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Keswick’s Biblical Strengths: where Keswick is Scriptural, in an Analysis and Critique of So Great Salvation by Stephen Barabas, part 1 of 4
proponents of the Keswick theology[1]
rightly exalt the Lord Jesus Christ, His power to sanctify sinners, and the
necessity of faith in the Christian life.
A high regard for these tremendous truths will indubitably strengthen
the believer’s spiritual walk, and Keswick’s proclamation of these Biblical
doctrines has unquestionably been a means of Divine blessing upon many. Furthermore, Keswick’s preaching that
believers must immediately surrender to the Lord and confess all known sin is
eminently Biblical. If, because of
Keswick’s calls to the surrender of the will, “no man can attend a Keswick
Convention and be the same afterwords:
he is either a better or a worse man for it,”[2]
such a fact is highly commendable, for strong Biblical preaching does not leave
hearers unmoved.[3] Likewise, a call to the “renunciation of all
known sin . . . and . . . surrender to Christ for the infilling of the Holy
Spirit”[4]
is an excellent and commendable message, at least if its terms are defined
properly. When Keswick emphasizes “the
exceeding sinfulness of sin”[5]
and seeks to have “laid bare . . . the cancer of sin eating at the vitals of
the Christian . . . [so that] the Christian is urged to cut it out at once”[6]
and come to “an unreserved surrender to Christ . . . in . . . heart and life,”[7]
it does very well.
Keswick deserves commendation when it seeks to have the “Holy Spirit exalted .
. . [and] looked to as the divine Guide and Governor . . . [and] prayer is
emphasized as the condition of all success and blessing.”[8]
When some[9]
modern Keswick writers teach that the Holy Spirit “dwells in every child of God
. . . [but] not every Christian is filled with the Spirit . . . [and] to be
filled with the Spirit is not presented in Scripture as an optional matter, but
as a holy obligation that rests upon all Christians,”[10]
they do well. The Holy Spirit is God,
equal in essence to the Father and the Son, and worthy of all reverence, trust,
and worship. Keswick is correct that the
“Christian is expected to live in communion with the Spirit[.]”[11] What
is more, prayer is indisputably vital to Biblical Christianity, to the extent
that believers are characterized as those who call on the Lord (1 Corinthians
1:2). Keswick emphasis upon the
impossibility of “mere moral processes to overcome sin”[12]
and upon the error of self-dependence in sanctification (cf. 2 Corinthians 1:9)
is important and correct, as is its affirmation that the believer’s “union with
Christ in His death and resurrection . . . secures moral renovation as well as
justifying grace.”[13] John Murray notes, “Anyone who is sensitive
to the high demands of the Christian vocation . . . must find himself in deep
agreement with the earnest contrition which has characterized so many of the
Keswick leaders and with their insistent plea for the appropriation and
application of the resources of God’s cleansing and sanctifying grace.”[14]
Furthermore, Keswick is correct in its
affirmation “that in Scripture sanctification comes by faith.”[15] Modern Keswick emphasis upon evangelism and
missions is clearly Scriptural (Acts 1:8) and is a tremendous blessing. While the earliest Keswick Conventions, in
keeping with the universalism of Hannah W. Smith and the denial of an eternal
hell by many others, had no particular missions emphasis and rejected calls to
have a missions meeting, this opposition to missions was eventually reformed. When asked, the initial Keswick attitude was
that appeals for missions were “quite out of the question; you surely
misunderstand; these meetings are for
edification!”[16] Believers who reject early Keswick weakness
on evangelism and missions and adopt the later view in favor of these
activities, or gain a greater understanding and practice of Biblical truths
such as the other ones mentioned above through hearing Keswick preaching or
reading Keswick literature, will be able to grow closer to God and be more
effective in serving Him as a result. Such Keswick teachings explain why many
have received definite spiritual blessings at Keswick Conventions.
while these aspects of the Keswick theology are Biblical, refreshing, and key
to an increase in spiritual life, they are not unique to Keswick or to Higher
Life doctrine. The historic Baptist
doctrine of sanctification has taught all of these truths,[17]
and many old-line evangelical Protestants have done so likewise. One can learn all of these great truths from
the Bible alone or from Christian writings without any connection with the
Keswick movement. For example, J. C.
Ryle, the classic nineteenth century devotional writer and opponent of the
Keswick theology, wrote:
“self-consecration” . . . of which so much is said in the new [Keswick]
theology . . . I never in my life heard of any thorough evangelical minister
who did not hold the doctrine and press it upon others. When a man brings it forward as a novelty I
cannot help thinking that he can never have truly known what true conversion
was. . . . [T]hat the duty and privilege of entire self-consecration is
systematically ignored by Evangelicals, and has only been discovered, or
brought into fresh light by the new [Keswick] theologians, I do not for a
moment believe.[18]
self-dependence was similarly a major theme of pre-Keswick Christian
piety. Thomas Manton (1620-1677) the
famous preacher and member of the Westminster Aseembly, was hardly a pioneer
exploring untouched ground when he devoted the first and largest section in his
Treatise on Self-Denial to the
necessity “to deny . . . self-dependence.”[19] Nor is the doctrine that sanctification is
through faith by any means a Keswick distinctive. The body of non-Keswick, Bible-believing
Christians hold to this truth:
is by faith . . . Whatever believers get from Christ, they must of necessity
get by faith . . . faith is the one receptive grace, the sole apprehensive
grace, that hand of the soul that lays hold upon Christ, and puts the believer
in possession of the fulness that is in him[.] . . . [A]ll gifts of God come
from grace, and all come to faith. Grace
is the only fountain, faith the only channel. . . . That sanctification is by
faith, then, is essentially a principle of Protestant theology, and is no
distinctive feature of the new [Keswick] teaching. . . . [T]he doctrine of
sanctification by Christ, through faith . . . had quite as prominent a place as
is now assigned to it [in the Keswick theology] in the theology and preaching
of the Reformers, of the Puritans, of the divines and preachers of the Second
Reformation in Scotland . . . of the sturdy old Evangelicals of the English
Church . . . and of the equally sturdy Evangelicals of the Nonconformists . . .
[a]nd an equally prominent place does it hold in the dogmatic and homiletic and
catechetic teaching of our evangelical contemporaries [in the late 19th
century] in all sections of the Christian Church. It is not, then, in respect of these
fundamental principles that we differ from the new [Keswick] school. On the contrary, we deny that they have any
exclusive propriety in these principles[.] . . . [Rather, what is truly
distinctive about Keswick is the idea] that there is a special act of faith . .
. subsequent to . . . conversion . . . [which] Mr. Boardman calls “second
conversion,” [and] Mrs. Smith calls
“entire consecration.”[20]
Biblical teaching that is by no means a Keswick distinctive—only the
unscriptural doctrine of the “second blessing,”[21]
which is connected with a quietistic idea of sanctification by faith alone, is
a Keswick distinctive.
See here for this entire study.
largely from the writings and preaching of unregenerate individuals and
self-acclaimed heretics such as Hannah W. Smith certainly does not mean that
all advocates of Keswick theology or those sympathetic to the Higher Life
system either endorse or hold to the gross errors of those associated with the
development of Keswick. Indeed, the
generality of modern advocates of Keswick are ignorant of the corrupt fountain
from which their system flows.
Salvation, Barabas. While it is very
hard to prove that “no man” has ever been the same after attending a Keswick
Convention, such a goal is unquestionably commendable.
Salvation, Barabas.
