Covenant theology links the promises of Pentecost to the provisions of Calvary.
Do you speak with an accent? In religious as well as in nonreligious settings, we need to feel part of the group. The sound of our speech, as well as the familiar meanings we attach to words and phrases, helps us feel at home.
Perhaps you have been struck, as I have in recent years, by the emergence of two clearly distinguishable ways of speaking the language of Christian faith, the language of Canaan. One of them accents the doctrine of the Atonement, the story of the cross, and emphasizes the trust that Christians put in the crucifixion of Jesus. I call that Calvary language. The other speaks of Pentecost, of the Holy Spirit’s presence in our lives, and of power—power to overcome sin, to witness, or to exercise some spiritual gift to edify our fellow Christians. I call this Pentecost language; its accent is the Spirit.
Christians whose spiritual roots lie in Lutheran pietism or Baptist evangelicalism are apt to speak most of the time in the accent of Calvary. They magnify grace, sometimes almost to the exclusion of good works, stressing their own unworthiness. They profess their joy to consist not in release from sin but in trusting the blood of Jesus Christ to atone for it. On the other hand, those who learned their faith from the Society of Friends, from Wesleyan or Keswick evangelicals, or from Pentecostal or charismatic fellowships, speak the idiom of Pentecost, with varying accents upon power or peace or purity.
One of the fascinating questions surrounding the history of the holiness movement in America and Britain is how the heirs of John Wesley moved beyond his almost exclusive use of Calvary language to declare the promise and describe the experience of sanctification. They began about the middle of the nineteenth century to use the term “baptism of the Holy Spirit” as a synonym for the older Wesleyan phrases “perfect love,” “heart purity,” or “entire sanctification.” To be sure, the sermons of Wesley and John Fletcher and of the early Methodists in America consistently affirmed the role of the Holy Spirit in actually bringing into human lives the sanctity promised and provided by the Atonement. But they emphasized the cleansing power of the blood of Christ, and almost never spoke of believers being “baptized” or “filled” with the Spirit. Wesley rejected Fletcher’s suggestion that Methodists employ these Pentecostal terms not because they dramatized the crisis experience over the process of sanctification, but from fear that he and his preachers would be charged with mystical enthusiasm. For Wesley, nothing could be worse; Christians must hold to the moral and rational character of biblical faith.
Those who preached the Gospel of heart purity, or Christian perfection, in both Wesleyan and Reformed traditions learned, first in America and then in Britain, to combine the dialects of cross and Pentecost, accenting equally the cleansing blood and the sanctifying Spirit.
Their enlargement of the language of Canaan was, I think, thoroughly biblical. When the Pharisees pressed John the Baptist as to who he really was, since he had denied he was either Messiah or Elijah or the prophet who should come, he replied, “I am the voice of one calling in the desert, ‘make straight the way for the Lord.’ ” The next day John the Baptist saw Jesus approaching and cried, “Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” I did not know who Messiah was to be, he went on to say; but “I saw the spirit come down from heaven as a dove and remain on Him. I would not have known him, except that the one who sent me to baptize with water told me, ‘the man on whom you see the Spirit come down and remain is he who will baptize with the Holy Spirit.’ I have seen and I testify,” John declared, “that this [Jesus] is the Son of God.”
This, of course, is covenant language. The writer of the Gospel began his story, as did the writers of the other three Gospels, with the announcement that God had fulfilled his covenant with Israel in the revelation of his Son, the dying Lamb, who became flesh and dwelled among us, “full of grace and truth.” As the prophets Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah had promised, he would baptize the faithful remnant with the Holy Spirit, and write the law in their hearts. In the last days, Joel had declared that God would pour out his Spirit on all flesh.
Both of the New Testament accents in Canaan talk, then, stem from covenant theology—the covenant of righteousness that God affirmed both in giving of the law and in the judgments pronounced when Israel could not obey the law. The prophets foretold that the covenant would be renewed and fulfilled in the coming of a suffering servant, a dying lamb, and in the gift of a sanctifying Spirit.
