Again Jesus of the Word-Faith Teachings. Fullerton, Calif.: Spirit of Truth Ministries, 1984. Martin, Larry. The Life and Ministry of William J. Seymour and a History of the Azusa Street Revival. Joplin, Mo.: Christian Life Books, 1999. Menand, Louis. The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001. Mills, Watson E. Speaking in Tongues: A Guide to Research on Glossolalia. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1986. Müller, George. The Life of Trust: Being a Narrative of the Lord’s Dealings with George Müller. New York: T. Y. Crowell, 1898. Murray, Frank S. The Sublimity of Faith: The Life and Work of Frank W. Sanford. Amherst, N.H.: Kingdom Press, 1981. Myland, D. Wesley. The Latter Rain Covenant and Pentecostal Power with Testimony of Healings and Baptism. Chicago: Evangel Publishing House, 1910. 1. The Revelation of Jesus Christ: A Comprehensive Harmonic Outline and Perspective View of the Book. Chicago: Evangel Publishing House, 1911. Nelson, Shirley. Fair, Clear, and Terrible: The Story of Shiloh, Maine. Albany, N.Y.: British American Publishing, 1989. Noble, E. Myron, ed. Like As of Fire: Newspapers from the Azusa Street World Wide Revival. Compiled by Fred T. Corum and Rachel A. Harper Sizelove. Washington, D.C.: Middle Atlantic Regional Press, 1991. Owens, Robert R. Speak to the Rock: The Azusa Street Revival, Its Roots and Its Message. New York: University Press of America, 1998. Parham, Charles F. The Everlasting Gospel. Baxter Springs, Kans.: Charles F. Parham, [1911]. 1. Kol Kare Bomidbar: A Voice Crying in the Wilderness. 1902. Reprint, Baxter Springs, Kans.: Robert L. Parham, 1944. Parham, Sarah E. The Life of Charles F. Parham, Founder of the Apostolic Faith Movement. Joplin, Mo.: Hunter Printing Company, 1930. Reprint, New York: Garland Publishing, 1985. Perkins, Eunice M. Joybringer Bosworth: His Life Story. 2d ed. Detroit: Eunice M. Perkins, 1927. Reed, David Arthur. “Origins and Development of the Theology of Oneness Pentecostalism in the United States.” Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 1978.
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Richardson, Cyril C. The Doctrine of the Trinity. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1958. Samarin, William J. Tongues of Men and Angels: The Religious Language of Pentecostalism. New York: Macmillan, 1972. Sayers, Dorothy L. Creed or Chaos? Manchester, N.H.: Sophia Institute Press, 1949. Seymour, W. J. The Doctrines and Discipline of the Azusa Street Apostolic Faith Mission of Los Angeles, Cal. with Scripture Readings. Los Angeles: William J. Seymour, 1915. Simmons, Dale H. E. W. Kenyon and the Postbellum Pursuit of Peace, Power, and Plenty. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1997. Spurling, R. G. The Lost Link. Turtletown, Tenn.: R. G. Spurling, 1920. Stewart, Alexander C., and Sherry Sherrod DuPree. The Silent Spokesman: Bishop Robert Clarence Lawson. Gainesville, Fla.: Displays for Schools, 1994. Synan, Vinson. “George Floyd Taylor: Con®icts and Crowns.” In Portraits of a Generation: Early Pentecostal Leaders, ed. James Goff and Grant Wacker. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2002. 1. The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition: Charismatic Movements in the Twentieth Century. 2d ed. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1997. Taylor, G. F. The Rainbow. Franklin Springs, Ga.: Advocate Press, 1924. 1. The Second Coming of Jesus. Falcon, N.C.: Falcon Publishing Company, 1916. 1. The Spirit and the Bride: A Scriptural Presentation of the Operations, Manifestations, Gifts and Fruit of the Holy Spirit in His Relation to the Bride with Special Reference to the “Latter Rain” Revival. Dunn, N.C.: George F. Taylor, 1907. Tracy, David. Blessed Rage for Order: The New Pluralism in Theology. New York: Seabury Press, 1975. Urshan, Andrew D. The Almighty God in the Lord Jesus Christ. Los Angeles: Andrew D. Urshan, 1919. 1. Apostolic Faith Doctrine of the New Birth. [Chicago]: [Andrew D. Urshan, ca. 1910]. 1. The Doctrine of the New Birth or the Perfect Way to Eternal Life. Cochrane, Wis.: Witness of God, 1921. 1. The Life Story of Andrew bar David Urshan. Stockton, Calif.: Apostolic Press, 1967. 1. My Study of Modern Pentecostals. n.p., 1923. Reprint, Portland, Ore.: Apostolic Book Publishers, 1981. 1. The Supreme Need of the Hour and the Source of Mighty Revivals. n.p., 1923. Reprint, Portland, Ore.: Apostolic Book Publishers, 1990. 1. Timely Messages of Comfort. n.p., 1918. Reprint, Portland, Ore.: Apostolic Book Corner, 1973. Wacker, Grant. Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001. Warner, Wayne. The Woman Evangelist: The Life and Times of Charismatic Evangelist Maria B. Woodworth-Etter. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1986. Wilson, Charles Reagan. Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause. Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1980. Woodworth-Etter, Maria. A Diary of Signs and Wonders. n.p., 1916. Reprint, Tulsa, Okla.: Harrison House, n.d.
