Baptists and the Holy Spirit: The Contested History with Holiness-Pentecostal-Charismatic Movements

By C. Douglas Weaver

The record is clear that Baptists, historically, have prioritized conversion, Jesus, and God. Equally clear is that Baptists have never known what to do with the Holy Spirit.

In Baptists and the Holy Spirit, Baptist historian C. Douglas Weaver traces the way Baptists have engaged—and, at times, embraced—the Holiness, Pentecostal, and charismatic movements. Chronicling the interactions between Baptists and these Spirit-filled movements reveals the historical context for the development of Baptists’ theology of the Spirit.

Baptists and the Holy Spirit provides the first in-depth interpretation of Baptist involvement with the Holiness, Pentecostal, and charismatic movements that have found a prominent place in America’s religious landscape. Weaver reads these traditions through the nuanced lens of Baptist identity, as well as the frames of gender, race, and class. He shows that, while most Baptists reacted against all three Spirit-focused groups, each movement flourished among a Baptist minority who were attracted by the post-conversion experience of the "baptism of the Holy Spirit." Weaver also explores the overlap between Baptist and Pentecostal efforts to restore and embody the practices and experiences of the New Testament church. The diversity of Baptists—Southern Baptist, American Baptist, African American Baptist—leads to an equally diverse understanding of the Spirit. Even those who strongly opposed charismatic expressions of the Spirit still acknowledged a connection between the Holy Spirit and a holy life.

If, historically, Baptists were suspicious of Roman Catholics’ ecclesial hierarchy, then Baptists were equally wary of free church pneumatology. However, as Weaver shows, Baptist interactions with the Holiness, Pentecostal, and charismatic movements and their vibrant experience with the Spirit were key in shaping Baptist identity and theology.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Release date: Jul 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781481310086

C. Douglas Weaver

C. Douglas Weaver is Director of Undergraduate Studies in C. Douglas Weaver is Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Religion and Associate Professor of Relig the Department of Religion and Associate Professor of Religion at Baylor University. He is the author or editor of seveion at Baylor University. He is the author or editor of several books, including The Acts of the Apostles: Four Centurieral books, including The Acts of the Apostles: Four Centuries of Baptist Interpretation. s of Baptist Interpretation.

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BAPTISTS and THE HOLY SPIRIT

The Contested History with Holiness-Pentecostal-Charismatic Movements

C. Douglas Weaver

Baylor University Press

© 2019 by Baylor University Press

Waco, Texas 76798

All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission in writing of Baylor University Press.

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The Library of Congress has cataloged this book under ISBN 978-1-4813-1006-2.

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To inquire about permission to use selections from this text, please contact Baylor University Press, One Bear Place, #97363, Waco, Texas 76798.

Dedicated to my five grandchildren: Camden James, James Oliver, Maci Brooke, Miriam Grace, and Hannah Justice

and

To the medical care team at MD Anderson Hospital, Houston (not limited to, but especially, Dr. Paul Corn, Dr. Ashish Kamat, Dr. Surena Matin, as well as Prasanth Abraham, Mary Cavanaugh, Kelly Creel, and Nikky Olumide)

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

I

1. Baptists and the Holiness Movement

2. Holiness, Healing, and A. J. Gordon

3. Baptist Responses to Holiness Teaching

4. Gender and Race in the Baptist Holiness Movement

5. The Radical Fringe and Spirit-Led End-Time Revivals

II

6. Baptist Involvement in the Azusa Street Revival

7. Baptist Hostility to the Azusa Street Revival

8. Baptists and Second-Generation Pentecostals Describe Each Other

9. Baptists, Pentecostals, and Divine Healing

10. Women Preachers among Baptists and Pentecostals

11. From Baptists, to Holiness-Baptists, to Pentecostals

III

12. The Charismatic Movement and Southern Baptists, 1960s

13. Conflict and Confrontation between Southern Baptists and the Growing Charismatic Movement

14. Keswick, Spirit-Filled, but Not Charismatic Southern Baptists, 1970s

15. American Baptists and the Charismatic Movement, 1960s–1970s

16. Southern Baptist Charismatics Seek Fulness, 1980s

17. Baptists and the Third Wave

18. Southern Baptists and Charismatics at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century

19. American Baptists and the Holy Spirit Renewal Ministries, 1980s–2000s

20. Gender and Race in the Baptist Charismatic Story

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

A project of this length naturally has many people to thank. The Department of Religion at Baylor University afforded a context of encouragement for writing. Dr. Bill Bellinger, chair, and colleagues like Dr. Mikeal Parsons were conversation partners regarding my work throughout the project. Several graduate students in our Department helped acquire materials. Many thanks to Dr. João Chaves, Yvette Garcia, Dr. Andrew Kim, Dr. Chris Moore, Susan Moudry, Scott Prather, Dr. Christopher Richmann, Joshua Smith, Gerhard Stuebben (who assisted with the index), and Steven Tyra. The dissertation work of Chaves (Brazilian Baptists), Garcia (Brownsville Revival), and Richmann (F.F. Bosworth) provided bonus resources. Conversations with former undergraduate students (Terry Braswell, Brad Rogers, and Chris Wood) were helpful regarding the legacy of the Brownsville Revival. Dr. Nathan Finn’s familiarity and insights into current Southern Baptist theology were important in my decision to look at a Keswick legacy in the SBC.

I am grateful to several people who read the whole manuscript or portions. In particular, Baptist theologian Dr. Fisher Humphreys graciously read the whole manuscript. Scott Prather and Christopher Richmann were excellent proofreaders (and commentators). The Baylor University librarians, especially those involved in interlibrary loan services, were indispensable. Other libraries (for example, American Baptist Historical Society, Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives, Flower Pentecostal Heritage Center of the Assemblies of God) have rich resources. The digitization of pentecostal materials is simply amazing.

Dr. Carey Newman, publisher of Baylor University Press, deserves special thanks. He and his staff (especially Jenny Hunt) have been wonderful to work with on this project and others. Carey’s creedal choice of favorite baseball teams is a point of tension, but his work with BUP is remarkable. I am proud to be publishing with him. As an insider (Baptist) and an outsider (to holiness-pentecostal-charismatic traditions), I hope that I have brought a worthy balance to this project. If research is to be enjoyable, I hit the bullseye in this book.

My dedication page highlights my five grandchildren (ages newborn to twelve). My wife, Pat, obviously demonstrated patience during the various phases of this work. The dedication also draws attention—perhaps TMI—to the medical journey that I have lived for the last several years. I am grateful to colleagues for their support (and chauffeuring rides to Houston from Waco), and I am grateful for the world-class doctors and nurses at MD Anderson Hospital. I have written as a historian, but I do believe that Baptists (and others) will not waste their time if they reflect on the Holy Spirit.