The succeeding references to the Holy Spirit in the Gospel of John consistently link the promises of Pentecost to the provisions of Calvary. Note, for example, in John 3:5–15 the words Jesus uses in responding to Nicodemus, a ruler in Israel who found incredible the notion that he should be born again. Here Christ himself linked together fulfillment of the covenant in the gift of the Spirit to the proclamation of God’s faithfulness to it in the grace of the Cross.
To discover and combine in one rhetoric of redemption the idioms of Pentecost and Calvary, which declare the fulfillment of God’s sanctifying purpose, as the nineteenth-century preachers of righteousness did, was a recovery of biblical Christianity.
That recovery was, moreover, an improvement upon John Wesley. Wesley’s pilgrimage from Anglican work-righteousness to complete reliance upon Christ “and him alone” for salvation—from the Holy Club to the cross—drew heavily upon Moravian pietism, and through their influence, upon Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith. Little wonder that he remained throughout his life enthralled by a truly biblical vision of the right-making power of faith in the Atonement. It also seems true, however, that the demand of the Enlightenment for moral and intellectual responsibility in Christian thought intensified Wesley’s fear of the mysticism within Methodist fellowship and the misunderstanding outside it that would flow from extensive use of the New Testament language of spirituality. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries those whom Wesley’s successors set to hungering and thirsting after righteousness discovered the meaning of Jesus’ promise “you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit.” That does not dishonor him. Rather, it calls twentieth-century Christians to a biblical recovery of the lost unity of evangelicalism—pacifist, pietist, Wesleyan, and Calvinist.
The man chiefly responsible for the adoption by American Wesleyans of the terms “filling” or “baptism of the Spirit” to describe the experience of sanctification was Charles G. Finney, New School Presbyterian evangelist and professor of theology after 1835 at abolitionist Oberlin College. Finney’s breakthrough in biblical understanding and experience remained obscure to me until recently, despite the work that I and other scholars had done in clarifying his general alignment with the doctrine of Christian perfection. We scholars missed the point for two reasons. None of us realized how closely Finney’s theological development, particularly his search for some means by which Christians would come up to the New Testament standard of holiness, paralleled developments in the so-called New England theology. For three decades before the Civil War, that intensely ethical and tacitly Arminian theology dominated Congregationalist and New School Presbyterian preaching in both the Northeast and the Old Northwest. The second reason is more embarrassing: None of us seems to have read all the fine print.
Finney became interested in the subject of holiness when, after ten years of immensely successful evangelism, he accepted in 1833 a New York City pastorate, first at the Chatham Street Chapel, and then at the Broadway Tabernacle. His Lectures to Professing Christians displayed that concern, and his Memoirs, composed forty years later, recalled it. In the autobiography he says he examined the teachings of the Methodists on the subject during his years in the New York pastorate, but laid them aside, thinking them to refer primarily to the emotions, rather than to the will—a misimpression that probably flowed from John Wesley’s use of the term “perfect love.” For Finney, the will was absolutely central. “By the heart, I mean the will,” he often said. He was sure, as were Nathaniel William Taylor and Lyman Beecher, who led the revolution in New England theology, that God had made men free and responsible. Moreover, grace reached men in the form of truth—truth so persuasive to their minds that in loving response to God’s grace they could will to be all he would have them to be.
These doctrines of man’s ability to exercise free will and of the moral nature of divine government flatly contradicted the notion of salvation by divine decree, or predestination, which only forty years before had reigned triumphant in New England Calvinism. The new doctrines were so prominent in the preaching of Finney’s generation of Congregationalist and New School Presbyterian leaders that Old School Calvinists accused them, with some degree of justice, of being Pelagians, that is, of teaching that salvation rested upon the Christian believer’s determination to be holy. But Finney and Beecher and Albert Barnes were in fact affirming in a new way the primacy of grace. The truth of the Gospel, they declared, is the “power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes.” In that Gospel the right-making power of God is revealed, bringing to those who will respond by committing themselves wholly to him “a righteousness that is by faith from first to last.” Such a commitment was impossible apart from the revelation of God in Jesus Christ—“full of grace and truth.”