Salvation, Barabas.
Salvation, Barabas.
Salvation, Barabas.
Great Salvation, Barabas.
classic Keswick and Higher Life founders and leaders, from William Boardman to
Hannah and Robert P. Smith to Andrew Murray, denied that all believers have the
Holy Spirit, affirming instead that only those who entered into the Higher Life
possess the Spirit. Stephen Barabas does
well to reject this false teaching of many early Keswick leaders, although he
does not do well when he ignores the facts and revises history to make
universal indwelling an undisputed Keswick teaching.
Great Salvation, Barabas.
Salvation, Barabas.
Salvation, Barabas.
Great Salvation, Barabas. The
quotation comes from R. W. Dale, who is supposed to support the contention that
“only since Keswick first called attention to the vital significance of [Romans
6] to the whole question of sin and sanctification have theologians even begun
to give it its proper place.” Barabas
also quotes from “John Laidlaw,” whom he alleges “bec[ame] one of Keswick’s
enthusiastic supporters.” However, the “biography
. . . by his son . . . [of the] great Birmingham Congregationalist, R. W. Dale
. . . expressly states . . . that his father did not associate himself with
Keswick. It is also highly doubtful that John Laidlaw of New College,
Edinburgh, had any significant involvement” (pg. 341, Review by Ian S. Rennie
of Keswick: A Bibliographic Introduction
to the Higher Life Movements. by D. D. Bundy. Wilmore, Kentucky: Asbury
Theological Seminary, 1975, in the Journal
of the Evangelical Theological Society 19:4 (Fall 1976) 340-343. Barabas’s employment of source material is
too often hagiographal, revisionist, and historically inaccurate.
Writings of John Murray, Vol. 4, a review by Murray of So Great Salvation, Barabas.
Salvation, Barabas.
Movements, Pierson. Italics in
original.
among Baptists far before the advent of the Keswick movement, as documented
in the chapter in this book on Ephesians 5:18 and the doctrine of being filled
with the Spirit. It is not a
little presumptuous to assert: “One has
to go back to the book of Acts for a parallel to the exaltation of the Holy
Spirit found in the meetings at Keswick” (pg. 38, So Great Salvation, Barabas).
provides no evidence that he read this critique of the Higher Life movement.
section on the evil of self-dependence is the first sin he discusses when he
surveys the kinds and subjective parts of self-denial. It follows an initial study of self-denial in
general. He spends more time on denying
self-dependence than he does on denying self-will, self-love, self-seeking, and
selfishness in respect one’s neighbors. See A
Treatise of Self Denial, pgs. 175-295, The
Complete Works of Thomas Manton, Vol. 15, Thomas Manton. London:
James Nisbet & Co., 1873.
Smith. The British and Foreign Evangelical Review (April 1876) 251-280. Similarly, Jacob Abbott, critiquing William
Boardman’s The Higher Christian Life,
notes:
of faith: that the victory which overcomes the world is
our faith. They all hold that the renewal
and purification of our sinful nature is, from first to last, the work of God;
and that faith connects us with the
source of life and power in God; that the ife which we now live in the flesh,
we live by the faith of the Son of God.
So that it may be as truly affirmed of sanctification, as of
justification, that it is all of faith—by grace—and glorying is excluded . . .
[for] self-righteousness . . . is
such a foe to grace. (pg. 511, Review of William E. Boardman’s The Higher Christian Life, Jacob Abbott. Bibliotheca
Sacra [July 1860] 508-535)
e. g., The Two Covenants and the Second
Blessing, Andrew Murray. Chicago,
IL: Fleming H. Revell, 1898.
Keswick’s History: Keswick Theology’s Rise and Development in an Analysis and Critique of So Great Salvation by Stephen Barabas, part 5 of 5
despite the withdrawal of Robert and Hannah Smith and other expected speakers,[1]
the first Keswick Convention took place, “acknowledging the debt [the speakers]
owed to Mr. Pearsall Smith,”[2]
and propagating the Higher Life theology of sanctification Mr. Smith had
learned from his wife. Despite “violent
criticism and opposition . . . [such that to] identify oneself with the . . .
Keswick Convention . . . [and] Higher Life teaching meant to be willing to be
separated from the leaders of the Evangelical Church,”[3]
including opposition by men such as Charles Spurgeon, Horatius Bonar,[4]
and J. C. Ryle.[5] For example, Dr. Bonar wrote:
authorized reports of the Brighton Conference—the number of perverted passages
of Scripture; and this is really the root of the whole evil. The speakers first disclaim, I might say,
derived theology, and then they proceed to distort the Word of God. . . . I was
grieved beyond measure . . . these perversions are part of the system. It cannot stand without them. . . . One of my
chief objections to the Perfectionst [Keswick] Doctrine is that it subverts the
whole argument and scope of the epistles to the Romans and the Hebrews. . . .
Have I written too strongly? I don’t
think so. Years are now upon me, and I
may claim to be entitled to speak; and . . . have this as my testimony before
God and the Churches, that I know few errors more subversive of what the Bible
really teaches, and of what our fathers of the Reformation died for, than this
modern Perfectionism. The thing now
called holiness is not that which we find in Scripture, and the method of
reaching holiness, by an instantaneous leap, called an act of faith, is nowhere
taught us by the Holy Ghost.[6]
Mr. Wilson decided to hold another convention.
“After that there was never any doubt that it should be held yearly.”[7] Wilson and Battersby would not heed the
warnings of the body of godly Bible-believing Christians in their day and
reject Keswick; “the greatest Leaders and Teachers of Evangelical Truth thought
it their duty to oppose to the utmost what they considered ‘very dangerous
Heresy’” taught at Keswick and its antecedent Holiness Conventions, “a false
doctrine of ‘Perfection in man,’”[8]
but the Conventions were to continue, nevertheless. Since that time “the Keswick message . . .
[has been] carried . . . to almost every corner of the world”[9]
and “its influence is seen to-day in every quarter of the globe.”[10] In modern times, Keswick Conventions are held
in many cities throughout countries such as England, the United States,
Australia, Canada, Romania, New Zealand, India, Jamaica, South Africa, Japan,
Kenya, and other parts of Africa, Asia, and South America—indeed, there are
“numerous conventions around the world on every continent which are modelled on
Keswick.”[11] Likewise, Keswick theology appears in
devotional compositions by men such as Andrew Murray,[12]
F. B. Meyer,[13]
J. Oswald Sanders,[14]
and Hudson Taylor.[15] Keswick’s teachings also impacted the Welsh
holiness revival of 1904-1905,[16]
“the German holiness movement, Foreign Missions, Conventions Abroad, the
American holiness movement, the American Pentecostal movement . . . the
Christian and Missionary Alliance . . . American fundamentalism . . . [and]
English fundamentalism or conservative evangelicalism,”[17]
as well as offshoots of Pentecostalism like the Health and Wealth or Word-Faith
movement which “arose out of the classic Higher Life, Keswick, and Pentecostal
movements.”[18] Keswick has indubitably become extremely
influential:
Moody Bible Institute[19] (D. L. Moody, R. A.
