Click to join the conversation with over 500,000 Pentecostal believers and scholars
Click to get our FREE MOBILE APP and stay connected
| PentecostalTheology.com
4
Editor’s Note: In 1987 Asbury Theological Seminary received a generous grant from the Pew Charitable Trust to undertake a major Wesleyan-Holiness Study Project. Dr. Mel Dieter became the Director
of this project
which from 1987-1990 regularly brought together
a group
of scholars from
a
variety of traditions to present and discuss a series
of papers
on subjects which would
ultimately demonstrate the widespread impact of the Wesleyan-holiness movement on American religious life and culture. In November, 1988 while the scholars associated with this project were meeting at Asbury, the Society for Pentecostal Theology was invited to hold its annual meeting on the campus of the Seminary. This was a momentous event for it marked the first time a major group of Pentecostals had been hosted by an institution so closely identified with the Wesleyan-holiness tradition. Mel Dieter presented the fol- lowing article
as a plenary address to a joint session of the SPS membership, the scholars associated with the Wesleyan-Holiness Study Project, and interested persons from
the Asbury community. It is printed below as it was given, November 11,1988.
The
Wesleyan/Holiness
and Pentecostal Movements: Commonalities, Confrontation,
and
Dialogue
Melvin E. Dieter*
First, a word of personal
privilege!
In
venturing
into our
discussions,
I was
again
reminded of the “inwardness” of
any
such effort. I have
tried,
in
my
academic studies to be true to those standards which seek to promote some kind of objectiv- ity
in
my writings.
But as
Henry
F.
May points
out in a 1979
essay
on intellectual and
religious history,
most of us long
ago gave up
the
hope of
finding
scientific truth in our historical
study
and research. With him. we conclude that it is much more realistic
only
to
expect
to gain some- where
along
the line “a usable
insight
or two.” We turn to this alterna- tive.
May says.
… because the data do not tell us what they are for; the answers don’t generate
the questions. Each historian has to decide what he is trying to do, and why and how to go about it according to every thing he has learned, not just in graduate school but in life. Thus we will have as many
visions as we have historians.
Gradually
most historians
may come to agree on some things, but whatever consensus is reached will continue to be fleeting and unstable, 1
*Dr. Melvin E. Dieter, an ordained minister of the Wesleyan Church,
retires from the
faculty
and administration of
Asbury
Theo- logical Seminary, September 1,
1990,
where he has served as Provost,
and as
Professor
of Church
History
and Historical Theol- ogy.
He will make his home in
Lyndhurst, Virginia.
1 Henry F. May, Ideas Faith
and Feelings: Essays in American Intellectual and Religious History (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 148.
1
like to
the
relationships
ments to one another since beginning
For the sake of convenience,
restricted supported by
sive of this
project generated
meeting
nary’s campus. Asbury
5
One of the
major
results
group working
at the
So,
with that caveat
supported by
the venerable
Henry May,
I would
review with
you
some of the issues which rise from
my
vision of
and
responses
of the Pentecostal and holiness move-
the Pentecostal revival
began
to surface at the
of the twentieth
century.
In that
process,
some “useful
insight” may
surface which can be
helpful
to all of us in the
ongoing
studies of our two movements.
I will draw on
my
current research and
writing projects
to assist us with whatever
analysis
we
may
do in so
an effort. In our current
Wesleyan-Holiness Study Project,
a grant from the Pew Charitable trusts, we are
bringing
the
Wesleyan holiness/higher-life
revival movement under the most exten-
and intensive
study
it has
yet experienced.
will
certainly
be to treat more
adequately
the
questions
out of these more than
eighty years
of relationships between
the Holiness and Pentecostal Movements. Because of the extensive
scholarly
networks linked to the scholar-research
heart of the
project,
we have established a new circle of interaction
which we believe will
produce exceptional
benefits in the future for both
the academic and
religious
worlds. We invite all of
you
to learn more
about.the ”
project
while
you
are here and to become active in it in some
way.
I must also
try
to tell
you
what a deep sense of satisfaction I have in
with the
Society
for Pentecostal Studies here on
Asbury
Semi-
is an institution rooted in the Methodist- .
deeply
holiness tradition. It is an interdenominational school which serves as a
unique “bridge
of communication” between the United Methodist
Church and the holiness churches and
agencies.