C. Douglas Weaver

Waco, Texas (2019)

Introduction

Have Baptists treated the Holy Spirit like a shy member of the Trinity? A typical Baptist narrative might suggest so. Baptists, as the story goes, are heirs and preeminent practitioners of the revivalistic tradition in the United States with its focus on personal evangelism, a personal conversion experience, and a personal relationship with Jesus. Salvation in the name of Jesus and prayers in the name of Jesus dot the Baptist worship landscape. Jesus-centric Trinitarians has been a proud Baptist moniker. There was never a denial of the Trinity or the importance of the Holy Spirit—many Baptists have sung the Doxology with its concluding line, praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost, like a musical creed practically every Sunday of their churchgoing lives. The overwhelming focus of worship and the Christian experience, however, has been Jesus Christ, God incarnate (Baptists would smile and say that the religion of Christianity is named after Jesus Christ). Naturally then, when I read a book during my seminary studies which called the Holy Spirit the shy member of the Trinity,¹ the catchy phrase resonated with my basic understanding of Baptist identity.

Such a portrait of Baptist history is a stereotype. Even my own experiences and education fit poorly into the stereotypical pattern associated with the Baptist tradition. I grew up in the era of the emerging charismatic movement—characterized by the acceptance and experience of several facets of pentecostal theology, particularly speaking in tongues and divine healing of the body—in denominations outside traditional pentecostal groups. The reality of the charismatic movement hit home in my college dormitory. One fall semester I was studying for a test when a close friend came into my room and said that we did not have to study. He had just come from a charismatic worship service and declared that he heard the audible voice of Jesus tell him that the end of the world was coming very soon. The friend quickly deduced that it was useless to study for the test if Jesus was returning before Christmas. The end did not come, of course, and we both studied and made As on the test (though it was a late-nighter for him after he acquiesced to a bit of eschatological doubt). My friend, who was Baptist, had just recently become a bapticostal and would eventually become an ordained pentecostal minister (and a fine academic scholar of impeccable character).

I am not a charismatic, nor did I actively seek the gifts of the Spirit back in the college years of the 1970s as my friend did. My relationship with my friend, however, undoubtedly stoked my long-term interest in the topic of Baptists and the Holy Spirit. In seminary, reading David Edwin Harrell’s book on American revivalism, All Things are Possible: The Healing and Charismatic Revivals in America, stoked my interest further.² My doctoral studies subsequently focused on the ministerial career of one of the first giants of the mid-century healing revival, William Marrion Branham. In my revision of the doctoral dissertation, a book about Branham followed, The Healer-Prophet, William Marrion Branham: A Study of the Prophetic in American Pentecostalism.³ Branham was another representative of the interaction of Baptist and pentecostal milieus. Comparing him to my encounter with the charismatic movement was a bit like comparing apples and oranges. Branham was an independent Baptist minister who emerged as a major figure on the scene of healing evangelism in the middle of the twentieth century and eventually considered himself the prophet to the end-time. His ministry of healing was conducted wholly in a subculture of the Pentecostal Movement; nevertheless, it still bore traces of his Baptist heritage.

These very different experiences and my continuing study of the Holiness and Pentecostal Movements convinced me that a historical examination of Baptists and the Holy Spirit would turn up a surprising story. I kept finding Baptist references here and there in works on the holiness-pentecostal-charismatic traditions. But even I was surprised at the extent of the detailed story as it unfolded. If Baptist interactions with the holiness-pentecostal-charismatic traditions regarding the Holy Spirit are any indication, the answer to the question, Do Baptists have a shy member of the Trinity? is a resounding no. Baptist interactions with the holiness-pentecostal-charismatic traditions and a concern for an experience of the Holy Spirit have been extensive, more extensive than ever imagined. The majority of Baptists opposed holiness-pentecostal-charismatic concepts, but significant, interactive influence was present. Said another way, much of the Baptist attention to the Holy Spirit has come while contending for their views and experiences of the Spirit in relation to holiness, pentecostal, or charismatic believers, or in being influenced by those traditions.

The evidence of this intriguing and substantive interaction between Baptists and the holiness-pentecostal-charismatic traditions has never been studied. Baptist histories have almost completely ignored the interaction, sometimes because they assumed it was not present, and often for reasons of emotional discomfort and perceptions of social respectability. Books specifically on holiness, pentecostal, and charismatic history have provided some attention to Baptist contributions, though little of that attention is focused or sustained.⁴

This study first and foremost brings together the various strands of the story of how Baptists interacted with, affirmed, and normally opposed their fellow restorationists regarding the experience of encountering the Holy Spirit. All of the groups—holiness, pentecostal, and charismatic—claimed in some form that they best restored the New Testament church. They were the most faithful in literally implementing and modeling the apostolic faith, and in some cases, they thought they were part of an unbroken line of succession going back to the New Testament, which was the ultimate form of restorationist ecclesiology. In whatever way they defined themselves, these groups believed that their Christian experience, theology, and worship practices were the fullest expression of the apostolic church, or, said succinctly, that they had the full gospel.

The interaction of Baptists and the holiness-pentecostal-charismatic traditions was certainly an ecclesiastical discussion—what did it mean to restore or to embody New Testament church experience—and is examined in detail, but in the context of various, conditioning social, racial, and gender factors.⁵ Baptist opposition to Pentecostalism was often colored by socioeconomic, class, racial, and gender influences. Baptists, with their historic roots on the margins of society, frequently and condescendingly noted that believers who advocated for holiness or pentecostal experience were on the fringes of society. The irony is striking, but it reveals the role of socioeconomic influences in the story of Baptist experiences of the power of the Spirit.

Most Baptists affirmed cessationism—the belief that miracles had ceased with the New Testament era—and they had to define or restrict their emulation of biblical experience and application of biblical restorationism accordingly. Bapticostals, or Baptists influenced by Pentecostal theology, desired to restore biblical examples of Jesus Christ yesterday, today, and forever (Heb 13:8). They were influenced by wider holiness and pentecostal currents and affirmed post-conversion, Spirit-filled experiences of sanctification, speaking in tongues, and divine healing as they extended their restorationist hermeneutic. Baptist interactions with the holiness-pentecostal-charismatic traditions add a new perspective to the discussion of restorationist ecclesiology in the American religious landscape.

Detailing how Baptists did not have a shy member of the Trinity also provides several new angles on understanding Baptist identity. A hallmark of Baptist identity is diversity, but this study examines and redefines that diversity in ways never fully explored. Historical evidence often reveals experience—vibrant, experiential faith—as the context for defining Baptist DNA.⁶ How Baptists have described and understood the Holy Spirit in their everyday religious experience and how those different responses have been influenced by interactions with the holiness-pentecostal-charismatic traditions is a new way of understanding Baptist diversity.

Examinations of Baptist life, especially in the latter half of the twentieth century, have most often focused on the battle for the Bible, the conflict between conservatives and moderates, or on Baptist political involvement in the Religious Right. This study broadens the picture at the level of religious experience—other things were going on besides religious politics. For example, the surprising, enduring legacy of the Keswick holiness tradition is recognized (a point not adequately made in previous examinations of Baptist history and theology). The Keswick influence is traced during the heyday of the nineteenth-century Holiness Movement, but also into the thought of twentieth-century Southern Baptist leaders to reveal its previously under-examined impact up to the present. Keswick spirituality played a significant role in the theology of the leaders of the Southern Baptist conservative resurgence of the 1980s and beyond. The Keswick tradition provided a sense of purity and spiritual power of the Holy Spirit to many conservatives who touted biblical inerrancy as the only acceptable basis of being a Southern Baptist.