Torrey, James M. Gray), Pentecostalism, and Dallas Theological Seminary (Lewis
S. Chafer, John F. Walvoord, Charles C. Ryrie). Simpson founded the Christian
and Missionary Alliance, Moody founded Moody Bible Institute, and Chafer
cofounded Dallas Theological Seminary. Pentecostalism, which subsequently
dwarfed Keswick in size and evangelical influence, is the product of Wesleyan
perfectionism, the holiness movement, the early Keswick movement, Simpson,
Moody, and Torrey. Dallas Theological Seminary, the bastion of the Chaferian
view of sanctification, is probably the most influential factor for the [strong
influence] of a Keswick-like view of sanctification in modern fundamentalism
and conservative evangelicalism.[20]
Hannah W. and Robert P. Smith continues to this day. Not only are their teachings being spread
worldwide through the continuing widespread propagation of Keswick theology,
but their message is the root of other forms of error and apostasy in
Christendom, such as, most notably, the Pentecostal, charismatic, and Word of
Faith movements.
See here for this entire study.
Great Salvation, Barabas.
Great Salvation, Barabas.
Great Salvation, Barabas. “Indeed,
it was within the ranks of the Evangelicals that the hostility was most
pronounced” (pg. 81, Evan Harry
Hopkins: A Memoir, Alexander Smellie),
for “the whole holiness movement was subjected to violent criticism and
opposition amongst evangelical Christians” (pgs. 31-32, Transforming Keswick: The
Keswick Convention, Past, Present, and Future, Price & Randall).
1875.
Ryle had a blessed and credible testimony to a genuine new birth:
conversion. First, Algernon Coote, a friend from Eton, urged him to “think,
repent and pray”; then he heard the epistle one Sunday afternoon in church: “By
grace are ye saved (pause) through faith (pause) and that not of yourselves
(pause) it is the gift of God.” The succession of phrases brought full
conviction to Ryle. “Nothing,” he said, “to this day appeared to me so clear
and distinct as my own sinfulness, Christ’s presence, the value of the Bible,
the absolute necessity of coming out of the world, and the need of being born
again, and the enormous folly of the whole doctrine of Baptismal Regeneration”
(pg. 573, Biographical Dictionary of
Evangelicals, ed. Larsen).
affirm that Ryle changed his mind about his criticisms of Keswick; however, all
that actually happened is that Ryle, in 1892, led in prayer the Sunday after a
Convention ended on the platform where the Keswick Convention had been in
session the week before. Ryle prayed
during a meeting in which D. L. Moody, whose work Ryle commended, was
speaking. Ryle supported Moody, while he
did not support the Keswick Convention.
The fact that Bishop Ryle would lead in prayer in a service where Moody
was preaching by no means proves that he had become amenable to the Keswick
theology, any more than the fact that he had preached at St. John’s Anglican
congregation in 1879 before the Keswick Convention proves his endorsement of
Keswick, whose meetings in the Keswick Tent he never frequented. Consequently, affirmations such as that of
Polluck that Ryle was a “foremost past critic” and his actions indicated that
by “1892 . . . Keswick stood accepted by British evangelicals” is not supported
by the evidence, at least in the case of Bishop Ryle (cf. pgs. 77-78, The Keswick Story: The Authorized History of the Keswick
Convention, Polluck).
88, 90, 93, “The Brighton Convention and Its Opponents.” London Quarterly Review, October 1875.
Great Salvation, Barabas.
Keswick Convention, ed. Harford. Cf. pg. 40.
Great Salvation, Barabas.
30, Forward Movements, Pierson.
Keswick: The Keswick Convention, Past,
Present, and Future, Price & Randall.
He has done for me at Keswick . . . [and] was in close fellowship with . . .
the great Holiness movement . . . [and] what took place at Oxford and Brighton,
and it all helped me” (pg. 177, 180, So
Great Salvation, Barabas; pg. 448, The Life of Andrew Murray,
DuPlessis). Murray spoke “at Keswick . .
. [in] 1895 . . . [and] for many years he led a similar Convention in South
Africa,” where he was a minister in the Dutch Reformed Church (pgs. 177, 182, So Great Salvation, Barabas). Note the
discussion of Murray’s theology in the chapter on him below.
the chapter on Meyer below.
Upway ‘Keswick’ Convention, Australia”
(pg. 143, So Great Salvation,
Barabas), advocating the second-blessing doctrine of “Wesleyan Perfectionism”
(pg. 110, Keep In Step With The Spirit,
Packer). “Chambers used the language of
Wesleyan entire sanctification,” having adopted “Keswick teaching . . . through
F. B. Meyer” (pg. 49, Transforming
Keswick: The Keswick Convention, Past,
Present, and Future, Price & Randall).
Great Salvation, Barabas. Hudson
Taylor, who spoke at the Keswick Convention of 1883 (pg. 81, The Keswick Story: The Authorized History of the Keswick
Convention, Polluck) after discovering “the Exchanged Life,” held a
partial-Rapture view, following the lead of Edward Irving and Robert Govett, as
did D. M. Panton, Evan Roberts, Jessie Penn-Lewis, Otto Stockmayer, Watchman
Nee, and many other advocates of Keswick theology and the Pentecostalism that
developed from it.
the center and leader of the Welsh holiness revival, was strongly impacted by
the Keswick theology, as was Mrs. Penn-Lewis.
Note the discussion of Roberts and Penn-Lewis in the respective chapter
below.
D. D. Bundy. Wilmore, Kentucky: Asbury Theological Seminary, 1975, in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological
Society 19:4 (Fall 1976) 340-343.
Barabas even records that “Mrs. William Booth,” the cofounder of the
Salvation Army and leading woman preacher, second blessing perfectionist and
continuationist, “remarked that Keswick had been one of the principal means of
establishing the Salvation Army” (pg. 151, So
Great Salvation, Barabas; cf. pg. 151, The
Keswick Convention: Its Message, its
Method, and Its Men, ed. Charles Harford; pg. 20, Forward Movements, Pierson).
Believe: Examining the Origin and
Development of Classic and Contemporary Word of Faith Theologies, Paul L.
King. Note also the trajectory from the
Keswick movement to Pentecostalism and the Health and Wealth heresy in the
discussion of A. B. Simpson and John A. MacMillan in the respective chapters
below.
speakers, with Moody’s backing, were able to penetrate further into American
evangelicalism,” so that “in the 1890s Keswick was a significant force molding
sections of the evangelical constituency in North America” (pgs. 56-59, Transforming Keswick: The Keswick Convention, Past, Present, and
Future, Price & Randall).
Moody’s “old friend F. B. Meyer” was key in bringing Moody’s ministry to
the side of Keswick; “a Keswick speaker [was] . . . at every summer conference”
at Northfield (pgs. 116-117, The Keswick
Story: The Authorized History of the
Keswick Convention, Polluck). Moody,
with thousands before him, at the time Robert P. Smith was leading the Brighton
Convention, asked the crowds to pray for a special blessing “on the great
Convention that is now being held at Brighton, perhaps the most important
meeting ever gathered together,” a public endorsement of Brighton that Moody
pronounced on both the first and last day of the Convention (pgs. 47, 319, Record of the Convention for the Promotion
of Scriptural Holiness Held at Brighton, May 29th to June 7th,
1875. Brighton: W. J. Smith, 1875).
Theology: A Historical and Theological
Survey and Analysis of the Doctrine of Sanctification in the Early Keswick
Movement, 1875-1920, by Andrew Naselli.
Ph. D. Dissertation, Bob Jones University, 2006. Abbreviations employed in the source text for
institutions have been expanded to give their full names. In addition to Dallas seminary, the influence
of Moody and Scofield on the spread of Keswick theology in fundamentalism is
very significant: “The return of the
holiness teaching to America . . . i[n] [its] Keswick form, was . . . related
to the work of D. L. Moody. . . . Moody . . . taught very similar views . . .