In this function it
has,
with some
success, kept
a flow of
mutually revitalizing
moving
back and forth between two
religious
communities
seem to be
separated by
a chasm of
divergent viewpoints
wide to be spanned. Thus
far, there has been sufficient mutual commit-
ment to a common set of
Wesleyan
values on both sides to allow the
to be fruitful in
spite
of real and
perceptual
differences at
many
other
points.
I say all of that
only
to raise
my
banner of
hope
for the
present
moment. In
my view,
the basic
theological
and
experiential
commit- ments of both the Pentecostal and the holiness movements are rooted
in the
holiness/higher-life
I have reminded Donald
Dayton
that when he uses the cate-
gories
he does for
defining
the roots of Pentecostal
in his latest
book,2
he could
just
as well have made the title, The Devel-
Nineteenth
Century
Holiness
Theology.
The same mother
times,
relationship
But
historically century.
opment of
relationships
which,
at
too
–
revival milieu of the nineteenth
theology
as he does
Asbury
2Donald W. Dayton, Theological Roots of Pentecostalism Grand Rapids: Francis
Press/Zondervan and Meteuchen, NJ.: Scarecrow Press, 1987.
2
6
gave
birth to us both. It is therefore
my personal hope,
a hope shared
by many
of
my colleagues
as
well,
that
Asbury may
be
able,
through
this common
heritage
to serve as a point of communication between
these two traditions as well.
Bridge imagery
of itself
implies
some obstacle or obstacles that must be over-arched so that two communities which ordi- narily may
not communicate
may
find a place of mutual
interchange
and commerce.
Consequently,
I bring to this moment more than academic
concerns. Opportunities
like this for
dialogue
between our two traditions have been all too scarce in our common
history.
A major theological institute of the holiness churches was held November 1964 at Winona Lake. Indiana. The
presence
of an invited observer from the Assemblies of God made it
‘
the first
time,
to my
knowledge,
that a member of the Pentecostal
family had been
part
of an
officially sponsored
holiness
meeting.
Nine
years later Donald
Dayton
and
myself
were invited to read
papers
at the meet- ing
of your society at Lee
College
in Cleveland, Tennessee.3 Since then Pentecostal scholars have become members of the
Wesleyan Theological Society
and
Wesleyan
scholars have become members of the
Society
for Pentecostal Studies. Several of the sixteen scholars who make
up
the research core of our
Wesleyan/Holiness Study Project represent
Pente- costal
scholarship
and this
society.
The
progress
of
rapprochement
has been slow but we are
getting
there. I hope that these
days together
will help
us all to take even more
significant
strides forwards the
goal
of better mutual
understanding
and
respect.
We must
honestly recognize
those fundamental differences which dis- tinguish
us as
movements,
but I am convinced that our common com-
mitments are
just
as fundamental as
any
differences. If we will search out our commonalities with the same
intensity
as we do our
differences, we will
keep
at the
bridge-building
task. And what I
say
here rather obviously
about the
strong
common commitments of the holiness movement with what is known as the
Wesleyan/holiness
sector of Pen- tecostalism,
I
say
as well for the other
large
sector of
your
movement which is significantly
shaped by
the Reformed tradition in some
aspects of its life. As I make that
observation,
I beg a special indulgence from my
friend Edith Blumhofer on the merit of
again carefully having
read her dissertation on this
question.4
I would like to
suggest
that the
spiri- tual
dynamic
of such movements as the Assemblies of God is at least equally
or even more
strongly
derived from the historical
campmeeting perfectionism
as it is
by any
classical Reformed
categories.
The
theolog- ical and
experiential
wineskins of the Keswick low-church
Anglicans
3These papers appear in Vinson Synan, ed. Aspects of Penlecostal-Charismatic Origins (Plainfield,
NJ.:
Logos International, 1975), 39-80.
4Edith
Lydia Waldvogel,
“The
‘Overcoming
Life’: A Study in the Reformed Evangelical Origins
of Pentecostalism,”
unpublished PhD Dissertation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, 1977), 225pp.
3
7
and others
through
whom the
higher-life message
came back to its American home have
always,
it seems to
me,
been hard
put
to contain the holiness wine. To use another
metaphor,
the dominant
genes
of the vigorous
Christocentric
pneumatology residing
in our common
parent, the holiness
revival,
have left in all of the progeny such a unified
imprint of spirituality and
experience
that each of us will be the loser if we fail to recognize
it.
One of the most
interesting insights
to come out of the first
project conference which was held here last June was an
historiographical
one rising
from a paper read
by Dr.