To ask again, have Baptists had a shy member of the Trinity in recent decades? This study provides the first significant, in-depth interpretation of broad Baptist involvement in the larger charismatic movement that found a prominent place in the American religious landscape during the second half of the twentieth century into the twenty-first century. Untold stories of Baptist and ex-Baptist charismatics are highlighted, as well as the prominent place of Baptist involvement and the role of key leadership in the charismatic story. The book describes a flourishing bapticostal presence or desire for encountering the Holy Spirit in Southern Baptist experience, in American Baptist life (ABCUSA), and among African American Baptists. Reading the well-known charismatic revivals, the Toronto Blessing and the Brownsville revival, through a Baptist lens provides new ways of understanding the larger charismatic phenomenon.

Baptists and the Holy Spirit has three major parts: Baptist interactions with the Holiness Movement of the mid- to late-nineteenth century; Baptist interactions with the Pentecostal Movement, particularly in the first half of the twentieth century; and Baptist interactions with the charismatic movement of the latter half of the twentieth century. Much of the interaction, though certainly not all, focused on the role of the Holy Spirit in everyday Christian experience. Concerns revolved around the meaning of holiness/sanctification and around being baptized or filled with the Holy Spirit, which could be for cleansing of sin or for power to witness and evangelize. Baptist interactions with the holiness-pentecostal-charismatic traditions often revolved around understandings of miracles and spiritual gifts, especially speaking in tongues and whether these were possible in contemporary times. Baptist cessationism was widespread and clashed with the minority of Baptists open to the power of biblical miracles, especially a full gospel that emphasized speaking in tongues and divine healing in the present age.

Baptist interactions with these kinds of issues rarely took place before the substantive growth of holiness teaching in the United States and England in the nineteenth century. Advocates for a trail of ecstatic, Spirit-led worship practices, alongside and part of demonstrations of the miraculous in Christian history, point to the emotionalism found in the First and Second Great Awakenings in the colonies and subsequent early republic. For example, revival services of the Separate Baptists, led by evangelist Shubal Stearns, are cited for their intense emotionalism: the consciousness of conversion, with all the excited manner and holy whine, and the nervous trembling and wild screams among their hearers.⁷ In strong restorationist fashion, the Separate Baptists practiced at least nine church rites derived from a literal application of rituals found in the New Testament. They included laying on of hands and anointing with oil for the sick with prayer for healing—a practice later non-cessationist Baptists continued.⁸ Baptist involvement in charismatic-type worship before the advent of the Holiness or Pentecostal Movements also reportedly found expression in the Second Great Awakening at the outset of the nineteenth century. Worshippers in those revival services testified to falling down to the ground ostensibly under the compulsion of the Holy Spirit, an experience that was later called being slain in the Spirit.⁹

During this same era of Baptist participation in revivalism, the influential Philadelphia Baptist Association issued its Philadelphia Baptist Confession, a reprint of the Calvinistic Second London Confession of 1689. The only new items were articles on singing psalms and the laying on of hands. In some Baptist circles, laying on of hands was considered a biblical ordinance and thus commanded to be practiced as part of ongoing Christian worship. The Confession described its purpose: the end of this ordinance is not for the extraordinary gifts of the Spirit, but for a farther reception of the Holy Spirit of promise, or for addition of graces of the Spirit. The article elaborated that laying on of hands, like other ordinances, was confirmed by signs and wonders, and divers miracles and gifts of the Holy Ghost.¹⁰ The document made no reference to a continuation of miracles in the present age but said that prayer, when done with others, should be in a known tongue.¹¹ In 1802, the Philadelphia Baptist Association issued a circular letter that touted a cessationist perspective regarding miracles. The letter argued that the baptism of the Holy Spirit and the accompanying miracles in Acts 2 were confined to the apostolic era to assist in the birth of the church. The Calvinistic understanding of cessationism became the pervasive understanding of spiritual gifts and miracles in the Baptist world.¹² Substantive interaction of Baptists with other Christians about the gifts of the Spirit and the baptism of the Holy Spirit began with the growth of the Holiness Movement and continued with pentecostal and charismatic stories. This story begins, then, with the Holiness Revival of 1858.

Baptists and the Holy Spirit is a story of surprisingly extensive interaction between Baptists and the holiness-pentecostal-charismatic traditions. The narrative is part of the restorationist drive to embody or emulate the ecclesiastical practices and experiences of the New Testament church. It was a competitive interaction because these groups often employed a literal biblicism based on the conviction that they possessed the full gospel or the fullest expression of apostolic Christianity. Baptist DNA was an interplay of Word/Spirit/experience. Baptists had always described themselves as subject to biblical authority—people of the Book. Their heritage was also one of Spirit-led experience, an experiential piety in search of direct encounters of God. Various Baptists moved beyond their conversionist spirituality in search of more experience from emerging traditions that gave room for intense, Spirit-led experience. Thus, they sought extra doses of holiness, the baptism of the Holy Spirit—with or without speaking in tongues—divine healing, and being slain in the Spirit. Responding to the religious-cultural winds around them, these bapticostals extended the interplay of Word/Spirit/experience beyond the comfort zone of many of their Baptist colleagues. A Word-based, Spirit-led, experience-defining faith—the order was often indistinguishable—was in search of the New Testament church’s direct encounter with the power of God the Holy Spirit. These Baptists had no shy member of the Trinity, and those Baptists who opposed them could ill afford to ignore the Holy Spirit in defense of their biblical faith.

In these pages, the reader will find an updated overview of the holiness-pentecostal story in the American religious landscape, but through a new method of reading the story through the experiential lens of a particular denominational group, the Baptists. The extensive nature of Baptist interactions with the holiness-pentecostal-charismatic traditions reveals the increasing impact of the pentecostalization of American religion upon the dominant baptistification (especially the freedom of choice, and the importance of decision and experience) practices that had long characterized American religion.¹³ A new look at restorationist practices, a new way of understanding denominational diversity and conditioning social factors, a new depth in telling the African American Baptist story, and a new way of recognizing the malleable nature of denominational boundaries—this is a Baptist (and holiness and pentecostal) story that has rarely been acknowledged, and less frequently told.

I

•••

1

Baptists and the Holiness Movement

Holiness teachings that began to flourish in early nineteenth-century America were mostly associated with Methodism.¹ John Wesley had advocated a second experience beyond conversion: a second blessing of sanctification. Believers could have an instantaneous or gradual process of obtaining sanctification, which Wesley insisted was not sinless perfection but perfect love. Holiness meant not an avoidance of temptation or unintentional misdeeds but a purity of motives and having the mind of Christ per scriptural admonition.² John William Fletcher, one of Wesley’s disciples, expanded his teachings on sanctification. Fletcher’s use of pentecostal language of the Spirit, especially baptism of the Holy Spirit, to describe and define sanctification became widely used on the American scene in the late nineteenth century. Wesleyan teachings on holiness generally emphasized cleansing and moral purity; the second blessing was an eradication of sin/sinful nature. American Methodism’s attachment to Wesleyan teachings on the doctrine of Christian perfection/sanctification, according to scholars of the movement, was a process of ebb and flow.