[to] Keswick . . . and made them central in his work. . . . C. I. Scofield . .
. eventually more or less canonized Keswick teachings in his Reference Bible” (pgs. 78-79, Fundamentalism and American Culture,
Marsden). D. L. Moody not only prayed for blessing upon
the Higher Life meetings at Brighton during his evangelistic campaign in
Convent Garden in 1875 (pgs. 23-24, So
Great Salvation, Barabas) but also brought many Keswick speakers in who
propagated Keswick theology at Moody’s conferences at Northfield: “The visits of Rev. F. B. Meyer, and notably
of Prebendary H. W. Webb-Peploe, of London, and Andrew Murray, of Wellington,
S. Africa (who were at Northfield in 1895), and the late G. H. C. McGregor
introduced into Northfield conferences the grand teaching of Keswick” (pg. 164,
Forward Movements of the Last Half
Century, A. T. Pierson. New York,
NY: Funk & Wagnalls, 1900; cf. pg.
163, So Great Salvation, Barabas; pg.
6, Out of His Fulness: Addresses
Delivered in America, Andrew Murray.
London: J. Nisbet & Co,
1897). The Keswick theology
of Moody, Scofield, and their associates were in turn very influential in
Pentecostalism (cf. pgs. 111-113, Vision of the
Disinherited: The Making of American
Pentecostalism, Robert Anderson).
Keswick’s History: Keswick Theology’s Rise and Development in an Analysis and Critique of So Great Salvation by Stephen Barabas, part 4 of 5
Specifically,
the Keswick form of the Higher Life theology was formulated through the central
influence of Hannah W. and Robert P. Smith at the Broadlands, Oxford, and
Brighton Conventions that immediately preceded the first Keswick Convention. The first and following Broadlands
Conferences were held at the invitation of the dedicated spiritualists Mr. and
Mrs. Mount-Temple, and all sorts of infernal spirits, doctrinal differences,
and heresies were warmly welcome.
Speakers included the universalist George MacDonald, who received his
prominent speaking position at the direction of his good spiritualist[1]
friends[2]
the Mount-Temples.[3] He became good friends with fellow
universalist Hannah W. Smith.[4] Nonetheless, while Christian orthodoxy was by
no means held in common by the Broadlands speakers, “[t]he ‘Seed,’ of which
George Fox spoke, was rooted in them all,”[5]
and those in “the Society of Friends”[6]
rejoiced at the messages brought, as did the spiritualist Mount-Temples, who
continued their very influential patronage of Mr. and Mrs. Smith.
flagship 1874 Broadlands Convention Robert “Pearsall Smith was chairman and
principal speaker, though, before the week was done, it became evident that his
wife, Hannah Whitall Smith, was a herald of the evangel they carried yet more
effective than himself.”[7] Indeed, she was the chief of the Broadlands
preachers.[8] Further Conventions, led by Mr. and Mrs.
Pearsall Smith and with ever-larger crowds, were held at Oxford and Brighton[9]
to perpetuate the Higher Life teaching of Broadlands.[10] Mrs. Smith’s captivating preaching bewitched
her audiences, so that at Oxford and Brighton no hall was large enough to
accommodate the crowds that flocked to hear her.[11] The meetings reminded Hannah W. Smith and
others “of the days when George Fox,” the founder of the Quakers, saw countless
numbers “convinced . . . during . . . his meetings,” or of the “wonderful
Yearly Meetings” that took place in the days of the prominent Quakers
“Elisabeth Fry and Joseph John Gurney.”[12] Following these Conventions, meetings
specifically in the English town of Keswick, from which the new doctrine preached
by the Smiths came to obtain its name, were proposed in 1875. An Anglican minister,[13]
“Canon T. D. Harford Battersby . . . [who] . . . was part of an old and
well-to-do west-country Quaker family that had moved into evangelical
Anglicanism in the early 19th century,”[14]
and “a friend of his, Mr. Robert Wilson, a Quaker who also was specially
blessed [at the earlier Higher Life meetings led by the Smiths] . . . decided
to hold a Convention at Keswick, where similar teaching should be given.” The “chief Brighton speakers,” of whom the
most important were certainly “Mr. and Mrs. Pearsall Smith, [were] to take part
in it.”[15]
were so far from being convicted of sin and of their need to turn from their
false religion and false gospel to Christ for the new birth, and instead so
happy with the Higher Life theology of Keswick, that one of them could become
co-founder[16]
of the meetings at Keswick, be the “the heart and soul” of the Keswick mission fund,[17] be lauded by many Keswick writers and speakers,[18]
and even be termed “the father of the Convention.”[19] Since the Quakers Hannah and Robert Smith
formulated and spread the Keswick theology at the preparatory Broadlands,
Oxford, and Brighton Conventions,[20]
such acceptance of Quakerism was entirely expected. As one Quaker periodical noted, extolling the
teaching of the Brighton Convention:
gathering . . . [taught the] truth [of the Higher Life and] the renewed
[post-conversion] baptism of the Holy Spirit . . . [which had been] revived in
a time of darkness by the early Friends[.] . . . It has been often said that
the Friends have always upheld this cardinal truth[.] . . . This is undoubtedly
true, and many of the early Friends walked in the light of it, as testified by
the writings of Fox, Penn, Barclay, Penington, and others[.] . . . Hannah W.
Smith . . . felt that she had an especial message to the Friends in this
country, and from [her] lucid setting forth of this truth many of us have
derived deep and lasting benefit. . . . Perfection lies in this [Higher Life
system]. . . . [T]housands . . . every day flocked to hear the Bible readings
of Hannah W. Smith, eagerly accepting her clear and winning settings forth of
the life of faith . . . [at] the Friends’ Meeting House . . . to a crowded
assembly, those of our own body were proclaiming in triumphant strains the
glory and richness of this full salvation[.][21]
welcomed at Keswick as true Christians.[22] Thus, “[a]t the outset the management of the Convention was
entirely in the hands of the two conveners, Canon Harford-Battersby and Mr.
Robert Wilson.”[23] The Quaker “Robert Wilson [was] one of the two
founders of the Convention and its chairman from 1891 to 1900.”[24] Speakers
were for some years only selected at “the personal invitation of the
conveners,” Wilson and Battersby, although in later times the “the Trustees of the Convention”
began to make the selections.[25]
William Wilson, Robert Wilson’s son, continued his father’s work when Robert
became Keswick chairman,[26]
Robert being the “successor” of Harford-Battersby after the latter man’s
retirement.[27] The succession was the more natural because
Wilson was Harford-Battersby’s “principal parish worker,” regularly attending
the Canon’s Anglican assembly Sunday evenings after attending the Friends’
Meeting in the morning.[28] Indeed,
Robert Wilson was not only co-founder of Keswick and chairman of the Convention
for nearly a decade but was also the author of the Keswick motto “All One in
Christ Jesus.”[29] Truly, “without Mr. [Robert]
Wilson’s support and brave backing, there would have been no . . . Keswick
story . . . at all.”[30]
the Anglican with a Quaker background, Harford-Battersby, and his chief parish
worker, the unrepentant Quaker Robert Wilson, together founded the Keswick
convention and “invited . . . leading
speakers [such as] Mr. and Mrs. Pearsall Smith.