I NDE X Abel, 30, 107 Abraham, 229, 281 Adam, 30, 31, 39, 41 107, 177–178, 186, 217, 221, 276–277, 279, 281, 296, 325–330, 332–333, 338 Adamic race (vs. sixth-day people), 29–31 Africa, 36, 269, 271–272, 394n17 African-Americans, 19, 63, 65, 79, 260–264, 266–267, 270, 283 Afrocentrism, 269–270 Allen, Richard, 266 altar theology, 182, 184–185 amateur theologians (early pentecostals as), 8 Anderson, Robert, 366n5, 377n1, 393n2 angels, 37–38, 106, 325, 328 —fall of, 106–107, 229, 327–328 Anglo-Saxon (Nordic) race, 32, 34, 271, 273, 283, 324, 370n33 animal sacri¤ce, 214, 330 annihilationism, 22, 39–40 anointing that abideth, 47, 68 anointings of the Spirit, 16, 24, 46– 47, 71, 90, 92, 187 antichrist, 36–38, 43, 45, 107, 108– 109, 146 anthropology (human nature) —human spirit, 41, 218, 222, 325 —image/likeness of (similarity to) God, 178, 216, 296, 325, 328–350 —satanic nature after fall, 328 —soul, 217–220, 222 —tripartite character (body, soul, spirit), 121–23, 325
anti-institutionalism, 149, 165, 287 apostolic faith (as designation of pentecostal movement), 18–19, 26– 27, 267 apostles (disciples), 34, 46–47, 159, 171–172, 222, 225, 350 —baptism of the Spirit, 246 —never spoke in tongues, 310 —salvation of, 181 appropriating faith, 300–303 Armageddon, 38, 109 Arminianism, 157, 391, 375n48, 391n107 Arroyo Seco meeting (1913), 194, 239 asceticism, 250–253 Assemblies of God, 136, 141, 195, 199, 239, 241, 255, 261–262, 290, 293, 316, 354, 358 Athanasius, 350 atonement, 177–178, 213, 274–276, 296–299, 302, 335–336 Aulen, Gustaf, 388n34 Azusa Street Mission, 2, 10, 16, 54– 55, 57–59, 63–65, 68–85, 110– 111, 138, 140, 198, 201, 260, 261, 263, 284, 293, 316, 373n15, 373–374n19 —Apostolic Faith, The, 59, 61, 64–67, 70, 72, 75–77, 79–84, 260 Babylon, 36–37, 108, 109, 272–273 backslider, 21–22, 236, 253 Baer, Hans, 393n3 baptism of the Spirit —and/or baptism of ¤re, 17, 186– 188, 191, 385n112 —coterminous with conversion and
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Index
sancti¤cation, 221–223, 241, 247, 391n109. See also new birth —as eschatological empowerment, 44–50 —evidence/signs/manifestations/marks of, 74–80, 94–98, 103, 130–132, 159–162, 188–191, 243–244, 288–289, 306–312. See also tongues —following conversion, 154, 158–160 —following conversion and sancti¤cation, 70–73, 90–94, 174, 186–188 —and gifts of Spirit, 98–100, 128, 162–163, 224 —losing and regaining, 73 —partial experience of, 17, 112, 115– 116, 118, 188–189, 289 —pentecostal fullness (as alternative label of experience), 117–118, 120–123, 127 —personal experiences of, 1, 2, 4, 9, 62–63, 138, 168, 237 —possessed by Adam, 217 —as understood by Kenyon, 337, 344–345 baptism in water, 155–156, 195–196, 204, 222–224, 236, 381 —in Jesus’s name, 150, 195, 199, 204, 222–223, 239, 245 —as necessary for salvation, 222, 224, 242–243 Baptists, 17–18, 50, 56, 86, 138, 164, 198, 267, 287, 314, 318, 359, 363, 366n5 Barkun, Michael, 370n33 Barrett, David B., 365n1 begettal (vs. birth of the Spirit), 220– 221, 245 Bendroth, Margaret Lamberts, 401– 402n99 Bible (interpretation of ), 20, 96, 111, 170–171, 180–181, 205, 238 birth of the Spirit, 176, 195, 221– 223, 225 —as experienced by Christians in the past, 389n74 blood of Christ, 157–158, 219