The Holiness Movement was a blend of historic pietism, American revivalism, and Wesleyan perfectionism.³ Certainly one primary avenue for the spread of holiness teachings was through the Tuesday prayer meetings that were initiated by Sarah Lankford and her brother and sister-in-law, Walter and Phoebe Palmer, in New York in 1835. The Tuesday Meeting for the Promotion of Holiness met in the Palmer house for almost sixty years and inspired similar meetings in other cities. Phoebe Palmer became a spokesperson for women in (preaching) ministry and for the contention that sanctification was an instantaneous second blessing for those with naked faith who only believe. Her theology, which gathered momentum and had significant influence in holiness circles, was a corollary to revivalistic evangelism that had already popularized instantaneous conversion experiences. Palmer’s use of the pentecostal imagery of Acts 2 to describe sanctification was extremely influential among holiness believers who identified sanctification with the baptism of the Holy Spirit.⁴

Sanctification and perfectionist teachings also found root outside Methodism in more Reformed circles. In the 1830s, Charles Finney and Asa Mahan became identified with Oberlin Perfectionism, which has been described as within a hair’s breadth of Wesleyanism.⁵ Mahan’s The Scripture Doctrine of Christian Perfection was read widely in the burgeoning holiness circles. Mahan and the Palmers had significant interaction. Another key work was Presbyterian William Boardman’s Higher Christian Life (1858). For non-Wesleyan holiness advocates, Boardman’s use of the phrase higher life became their preferred identity marker because of the tendency of critics to lambast Christian perfection as sinless perfection. Key events in the history of the Holiness Movement were the Revival of 1858, which especially affected Northern cities, and then the establishment of the National Camp Meeting Association for the Promotion of Holiness in 1867 (with fourteen camp meetings from 1867 to 1872).⁶

Holiness advocates after the Civil War era offered several definitions of the baptism of the Holy Spirit, the key experiential and doctrinal treasure that holiness and then pentecostal readers found in Acts 2. The first was the equation of the baptism of the Holy Spirit with sanctification, in a Wesleyan focus on cleansing and purity. With the increased use of pentecostal language, the question of the Spirit providing power arose (cf. Acts 1:8). Asa Mahan’s work, The Baptism of the Holy Spirit (1870), gave attention to this theme of power. The meetings of the National Camp Meeting Association became a hot spot for sermons on the promise of divine power. Some, like Phoebe Palmer, affirmed that holiness was power; others said the baptism of the Holy Spirit brought holiness and power to evangelize. Some, like the former Baptist and founder of the Fire-Baptized Holiness Church, Benjamin Irwin, began to describe three blessings (conversion, sanctification, and then the Holy Spirit baptism for power to serve and witness), and a similar threefold paradigm was later seen in the doctrinal development of pentecostal denominations like the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee) and the Pentecostal-Holiness Church. The promise of power in holiness circles assuredly brought the hope of empowerment to the powerless among the poor and lower classes in the emerging cities.⁷

As more non-Wesleyans became holiness advocates, especially popular revivalists like D. L. Moody and Reuben (R. A.) Torrey, the baptism of the Holy Spirit was even more identified as an enduement of the Spirit’s power for service. Sanctification was then often described as progressive rather than instantaneous and not a separate second blessing or distinct religious experience. Finally, the Keswick Holiness Movement of England was influential in the United States, with evangelists like Moody and Palmer preaching in both countries. Keswick meetings began annually in 1875. If Wesleyans in America were eradicationists, Keswick participants were suppressionists regarding sanctification’s effect on the sinful human nature. For Keswick participants, the baptism of the Holy Spirit was often seen as a second religious experience and understood as an enduement of power for witnessing and missions.⁸

The Holiness Movement became significant in denominational circles. Pro-holiness publications were flourishing. Some have suggested that a majority of Methodist parishioners were attracted to it, though certainly Methodist leaders increasingly attacked the phenomenon. By the 1890s, holiness theology was rampant yet under siege. Methodist opponents thought that holiness advocates were, simply put, changing the face and direction of Methodism to something unrecognizable and thus something uncomfortable. As one Methodist opponent commented, They have changed the name of our meetings, substituting holiness for Methodist. They preach a different doctrine. They sing different songs.⁹ Consequently, many holiness advocates left established denominations—became come-outers—and numerous separate holiness denominations were born. These come-outers are often referred to as radical evangelicals.¹⁰ Believers with the most intense commitment to holiness theology gradually adopted a fourfold gospel: an affirmation of conversion, divine healing, baptism of the Holy Spirit, and an imminent return of Christ (premillennial eschatology). As Christian and Missionary Alliance leader A. B. Simpson put it, Jesus Christ was Savior, Sanctifier, Healer, and Coming King.¹¹ The fourfold pattern became the doctrinal basis of the birth of Pentecostalism—with baptism of the Holy Spirit being redefined to understand speaking in tongues as the initial evidence of the spiritual experience.

Evangelical historian George Marsden laid out several characteristics of the development of modernity in American religion in the latter half of the nineteenth century and then compared and contrasted various Protestant renewal/reactions such as the Holiness Movement to it. Liberalism, or modernism, affirmed the basic elements of the modern age, which included historical-critical biblical methodology, an optimistic view of humanity and the incarnation of God in the development of human civilization (deifying historical process), a focus on ethics and morality as the essence of Christianity, and the centrality of religious feelings or experience. The various conservative, evangelical movements were mirror images of liberal currents. In particular, the Holiness Movement was a mirror image of the liberal stress on morality. Whereas liberalism eschewed a belief in original sin and highlighted an optimistic view of humankind and its potential, the Holiness Movement revealed its conservative roots regarding the sinfulness of humanity, but with a twist. The empowerment of the Holy Spirit, received in the second blessing or the baptism of the Holy Spirit, allowed believers to overcome their sinful condition and be ethically pure, or be holy.¹²

Socioeconomic factors were, of course, pivotal to the development of the Holiness Movement. Wealthier Christians were more prone to reject holiness themes, which were tied to some form of separation from the world. Many holiness believers were from more modest socioeconomic conditions, the working or lower classes.¹³ The Holiness Movement in some regions (e.g., the South) functioned as an apolitical religious response to the social issues of the era that paralleled the response of the political Populist Movement.¹⁴ Said another way, the Holiness Movement was part of the conservative reaction against the development of urbanization, the expansion of railroads, and new industrialized businesses, but was also an innovation that stressed the equality of religious experience among the rising differences in class, race, and gender in the expanding society of the United States.¹⁵

The story of general Baptist involvement in the Holiness Movement is a story rarely told.¹⁶ Surprisingly, the wide-ranging 1881 Baptist Encyclopedia of William Cathcart ignored holiness figures of that era, and modern studies have been scant or limited in focus.¹⁷ The story of the Holiness Movement and Baptists best begins with the Revival of 1858.