Finney, however, became concerned that the responses he saw even the most earnest Christians making, and the responses he saw in his own heart and life, had not yet brought them up to the biblical standard of righteousness. When, therefore, he began spending most of each year at Oberlin College, he was still in a quandary about how Christians could attain that standard. At Oberlin, of course, Finney became a close associate of Asa Mahan and the students who had rebelled from Lane Theological Seminary when the trustees attempted to curb their antislavery activities. The Oberlin College and community was from the day of its founding in 1835 the seedbed of American Christian radicalism, not only on the question of slavery, but of racial brotherhood, women’s rights, peace, prohibition, and a whole range of concerns for the creation of a righteous social order, in the nation and in the world.
President Mahan, swept along by the intensity of the religious search characterizing the community, preceded Finney in his experience of a second crisis of Christian faith. He called it, uncompromisingly, “perfect sanctification.” Finney did not profess a second work of grace at that point, however, though he played an important part in underlining, not only for Mahan, but for the whole Oberlin community, the important distinction between desire and will. A man might wish to be holy until his dying day, Finney insisted, but until he willed to be so, as both the Old and New covenants required, “with all his heart and mind and soul and strength,” wishing made little difference. Here, Finney exhibited what covenant theology had, since the Westminster Assembly of Divines, consistently affirmed: that God treated his children like persons, and expected them to respond fully to his grace and commit themselves heartily to him. But the question for Finney, as always for the Methodists, was, by what means, by what experience, does God communicate his grace so perfectly as to enable us to will his will?
In the fall of 1838 Finney was restrained by ill health from making his usual evangelistic tour to the East, so he set about delivering and publishing in the Oberlin Evangelist a series of lectures that, as he explained in an accompanying letter, were intended to correct his longstanding neglect of the doctrine of sanctification. The lectures show us a splendid mind laying aside old views and adopting new ones. The evangelist thought his way back through the Bible and revitalized the long-neglected promise of holiness that lay hidden in Puritan theology. He spoke of devotion to God, first; then of the law, which Christ had summed up in two “great commandments” to love God and our neighbors; and finally, of the attainability in this life of an experience of Christian holiness such as God had commanded and his covenant had promised. The evangelist did not retreat from the emphasis in New England theology on the ability of human beings, as distinct from their disposition, to choose God’s will; but he restored to a crucial place in giving them that disposition the revelation of God’s love, and their reception by faith of the sanctifying baptism of the Holy Spirit. He thus gave the idea of divine sovereignty a new and powerful meaning in Christian experience.
Moreover, in these lectures Finney worked his way through the whole of Old Testament theology, in a way that John Wesley never did, linking together Deuteronomy, the Psalms, and the prophets, to demonstrate the overwhelming consistency and force of the Old Testament promises of the sanctifying Spirit. The renewal of those promises in the preaching of John the Baptist and in the assurances Jesus gave to the Apostles on the eve of his crucifixion tied the Old and New Testaments together. The baptism of the Holy Spirit, poured out initially in a dispensational way at Pentecost upon the whole of the church, Finney declared, signaled the fulfillment of God’s covenant not just with Israel but with all humankind. The experience was, therefore, normative for all Christians; it was the source of that divine grace which sanctified their hearts and minds. Preachers must have it, and they must lead their converts into it. By this means alone could such righteousness prevail in individual and social life, in church and nation, as the Lord had ordained for his people.