bloodless religion, 107–108, 318 Blumhofer, Edith L., 366–367n5, 367n1, 372n2, 379n3, 381n42, 395n4 Boas, Franz, 271 Book of Discipline of the AME Church, 59, 72, 373n19 born again (into satanic nature), 328, 338 Bosworth, Fred Francis, 14, 194, 316, 319, 343, 354, 360, 398n47 —biography, 290–294 —Do All Speak in Tongues? 293– 294, 305 —fall, the, and sickness and death, 296–298, 395n12, 395–396n13 —God’s love vs. God’s power, 294–295 —healing and appropriating faith, 298–305 —tongues, 305–313 Boyd, Frank, 93, 375n49 Bride (of Christ), 44–46, 90, 102– 105, 125–127, 230 British Israelism, 369–370n33, 370n35 Bryant, W. F., 51 Cain, 30, 107, 229 call to ministry, 21, 113, 165, 314 Callahan, Leslie Dawn, 369n25 Calvin (Calvinism), 54, 165, 182– 183, 391 Canaanites, 272, 282 capacity for the Spirit, 93 Carothers, Warren Faye, 309 Cashwell, Gaston B., 59, 84, 87, 167–168 Catholicism, 9, 53, 113, 256, 287, 322, 351, 390n85 celibacy, 241, 382n68 charismatic movement, 9, 286–287 Christ —divinity of, 208, 211–213, 215, 255, 384–385n90 —humanity of, 212–213, 215, 384– 385n90 —redemptive work of, 213–215, 277– 284, 330–336, 341, 349, 390–
Index 391n97, 400–401n84. See also return of Christ Christian & Missionary Alliance, 23, 60, 114–116, 376n90 Christian experience (sequence of ) —single event (conversion, sancti¤cation, and baptism of the Spirit merged into one), 221–222, 241–247 —three-step pattern (conversion, sancti¤cation, baptism of the Spirit), 41–42, 46–47, 68–73, 90–92, 118–123, 135–136, 164, 174–187, 247, 384n86 —two-step pattern (conversion followed by baptism of the Spirit), 135–136, 139, 153–158, 164, 247, 337–345 Christian Union, 51, 54 Christus victor, 215, 335–336 Church of God (Anderson, Ind.), 61 Church of God (Cleveland, Tenn.), 50– 51, 54–55, 135, 262 Church of God in Christ, 264 Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ, 264 Coffey, Lillian Brooks, 393n3 Conn, Charles W., 371n71, 372n80, 393n2 consecration, 184–186 conversion, 41, 69, 154–156, 158, 174–182, 186 —“real,” 242 Cox, Harvey, 6–7, 361–362 Crawford, Florence, 65 creation, 28, 107, 226–229 —age of earth, 106, 226, 376n81 —of humanity, 29–31, 229, 325, 369n25 —ongoing process of human creation, 325–326 —world created for sake of humanity, 228, 399n65 creeds, 24, 53–54, 66–67, 357– 358, 363 crisis (at end of age), 102, 141–142, 145–146, 229–230 Cook, Glenn, 198–199
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Crumpler, Abner Blackmon, 86–87 Cullis, Charles, 64, 315, 399n50 Darwin, Charles, 321–322 David, king of Israel, 33, 275, 277, 282, 368n21 Dayton, Donald, 3, 288, 368n5, 374n23 death —as result of the fall, 214, 218, 242, 296–297 —spiritual death, 242, 328–329, 339, 349, 400nn73,84 death of sinful self (self-life, “old man,” etc.), 114, 119–120, 163, 180, 237, 250–251. See also sancti¤cation dei¤cation, 242, 350–351 demons, 48, 108, 146, 276, 325, 329 —territorial, 329 depression, 237 devil. See Satan Dieter, Melvin Easterday, 367n5 disease (as God’s chastening), 395– 396n13 dinosaurs, 228–229 disciples. See apostles Dixon, A. C., 236, 238, 380n20 doctrine, 5, 66, 67, 68, 161, 232–233. See also truth —age of doctrine past, 351–352 doubt, 171–172, 347 Dowie, John Alexander, 17, 23, 26– 27, 292, 367n1 DuPree, Sherry Sherrod, 393n3 Durham, William, 1, 14, 64, 169, 173, 177, 184, 193, 237, 313, 316, 354, 356, 378–379n3, 380n20, 381n48, 397–398n47 —biography, 136–141 —criticism of holiness theology, 151–153 —Pentecostal Testimony, 141, 378–379n3 —theology of the ¤nished work of Christ 153–158 —tongues and the baptism of the Spirit, 158–165