Richard Shiels of Ohio State
University. The core of the discussion was the contention that the
history
of the early
Methodist movement in America still remains a “sanitized”
story. This observation raised for all of us the
all
challenge
to identify more real- istically
the diffuse motives which lie behind our
polemics
as we respond
to other
religious
movement which seem to represent a threat to us at one
point
or another. Shiels’ research on
early
Methodist
evange- lism in New
England
revealed that the Puritan establishment’s reaction to the Methodist invasion of Yankee
religious
communities seems to have been little different from the
way
in which
contemporary
establish- ment
religion regards
the cults of our
day.
With few
exceptions
the Methodist
pioneers
were viewed as crude in dress and
speech
and as unwelcome threats to the
prevailing
familial and societal structures. Their
style
of preaching and
worship
contradicted
everything
which had been established
by
two hundred
years
of accepted
practice.
To be sure the observation that class structures
play a significant
role in an establishment’s
response
to new movements is not
radically new, but the
specific
call for its
application
to
early
Methodist
history
is significant
for us. Such
application
would enhance our
understanding
of subsequent
reactions of later Methodism to the holiness revival and of both of the former to the later Pentecostal revival.
A more
adequate description
of how Methodists were
perceived
in the pre-Civil
War
period
and how
they
wished to be perceived after
they
had become a force to be reckoned with in American
society
can add a new dimension to the
understanding
of the rise and
ongoing
fortunes of the holiness movement within Methodism. And a similar case could be made,
I believe, for the rise of New School revivalism in Calvinism and the Princetonian
responses
to it,
especially
as it
promoted higher-life themes under
Finney, Mahan,
Boardman and others. The ultimate charge
that Warfield and his friends leveled
against
the movement was that it was
really
“Methodist.” And in this he was
essentially correct;
but the
interesting
element in this is that it
may
have been the
perceived cultural as much as the
theological
threat which Methodism
represented to a culture
largely
defined in Puritan terms that made such
labelling effective. It was the best means
by
which such
persons
could
reject
the
‘
4
8
Perfectionist
end-product
of the New School
theology
and with it the credibility
of the whole of New School
theology
itself.5
It was effective not
only
for the “Old Calvinists”
against
the New School,
but the onus of
being
“Methodist” even rubbed off on the holi- ness movements in New-School Calvinism themselves.
They fought hard and
long
to make it clear that their
higher-life theology
was not Wesleyan perfectionism
of
any sort,
but rather an
outgrowth
of Re- formed
theology.
In
consequence they
not
only
altered their under- standing
of their
theological roots,
but lost almost
totally
the
importance of their historical roots as well. I am not
deploring
the honest efforts of Finney
or others to
try
to make their holiness
teachings acceptable enough
to their Calvinistic
theology
so their
people
would hear them. I am
saying
that we have to take a more
in-depth
look at
why
their descendants who have become one of the most
significant
sectors of contemporary evangelicalism
tend to interpret their
contemporary
status as a movement and their
heritage by associating
their
understanding
of themselves
predominantly
with the
very persons
who in their
day
so strongly rejected
the
higher-life
leaders and
theology
which were as responsible
as
any
other factor in
why
and how
they
came to be and who
they
are.
My
current research in the
papers
of Hannah Whitall Smith sheds additional
light
on the
question
raised
by
Sheils’
investigations
of the early
Methodist
experience
in New
England; therefore,
let me draw on her
story
at this
point
before I make a few other limited references to their
importance
to our
understanding
of a whole
range
of developments in nineteenth
century religious experience particularly
as
they
relate to both of our movements.
The Smith collection of decades of
spiritual
diaries and thousands of pieces
of
correspondence together
with
pamphlets
and news items on late nineteenth
century
revivalism
represent
a rich and
yet largely untapped
resource for the
study
of the
holiness,
Keswick and Pente- costal traditions..The Smiths were
actively engaged
at the heart of the post-Civil
War holiness revival which created the seedbed for the flowering
of the other two movements. Since
they
both came out of Philadelphia’s community
of classical
birthright Quakers
into the Methodist holiness revival and carried that
message
on into Lutheran, Reformed and free churches as well as to Methodist circles in England and
Europe,
their
story
touches the whole ecumenical
range
of the holiness/higher
life revival itself. In
my
references to their
experience throughout
the
paper
I
hope you
will share with me some of the new sense of
reality
which it lends to ‘ the outline of nineteenth
century revivalism.
5Donald W. Dayton, “Yet Another Layer of the Onion: Or Opening the Ecumeni- cal Door to Let the Rifraff in,” The Ecumenical Review 40:1 (January, 1988), 87-110 explores
these themes more fully.