Revival of 1858

The event usually seen as a major impetus for the developing Holiness Movement is referred to as the Revival of 1858 and featured the Tuesday meetings for holiness led by Phoebe Palmer. Precise origins are debated. One scholar found its initial stages in the prayer meeting revival campaigns of Phoebe and Walter Palmer in Canada in late 1857.¹⁸ The revival is also called the businessman’s revival, with origins being found in prayer meetings first held in a Dutch Reformed church in September 1857. The center of the revival was New York, but it was evident in other places, primarily in the North and especially in urban areas. Scholars suggest that a trigger for the revival was an economic panic in the fall of 1857. Not surprisingly then, midday interdenominational prayer meetings attracted many business leaders who were suffering financially with the collapse of banks.¹⁹ The prayer meetings guaranteed the revival significant lay involvement. The revival was not confined to prayer meetings, however. Revivalists like Charles Finney and Baptists A. B. Earle and Jacob Knapp were active and sought after by churches.²⁰

Beyond the activity of Baptist evangelists, Baptists participated in the Revival of 1858 and the Baptist paper, The Watchman, covered it.²¹ Baptists in New York, for example, had already started in December 1857 setting aside one day of the week to pray for a revival.²² In 1858, Baptist Mariners’ Church in New York had meetings every evening for three months, with 1,010 baptisms reported and the congregation’s growth rising from 100 to 500 members (many of the baptized were seamen from other countries). Baptist support of the revival reportedly led to 150,000 baptisms in 1858.²³ Northern Baptists’ most influential leader, Francis Wayland, was involved in revival efforts. The Brown University president, at the time the interim pastor at First Baptist Church, Providence, Rhode Island, attended the prayer meetings of the businessmen, preached, and visited them.²⁴ Revival also occurred at colleges like the University of Virginia. Baptist minister J. William Jones, later known for his work in Confederate revivalism during the Civil War, helped organize a Young Men’s Christian Association at the university in 1858. The first collegiate YMCA in America, this group held prayer meetings and Bible studies in the boarding houses where students lived and helped spread revival.²⁵

The Revival of 1858 is regarded as a revival with perfectionistic characteristics. Revivalists like Phoebe Palmer preached conversion and sanctification as a second blessing throughout the 1850s. Palmer’s Tuesday meetings were hotbeds for holiness teaching. Presbyterian William Boardman’s book, The Higher Christian Life, was published in 1858 at the height of the revival fervor and helped advance Wesleyan holiness teachings to non-Wesleyan audiences.²⁶ Baptist involvement in the revival normally emphasized evangelism. Sources that document Francis Wayland’s or J. William Jones’ involvement, for example, do not discuss the revival in terms of holiness concepts. Baptist evangelist Jacob Knapp, active in the revival, distanced himself from holiness teaching during his career. Knapp quipped, As for myself, I was never troubled with too much holiness; my difficulty has rather been the want of it.²⁷ On the other hand, John Quincy Adams of New York and other Baptist ministers—enough to begin a noteworthy ‘higher life’ movement in their denomination²⁸—attended meetings of Phoebe Palmer, read William Boardman, and thus were influenced positively by holiness teachings and testified to an experience of the second blessing during the revival. Soon after the revival, A. B. Earle testified to his own experience of sanctification, echoing the language of the Palmers. Timothy Smith has even designated one Baptist minister, Henry Fish, a clear and important precursor of the Revival of 1858. Fish’s focus on the Holy Spirit and the needed restoration of Pentecost helped till the soil for Baptists, and others, to focus on holiness and the power of the Holy Spirit.²⁹

Henry Fish (1820–1877)

Henry Fish was well known in New Jersey Baptist life in the mid-nineteenth century for his pastoral ministry, his involvement in promoting Baptist education, and his writings. A graduate of Union Theological Seminary in 1845, Fish was then ordained as pastor of the Baptist church at Somerville. In 1851, he became the pastor of First Baptist Church, Newark, and remained there for twenty-seven years.³⁰ Fish is best known for his ardent promotion of Baptist identity and religious (soul) liberty. In his 1860 book on conscience entitled The Price of Soul-Liberty and Who Paid It, Fish was a thoroughgoing Baptist triumphalist who argued that Baptists had always practiced the great truth, that as every man is held directly accountable to GOD for his religious faith and practice, he cannot, of right, be held accountable to any human tribunal; but on the other hand, may claim the heaven-descended and inalienable right to be let free from all arrogance, and every form of compulsion, in the affairs of this soul.³¹ In 1855, however, four years before writing his soul liberty treatise, Fish wrote Primitive Piety Revived, or The Aggressive Power of the Christian Church. He tied freedom of individual conscience to freedom for conversion. The book, with its call for apostolic soul winning, helped pave the way for the awakening of 1858.³²

Fish argued that pentecostal piety was the key to the restoration of the New Testament church—a familiar Baptist identity marker. He queried, Why may Christians not be filled with the Holy Ghost as they were in primitive times? Fish called this restorationist push for a return to apostolic faith evangelical sanctification. He also offered a familiar mid-nineteenth-century experiential definition of holiness as eradication: The Spirit of God is the grand animating agency in the Christian Church. He is the sanctifier of the soul. He enables us to overcome and eradicate the remains of sin within us and give to the new nature symmetry, beauty, maturity and strength.³³ Neither could this Spirit-led experience be taken for granted because, in good Baptist/evangelical fashion, Fish said that it requires much less vigilance to maintain a sound creed than a sound heart.³⁴

Fish highlighted the role of faith and Scripture in his doctrine of holiness. He wrote that faith secures our sanctification and the believing soul accepts the word of God. Yet holiness did not come without exertion on our part. Believers needed to strive for holiness since it was a great witness, better than argument or persuasion.³⁵ Fish identified with the move among holiness advocates to call for a return to Pentecost and the baptism of the Holy Spirit as an enduement of power. He wrote a journal article, Power in the Pulpit, in which he elaborated on holiness and witnessing. He warned against professional piety and reminded his readers that a holy office does not make one holy. He argued that the Spirit-led experience of holiness or the baptism of the Holy Ghost was the most essential ingredient to pulpit power. The apostles at Pentecost were not qualified to preach until the Divine Spirit, in a special sense, had come upon them. Neither is anyone, Fish added.³⁶

Fish not only wrote about the need for revival, his church participated in it. One article reporting on the Revival of 1858 noted that a great work was occurring in Fish’s church, with an emphasis on prayer rather than preaching at midweek services. By April 1858, Fish’s church had reported a growth of two hundred members.³⁷ In 1874, Fish published a handbook on revivals that included commentary on the Revival of 1858. Revivals swept the country like the day of Pentecost, Fish affirmed, and ministers who seemed to be baptized with the Holy Spirit preached with a new power and earnestness, bringing truth home to conscience and life as rarely before . . . it really seems as if the millennium were upon us in its glory.³⁸ With the ministry of Henry Fish, holiness concerns among Baptists had begun.