412
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Index
—view of pentecostal movement, 145–151 —views of contemporary Christianity, 141–145 —The Work of Christ and the Holy Ghost, 141 Eastern Orthodox theology, 188, 351 Eber, 108 egalitarianism, 55, 79–80, 106, 260– 261, 363, 377n125 Egypt, 108, 269, 272–273 ekklesia/eklektoi, 118 Elijah (as prophetic ¤gure), 18, 44 emotions/affections, 97–98, 121, 251–252 empirical realities of Christian life, 112, 119, 156, 360–361 empirical theology movement, 359–361 eschatology, 34–50, 80–85, 101–110, 123–127, 145–146, 154, 159, 192–193, 229–232, 254 essentially contested concept, 11–12 Ethiopia, 268–269, 271, 273 evangelism, 25–26, 44, 49, 101, 104– 105, 110, 130–131, 139, 163, 307, 392n116 Eve, 39, 107, 186, 213–214, 216–218, 229, 242, 276–277, 325–328, 330 evil spirits. See demons Ewart, Frank J., 15, 140, 196, 199 experience —misnaming of, 157 —mystical/ecstatic, 24, 115–116, 165, 169 —no need for dramatic, 344–345 —and theology, 3–5, 119, 156–157, 169, 183–185, 243 experimentalists, 362 faith, 303–305, 307, 311–312, 351 Falcon Bible School, 88, 168 fall, the, 30, 41, 177, 186, 213–214, 227, 229, 242, 276, 296, 322, 326–330, 338 —as process (vs. immediate event), 217–218, 328, 388n41
—as result of high treason against God, 327 false doctrine, 27, 141, 150–151, 202, 233, 252, 383n84 false religion, 107–109, 144 fanaticism, 27, 43–44, 147–148, 170, 238, 356 Farrow, Lucy, 62 fatherhood of God and brotherhood of man, 266–267, 361 Faupel, D. William, 368n3, 378n1 fellowship (with God), 187, 325, 339–341 feminine imagery of God, 295 ¤nal judgment, 39, 40, 230 ¤nished-work theology, 134, 135, 144– 145, 154–155, 165, 173, 182, 183–184, 243, 354, 385n106, 397–398n47 Fire Baptized Holiness Association (Church), 167–168, 170 ®aming sword theory of atonement, 213–215 Flower, J. Roswell, 15 formalists/formalism, 34, 43, 147, 240 fossils, 31, 229, 321 Franklin Springs Institute (Emmanuel College), 88–89 Friedman, Michael, 370n33 fruits of the Spirit, 98–99, 244 fullness of God, 60, 91, 93–94, 117– 118, 127–128, 224, 242, 250 fundamentalism, 28, 143–144, 238, 299, 323–324, 355–359, 362, 380n20, 392n124, 401n99, 402– 403n1 Gallie, William, 11–12 Garvey, Marcus, 267, 394n8 gender roles, 79, 264, 327, 342, 377–378n125, 382n63, 401– 402n99 gifts of the Spirit, 98–101, 129, 146, 161–162, 189–190, 224, 287, 307–309, 312–313, 356 “God liquidized,” 1, 122 Goff, James, 28, 368n6
Index good vs. evil (battle in human history), 107–110, 229–230 Goodman, Felicitas D., 367n7 Goss, Howard, 15 Gregg, Howard D., 394n8 Guyon, Madam, 42 Hagin, Kenneth E., 313, 396–397n46 halfway Christians, 245–246 Ham (Hamitic race), 271–274, 282–283 Hardin, Benjamin Irwin, 87 Harnack, Adolph, 266 Harrell, David Edwin, 395n1 Hayde, Estella, 292 Haywood, Gar¤eld T., 14, 196– 232, 234, 245, 259, 264, 358, 386–387n11, 388n41, 389nn71,74 —biography, 198–200 —Christology, 211–216 —fall, the, and human sin, 216–219 —godhead, 205–211 —history and eschatology, 225–232 —salvation, 219–225 —tradition and revelation, 200–205 healing, 22, 41, 47–48, 64, 112, 114– 116, 146, 162, 287, 292, 296– 305, 315, 346–348, 356, 370– 371n52, 375n44 —how to obtain, 300–305 —natural power of body to heal itself, 297, 304–305, 328 heathen, 178, 231, 324 heaven, 36, 39–40, 64, 82, 103, 111, 125, 192, 334 hell, 22, 39–40, 67, 334–336, 401n86 higher criticism of Bible, 142, 203, 226, 240, 323–324, 356, 379n17, 393n124 Holiness Church (of North Carolina), 86–87 holiness/higher life movements, 366– 367n5 holiness pentecostalism. See King, Joseph Hillary; Taylor, George F. Hollenweger, Walter T., 369n25
