Divine Healing: The Holiness-Pentecostal Transition Years, 1890–1906

Theological Transpositions in the Transatlantic World

Robinson

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781621895916
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Religione

In the present volume, James Robinson shows how the Holiness movement contributed to the rise of Pentecostalism, with emphasis on those sectors that practiced divine healing. Although other scholars have undertaken to explore this story, Robinson's treatment is by far the most thorough examination to date. He draws productively on the burgeoning secondary literatures on Pentecostalism and healing, and brings to light frequently overlooked, yet revealing primary sources. The events narrated are fascinating in their own right, and are important to the histories of Pentecostalism and healing for how they clarify the processes by which divine healing was pursued, debated, and often disparaged. The text also contributes to larger medical and social histories, offering tantalizing glimpses of the roots of some of today's most popular and contested medical and religious responses to sickness and health.

1

The Holiness-Pentecostal Transition in America

The first major schism to shake the mainstream Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC) during the antebellum period took place with the founding of the Free Methodist Church of North America (FMC). The departure in 1860 of the schismatic body was not, on the face of it, a major statistical blow to the MEC because fifty years later the FMC numbered just under 38,000 members. However, it was a portent of troubles to come.21 As the century progressed, the MEC increasingly adopted middle-class ways and values while the Wesleyan Holiness counter-movement appeared on the scene to become “one of the most powerful and yet most neglected of nineteenth-century religious movements.”22 Many of the Holiness adherents expressed their disenchantment with what they saw as the increasing deadness of the MEC. They objected to the wilted fervor of the mainstream body, its formal worship and procedures. There was a dislike of the increasing grandeur of its urban churches and the voguish dress code of its rising middle-class membership.

In 1867, the first camp meeting, organized by the newly-founded “National Camp Meeting Association for the Promotion of Holiness,” took place at Vineland, New Jersey. It is estimated that a crowd around 10,000 attended the Sunday afternoon service to hear MEC Bishop Matthew Simpson preach.23 The “National Association,” as the organization came to be known, began to expand beyond camp meetings by holding tent meetings in strategic cities throughout the country. The organization then changed its name to the “National Association for the Promotion of Holiness.” Its greatest strength lay in the Midwest, South and Southwest of the country.

In the early years the movement, as it began to organise in national, regional, state and local associations, met with the support of some key MEC bishops and clergy while other denominational leaders were perturbed by the potential for disaffection, justifiably so as events were to prove. As early as 1869, the editor of the official Methodist periodical, Northern Christian Advocate, voiced his alarm at the quasi-ecclesiastical nature of the National Camp Meeting Association. He asserted that at the second and third National Association gatherings, though largely attended by Methodists, the MEC had nothing officially to do with it, yet the public held the MEC responsible for the organization.

By March, 1884, the National Association held at least fifty-four summer camps. Ministers and lay members returning home spread the doctrine of Christian perfection through holiness prayer bands and holiness periodicals and schools. Their enthusiasm for the message of a second blessing increasingly met with bitter opposition from all levels of the mainstream church. None more so than Bishop Thomas Bowman, who, in speaking to young Methodist ministers at the 1883 New England Annual Conference, referred to the subject of holiness as a “darkness that repels our people. . . . There are some of our people who are constantly talking and entirely too much on the question of entire sanctification.” A similar attack appeared in the New York Christian Advocate, the largest and most influential Methodist publication in America. It accused many of the Holiness Associations of being “a standing menace to the spirit of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and religious anarchists.”24 There was considerable support for the more Reformed view on sanctification expressed by MEC theologians denying that sanctification accomplished anything not previously effected in regeneration. In a sermon preached on the subject, the minister objected to the usage that rendered sanctification a second work. He asked, “Who says so? . . . No reader of the Bible of ordinary intelligence says so.”25

By the 1890s, the Methodist hierarchy sought to regulate a situation that was retreating from its control. The effect of this was to bolster the “come-outist” cause as increasing numbers of Holiness adherents became convinced that the preservation of Wesleyan perfectionism lay outside the MEC and other mainstream denominations. It was an option captured in a hymn that called believers to “Leave the names and creeds of Babylon/ Take the Holy Bible way” and carried the refrain

Come out from among them

Oh, do not partake of her sins;

Come out from among them

For her judgement already begins.26

The last National Association convention with a recognized tie to the MEC was held in 1901. Though the number who withdrew from the MEC was sizeable, the majority who accepted the holiness message chose to remain in the church. The come-outer cause curtailed public interest by its susceptibility to schism. Instead of forming one grand, unified front, it split repeatedly. In the period 1893–1900 twenty-three Holiness denominations were founded, a statistic that led Synan to comment, “never before in the history of the nation had so many churches been founded in so short a time.”27 It is estimated that around 100,000 left the MEC out of four million Methodists in America in the 1890s. Within mainstream Methodism between one third and one half remained committed to the holiness doctrine of sanctification as a second work of grace. Even so, the schismatics proved to be the seedbed for much of the flowering of Pentecostalism. Their promotion of second-work sanctification entailed a renewed promise of “miracles of direct divine intervention and guidance in human affairs.”28 Their radicalism fashioned “a world of power and wonder in which the miraculous was routine, the routine miraculous.”29

Divine Healing within the Wesleyan Holiness Tradition

Historians of the Wesleyan Holiness movement have, in general, paid scant attention to the extensive healing ministries found within it in the decades around the turn of the century. Their reluctance to acknowledge the link was in some cases an attempt to avoid contamination by association with early Pentecostalism into which a sizeable number of Holiness people morphed.30 By contrast, greater prominence has been given to the Higher Life healers in the Reformed tradition such as A. B. Simpson and A. J. Gordon, while Wesleyan Holiness healing has been treated as a side issue. One reason for the side-lining of its contribution lay in the fact that leading Higher Life healing advocates, like Simpson and Gordon, operated in urban settings in the 1880s when the healing message was attracting widespread press coverage. Their writings carried a particular appeal to the lettered middle class at a time when Christian Science and New Thought were upping the temperature of public disputation. By contrast, come-outerism’s rapid spread took place largely in rural communities and small urban centers from the mid-1890s in the Midwest and South. By contrast, the Higher Life movement was stronger in the urban/industrial North-East. Many of the Wesleyan Holiness people were loath to accommodate themselves to the culture of the growing urban middle class. For them, the lifestyle of the well-heeled smacked more of “friendship with the world and enmity with God” (Jas 4:5). While the middle class might dress to kill, one Holiness group embroiled itself in wrangling over the wearing of ties. The so-called “Necktie Controversy” exercised the Church of God Reformation Movement for years. The leader of the anti-necktie faction maintained in 1903 that “any article of dress put on merely for adornment can only be the fruit of pride in the heart.” As the Movement moved into the cities in the 1900s some members protested that their dress code strictures were a barrier to the evangelization of the business class. The controversy led to a split in the denomination in 1913.31 The puritanical temper of the late Victorian age “was nowhere observed more strictly than in Holiness circles.”32

The come-outers agenda carried a strong restorationist impulse to reconstitute the dynamic of the primitive church. Charles Ewing Brown (1883–1971), a second generation leader of the Church of God (Anderson), affirmed the role of the Spirit in church polity: “It is my belief that the apostolic church was spiritually organised by the Holy Ghost [in that] the Scriptures teach the government of the church by the Holy Spirit through the bestowal of gifts.”33 There was a distinct gearing up of pentecostal ways of acting and thinking within some newly radicalized groups. The term “pentecostal” ca...