Perfect

In his Plain Account of Christian Perfection, John Wesley affirmed that as Christians we are “to be ‘perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect.’ ” Many Protestants have read such verses from Matthew’s account of the Sermon on the Mount as intended to convince sinners of their need for grace, not as indicative of anything attainable this side of the Jordan. Wesley, by contrast, saw “entire sanctification” as required of the Christian, “not only at or after death, but ‘in this world.’ ” Wesleyans cited verses such as 1 John 3:6—”Whosoever abideth in him sinneth not”—as clear biblical proof for their doctrine. Over time, though, many Methodists neglected or discarded perfectionism, which Wesley had termed the “grand depositum” of his movement.

The Fire Spreads: Holiness and Pentecostalism in the American South

Randall J. Stephens (Author)

Harvard University Press

416 pages

$30.98

Randall Stephens offers a rich portrait of Christians in the American South who embraced perfectionist teachings. Mining untapped pamphlets, periodicals, diaries, and church records, he presents a lucid chronological and regional study of the holiness and Pentecostal movements that eventually dominated the national perception of southern religion. Himself the grandson of a “barnstorming holiness preacher,” Stephens chronicles the many ironies that led to this unexpected triumph.

At first, southerners resisted northern holiness missionaries through a combination of anti-abolitionist regionalism, a “musky chauvinism,” and deep-rooted Calvinist pessimism. Eventually, however, “carpetbag” evangelists and a flood of literature—Stephens pays careful attention to the role of holiness publishers—converted a stream of “holiness scalawags” to the “double cure.” Unlike their mainstream evangelical counterparts, these “religious mavericks” largely rejected the Lost Cause and at least sometimes challenged Dixie’s regnant racism and patriarchy. Methodists who adopted holiness teachings saw themselves as restoring the fervor of earlier Wesleyanism, and many longed for the restoration of the New Testament church’s spiritual gifts while anticipating the imminent return of their Savior. Similar to the way southern Democrats met the Populist challenge, southern denominations responded with derision and expulsions, which holiness preachers endured as badges of persecution and signs of the Second Coming. “The Quarterly Conference will just be reading the verdict on some holiness evangelist,” wrote the preacher and publisher H.C. Morrison, ” … And, behold! The man has disappeared [in the rapture].”

News of the 1906 Azusa Street revival reached southern holiness churches awaiting signs of a latter-day Pentecost. Thousands of holiness Christians embraced what detractors dubbed the “tongues movement,” both as evidence of Holy Spirit baptism and “the ultimate sign of the world’s end.” Citing Freud’s theory of the “narcissism of minor differences,” Stephens observes that holiness denominations treated Pentecostals much as mainline denominations had treated them. In the face of denominational discipline and predictions of inevitable demise, Pentecostalism quickly superseded the holiness movement in terms of numbers and cultural significance. During the nadir of race relations in the South, at least some Pentecostals also trod a dangerous path that was “almost progressive.” F.F. Bosworth, a white Pentecostal itinerant, preached at an interracial camp meeting in Texas; afterwards a group of ruffians met him at the train station, beat him with boat oars, and left him on the train tracks. Bosworth noted that God avenged him when a train later struck and killed one of the miscreants on the very same tracks.

After his careful examination of the origins of southern Pentecostalism, Stephens sketches the movement’s later evolution. Once apolitical, egalitarian, and pacifist, white Pentecostals in particular “came in some respects to look more and more like their perennial enemies” and “identified with the same kind of social and political conservatism they had once shunned or even openly condemned.” Having experienced a steady rise in wealth and social status, few Pentecostal preachers today would spend their time warning against Sunday newspapers, oyster suppers, and neckties.

Crisply written, analytically clear, and full of colorful personalities, The Fire Spreads is the most significant study of Pentecostal origins since Grant Wacker’s Heaven Below, and Stephens’ four chapters on holiness Christianity provide an unparalleled introduction to that movement’s emergence and growth in the South. Good books leave their readers wanting more, and Stephens’ survey of more recent developments left me hoping he will return to these years with the same chronological and regional nuance that undergirds the earlier portions of his narrative. While Stephens notes the role of the Keswick movement and Dwight Moody in promoting both holiness and premillennialism, he sometimes credits southern Pentecostalism for what are more accurately seen as broader trends within American evangelicalism. For example, Stephens suggests Pentecostalism’s responsibility for the ascendancy of premillennialism within American theology and culture, citing the popularity of Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth and the Left Behind series. But Lindsey (a graduate of Dallas Theological Seminary) and Tim LaHaye (a Bob Jones University alumnus) hale from segments of the evangelical/fundamentalist landscape that vigorously opposed the Pentecostal and charismatic fire. Evangelicals—and later fundamentalists—across the United States steadily embraced premillennialism during the late 1800s and early 1900s. Likewise, Keswick-style holiness and consecration imbued mainstream evangelicalism with perfectionistic teachings by the mid-20th century. In the 1950s, Billy Graham and Bill Bright—among many others—encouraged their followers to become “filled with the Spirit” by completely surrendering themselves in faith to Jesus Christ. Stephens could more fully explore the cross-fertilization between evangelicalism and fundamentalism on the one hand and Pentecostalism and the charismatic movement on the other.

I also wanted more description of the fire itself. Most of The Fire Spreads is a history of the holiness movement, focusing on transregional networks, intra-denominational conflict, and doctrinal development. The narrative really crackles once it reaches the emergence of Pentecostalism, as the movement’s ecstatic spirituality comes to the fore. “That same electrifying Spirit that overwhelmed Cornelius and the apostles in Acts,” writes Stephens, “was again available to all.” Members of the holiness denominations left in droves, convinced that their familiar churches “could not generate this kind of excitement.”

“O for a heart to praise my God,” wrote Charles Wesley, “a heart from sin set free.” My own experience has more closely approximated that described by Wesley’s Baptist hymn-writing contemporary, Robert Robinson: “Prone to wander, Lord I feel it, prone to leave the Lord I love.” Few denominational hymnals include Robinson’s fourth verse to “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing”: “O that day when freed from sinning,” he concludes, “I shall see Thy lovely face; Clothed then in blood washed linen, How I’ll sing Thy sovereign grace.” In this formulation, freedom from sin clearly comes only after entrance into eternal life. Of course, denominations find ways to make doctrinally specific hymns palatable for their own theologies. For instance, many Reformed Protestants substitute “promised rest” for “second rest” in Wesley’s “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling.” Such adaptations hint at doctrinal disagreements but also suggest their relative unimportance.

As Stephens’ narrative of holiness and Pentecostal success indicates, a dynamic spirituality rather than theological innovation fueled the movements. The last few decades have witnessed a rapprochement among Pentecostal, charismatic, and non-charismatic evangelicals, sometimes attributed to shared social and political concerns. A conservative political agenda probably helped some movement leaders transcend the “narcissism of minor differences,” but on a grassroots level it might have more to do with a shared culture of informal, emotional worship and a fervent spirituality seeking daily and direct contact with God. And even when there is room for legitimate theological disagreement, when the next fire spreads we might learn a lesson from the missteps of those in Stephens’ book who responded with calumny and vitriol to the emergence of new movements.

John G. Turner is assistant professor of history at the University of South Alabama. He is the author of Bill Bright and Campus Crusade for Christ: The Renewal of Evangelicalism in Postwar America, just published by the University of North Carolina Press.