John Quincy Adams (1825–1881)

In his personal testimony, John Quincy Adams said that he was converted at Norfolk Street Baptist Church, New York, at the age of twenty. He received sanctification two years later, but did not at that time know what to call the experience. Adams then lost the blessing after two months because he did not know that he needed to keep it through the exercise of simple faith in Jesus.³⁹ Subsequently, Adams testified that he entered a cycle of sinning and repenting and even desired death—comments often heard in other Baptist holiness testimonies—if that was the only way to be set free from his sins. During this time, Adams entered the local Baptist church ministry (Caldwell, New Jersey, 1849) and had success in evangelism and writing, though he suggested he ministered amid great nervousness and doubt and fear.⁴⁰ In 1853, for example, Adams wrote a book, Baptists the Only Thorough Religious Reformers, which went through several editions, and even today is published as a classic restorationist declaration that Baptists embody the authentic New Testament church.⁴¹

In 1856, Adams became pastor of North Baptist Church, New York—perhaps because of the success of his book—and soon the Revival of 1858 changed his focus.⁴² He testified that he learned about the second blessing of the Holy Spirit at one of the gatherings at Phoebe Palmer’s home and was impressed that Christians from various denominations, including other Baptists, were there. He also read holiness advocate William Boardman’s 1858 book, The Higher Christian Life.⁴³ In 1859, after a battle with dysentery, Adams reversed course and no longer desired death because of the cycle of sinning in his life, but began to preach a higher Christian life experience, even though he testified to not yet having experienced sanctification. Adams attended further gatherings at the Palmers’, and he yearned for an emotional experience for days. Finally, on March 25, he began to trust God for a second blessing without any feeling or emotion—clearly a Palmerian approach to holiness.⁴⁴ That day, Adams testified, was a day of peace such as I had never enjoyed before. . . . Through him I was more than a conqueror. Sin had no dominion over me. I had no anxiety, no fear; Jesus fully saved me, and saved me fully each moment. I entered into rest—the rest of faith, and soon my soul was filled to overflowing with the love of Christ.⁴⁵

Adams’ preaching on sanctification at his church found receptive hearers and significant opposition. On July 1, 1859, he and eighty-one members of the church—perhaps not surprisingly those of poorer economic status—organized a new congregation, Antioch Baptist Church. The following year the New York Baptist Association extended fellowship to them, but opposition ultimately denied them full membership.⁴⁶ Adams still maintained his Baptist convictions, however, and despite the interdenominational nature of the Holiness Movement, he lauded Baptist principles as biblically superior.⁴⁷

In one of his earliest sermons on sanctification, Adams spoke of entire sanctification as being entirely set apart for God—to be wholly consecrated, with the consciousness, wrought in the soul by the Holy Spirit, that such consecration is accepted through the merits of Christ. Body, soul, and spirit are sanctified wholly. According to Adams, the believer is in a state of the most perfect self-renunciation and, in words he repeated and other Baptists later emphasized, the soul is sweetly at rest and experiences the rest of faith even though trials and temptations may come. The sanctified believer also has a sweet sense of inward purity under ‘the sanctifying power’ of the Holy Spirit.⁴⁸

Adams offered an experiential method for proving the doctrine of sanctification. The justified soul had a deep sense of the need for the experience, and the justified acknowledged that she/he was not living up to the present privileges of a better Christian life. Adams ironically noted that as persons approached death they did not seem to oppose the possibility of sanctification. In Baptist-restorationist fashion, Adams said that sanctification was clearly found in the Bible, and was experienced in the apostolic church.⁴⁹ He concluded in Palmerian language, God can do this work. He is willing to do it. He has promised to do it.⁵⁰

Sanctification was not due to human effort, according to Adams, but was solely the work of divine grace. Again reflecting the influence of Phoebe Palmer, Adams said that Christ was the altar for the obedience that believers offer.⁵¹ Adams preached to his church members that they had been willing to exercise faith for conversion; why not, therefore, exercise faith in Christ to purify their hearts . . . to subdue sin? Both the first and second blessings were obtained solely by faith.⁵² Adams attempted to avoid being branded a perfectionist, something that sounded too unorthodox to Baptist opponents. In contrast to being perfectly sinless, he said that he was perfect in ignorance, in weakness, in folly and, aside from Christ, I am perfect in vileness and sin! This is the only perfection I claim! But for my perfect ignorance, Christ has perfect knowledge—for my perfect weakness, He has perfect strength—for my perfect folly, He has perfect wisdom—for my perfect vileness and sin, He has perfect righteousness and sanctification. By faith I appropriate Him. And taking Him, I take all.⁵³

From 1863 to 1868, Adams published a holiness journal called The Christian; Devoted to the Advancement of Gospel Holiness. He asserted that the journal would ignore sectarianism and present the truth as we find it in God’s Word.⁵⁴ Baptists were the primary audience and the primary authors of numerous articles and testimonies.⁵⁵ The journal’s defense for advocating holiness followed a method that was part and parcel of Baptist identity. The Bible was the Christian’s sole authority for faith and thus it was his/her duty to affirm the biblical nature of the second blessing. In addition, scriptural authority was verified by personal experience and, in the case of holiness, the testimony of hundreds of God’s most devoted children affirmed it.⁵⁶

Throughout subsequent journal issues, Adams’ teaching was reflected in the testimonies of his church members and fellow Baptist pastors from New York and beyond. The separatist (later come-outism) rhetoric associated with groups considered sectarian by the larger culture was aggressive and unabashed. Adams said that the world’s spirit of selfishness and unbelief was seen in pleasures and recreations like the horse-race course, the theater, the ballroom and the card table.⁵⁷ The holiness message was to be inclusive, however. C. W. Brooks, another Baptist pastor from New York, preached that sanctification was intended for all Christians. Citing the favorite Protestant and especially Baptist teaching of the priesthood of all believers, Brooks said that all have equal rights to the fullness of divine grace . . . [the] high and low, rich and poor, bond and free.⁵⁸

In Palmerian language and that of the larger Wesleyan tradition, these Baptists testified that the separate experiences or works of grace—justification and sanctification—were to be accepted by simple faith or by naked faith. The seeker must not rely on feelings or emotion but upon the Word of God. If a person did not feel any different, he/she must only believe.⁵⁹ According to C. W. Brooks, Sometimes we are shut up to the naked faith upon the simple promise of God’s word, without any other light or feeling. . . . Now, we are to believe that, because God says so, and for no other reason. His word and not our feeling is to be the basis of our faith. Satan tells you that this is presumption; no, it is not; it is simple faith. It is the highest presumption to dare to disbelieve what God says.⁶⁰

Adams and supporters often described the experience of holiness in mystical-type language. Christ was a perfect Savior who offered a present full salvation. Entire sanctification was perfect peace and an experience of divine light in the soul. The soul was filled with uninterrupted peace and light.⁶¹ As one believer testified, A new sensation, one I had never felt before, seemed to fill me, to permeate my whole being. It was not excited feeling, it was not joy. It was peace—deep, calm, perfect peace, a peace like a river. It was love, unutterable love. It was light, an atmosphere of light, in which my soul seemed bathed, and which seemed to penetrate body and soul alike.⁶²