5
9
Hannah Whitall Smith’s letters
vividly portray
the
personal struggle
which
proper
members of early nineteenth
century society
had in accept-
ing
the Methodists and their
vigorous message
of vital Christian
experi-
ence,
we discover there that the
popular contemporary image
of the
Methodists was just as great a problem for a wealthy
Philadelphia Quak-
eress as it was for a proper Boston Brahmin.6 As
open
as Hannah Smith
was to vital
religious experience during
all of her
life,
the
tinges
of social
bigotry
surface
again
and
again
to color her
acceptance
and even her
expression
of the
experiential
excitement she found
among
the
Methodists. The latter
group
constituted much of the labor
supply
for
her
family’s large glass factory
in
Millville,
New
Jersey.
She liked the
Methodist
experience.
but she
questioned
the theological
expression they
gave
to it.
–
In a letter to her sister
Mary
Thomas. wife of Johns
Hopkins trustee, . Dr. James
Thomas,
she
says
that she “…
longs
for a more full deliver-
ance from sin
…,”
but that in
spite
of all her
knowledge
of truths about
“resurrection life and
separation
from the world,” she finds herself
pow-
erless.
Finally,
she concludes:
To know is not enough. And so I have begun to question whether after
all, and in spite of their many grievous errors, the Methodists have not
got
hold of a secret of Christian experience which is just what I need … 7 Or
again
to her cousin Carrie Lawrence she
says,
.
The Methodists do use very erroneous expressions in speaking of this
experience.
It is just that they have so little knowledge of divine truth, &
[sic] therefore express just what they feel … They feel dedicated, so do I,
but I know because of my clearer views of the truth that it is not dedica-
tion but abandonment…. 8
And
again
her “Journal”
entry
Of March
12,1867
concludes:
.
And this is the Methodist blessing of “holiness.” Couched by them it is true in many wrong phrases, and held amid a great mixture of error, but still really livingly experienced and enjoyed by them. I feel truly thankful to them for their
that I was led to see there was such a life unfaltering testimony
to its reality for it was thro’ them
possible. I feel thankful also however that I have been from into some of their errors with to it.
preserved falling
regard
But better to have the experience with all the errors, then to live without it and be
doctrinally correct, as was my former case …
very
The fact that it was
particularly trying
to her and her
Proper Quaker friends to receive
religious
instruction from the Methodists shows
up
6For an interesting summary of the two cultures see. E. Digby Baltzell, Puritan Boston and
Quaker Philadelphia:
Two Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Class Authority
and Leadership, Boston: Beacon Press, 1979.
7From Hannah Whitall Smith to Mary Thomas, Millville N. J., September 30, 1866.
8To her cousin Came Lawrence, Millville N. J., February 26, 1867.
6
10
emphatically
in a letter of March
14, 1867, when she asks her cousin Alice Whitall to tell another
cousin,
Carrie
Lawrence,
that
if she [Carey] was as hungry as I was [for the Methodist blessing] she would be willing to eat a crust out of the gutter, if she could get it nowhere else.
She continues,
If I had thought it would have helped me any to go up to a Methodist Altar [sic] & be prayed for by the “Altar workers” I would have been to have done it …
glad
Later in the same letter. she indicates there was similar
prejudice against the Methodist
origins
of the doctrine
among
other
Quakers
as well.
Mr. Inglis … is evidently shaken in his prejudice against the Methodists.
I am certain my Article [sic] which I wrote for the Witness, & [sic] to
which he alludes, did not contain anything but what he taught when here.
In
my
letter however I
distinctly
stated that I had
experienced
the
Methodist experience, as it seemed to me that was only fair, & [sic] I
suppose
this frightened him a little….9 9
Even after she
readily acknowledges
her
great personal
debt to her Methodist mentors. the social
distancing
of herself from them still comes through.