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Holy Spirit (see also baptism of the Spirit) —¤lling of the Spirit, 91, 93, 158, 237, 241, 243, 285, 289, 337, 343–345 —lacking a body, 95 —operations of, 90–92, 94–95 —“with” a person (vs. “in” a person), 246 homo-thumadon, 131 human nature. See anthropology identi¤cation (oneness) with Christ, 41, 135, 155, 348–351 incarnation, 211, 213, 221, 256, 280, 331, 335 —including all races, 279–281, 283 —involving change in Godhead, 278, 331 innocence of children, 127, 177–178, 401n86 intellect (a problem), 122 interpretation (of tongues), 74, 128, 189–190 Irwin, Benjamin Hardin, 17, 167, 368n1 Jacobsen, Douglas, 403nn1,4 James, William, 365–366n3 Japheth ( Japhethite race), 271–273, 282–283 Jehovah titles (of God), 207 Jerusalem, 36, 45, 110 Jesus (historical ¤gure), 33–34, 41, 52, 156, 181, 212, 222, 225, 298, 303, 332–333, 336, 361 —historical Christ versus essential Christ, 178, 361 —as mixed race model of humanity, 281, 284 —needed to experience baptism of Spirit, 92–93 —“strange Galilean,” 332 Jesus-only pentecostalism. See Oneness pentecostalism “Jesusized,” 349
414
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Index
Jews/Judaism, 35–36, 45, 52, 170– 171, 230, 273–274, 283 John of Damascus, 351 Jones, Charles Edwin, 367n5 joy, 72, 222, 225, 252, 254, 291, 340 Judah, 282 Judas (as antichrist), 36–37 justi¤cation, 69–73, 90–92, 95, 176 —“a little bit of,” 112 Kelly, Dean M., 402n1 kenosis, 93 Kenyon, Esek William, 14, 290, 313, 358, 380–381n42, 397–398n47, 399n65, 400n73, 400–401n84, 401n86 —biography, 314–319 —law of identi¤cation with Christ, 348–352 —legal rights of believers, 341–348 —new birth, 337–341 —views of creation, fall, and redemption, 325–336 —ways of knowing, 320–325 King, Joseph Hillary, 85, 88, 136, 360–361, 382nn63,67, 382– 383n68, 383nn76,84, 383– 384n85, 384n86, 384–385n90, 385nn106,112, 386n127 —biography, 164–169 —criticism of other theological positions, 182–186 —experience, hermeneutics, and religious con®ict, 169–174 —initial and full salvation, 174–182 —tongues and the baptism of the Spirit, 186–193 kingdom of God vs. kingdom of heaven, 245–246 kinsman redeemer (Christ as), 275–280 Ku Klux Klan, 261, 283, 382n62 LaCugna, Mary, 387n22 lamb slain before the foundation of the world, 227, 333 Land, Steven J., 6 landmark movement, 56, 372n82
latter rain, 85, 111, 125, 130 laughing in the Spirit, 98, 291 Lawson, Bishop Robert C., 14, 313, 394nn8,17, 394–395n33 —anti-racist theology of the atonement, 274–285 —biography, 263–265 —racial history of the world, 270–274 —racism and faith, 265–270 legal rights of Christians (before God), 279, 336, 341–348 liberalism, 143–144, 320, 361, 390 Lost Cause, 164, 382n62 love, 52, 55–56, 67, 71–72, 79–80, 132, 240, 263, 275–276, 327 —God’s love of humankind, 221, 294– 295, 301, 342, 352 —as “heart service,” 130 —and racism, 267–269, 274 —as sign of baptism of the Spirit, 79– 80, 130 Lucifer. See Satan Lum, Clara, 59, 61, 65, 372n2 Luther, Martin, 34, 54, 64, 102, 389n74 Macintosh, Douglas Clyde, 359–360 Malcolm X, 270, 394n14 Man-Child, 44–46, 82 marriage, 65, 79, 151, 241, 251–252, 337, 340 Matta, Judith A., 397n47 Mason, Charles H., 15, 261 McConnell, D. R., 397n47 McPherson, Aimee Semple, 14, 17, 316 medicine, 22, 131, 299, 371n52 Menand, Louis, xii, 365–366n3, 369n25 mental assenters, 347 merely converted (justi¤ed, regenerated), 21, 41, 71–72, 230–231 Methodism, 17, 22, 56, 86–87, 113– 115, 138–139, 164–167, 170, 198, 266–267, 287, 291–292, 314, 359, 363 middle class, 383n76 millennium, 35, 38–39, 83, 104, 109, 125, 216, 230, 299