Mr. Pearsall Smith promised to preside.”[31] “Robert . . . [was] invited . . . to preside
and . . . Hannah Pearsall Smith . . . to give daily Bible Readings,” that is,
to preach,[32]
as well as to run the ladies’ meetings.[33] Indeed, Keswick was to be “arranged around
the Pearsall Smiths.”[34] However, when Mr. Smith hastily withdrew
because of a doctrine and practice the Brighton Convention Committee[35]
was hesitant to explain, the Keswick movement almost collapsed. Robert had been teaching that the baptism of
the Holy Ghost was accompanied by physical sexual thrills because of the
esoteric union of Christ with His people as Bridegroom and Bride, as described
in the Song of Solomon. Public confesson
and repudiation of Robert Smith’s abominable teaching would indeed have cast a
dark shadow over Keswick, since it was an indisputable fact that even without
Mr. and Mrs. Smith’s presence “a continuity of teaching [was] maintained . . .
the same as that given at the Oxford Conference,”[36]
where the great spiritual secret of erotic Baptism was publicly proclaimed. In that day of Victorian propriety very few
would have wanted to propagate and preach a theology of sanctification invented
by such persons. The Keswick Committee
consequently deemed it best to conceal the reasons for the withdrawal of Mr.
and Mrs. Smith. In this manner the
Higher Life could be proclaimed while the embarrassing shadow of the unholiness
of its originators remained cloaked in obscurity.
See here for this entire study.
Mount Temple determined that MacDonald should “have an hour all to himself” to
address the Holiness Conference participants. (Circular letter, Broadlands, & December 30-31, The Christian’s Secret of a Holy Life,
Hannah W. Smith, ed. Dieter); cf. pg. 33, Transforming
Keswick: The Keswick Convention, Past,
Present, and Future, Price & Randall.
MacDonald was perfectly aware of the spirititualism of the
Mount-Temples. For example, he wrote to
his wife about how he witnessed a medium at Broadlands winning a convert to
spiritualism by employing her supernatural powers (pg. 26, Ruskin, Lady Mount-Temple and the Spiritualists: An Episode in Broadlands History. Van Akin Burd. London:
Brentham Press, 1982).
pg. 27, The Life that is Life
Indeed: Reminiscences of the Broadlands
Conferences, Edna V. Jackson.
London: James Nisbet & Co,
1910.
conference at Broadlands in 1887 where George MacDonald taught (pg. 98, A Religious Rebel: The Letters of “H. W. S,” ed. Logan
Pearsall Smith, reprinting a Letter to Her Friends of August 1887).
continued for many years; for example, in 1893 he was her guest at her home,
and she wrote of him: “George MacDonald
. . . is the dearest old man, so gentle and yet so strong, and with such a
marvellous insight into spiritual things. . . . [H]e has done a beautiful work
in the world” (pg. 120, A Religious
Rebel: The Letters of “H. W. S,” ed.
Logan Pearsall Smith; from Letter to Her Friends, September 11, 1893). Hannah recommended George MacDonald’s book Diary of an Old Soul to her daughter
Mary, affirming that it “will help you” (Letter to Mary, January 27, 1883,
reproduced in the entry for December 9 of The
Christian’s Secret of a Holy Life, Hannah W. Smith, ed. Dieter). Mrs. Smith likewise wrote of her great
“unity” with “George MacDonald,” saying that they “got very close,” and affirmed:
“It has been a sort of dream of my life to . . . sit at the feet of
[him],” as she was able to do at the Holiness Conferences at Broadlands. MacDonald
was a welcome presence and speaker at English Holiness Conferences, for if
Hannah W. Smith’s universalism was no barrier to her, neither was his
universalism a barrier to him—indeed, to Mrs. Mount-Temple, universalism was a
reason to receive promotion and influence (Circular letter, Broadlands, &
December 30-31, The Christian’s Secret of
a Holy Life, Hannah W. Smith, ed. Dieter).
Hopkins: A Memoir, Alexander
Smellie.
Hopkins: A Memoir, Alexander
Smellie.
Hopkins: A Memoir, Alexander
Smellie.
e. g., that a list of Broadlands Conference speakers and attendees places the
Smiths first, following only the hosts, Lord and Lady Mount-Temple (pg. 34-35, The Life that is Life Indeed: Reminiscences of the Broadlands Conferences,
Edna V. Jackson. London: James Nisbet & Co, 1910. Cf. pgs. 186-187, where in the list of
participants in the last Conference of 1888, she is prominent again, the first
woman in the list after the Mount-Temples.).
“Amongst the speakers [the Broadlands historian] think[s] first of Mrs.
Pearsall Smith[.] . . . ‘The angel of the churches,’ Lady Mount-Temple used to
call her” (pgs. 48-49, Ibid).
Convention were those in which Hannah [W. Smith] preached her practical secrets
of the happy Christian life to audiences of 5,000 or more, mostly clergymen who
were theologically opposed [correctly, 1 Timothy 2:9-15; 1 Corinthians
14:34-37] to the preaching ministry of women” (“Smith, Hannah W. & Smith,
Robert Pearsall,” Biographical Dictionary
of Evangelicals, ed. Timothy Larsen).
Convention from around twenty-three countries (pg. 23, So Great Salvation, Barabas).
124, The Life that is Life Indeed: Reminiscences of the Broadlands Conferences,
Edna V. Jackson. London: James Nisbet & Co, 1910.
the entry for July 26 of The Christian’s
Secret of a Holy Life, Hannah W. Smith, ed. Dieter. Compare the articles on Elisabeth Fry and
Joseph John Gurney in The Biographical
Dictionary of Evangelicals, ed. Larsen.
in question, T. D. Harford-Battersby, had a Quaker background, does record that
Harford-Battersby had made the theological rounds from apostate
Anglo-Catholicism, to modernistic and evolutionary Anglican broad-churchism, to
more evangelical Anglican low-churchism that was “strongly influenced by
English Methodism” (pgs. 15, 24-25, So
Great Salvation, Barabas). One hopes
that Mr. Harford-Battersby did not merely adopt better theology than the
Anglo-Catholic and modernistic heresies that he had formerly followed, but if
he was himself personally born again after turning to Anglican low-churchism
Barabas makes no mention of such an event.
Indeed, Harford-Battersby’s two hundred and thirty page biography only
states that he “he drew by degrees, but steadily, towards a calm and firm
settlement in what are known as evangelical beliefs” (pg. x, Memoir of T. D. Harford-Battersby,
Harford), “[b]eginning as a Tractarian,
[but] little by little be[ing] led to Evangelical views” (pg. 75, Evan
Harry Hopkins: A Memoir, Alexander
Smellie). Not a single sentence of the
biography of Battersby mentions a new birth experience associated with his
rejection of high-Anglican or Tractarian heresies.
is not at all a good sign that the only record of anything like a conversion to
Christ in Harford-Battersby’s biography is his own testimony that he first
began to repent and believe when he received confirmation. He wrote:
principle. I was altogether a thoughtless, vile creature. I . . . was plunged .