She wrote to her sister, Sarah, on
September
7, 1867, from what she considered to be her life of exile from culture and
proper
soci- ety
in the
factory
town of Millville, New
Jersey,
‘
It seems as if after. all God was going to shut me up to
Millville for all
poor despised
forward
spiritual blessings, for it is only here that I ever take
And the Methodists have
really me
what any I never learned elsewhere. Their little holiness steps.
ignorant taught
meeting I And enjoy
intensely. my dress maker, & one or two of our Blowers [sic] are to me.
really great helps They sing the sweetest choruses at that meet-
ing….10
Out of Shiels’ conclusions and evidence such as that
above,
a working thesis is not difficult to
project:
“The
post
war holiness movement fell upon
hard times in Methodism and American
religion
in general not
only because of the
perceived
radical nature of its
message
of entire sanctifi- cation,
but
because,
as the movement itself
consistently maintained,
it promoted early
revivalistic Methodism in its ethos and
style
as well.” As Methodism’s acculturation
rapidly progressed throughout
the rest of the century,
the result
may
well have been that
many
Methodists who rejected
the revival were
rejecting
not
only Wesley’s
doctrinal
authority, as they largely had to by the end of the
century
in their efforts to end the battles over holiness in the church, but,
perhaps
even more
significantly, in
rejecting
the holiness movement
they
were
attempting
to
put space between themselves and their own
history.
The broad-based, fluid
.
9To her cousin Carrie Lawrence, Millville, N.J., March 14, 1867. 1°Fo her sister Sarah, September 7, 1867.
7
11
revival movement
represented,
for them a primitive Methodism which they
were
eager
to forget as they gained increasing
acceptance
and social standing
in American
society.
Further research in this area will be
helpful
both to Methodist and holiness/Pentecostal studies. The
significance
for us
today, however,
is that the same basic thesis can be
helpful
in
understanding
holiness and Pentecostal
relationships.
The Methodist holiness movement had
always maintained
throughout
its
seventy-year history prior
to the Azusa Street revival that it represented
mainline,
historical Methodism. Non-Methodist higher-life
traditions also
consistently
touted the mainstream character of
the their movements’ Biblical and historical
authenticity.
But
the,
broad net which the holiness revival cast out into the
teeming religious
seas of the late nineteenth
century caught up a larger
number of eccentric
speci- mens than revival movements
commonly
have done.
The
loosely ordered, polycephalous
revival
brought
little
discipline
to bear on such individuals. As a result, the bone of criticism which
lodged most
frequently
in the throats of the more
ordered, Methodist-affiliated holiness leaders was the
frequent
and often demonstrable
charge
that the wildest of fanaticisms could be found within the holiness ranks. Such charges were
at a peak in 1906 when the Pentecostal revival created a fertile field for a new wave of enthusiasts and
ready-made
folk theolo-
gians
of all sorts. It was all that the
maturing leadership
of a seventy- year-old
movement needed to make almost
desperate
calls for
organiza- tion and
greater
control
among
holiness
groups
about that time. Their own time for more acculturation was at hand and
pressures
of social acceptance
as well as a perceived threat to their
theological integrity helped
to give rise to the
strong
contention between the Methodist holi- ness movement and the new Pentecostalism. The latter
represented
a major
threat to the efforts of the former to address one of the
top
items on their future
agenda.
The same
process
was at work in the
rejection
of the new
“tongues
movement”
by
the more reformed
higher-life
move- ments within the
rising
fundamentalist culture of early twentieth
century.
Similar issues have created
continuing
tensions between both the holi- ness churches and the Pentecostal churches and the charismatic revival of the last three decades. The writer can well remember how in numer- ous denominational
proclamations
and decisions
condemning
the new movement
the arguments against
its perceived ethos and
practices
were very
similar to those which had once been marshalled
against
holiness advocates
by bureaucratic
Methodism in the nineteenth
century.
In all of these deliberations it seemed to me that we were
shooting
ourselves in the foot. The
predominant
reasons we were
giving
for
putting
distance between ourselves and the charismatics were
very
similar to or often identical with those which Methodism or other old-line churches had used earlier to separate themselves from the holiness revival and
against whose
injustices
our fathers and mothers had so
loudly protested.
Let me
call, then,
for renewed awareness of these
dangers
in the
writing
of
8
12
our stories and call all of us to a new commitment to try to free ourselves from
any captivity
to these biases. Let us make an effort to
put
straw men aside and
bring
valid differences to future
dialogue.
It
appears
that I have consumed most of
my
time in a still much too briefly argued
concern for one element in our mutual
dialogue.
I hope through my
continued studies in the Smith archives to
get
a new and enriched
perspective
of
many
of the issues which lie at the heart of the nineteenth
century holiness/higher/life experience.
These resources have already
been most fruitful to me because
they
afford a rare
opportunity to view the nineteenth
century religious experience through
the eyes of a lay person,
a woman, of unusual
perception
who was
intimately caught up
in the
swirling religious
and cultural currents of the
period.
Let me take
only
one of many issues and let her
experience speak
to it; it is the issue of the intense
quest
for a manifested
baptism
of the
Holy Ghost which marked American
religion
so
singularly
in the nineteenth century.