Index Mills, Watson E., 367n7 Milton, John, 326 ministerial training (in local congregation), 149–150 miracles, 92, 142, 144, 146, 162, 305, 315, 356 miscegenation, 269, 281, 284, 369n29, 394–395n33 modernists, 144, 295, 301, 355–356. See also liberalism Moody, Dwight, 35, 236, 315 Moore (Seymour), Jenny, 65 Moses, 45, 212, 214, 277 Müller, George, 315, 398–399n50 Murray, Frank S., 367n1 Myland, David Wesley, 1–2, 14, 16– 17, 60, 110–112, 162, 174, 180, 215, 289, 360, 377n110, 377– 378n125 —biography, 113–117 —eschatology, 123–127 —fullness of the Spirit (how to obtain), 120–123 —pentecostal fullness, 117–120 —tongues and other manifestations of the Spirit, 127–132 Name (of Jesus), 207–208, 215, 222, 239–240, 257–258, 345–346 —effortless use of Name, 346–347 —power of the Name, 258, 343, 345–346 Nestorian Christianity/theology, 235, 256, 384–385n90, 390n85 Nelson, Douglas, 372–373n7 Nelson, Shirley and Rudy, 367n1 new birth, 221, 223–224, 234, 241– 250, 254, 323–324, 328, 390 —many future new births, 192 —vital and legal dimensions of, 337– 339, 341–343 New Issue, 195, 234, 239, 255 New Jerusalem, 110, 192, 231 Nicea (Council of ), 53 Nimrod, 107–109, 272 Noah, 31, 159, 271, 303 Noble, E. Myron, 372n3
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occult, 35, 42 Onan, 282 oneness of the Godhead, 132, 195, 205–211, 224, 239–240, 255– 258, 331, 346 —complexity within, 205–206, 256–257 —proto-Oneness views, 150 Oneness pentecostalism, 15, 134– 135, 262, 358. See also Haywood, Gar¤eld T.; Urshan, Andrew David orthopathy, 6 orthodox (traditional) theology criticized, 29, 31, 33, 39, 233, 234, 320, 351, 357–358 Osborne, T. C., 287, 294 Owens, Robert R., 373n7 Ozman (LaBerge), Agnes N., 25, 368n18 Parham, Charles, 4–5, 14, 18–19, 54–56, 58, 60, 62, 64, 68, 73–74, 77, 83, 97, 162, 193, 261, 288–289, 292, 309, 351, 357–359, 363, 368–369n21, 369nn25,29, 369–370n33, 370nn35,39, 370–371n52, 371nn54,57, 372n81 —baptism of the Holy Spirit, 46–48 —biography, 20–28 —eschatology, 35–40, 44–46 —Kol Kare Bomidbar: A Voice Crying in the Wilderness, 18, 26 —sancti¤cation, 41–43 —tongues, 48–50 —view of creation, 28–29 —views on race, 29–34 patience, 123, 193 Pearlman, Myer, 5 Pentecostal Assemblies of the World (PAW), 196, 198, 241, 262, 264 Pentecostal Holiness Advocate, The, 88, 187 Pentecostal Holiness Church, 88–89, 136, 168–169 pentecostal movement (pentecostalism)
416
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Index
