“Where we are” and “what we are”: Anabaptist and Wesleyan holiness views on “the world”

The Anabaptist movement, which emphasized an ethic of love and nonconformity typified by the story of martyr Dirk Willems (above left), and the Holiness movement, which emphasized the Christian perfection teachings of John Wesley (above right), were both opposed to “the world,” but for radically different reasons. Photos courtesy of Google.

As movements that generally rejected intellectualized expressions of faith and embraced ethical orthopraxy, both Anabaptism and Wesleyan holiness emphasized the renunciation of sinful behavior and a full turn toward obedience to Christ: in other words, nonconformity to what the Brethren in Christ termed “the world.”

For scholars of Brethren in Christ life and thought, suggesting utter congruence between these two ethical frameworks might be tempting. After all, both emphasize conversion, consecration, and separation as methods for living a life pleasing to God. Yet as an article in a 1934 edition of the Evangelical Visitor indicates, turn-of-the-century Brethren in Christ conceived of dramatically different — though related — reasons why the Anabaptists and the holiness people rejected “the world.”

A distinction between Anabaptist and holiness conceptions of “the world,” after the jump.

A Word about our Name

I’d wager that most readers of this blog have read — or at least skimmed — Carlton Wittlinger’s seminal history of the Brethren in Christ, Quest for Piety and Obedience.

For those who haven’t, here’s the gist: in their more than two century history, the conservative religious group known as the Brethren in Christ have attempted to fuse their two founding theological strands — Anabaptism, with its emphasis on whole-hearted obedience to God, and Pietism, with its emphasis on a life-changing conversion experience and warm-hearted devotionalism — in their communal pursuit of the Kingdom. Along the way, they were influenced by other movements: Wesleyan holiness, with its emphasis on second-work sanctification, and American Evangelicalism, with its emphasis on church growth and “aggressive” evangelism — both of which they interpreted as complimentary underpinnings to their spiritual foundation.

A generation of Brethren in Christ scholars and historians — E. Morris Sider, Luke Keefer Jr., Owen Alderfer, Martin Schrag, and others — has worked to further confirm Wittlinger’s original findings: that the spiritual journey of the Brethren in Christ has been a “quest for piety and obedience.”

As but one in a long line of scholars writing about this unique Protestant group, I take my cue from those who have gone before. This blog serves as a way to continue the search for evidence of piety and obedience among the Brethren in Christ.

Thus, the title of this blog — “the search for piety and obedience” — is both an allusion to Wittlinger’s history as well as a statement of intent, as I seek to discover how the Brethren in Christ have succeeded — and failed – in their pursuit of God’s will for the church.

“Such Dead Theology,” or How an Emphasis on Ethics Saved the Brethren in Christ from Fundamentalism

In his essay “The Holiness Churches: A Significant Ethical Tradition,” historian Donald W. Dayton identifies an essential difference between the holiness movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the fundamentalist and evangelical traditions of the same period.

The Holiness movement differs from fundamentalism and evangelicalism in that it is more oriented to ethics and the spiritual life than to a defense of doctrinal orthodoxy. Indeed, one of the distinctive features of the Holiness traditions is that they have tended to raise ethics to the status that fundamentalists have accorded doctrine.

This orientation toward ethical living (and against doctrinal precision) was evident in the lives of many of the Brethren in Christ who embraced Wesleyan holiness teaching at the turn of the century — though few embodied it more fully than Abraham L. Eisenhower, a veterinarian-turned-roving-evangelist-turned-orphanage-caretaker.

A.L. Eisenhower (pictured above, with wife Anna) was a 19th-century Brethren in Christ evangelist -- and a prominent voice for the kind of ethicism that kept the denomination from fully embracing fundamentalism. (Photo courtesy of BIC Historical Library and Archives)

The son of a Brethren in Christ minister, Eisenhower received his “full salvation” — or entire sanctification, an essential experience for holiness Christians — in 1892, during a Brethren in Christ tent revival in his native Abilene, Kans. The experience so profoundly affected him that he sold his (moderately successful) veterinary practice and joined with other brethren to pioneer an experimental form of evangelism: the Gospel Wagon. Later, he and his wife Anna founded the Jabbok Faith Orphanage and Missionary Training Home, a venture they conducted without the financial support of the church for a decade.

Eisenhower’s “baptism in the Spirit” (as the experience is also known) had other effects, too — including instilling in him the long-held conviction that “we do not need more theology, but men who will spend their time on their knees in fasting and prayer until they get the pentecost baptism.”

Why “the pentecost baptism” (and its results) insulated the Brethren in Christ against doctrinaire fundamentalism, after the jump.

“Oh, the Weather Outside is Frightful”: Proclaiming the Dispensation in a Chilly Climate

Does a frosty landscape portend the end of the world as we know it? It could, according to a 1930s editorial in the "Evangelical Visitor."