Interestingly enough, Finney did not yet profess to have attained this experience himself. Not until three years after his course of lectures was completed did he find the covenant fulfilled in his own life. In a little-noticed passage of his autobiography, he recounted that during the winter of 1843–1844 he filled the pulpit at Marlborough Chapel, in Boston, a newly organized Congregationalist group, which he said was “composed greatly of radicals,” most of them holding “extreme views” on such subjects as nonviolence, women’s rights, or antislavery. He had always felt “greatly drawn out in prayer” when preaching in Boston, but during this winter, he declared, “my mind was exceedingly exercised on the question of personal holiness.” After many weeks of Bible reading and prayer, during which he avoided visiting with individuals, Finney found himself, as he remembered it, in “a great struggle to consecrate myself to God, in a higher sense than I had ever before seen to be my duty, or conceived as possible.” In particular, he felt unable to give up his ailing wife without reservation to the will of God. “What if, after all this divine teaching, my will is not carried,” he asked himself, “and this teaching takes effect only in my sensibility? May it not be that my sensibility is affected by these revelations from reading the Bible, and that my heart is not really subdued by them?” The issue was the same one he had raised at the revival in Oberlin in 1836: desire versus will, sentiment versus choice.
One memorable day, however, the evangelist was able, as he put it, “to fall back, in a deeper sense than I had ever before done, upon the infinitely blessed and perfect will of God.” Then, in an act of consecration that fit precisely Calvinist Samuel Hopkins’s description of the Christian’s duty, Finney recalled, “I went so far as to say to the Lord, with all my heart, that He might do anything with me or mine, to which His blessed will could consent; that I had such perfect confidence in His goodness and love, as to believe that he could consent to do nothing, to which I could object,” including “the salvation or damnation of my own soul, as the will of God might decide.” This act of consecration also involved giving up his former assurance of salvation, and taking it for granted thereafter that he would be saved, as he put it, “if I found that … [God] kept me, and worked in me by His Spirit, and was preparing me for heaven, working holiness and eternal life in my soul.”
Looking back at this experience when writing his Memoirs thirty-two years later, Finney declared:
“As the great excitement of that season subsided, and my mind became very calm, I saw more clearly the different steps of my Christian experience, and came to recognize the connection of all things, as all wrought by God from beginning to end. But since then I have never had those great struggles and long protracted seasons of agonizing prayer, that I had often experienced. It is quite another thing to prevail with God, in my own experience, from what it was before. I can come to God with more calmness, because with more perfect confidence. He enables me now to rest in Him, and let everything sink into His perfect will, with much more readiness, than ever before the experience of that winter. I have felt since then a religious freedom, a religious buoyancy and delight in God, and in His word, a steadiness of faith, a Christian liberty and overflowing love, that I had only experienced, I may say, occasionally before.… Since then I have had the freedom of a child with a loving parent.”
This testimony to the fruits of a second work of grace would have suited any Wesleyan. Certainly he did not describe it in the terminology of natural ability or of obedience to God’s absolute moral law, which had earlier pervaded his preaching. The full cooperation of God with man, a conjunction of divine and human agency, had become for him, as for John Wesley’s Methodists, the way to spiritual peace and moral triumph.
George O. Peck, editor of the influential Methodist weekly, the New York Christian Advocate, followed closely the publication of Finney’s lectures in 1839 and 1840. In the fall of the latter year he became the first Methodist to adopt Finney’s language. Others followed at once, and by 1850 reports of Methodist camp meetings and revivals frequently referred to persons being “baptized” or “filled with the Spirit,” and used the terms interchangeably with “heart purity,” “perfect love,” or “entire sanctification.” Phoebe Palmer, a leader of the holiness movement among Methodists, was so deeply involved in the elaboration of John Wesley’s language of Calvary that she was one of the last to adopt the new terminology; but she did adopt it, in the fall of 1856, after a summer of immense spiritual refreshing in camp meetings in western New York. Three years later she published her book, Promise of the Father for the Last Days, using Peter’s text at Pentecost for a biblical argument in favor of women’s right to preach the Gospel—a right that she had exercised, but refused to claim, for the previous twenty years.
Ever since, Wesleyans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Friends devoted to the proclamation of Christian holiness have intermingled, in preaching and in witness, the language of Pentecost and the language of Calvary. The imagery of the Spirit did not displace the cross, certainly. Holiness camp meetings, especially Methodist ones held along the eastern seaboard, closed with long Sunday night communion services, at the end of which Christians who had prayed throughout the week for the baptism of the Holy Spirit were urged to open their hearts and sing, “The cleansing stream I see, I see, I plunge, and oh, it cleanseth me.”