—de¤ned, 8–12 —fragmentation of, 10–11, 134–135, 200–201 —fuzzy boundaries of, 8–12, 286– 290, 313–314, 319–320 —possibility of its being rejected by God, 201–202, 268, 285 —pruning of, 240 —tensions/disputes within, 147–153, 307, 313, 316–317, 358 pentecostal theology (distinctive style of ), 5–8 perichoresis, 209 perilous time, 85, 106, 232 Perkins, Eunice M., 395n3 persecution, 101, 146, 192, 225, 240, 249, 252–253 Pethrus, Lewi, 3–5, 9 Piper, William Hamner, 112 plerosis, 93 poor, the, 23, 130, 260–261, 273 postmillennialism, 43, 392 power (conferred by Spirit) —greater than Jesus, 224, 333 —to heal, 47–48, 100, 224 —of instantaneous travel, 44, 231 —to perform miracles (signs and wonders), 44, 143–144, 146, 224, 347–350 —over Satan and demons, 47–48, 348–349 —for service, 41, 91, 308, 343 —to witness and preach, 46, 49, 74, 97, 101, 224–225, 343 praise, 75, 189, 305 prayer, 122, 163, 249, 300–305, 347, 360, 392n116 prejudice (spiritual), 172–173 Prentiss, Henry, 198 Presbyterians, 17, 235–236, 246, 267, 363, 390n85 primal spirituality, 362 process theology, 192, 386n127 progressive theology, 87, 102 psychic powers, 42, 274, 281 Quakers, 17, 22
race, 29–32, 34, 65, 79, 260–274, 279–285, 369n25 racism, 65, 261–271, 283–285, 324, 369n29 Rahab, 282 railroad to heaven, 52 rapture, the, 36, 46, 82, 103, 105, 125–127, 230, 389n74 raptures, 125–126 redemption, 276–279, 330–335, 339–341 Redemption, the, 44–45, 83, 162 reincarnation, 108 repentance, 68, 143, 175, 223 restitution for sin, 21, 68 restoration of primitive Christianity, 51, 54, 64, 67, 124, 154, 162– 163, 310 return of Christ, 35, 38, 40, 42–43, 45–46, 64, 72, 73, 80–82, 104, 115, 123, 153, 273 —delayed, 392n116 Revelation Knowledge, 322–324 revelations (from God) —of new truth, 101, 116, 151–152, 168, 171–172, 197, 204–206, 226, 238–239, 258, 354, 357–358 —resistance to, 88, 102, 151–153, 172, 201–203, 309–310 Richardson, Cyril C., 209 Riss, R. M., 395n4, 398n47 Robeck, Jr., Cecil M., 368n1, 372nn1,7, 396n39 Roberts, Oral, 287 Ruth, 275–276, 279, 283 Sabellius, 210 salvation (see also new birth) —complete, 154–158, 221–222 —initial and full, 174–182 —lost and regained, 73, 157, 254 —process of, 299–300 Samarin, William J., 367n7 sancti¤cation, 41–43, 69–73, 90–92, 95, 174, 179–186, 220 —“a little bit of,” 112 —“a more perfect,” 248, 254
Index —as process, 242, 248, 250 Sanford, Frank W., 17, 23–24, 315, 367n1 Satan, 52, 58, 73, 97, 99, 106– 107, 110, 127, 129, 132, 142, 146, 148, 218–220, 227, 229– 230, 249, 276, 279, 295–296, 302, 306, 326–333, 335, 338– 340, 347–349, 400n73 Sayers, Dorothy, 209 science/scientists, 28, 107, 142, 204, 226, 320–321, 324 sealing of the Holy Spirit, 37, 44, 46, 50, 103, 154, 158, 245, 253, 389n71 sectarianism, 22–23 seed of the woman, 276–277 Sense Knowledge, 321–324, 340, 345 sentimentalism, 342, 378n125 separationism (ecclesiastical), 143 Seymour, William, 2, 14, 27, 57–60, 66–67, 96, 133, 140, 284, 354, 372n1, 373–374n19 —biography, 61–66 —Doctrines and Disciplines of the Azusa Street Apostolic Mission of Los Angeles, The, 59, 65, 68, 71–73, 81 —eschatology, 80–84 —theology at the Azusa Mission, 66–69 —three-stage pattern of Christian life, 69–74 —tongues and love as manifestation of the baptism of the Spirit, 74–80 Shem (Shemites, Semites), 271–274, 281–283 sifting of the Church, 142, 153 Simmons, Dale H., 380–381n42, 397– 398n47 sin, 69–70, 92, 123, 177–184, 214, 217–220, 330, 333–335, 339– 342, 349, 359 —and shunning of sinners, 368– 369n21 singing in Spirit, 16, 373n15 sixth-day people, 29–31 Spittler, R. P., 367n7