The role of emotion in the Baptist experience of holiness was at times conflicted. Repeatedly, Baptist stories sounded Palmerian when believers said that they did not experience ecstatic or rapturous emotion. Simple faith did not need or rely on emotionalism. Baptists affirmed with Palmer that they cast themselves on the altar of sacrifice, giving all to Christ who was the altar and sanctified the gift.⁶³ At the same time, one Baptist said that the Holy Spirit came upon him in such power that he could only utter the Spirit’s name by way of adoration for a quarter of an hour . . . I fell upon the floor powerless, though not entirely unconscious, for an hour.⁶⁴

While Baptists preferred the rational method of simple faith, their testimonies revealed that the emotional weight leading up to the mystical relief experienced in the second blessing could be intense. Believers panted after the baptism of the Holy Spirit.⁶⁵ They told of the frustrations of living a Romans-chapter-seven life—the ups and downs of doing what they did not want to do and not doing what they should. A striking number of seekers reminiscent of Adams’ personal story told how they wished for death in order to escape a life of sin and the cycle of the broken resolutions of a non-sanctified life.⁶⁶ Moreover, as Adams and Palmer affirmed, believers had to keep testifying of the experience or else they would lose it.⁶⁷

Adams and supporters acknowledged Baptist opposition to their holiness experience. They responded that they were discouraged by what is called orthodoxy. The support for holiness—a restoration of the Pentecostal model of the primitive church—was actually the only way to unify the church.⁶⁸ They contended that holiness was not a sectarian doctrine, as opponents charged, nor was it a threat to denominational identity: We seek to advance not ‘Methodist holiness’ or ‘Baptist holiness’ or ‘Presbyterian holiness’ but ‘gospel holiness.’⁶⁹

Adams’ 1870 book Experiences of the Higher Christian Life in the Baptist Denomination reprinted numerous testimonies that had originally appeared in the six-year run of the journal. The testimonies revealed that Adams had contact with holiness-oriented Baptists from several states. The book continued to elaborate on holiness as a second experience of grace. Authors discussed what term or phrase was best to use to describe holiness. These Baptists stated their hesitancy to use terms usually associated with Methodism, like perfect love, entire sanctification, and Christian perfection—though they still did so.⁷⁰ Adams acknowledged that Presbyterian William Boardman’s The Higher Christian Life had influenced Baptists because Boardman clearly focused on the authority of the Bible. While Adams had employed various terms for holiness, he declared his preference for Boardman’s phrase higher Christian life because it avoided hints of sinless perfection.⁷¹ Other Baptist testimonies affirmed Boardman’s reference to the higher Christian life as a second conversion.⁷²

Some testimonies in the Adams’ book noted the influence of the work of Oberlin holiness leader Asa Mahan. One anonymous struggling pastor writing about Mahan sounded a typical refrain regarding the reading of all non-Baptist holiness literature: whether the philosophy of the writer was correct or his choice of terms judicious, one thing was sure: there was attainable for the Christian a ‘higher life,’ a deeper experience . . .⁷³ At times, Phoebe Palmer was mentioned in the testimonies, but actually far less than might be expected given her influence. At the same time, her affirmation of women in ministry was problematic for most Baptists. If she were emphasized, it would add fuel to the fire of Baptist critics of the holiness experience.⁷⁴

Absalom B. Earle (1812–1897)

Itinerant Baptist evangelists were not an uncommon sight in the nineteenth century. The focus of their preaching was the salvation of souls. Some, like Emerson Andrews, but especially A. B. Earle, were involved in the Holiness Movement.⁷⁵ Earle was one of the two most respected evangelists in America from 1859 to 1874, or until D. L. Moody dominated the revival scene.⁷⁶ Baptists acknowledged that Earle was the most noted Baptist evangelist of his day.⁷⁷

Earle’s experience of sanctification gave weight to the movement associated with John Q. Adams.⁷⁸ His journey toward sanctification followed the same path as Adams. He was successful in evangelism, but still battled the despair of a Romans-chapter-seven lifestyle of broken resolutions. In 1859, Earle, in a diary he called his consecration book, resolved to live a life of entire sanctification to God; yet sin, especially his strong will, defeated him. Finally, after much struggle, he had simple faith in God’s word.⁷⁹ At 5:00 p.m., on November 2, 1863, although he had never felt weaker, Earle testified that he fully trusted in Christ and felt peace without fear, which really became rest.⁸⁰

Throughout the 1860s into the 1880s, Earle, whose home base was Boston, traveled the country as an itinerant evangelist from the New England states to the Midwest to California. He also spent time significant time in North Carolina. In 1871, for example, he reported that he preached 575 sermons in nine months.⁸¹ By 1886, according to one sympathetic observer, Earle had traveled 340,000 miles, had preached 20,850 sermons, and had seen 160,000 converts join churches because of his ministry. Significant success no doubt, but critics questioned if the numbers were inflated and what they really meant.⁸²

Earle’s preaching was generally well received. A one-month meeting in Leavenworth, Kansas reported 300 conversions.⁸³ Highly regarded pastors Henry Fish of New Jersey, Richard Fuller of Baltimore, and Thomas Armitage of New York praised the evangelist.⁸⁴ First Baptist Church, Raleigh, North Carolina, had Earle as a guest evangelist on several occasions from 1869 to 1881, and a revival in 1870 was frequently mentioned in the Biblical Recorder of North Carolina for its success. Governor W. W. Holden and his wife were baptized in one of Earle’s meetings in Raleigh.⁸⁵ In addition, in an 1881 campaign, Earle preached in Raleigh for twenty-one days, and 100 conversions were reported.⁸⁶ T. H. Pritchard, pastor of First Baptist Church, Raleigh, was one of Earle’s best supporters, commenting on the most remarkable man I have ever seen . . . the most remarkable seasons of revival I have ever known.⁸⁷ Other Baptists, either humorously or with envy, thought Earle a good man but not the best preacher they had heard.⁸⁸

Earle preached to Baptists, but he became known as one of the earliest revivalists to conduct union interdenominational revival meetings in which denominational distinctives were muted. Earle thought union meetings were best to convert sinners to the faith; yet he still declared that believers could hold firm denominational convictions.⁸⁹ The new measures of Charles Finney’s evangelism had also recently entered Baptist life, and Earle was a significant early promoter of the innovations.⁹⁰ Some Baptists who thought women should remain silent in public opposed Earle’s Finney-like practice of encouraging converts, including women, to testify of their experience in the services.⁹¹ Critics of professional evangelism, including Baptist pastors who thought that itinerant ministers neglected the total life of the church, questioned Earle’s use of machinery. Yet one commented that no one seems more deeply impressed than he is with the necessity of the Spirit’s agency in conversion.⁹² In good Southern fashion, one critic resisted the authenticity of revival conversions and had a hard time accepting Earle’s machinery because it smacked of New Englandism.⁹³