What Methodists did not adopt from Finney, however, and possibly did not even seriously consider, was the revitalized form that his biblical study gave to covenant theology. Grafted onto the tap-root of the Wesleyan doctrine of a sanctifying atonement, this Puritan perspective on Old and New Testament truth would have deeply enriched the Methodist tradition, I believe. John Wesley, as Professor John N. Oswalt has recently pointed out, did not rely very much upon the Old Testament as a source for the doctrine of Christian perfection. In Wesley’s century, those who made a specialty of Old Testament theology were the Calvinistic preachers whom he found it important to resist, because he thought their doctrine of election undermined the call to Christian perfection. The theology of Charles G. Finney, however, brought the whole of both the old and new covenants to bear upon God’s purpose to create his children in holiness and righteousness.
Finney’s deep consciousness of sin—especially his awareness of its stubborn social character—and his fierce loyalty to the law offered a ballast against the sentimentalizing of New Testament doctrine, which lay immediately in the future. This is evident not only in the shallow uses many evangelicals made of the doctrine of the Atonement at the beginning of the twentieth century, separating their understanding of God’s love from his judgments that are “true and righteous altogether,” but also in the tendency of the liberal heirs of the New England theology to pull loose the idea of the Incarnation from its rooting in God’s covenant of grace. Moreover, the social gospel, which began in the sturdy biblical theology of Oberlin and Wesleyan preaching before the Civil War, became a shallow idea indeed when nothing but a humanized conception of the love of Jesus was its motive power. “What would Jesus do” is always a cleansing question; but what God’s law, and our faithfulness to him, requires, needs always to be the context in which Christians ask that question.
For the holiness movement itself, as for Christendom generally, the missed opportunity seems in retrospect a great loss. Although American evangelicals inspired by the Wesleyan, Oberlin, and English Keswick movements stressed with increasing consistency each Christian’s need of a personal baptism of the Spirit, comparing William Booth with Dwight Moody, or Henry Clay Morrison with R. A. Torrey, makes it plain that Bible-believing Christians still inhabited divergent theological worlds, and still spoke with different accents. The persistence of two dialects in Canaan, I believe, reinforced the tendency of the American wing of the Keswick movement to emphasize power over purity, and of the radical Wesleyans to concentrate on conventional standards of personal purity. As the twentieth century moved forward, both groups lost much of the social idealism, of the faith of nineteenth-century perfectionists in the power of the Holy Spirit to help not only the church but the nations of the world become the kingdoms of the Lord. The Pentecostal movement compounded these confusing tendencies, popularizing the notion, which the radical Wesleyans rejected, that the power of the Spirit’s baptism was expressed chiefly in charismatic gifts, particularly the unknown tongue. From all of this, I think, Charles G. Finney’s perfectionist version of covenant theology would have helped to save us.
But my purpose here is not to regret past failures but to raise a hope. Despite the confusions of our era, in which an essentially superficial New Testament biblicism undermined the authority of the Old Testament, and a growing worldliness in the old-line churches reinforced the tendencies of spiritual religion toward sectarian fragmentation, and despite what everyone thought was going to turn out to be the immense triumph of secularism in the twentieth century, evangelical religion has continued to flourish everywhere. And so, please God, we have come to a new day, when in the public life of many nations as well as in the inner life of the worldwide evangelical movement, Christians can hope again to unite in a vast outreach of the Gospel.
That hope depends, I believe, upon our doing what the nineteenth century did not quite succeed in bringing off. We must search the Scriptures together, evangelicals all, whether our backgrounds are Wesleyan, Reformed, Pietist, Quaker, charismatic, or liturgical, and recover for our day the biblical ideal of righteousness—one in which the God of the covenant shows us afresh that his judgments are true and right-making altogether.