. . into idleness and dissipation . . . justly might I have been cut off in the
midst of this course, but the Lord most graciously kept me[.] . . . [In] the
care and goodness of God to me[,] He so ordained it that confirmation should
come very soon[.] . . . Then I first learned to turn my thoughts really towards
heaven, to repent, and believe in Jesus (pg. 6, Memoir of T. D. Harford-Battersby, Harford).
indicates that he was a vile person, full of idleness and dissipation, but the
Lord graciously kept him alive until he received the rite of confirmation,
through which he came to repent and believe in Jesus. Belief in such a ritualistic false gospel in
his allegedly more evangelical and non-Tractarian childhood would provide an
easy explanation for his ability to adopt the Roman Catholic heresies taught by
(the later Roman Catholic Cardinal) Newman and the other high-Anglican
Tractarians at Oxford during Harford-Battersby’s college days, such as a
“visible church with sacraments and rites, which are the channels of invisible
grace, an episcopal dynasty descended from the apostles, [and] an obligatory
body of doctrine, to be found in Scripture, but only recognised there by the
aid of Church tradition” (pgs. 24-25, Memoir). “Mr. Battersby came under the spell. He
missed no opportunity of hearing, not only Newman himself, but Manning and
Pusey, and other leaders of the [Anglo-Catholic] movement. He discussed the
sermons with his friends. He wrote about them in his letters home, and thus
drew down upon himself grave warnings from his father as to the dangers of
Romanising views” (pgs. 28-29, Ibid).
was indeed born again at some point, but there is certainly no mention of such
an event at any point in his biography. Neither in his childhood before he
adopted—which a true Christian will not do—an accursed sacramental false gospel
(Galatians 1:8-9), nor after his entry into Anglican holy orders, when he
“elected to begin ministerial work in a High Church parish” where baptismal
regeneration and other sacramental heresies were taught because of his
“admiration for Newman and the other leaders of the Oxford movement,” (pg. 52,
cf. 43ff, Ibid), is there any
evidence at all of a genuine conversion.
All that is recorded is that he gradually abandoned ritualism for
rationalism and the broad-church Anglicanism of Frederick Myers, the curate of
the town of Keswick under whom Harford-Battersby served after leaving his first
ministry, and whom he regarded as “a guide and as a prophet” (pg. 288, Biographical Dictionary of Evangelicals)
although Myers was a spiritualist (pgs. 23-24, The Keswick Story, Polluck).
Under him Harford-Battersby learned not to be concerned about “trying to
find out the right theory of inspiration” (pg. 67, Memoir of T. D. Harford-Battersby, Harford). He finally replaced Myers as curate after his
predecessor’s death and then gradually moved towards evangelical ideas—which
meant assent to the “truth of Protestant principles” rather than
“Anglo-Catholicism” (pg. 60, Ibid),
not personal conversion and the new birth.
Finally, after being convinced by the doctrine of Hannah W. and Robert
P. Smith, Harford-Battersby was “persuaded that the current teaching of the
Evangelical school itself was defective and one-sided, and . . . of the general
truth of the teaching upon which the holiness movement was based” (pgs.
175-176, Ibid). He then abandoned mainstream Anglican
evangelicalism for the Higher Life doctrine characteristic of the Keswick
theology, destitute of a clear testimony to a new birth, but possessed of a
clear testimony to the second blessing of the Higher Life. Such was the spiritual progress of the
Anglican Canon without whose entry into the Higher Life at the “Oxford
Convention . . . the . . . Keswick
Convention would never have had a beginning” (pg. 29, Forward Movements, Pierson).
D. D. Bundy. Wilmore, Kentucky: Asbury Theological Seminary, 1975, in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological
Society 19:4 (Fall 1976) 340-343.
T. D. Harford-Battersby, Harford.
Great Salvation, Barabas. Canon
Harford-Battersby, despite Wilson’s Quaker theology, considered him a “dear
brother” (pg. 195, Memoir of T. D.
Harford-Battersby, Harford), and at the Canon’s deathbed, Wilson was by his
side (pg. 219, Ibid).
Keswick Convention: Its Message, Method,
and its Men, ed. Harford.
Message, Method, and its Men, ed. Charles Harford, is dedicated “to the
memory of Thomas Dundas Harford-Battersby and Robert Wilson, Founders of the
Keswick Convention.” In a chapter on
Keswick men, J. Elder Cumming breathes not the slightest warning about Quaker
heresies but concludes his very laudatory description of Robert Wilson with the
following affirmation, after recounting Mr. Wilson’s death: “Truly, the end of that man was peace! Who
would not wish for such an end, if prepared for it, as he was?” (pg. 64, The Keswick Convention, ed.
Harford). Thus, although Quakers deny
justification by the imputed righteousness of Christ and other essential
aspects of the Biblical gospel, Keswick leaders wished to be in the same place
as Quakers like Mr. Wilson at death.
While one can hope that, somehow, Mr. Wilson did not actually believe in
Quakerism and its false gospel but was truly converted, wishing to be
associated in death with Quakers is not a little unwise.
Hopkins: A Memoir, Alexander
Smellie.
Printed for private circulation, 1890; pgs. 335, 371, 407, 416-420, Record of the Convention for the Promotion
of Scriptural Holiness Held at Brighton, May 29th to June 7th,
1875. Brighton: W. J. Smith, 1875.
the Brighton Convention,” The Friends’
Quarterly Examiner, 9:23-26. London: Barrett, Sons & Co, 1875. Note that pages 416-420 of the Record of the Convention for the Promotion
of Scriptural Holiness Held at Brighton, May 29th to June 7th,
1875. Brighton: W. J. Smith, 1875 consists of excerpts from this article in
the Friends’ Quarterly Examiner
extolling the teaching at Brighton.
Keswick Story: The Authorized History of
the Keswick Convention, Polluck.
Convention: Its Message, Method, and its
Men, ed. Charles Harford.
Convention, ed. Harford; cf. pg. 119, The
Keswick Story: The Authorized History of
the Keswick Convention, Polluck.
Convention, ed. Harford.
Convention, ed. Harford.
Convention, ed. Harford.
Story: The Authorized History of the
Keswick Convention, Polluck.
Convention, ed. Harford.
Convention, ed. Harford.
Salvation, Barabas.
Keswick: The Keswick Convention, Past,
Present, and Future, Price & Randall.
Keswick Convention: Its Message, its
Method, and its Men, ed. Harford.
Story: The Authorized History of the
Keswick Convention, Polluck.
the chairman of the Mildmay Conference, and Lord Radstock. All these were solid Broadlands men, and
Blackwood’s suggestion led to the expansion of the 1874 Broadlands Conference
at the Oxford Convention (pg. 17, The Life that is Life Indeed: Reminiscences of the Broadlands Conferences,
Edna V. Jackson. London: James Nisbet & Co, 1910).
Convention, ed. Harford. Harford-Battersby
testified to the profound influence of Robert P. Smith upon him and countless
others: “Not that I would shrink from
confessing the great debt which I, and thousands more with me, owe to that
remarkable man whose name has become a by-word and a reproach in the estimation
of many whom I greatly honour” (pg. 173, Memoir
of T. D. Harford-Battersby, Harford).
Thus, “Mr. Smith . . . was at this time an honoured instrument in the
hands of God for reviving the spiritual life in the hearts of hundreds, and
even thousands, of devoted servants of Christ, both in this country [England]
and on the Continent” (pgs. 174-175, Ibid). That the teaching of Keswick was that of the
Smiths is historically indisputable.
What Has Happened that the Gospel Has Been So Messed Up by Professing Christians?
Last week I wrote two posts about so-called gospel declaration in independent Baptist churches (one and two). The warped or corrupt or lacking presentation of Kurt Skelly just represents what’s already all over. It’s bad that he and that whole direction of practice is so admired among independent Baptists or that even those not with him still think of him as successful. Evangelicals as a whole are worse in general than these independent Baptists. I don’t think it’s close on this, especially considering an article in Christianity Today last week, naming the most influential Christians in 2016, which included the pope and Hillary Clinton — very sad. What has happened? Why did this happen?