Smith’s Christian
pilgrimage
follows an almost classical chro- nology
of nineteenth
century religious experience.
She was
evangelically converted in a noon
prayer meeting
in the Revival of 1858 and the
next year resigned
her
membership
in her
Quaker meeting.
In
spite
of her resignation
she continued to be a powerful agent of change in American Quakerism.
After her
conversion,
the
Plymouth
Brethren became her spiritual
mentors.
They helped
her to her
life-long
commitment to take the Bible in a common sense sort of
way
as God’s word to men and women.
However,
in her search for a more
experiential religion
she rejected
what she felt was the too doctrinaire and
polemical
stance of the Brethren. It was now the Methodists
who, through
their
small-group meetings, began
to
guide
her as she continued her
quest
for life in the Spirit.
Her search
very early
on centered
explicitly
on her desire for the “Baptism
of the
Holy
Ghost.” In the
early
National Holiness Associa- tion
campmeetings
both she and Robert
professed
to experience entire sanctification as
preached by
the Association’s members. Robert’s experience
was
accompanied
with
strong
emotion and inner witness of the
Spirit. Although
she testified that her new-found
relationship
with God had anchored her faith forever and had freed her from the
power
as well as the
guilt
of
sin,
she
still longed
for some “demonstrable evi- dence” of “the
Baptism.”
Out of that
experience
she
began
to continue to seek it as an additional
experience
of God. She is
finally
convinced, however. after
years
of
searching
with
days
of
fasting
and
prayer
and running
down
every
mentor who
might
lead her into the
experience,
that it is not for her. She concludes that
religious experience
comes to per- sons
according
to their individual
temperament
and not
according
to any standardized
pattern.
As she reveals in her
spiritual autobiography,
she finally
learned that God was
good
and He loved her
unfailingly
and that was
enough
and that was all.
9
ing
Henry May’s language. strable” evidence mented
example century
America truth saturated
objective
experiencing theological general acceptance
In position
and sanctification
would know
the
13
docu-
with God.
less than intervention which did not
rely
the
Holy
Ghost it and all who were
looking
on done.” Hannah Whitall Smith
Let me
present you
with
my
“vision” and
my “insight”
on this accord-
to
my
“life
experience”
as well as my “academic”
training,
to’ use
Hannah Whitall Smith’s search for the “demon-
of
Holy Spirit provides
us with a classically
of the
quest
of thousands of Christians in nineteenth
and
Europe.
A common sense
understanding
of life and
the culture. The old Puritan’s
hoped
for
“signs
of elec- tion” which
might give
some
hope
of the
reality
of an otherwise
largely
salvation was
certainly
not
enough
for a period which was
transition from focus on divine
sovereignty
to
of the doctrines of free will.
Wesley’s
and
pietism’s s inner witness filled the
gap
for
many
who
sought
assurance of salvation.
America
persons
like Phoebe Palmer moved to the
right
of Wesley’s
relied on a rationalistic biblicism to claim the salvation and
by grace.
Others moved to the left of
Wesley
and looked for
religious feelings
or emotion to verify their
relationship
But there were others who would not settle for
anything
witness of direct, divine, incontrovertible
on intellect or
feeling
but on a
sign
of the
presence
of
which both the individual
experiencing
that “the work had been
finally
settled in to an evangelical
Quaker mysticism
when her desire for
“felt” witness never came to her. But there were thousands and hun- dreds of thousands of other nineteenth
century
Americans
struggling
for
in a world that had
gone topsy-turvey
on them, and
wanted
something
more. It was out of these
yearnings
that Pente-
was bom and it is out of the
differing conceptions
of the
the divine witness that our differences arise. Those differ- ences,
in turn
represent
nuances of
theological
difference which
might tend to divide us even if all the straw men of false divisions were con- sumed on the altars of our
honesty
and love. But
my
final
insight
is that given
that
reality
there is only one
thing
left for all of us to do and that is to recognize those differences and
personal preferences
and move
along
in Christ.
to
my
1973 SPS
paper
still stands. We are not identi- cal
twins,
but we
may
be fraternal twins. At
any
rate we are so close to each other in so many
ways
out of our common historical roots similar-
of faith that we could
begin
at least “to act like
family”
as we
say
in
After all this is November the llth. We used to call it
religious certainty they
costalism nature of
as brothers and sisters The conclusion
ity
Kentucky. “Armistice
Day!”
.-
10