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social gospel movement, 359 social outreach, 23, 315, 359 Solomon, 277, 283 sons (daughters, children) of God, 176, 224, 341–343, 348, 384n90 —God’s passion for children, 325–326 spiritual fornication, 67 spiritual growth/maturation (process of ), 158–159, 163, 169, 183– 184, 220, 299, 308, 343 spiritual immaturity, 147, 150–152, 158, 161 spiritual supermen, 350 Spurling (Kenyon), Evva, 314–317 Spurling, Richard, 50–51 Spurling, Richard G., 14, 18, 133, 358, 372n81 —biography, 50–51 —law of love, 52–56 Statement of Fundamental Truths (Assemblies of God), 195, 290, 293 Stewart, Alexander C., 393n3 suffering —Christ’s suffering, 214–215, 333–334 —human suffering/af®iction, 55, 191– 192, 210, 225, 241, 249–250, 252 Sumerians, 272 Swidler, Ann, x Synan, Vinson, 367n5, 367–368n1, 373n7, 375n43, 378n1, 393n3 talents, 98–99 talking thought, 2, 66 Tamar, 282 Taylor, George F., 14, 59–60, 84– 85, 111–112, 129–132, 147, 162, 173–174, 188, 215, 272, 351, 359–360, 375nn44,48, 376n81 —battle of good and evil in human history, 107–110 —biography, 86–89 —creation and fall, 106–107 —eschatology, 101–106 —spiritual gifts, 98–101
418
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Index
—tongues and other manifestations of the Spirit, 94–98 —work of the Holy Spirit, 90–94 Taylor (Durham), Gertrude, 139–140 T-H-R-E-E—O-N-E God, 257 Tomlinson, Ambrose Jessup, 15 tongues —academic studies of, 367n7 —counterfeit (imitation), 27, 97–98, 129, 160, 289, 311 —as foreign language, 5, 16, 20, 25, 49–50, 74, 76, 80, 97–98, 100– 101, 237 —as gift of Spirit, 20, 49, 75, 100– 101, 128–129, 131, 161, 189, 223, 237, 306, 348 —importance of, de-emphasized, 76– 79, 190–191, 287, 293, 354 —as necessary sign of baptism of the Spirit, 10, 19, 48–49, 62, 74–75, 84, 90, 95–98, 103, 159–162, 188–189, 223, 244–245, 288– 290, 293 —necessary tongues doctrine rejected, 306–313, 344–345, 395n4 Torrey, R. A., 323 Tracy, David, 399n56 Tribulation, the, 35–38, 82, 104–105, 125, 230 —delay of, 104 Trinity, 92, 118, 135, 150, 187, 205, 208–210, 240, 255–257, 358 —economic vs. essential, 206 Trollinger, William Vance, Jr., 403n1 truth, 88, 147, 160, 172, 200, 202– 203, 232, 240, 248, 269, 320, 358, 383–384n85. See also doctrine Tull, James E., 372n82 two-party theory of Protestantism, 402–403 United Pentecostal Church, 241 unity —of all Christians, 24, 53–54, 67, 131–132, 153, 234
—of pentecostal movement, 72, 194, 267–268 University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 89 Urshan, Andrew David, 14, 196–197, 232–234, 354, 358, 390n88, 390–391n97, 391nn107,109, 392n116, 392–393n124 —biography, 235–241 —living as one reborn, 247–254 —nature of the godhead, 254–259 —obtaining the new birth, 241–247 uxoriousness, 326–327 virgin birth, 277–278, 332 Wacker, Grant, 367n7, 367n1, 370n44, 372n2, 403n10 Warner, Wayne, 367n1 wealth —as blessing from God, 348, 386– 387n11 —commerce/commercialism condemned, 19, 109, 233, 359 —love of money a hindrance to salvation, 126, 249–250 Wells, H. G., 271 Wesley, John, 34, 54, 64, 73, 102, 366n5, 389n74 Wesleyan theology, 156–157, 164 Whitmore (Durham), Bessie Mae, 137–139 Wilson, Charles Reagan, 382n62 wise/foolish virgins (parable of ), 43, 81–82, 392–393n124 Woodworth-Etter, Maria, 16–17, 194, 293, 316 word of faith movement, 396–397n46, 397n47 World’s Faith Missionary Association, 136–137 writing in tongues, 98, 373n15 Zedekiah, 33, 370n35 Zinzindor¤anism, 165, 184, 385n106 Zulu, 272
Douglas Jacobsen is Distinguished Professor of Church History and Theology at Messiah College, Grantham, Pennsylvania.
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