Assessments of Earle’s itinerant ministry did not pay significant attention to his views of holiness. As an evangelist, Earle intentionally focused most of his services on evangelistic conversions. Nevertheless, observers knew his holiness teachings. Earle’s advocate, T. H. Pritchard of Raleigh, defended Earle as an orthodox minister. Other observers usually recognized Earle’s contributions on the revival circuit but made sure readers knew that they did not agree with all of Earle’s teachings, particularly his view of the rest of faith, which was a term he helped popularize in holiness circles. Baptist educator John Broadus raised caution about Earle’s view of the rest of faith and another author simply satirized it.⁹⁴

Earle wrote three books that offered a full description of his view of holiness: Bringing in Sheaves, 1868; The Rest of Faith, 1873; and Abiding Peace, 1881. The books do not reveal much progression of thought. The first book actually has a chapter entitled Rest of Faith, which Earle used as the title of the second book. The third, Abiding Peace, provided Earle’s fullest definition of faith.⁹⁵ Scholars of the Wesleyan tradition will again quickly note the many influences of Phoebe Palmer’s theology of holiness that found their way into Earle’s ministry.

Earle did not coin the phrases the rest of faith and abiding peace in Christ, which he used to define holiness—John Quincy Adams had already used the terms.⁹⁶ Still, given Earle’s national reputation as an evangelist, he clearly helped popularize and perpetuate these positive descriptions to Baptists and the wider Holiness Movement. Earle used the language of entire consecration on occasion, but interestingly did not use the common phrase, entire sanctification, perhaps because of supposed sectarian connections. Unsurprisingly, like Adams and in Baptist fashion, he asserted that the holiness experience was not sinless perfection. With that said, Earle was not afraid to talk of a second blessing, distinct from conversion, in biblical and Wesleyan terms of perfect love.⁹⁷

Earle also reflected the Wesleyan/Palmerian move toward pentecostal language to describe the second blessing. He did not employ the language of Pentecost nearly as much as the concept of rest, but the identification of the second experience of grace as being baptized in the Holy Spirit was clear.⁹⁸ Earle noted proudly that at least one pastor had called him a Pentecostal evangelist.⁹⁹ He developed a handy ten-point checklist for his evangelistic work, which he named Ten Evidences of Conversion for Younger Christians. Number ten was a growing desire to be holy and like Christ which was called the crowning evidence of all. Earle also had a ten-point checklist entitled a Self-Examination for Older Christians. The climactic numbers nine and ten asked, Do I believe I have been baptized with the Holy Spirit since my conversion? and Am I now sweetly resting in Christ, by faith, now?¹⁰⁰

According to Earle, the second blessing or Holy Spirit baptism was not a sinless state, but rest, the rest of faith, a calm, sweet resting all with Christ. This rest will prevent gloomy and distressing fears about the future. How does a believer know he/she has obtained the experience? The proof of holiness was the production of the fruits of the Spirit. Temptations, in good Wesleyan fashion, were still present, but Earle said they were easier to resist.¹⁰¹ This was not the result of human effort, but of relying and thus resting on faith in Christ. The experience was received and retained by faith alone. In typical Palmerian fashion, the believer could rest in the promise of only believe.¹⁰²

When Earle published his third book, Abiding Peace, he continued to define holiness as the rest of faith. However, the focus had shifted. In Bringing in Sheaves, Earle had described his personal reception of holiness as peace without fear, which really became rest, and he affirmed that the experience was an abiding fullness in Christ’s love without interruption.¹⁰³ In Abiding Peace he moved to define more fully this rest as abiding peace in Christ. Believers, after their conversion, sought more depth to their Christian lives and were frustrated at ups and downs, or what Earle called unrest. He preached that Christians could abide in the fullness of Christ’s love without these breaks in communion with Christ. There was no promise of physical rest from toil, labor, or pain, but during these challenges the sanctified believer had abiding peace in Christ.¹⁰⁴ Citing the prophet Isaiah, Earle declared that in this state you will not worry at things that seem dark and mysterious; but, trusting all with God, your peace will be as a river. Adams’ followers had used the peace-like-a-river description even before Earle and before the 1873 gospel hymn It is Well with My Soul, written by Horatio Spafford after he tragically lost his four daughters at sea.¹⁰⁵

In his exposition of abiding peace, Earle highlighted the concept of soul travail, which was called a Gethsemane experience. Christians who were living in deeper communion with God would recognize this soul travail as they fully surrendered to God. In mystical-sounding terms, Earle said that the aim of soul travail was to exit from one’s spiritual closet endued with the divine gentleness and power of Christ, mightily to stir the hearts of those who have lost their first love, and to kindle the flame of his own soul upon theirs.¹⁰⁶ Earle’s contention that a clean heart is preparatory for the baptism of the Holy Ghost could be compatible with a three-blessing paradigm—conversion, sanctification, and Holy Spirit baptism—developed more clearly later in the teachings of former Baptist Benjamin Irwin and his Fire Baptized Holiness Church.¹⁰⁷ Earle was most likely inconsistent in his teachings since evangelism and the rest of faith/abiding peace dominated his thought.

While addressing the concept of abiding peace, Earle continued his earlier focus on faith to only believe, but he provided even more elaborate Palmerian language to describe concepts that were later used in the articulation of a name it and claim it prosperity gospel, or in the promises of divine-healing evangelists. If you ask him in faith to give you abiding rest and peace, you will have it, Earle exhorted; you cannot fail to receive it. He added, Let us remember, then, that whatever we want of God we are to believe for that definite thing . . . whatever we can believe for without doubting, we are sure to have; it cannot fail . . . In a bit of caution, Earle affirmed that mystery was involved: We can always receive an answer to the prayer of faith; but it may be a negative answer. . . . If the thing prayed for cannot be granted, you will not have faith for that definite thing, only that you can be answered. In the end, if you have the faith, the gift of holiness will be the result.¹⁰⁸

Earle’s focus on holiness was tied to his work as an evangelist. He said that the effectiveness of holiness meetings not characterized by intensity of desire for the salvation of souls should be doubted. Only Christians filled with the Holy Spirit like the apostles of the New Testament era could really be successful in revivalism. When the evangelist has the enduement from on high, Earle concluded, others will feel that power and sinners will be converted.¹⁰⁹

Other Baptist Voices

Baptists were involved in the various facets of the broader Holiness Movement like the holiness camp meetings that flourished in the 1870s. Edgar M. Levy (1822–1906) represented that involvement. Levy grew up a Presbyterian but was ordained to the Baptist ministry at First Baptist Church, West Philadelphia, at the age of twenty-one in 1844. After a pastorate there of fourteen years, he served in Newark, New Jersey, for ten years. Levy wrote an account of the awakening of 1858, but he had yet to claim a second blessing experience and never used the word sanctification in his report. In 1868, he returned to Philadelphia to become pastor of Berean Baptist Church, and while there became the major Baptist figure involved in the national holiness camp meeting phenomenon.¹¹⁰

Levy published his