‘Tis the season for cataclysmic cold and fitful economic rebounds, so it seems only right to offer a post about winter weather and a paltry job market. That such a post should be tied to fundamentalist eschatology and its impact upon turn-of-the-century Brethren in Christ thinking, is merely coincidental.

For some[1] Brethren in Christ of the (very) late 19th and early 20th centuries, just about every cataclysmic (or near-cataclysmic) event was evidence of the impending apocalypse.[2] Such occurrences proved more and more the imminent return of Jesus Christ.

Yet as this 1930 editorial from then-Evangelical Visitor editor Vernon L. Stump shows, major geo-political maladies weren’t the only premillenial potents.

How “an unusual amount of snowfall” heralds the Second Coming, after the jump.

Encouraging education…and equality: Mary and Clara Hoffman

At a time when the denomination was run almost entirely by men, Clara (seated) and Mary Hoffman were pioneers, promoting education and equality.

Regrettably, the history of the Brethren in Christ Church is all too often exactly that: his-story, a story of men who gave leadership, cast vision, and guided the denomination to new areas of insight and work.

But it would be remiss to suggest that women leaders did not play an essential role in the story of the church; in fact, examples about: At a time when women were barred from pastoral service, Rhoda Lee and Frances Davidson stirred the conscience of the Brethren in Christ toward international evangelistic outreach; Sarah Bert led the work of the Chicago Mission and pioneered the denomination’s burgeoning urban ministry.

Now, thanks to an insightful biographical sketch by Rebecca Kasparek, we know that women also played a key role in encouraging education within the church. Kasparek’s article on Clara and Mary Hoffman describes the way that the two women, who contributed almost eight decades of combined service to Messiah Bible School and Missionary Training Home (now Messiah College), also worked to raise the profile of women not only in society but particularly within the church.

Kasparek rightly highlights a stirring quote from Mary Hoffman:

We are glad for the place women have in conducting the affairs of the world. They have entered nearly every field of labor formerly only occupied by men and are proving themselves capable of doing satisfactory work in these places.

Read Kasparek’s full article here.

“On Bible lines”: Where the Brethren in Christ meet the fundamentalists

For Christian fundamentalists at the turn of the twentieth century, "Destructive Higher Criticism" was a tool used by liberals to lure born-again believers away from true faith.

The Brethren in Christ were (and are) not fundamentalists. This— thankfully—has been the long-held contention of many Brethren in Christ historians. While debates about “the fundamentals of the faith” raged on in schools and churches across the United States in the early years of the twentieth century, the Brethren (who had no seminary-trained pastors, and who avoided much ecumenical interaction in order to preserve a “pure” church unblemished by “worldliness”) remained both geographically and intellectually distinct.

But they were not modernists, either. The Brethren in Christ have long been a conservative fellowship, shaped decisively by theological strands that emphasized personal and corporate piety and obedience to God above all else. Thus, their worldview was not entirely distinct from that of the fundamentalists.

Luke Keefer, Jr., has offered a helpful qualification of this point, especially as it relates to the fundamentalist-modernist controversy. Because the church has long held a high view of Scripture, he argues, the Brethren in Christ “agreed with the conservative cause . . . [t]o the extent that they understood the ‘battle for the Bible.’”[1]

Evidence of this limited collusion with “the conservative cause” cropped up in the “News and Notes” section of this quarter’s newsletter from the Brethren in Christ Historical Society: a re-printing of a 1912 “announcement brochure” from what was then known as Messiah Bible School and Missionary Training Home (now Messiah College, which is currently celebrating its centennial year). The announcement asserts:

[B]y conducting [our school] on Bible lines we hope to avoid some of the disastrous results following the attendance at schools where ‘Destructive Higher Criticism’ is fostered and the Bible is not held as the main rule of life and action.

J. Gresham Machen left Princeton Seminary to found Westminster Theological Seminary in 1929.

The brochure’s pejorative reference to “Destructive Higher Criticism” would certainly have been echoed by fundamentalists like J. Gresham Machen. Machen reacted against Princeton Theological Seminary’s perceived shift toward liberalism by resigning his academic post and starting his own seminary, Philadelphia’s Westminster Theological, in 1929. In founding Westminster, he sought to foster “an intellectual atmosphere in which the acceptance of the Gospel will seem to be something other than an offense against truth” [2]—a mission, it seems, that Messiah’s earliest promotional literature (and the denomination sponsoring it) would likely have endorsed.

Notes:

[1] “‘Inerrancy’ and the Brethren in Christ View of Scripture,” in Reflections on a Heritage: Defining the Brethren in Christ, ed. E. Morris Sider, 214 (Grantham, Pa.: Brethren in Christ Historical Society, 1999). Keefer maintains, however, that a variety of circumstances and long-held convictions—not the least of which was the Brethren’s natural aversion from controversy-causing language—precluded their full acceptance of the fundamentalist position.

[2] What is Christianity? and Other Addresses, ed. Ned Stonehouse, 129 (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1951).