Satan and the world system has already been at work through all history blinding men to the truth. Because of the nature of human fallenness, man in his lost condition tends toward what is really bad. We should be amazed anything good happens with this darkness in and all around. There are always going to be multiple fronts of false teaching to deal with and if you take scripture literally, it’s going to get worse before it’s going to get better. You can count on a lot of bad stuff, but knowing that, to have scriptural discernment, we need to look out for it, see it, and call it out when we do. Let’s say that you have known what I’ve written in this paragraph. Now what are the specifics that explain what we see occurring today?
Lack of conversion leads to further lack of conversion. Unsaved people can really twist the gospel and large numbers of them have done so through history since Christ. This is not my saying that Kurt Skelly isn’t saved, but false teachers almost as a definition are not saved people. They aren’t telling the truth, because they themselves haven’t believed it. They may have believed some truths, but not enough saving truth to be saved. This doesn’t explain how all this lack of conversion started, of course. You can trace false teaching back to something from an unsaved person, a doctrine of demons (1 Tim 4:1), then passed along to unsuspecting, gullible believers. True teaching doesn’t often change in giant, radical shifts, but in incremental steps (the frog in the kettle).
James 3:1 says, “Be not many masters, knowing that we shall receive the greater condemnation.” Teachers have far more responsibility. We need to be more serious about judgment of them, even doubting the salvations of those who won’t stop teaching a false gospel. We should at least regard (“let them be unto thee”) them as unsaved, even if they are not (cf. Mt 18:17). I see a sweeping disregard of required components of a true gospel among independent Baptists.
A false gospel can’t then but produce false sanctification. People aren’t saved by a false gospel, so the production of change that comes only from a true gospel shouldn’t be expected either. Very often the Skelly type of “gospel” preaching doesn’t expect the continuous obedience that marks the identity of a true believer. The endurance in actual Christian living is the biblical assurance of salvation. Their means of change will be similar to the false gospel, however, usually some kind of manipulation. In many cases, I’ve seen it to be one program, one human strategy, after another, that doesn’t then bear biblical gospel preaching either. Carnality just begets more carnality.
The carnality that crafts external changes has resulted in numbers. The numbers bring a sort of validation, justifying the methods before men. They say it’s spiritual because things happened that they made happen. When things happen that they make happen, they testify that God did it. If God did it, they must be right, because God isn’t wrong. However, God’s Word sufficiently lays out the manifestations of true spirituality. God’s Word is the confirmation of whether it is of God. If you hear a false gospel, it’s still wrong, because it isn’t biblical — the same with a false sanctification.
The numbers of people interested in false teaching don’t make it true. The effect of false teaching doesn’t make it true. Numbers are particularly convincing short term even to many true teachers. They want to see something work. They are afraid to say something is wrong that seems to be working. On the other hand, they don’t want to say it isn’t working, when it looks like it is working. They do a very surface level, superficial, investigation, perhaps asking leading questions, softballs that allow for plausible deniability. They also might fear a charge of “sour grapes” or jealousy or bitterness. They may think they are failures who don’t deserve to criticize. A lot of this relates to how we endure hardness and find joy in the Lord. Men look to results for their happiness when their actual joy is in the immoveable. Don’t forget this.
On a more short term consideration, I believe that the lack of biblical preaching, the deficiency of true, actual exposition of scripture has resulted in perverted doctrine. The doctrine of salvation comes from exegesis of God’s Word. Men are crafting sermons, using the Bible, not preaching the Bible. Apparently many think this is how to use the Bible, like some kind of divining rod that yields messages not necessarily found in the text itself.
On the other hand, some preachers just don’t know what they’re doing, which relates to their view of sanctification. They judge on a mystical basis that they must be preachers, disconnected from the preparation and then actual objective proof that they rightly divide the Word of Truth. Preaching is mostly a mystical event rather than God speaking through the plain meaning of the text. The true meaning of the text exists separate from a subjective experience.
As a result of not knowing how to study the Bible, and, therefore, not actually studying the Bible, they don’t have a solid doctrinal standing from the Word of God. They are weak in their theology, because they don’t know the Bible. They don’t have a grasp of doctrine as a basis of their practice and methodology. Further, their doctrine isn’t historic. They don’t have beliefs rooted in historic Christian doctrine. To relate to the mystical experience men have sought as validation, theology is said to be dead. They wouldn’t want to be caught being too theological, and, therefore, dead.
What’s practical is the practice of scripture. Much of the practice in churches comes from the silence of scripture. It’s right because the Bible doesn’t say it’s wrong. Practice relates to what works rather than what God’s Word says. When something is practical, however, it explains the practice of scripture, not how you can succeed at implement methodology that will yield success.
In a broad category, false teachers have centered the gospel on man. You see this corrupt tendency in two different directions in scripture, either legalistic or licentious. Salvation is not by works, lest any man should boast, so it isn’t legalistic. When grace is an occasion to the flesh, that’s also man-centered. God’s grace teaches to deny ungodliness and worldly lust.
Skelly purveys the latter of the previous paragraph. The whole world has the same problem. Skelly misidentifies his audience. He sees them as consumers to whom he markets his message. Instead, they are sinners, and sin isn’t changed through sales type techniques. The needs of sinners are the ones God Himself identifies. We don’t start with what sinners themselves feel or what they might feel. We start with what God says. When someone is so concerned with what his audience feels, he shapes his message to their feelings and that twists the gospel. The foundation of this corruption is not starting with the Bible and the teaching it reveals. This centers on man again.
Men do not by nature seek the gospel. No one is a consumer of and for it. It is not something to be sold on men’s terms. It is completely God’s. Man’s disinterest should not shape the message. We must depend on the message itself. The message itself is the means. Everything I’m writing here is theological, and it is theology that needed more consideration from the men who crafted these plans.
Wrong doctrines resulting in a wrong message from a wrong message exhibit faithlessness. In Matthew 12:39, Jesus said, “An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign.” The Charismatics have their signs. Many independent Baptists seek for their own signs. The Bible is true whether lots of people believe it or not. If we believe it, then we like it. We love it. We preach it. We’re not ashamed of it. We preach it to people like it’s the greatest thing, because we think it is.
The signs that people seek they often produce. Then they say they must be right because they got a sign. The sign was how many people prayed prayers or how many people gathered in their building in any one week. They produce an environment in which people feel like something spiritual is taking place. This is all faithlessness.
Signs were for unbelievers, because they didn’t believe. Believers don’t need them, because they do believe. Needing them is again faithlessness, not faith. God is pleased by faith, not by mass producing experiences as a means of self-validation, which also relates this to pride. Man is being pleased and he feels proud of what he sees.
Because men seek validation through these numbers, they also honor those who see the most. Very often, bigger churches have the most influence, because it is assumed they most know what they are doing. Years of succeeding provide a buffer against criticism. The benefit of the doubt comes because of the report of mighty events occurring, not the account of faithful, obedient service.
More to Come.
Keswick’s History: Keswick Theology’s Rise and Development in an Analysis and Critique of So Great Salvation by Stephen Barabas, part 3 of 5
perfectionist heretics were important, Barabas recognizes that “the Keswick
movement had its [actual] genesis . . . [through] Mr. and Mrs. Robert Pearsall
Smith [and the influence of three of their books, including Mrs. Smith’s] The Record of a Happy Life,”[1]
after “Conferences . . . at Broadlands . . . Oxford . . . [and] Brighton. Robert and Hannah [Smith] were at the very
center of it all.”[2] Barabas provides not the slightest warning
about Mrs. Smith’s poisonous false doctrines, despite repeatedly citing her
book My Spiritual Autobiography: How I
Discovered The Unselfishness of God, which she wrote specifically to turn
people from Christian orthodoxy to heresy, and where her universalist heresy is
blatantly and grossly set forth.[3] In any case, it is clear that “the first
steps . . . [towards] [t]he Keswick Convention . . . owe . . . everything to a
Quaker glass manufacturer from Philadelphia, Robert Pearsall Smith[.]”[4] Mr. Smith “was instrumental, not only in
establishing Keswick as a perennial convention, but also in introducing the
Keswick emphases back into the United States.”[5] Barabas indicates that “[b]oth [the Smiths]
were born and bred Quakers,”[6]
having “always held the Quaker teaching concerning the Inner Light and
passivity.”[7] They brought their Quaker theology and other
distinctive heresies into the Keswick movement, which they founded.
revelation [of the Keswick theology of sanctification] came to Mrs. Pearsall
Smith about 1867. . . . At first her husband . . . was somewhat frightened . .
. thinking she had gone off into heresy . . . [but then he] came into her
experience when she called his attention to Romans vi. 6.”[8] Unfortunately, Mrs. Smith did not interpret
Romans 6:6 correctly, and she led her husband into an erroneous view of the
verse as well. The erroneous
interpretation of Romans six adopted by Hannah and Robert P. Smith continued to
dominate the Keswick convention for many decades:
if one passage of Scripture is to be identified as playing a larger role than
any other, it would have to be Romans chapter 6. Evan Hopkins said at the thirty-first
Convention that no passage of Scripture was more frequently to the fore at Keswick
than this one. Steven Barabas finds
himself not only agreeing with this statement but adding: “It is doubtful whether a Keswick Convention
has ever been held in which one or more speakers did not deal with Romans 6. .
. . There is no understanding of Keswick without an appreciation of the place
accorded by it to this chapter in its whole scheme of sanctification.” The key to this chapter, in the early Keswick
teaching . . . [of] Robert Pearsall Smith and his wife Hannah . . . is verse 6.[9]
Mrs. Pearsall Smith “was largely unchallenged from the Keswick platform until
1965 when John Stott gave Bible Readings on Romans 5-8.”[10] It was very easy for the Smiths to
misinterpret Scripture because “[n]either of [the Smiths] had any training in
theology,”[11]
in keeping with their Quaker backgrounds; for example, Hannah Smith
testified: “[A]s a Quaker, I had no
doctrinal teaching . . . I knew literally nothing of theology, and had never
heard any theological terms” since in her youth “no doctrines or dogmas were
ever taught us . . . a creature more utterly ignorant of all so-called
religious truth . . . could hardly be conceived of in these modern times [that
is, in 1902]. The whole religious
question for me was simply whether I was good enough to go to heaven, or so
naughty as to deserve hell.”[12] Despite woeful ignorance of theology and an
inability to accurately exegete Scripture, following Hannah’s lead, both Mr.
and Mrs. Smith embraced and began to zealously propagate the doctrines of the
Higher Life that were enshrined in the Keswick movement.
“beginning . . . some of the foremost leaders of the Church attacked [the
Keswick doctrine] as being dangerously heretical.”[13] Indeed, “the opposition the work was
subjected to at the beginning, even from Evangelical clergy,”[14]
was extreme, so that, indeed, the Keswick theology was “looked upon with the
gravest suspicion by those who were considered as the leaders of the
Evangelical section of the Church.”[15] Consequently, “very few Evangelical leaders
ever attended . . . the Keswick Convention . . . which was quite an independent
movement,” since “the
leading Evangelicals held aloof and viewed it with undisguised suspicion.” Rather than attending and supporting Keswick,
evangelicals “openly denounced it as dangerous heresy.”[16] Evangelical
opposition to Keswick was intense because the founders of Keswick seriously
compromised and corrupted or even outright denied the evangel,[17]
the gospel. For example, evangelicals
found unacceptable Hannah W. Smith’s opposition to the sole authority of
Scripture, proclamation of universalism, and rejection of the Pauline doctrine
of justification. Robert, while formally
adopting a weak and wobbly concept of justification by faith for a time, instead
of simply rejecting that core gospel doctrine as he had before, continued to
reject eternal security and tied his Higher Life theology into his opposition
to the preservation of the saints. Warfield
describes the Arminianism inherent in Robert Smith’s argument against
progressive sanctification being incomplete until death, as propounded by Smith
at the Oxford Union Meeting of 1874:
same spirit, exhorted his hearers not to put an arbitrary limitation on the
power of God by postponing the completion of their salvation to the end of
their “pilgrimage,” and so virtually attributing to death the sanctifying work
which they ought to find rather in Christ. “Shall not Christ do more for you
than death?” he demands, and then he develops a reductio ad absurdum. We
expect a dying grace by which we shall be really made perfect. How long before
death is the reception of such a grace possible? “An hour? A day? Peradventure
a week? Possibly two or three weeks, if you are very ill? One good man granted
this position until the period of six weeks was reached, but then said that
more than six weeks of such living” — that is, of course, living in entire
consecration and full trust, with its accompanying “victory”—“was utterly
impossible!” “Are your views as to the limitations of dying grace,” he
inquires, “only less absurd because less definite?” The absurdity lies,
however, only in the assumption of this “dying grace” . . . Smith describes it
as “a state of complete trust to be arrived at, but not until death.” The
Scriptures know of no such thing; they demand complete trust from all alike, as
the very first step of the conscious Christian life. It finds its real source
in the Arminian notion that our salvation depends on our momentary state of
mind and will at that particular moment. Whether we are ultimately saved or not
will depend, then, on whether death catches us in a state of grace or fallen
from grace. Our eternal future, thus, hangs quite absolutely on the state of
mind we happen (happen is the right word here) to be in at the moment of death:
nothing behind this momentary state of mind can come into direct consideration.
This absurd over-estimate of the importance of the moment of dying is the
direct consequence of the rejection of the Bible doctrine of Perseverance and
the substitution for it of a doctrine of Perfection as the meaning of Christ
being our Saviour to the uttermost. The real meaning of this great declaration
is just that to trust in Jesus is to trust in One who is able and willing and
sure to save to the uttermost — to the uttermost limit of the progress of
salvation. Death in this conception of the saving Christ loses the factitious
significance which has been given to it. Our momentary state of mind at the
moment of death is of no more importance than our momentary state of mind at
any other instant. We do not rest on our state of mind, but on Christ, and all
that is important is that we are “in Christ Jesus.” He is able to save to the
uttermost, and faithful is He that calls us, who also will do it. He does it in
His own way, of course; and that way is by process—whom He calls He justifies,
and whom He justifies He glorifies. He does it; and therefore we know
that our glorification is as safe in His hands as is any other step of our salvation.
To be progressively saved is, of course, to postpone the completion of our
salvation to the end of the process. Expecting the end of the process only at
the time appointed for it is no limitation upon the power of the Saviour; and
looking upon death as the close of the process is a very different thing from
looking upon death as a Saviour.[18]
Smith also believed, at least for a while, that Christ was the “redeemer . . .
from past sins” who will only “redeem . . . from all future sins . . . if [one]
will . . . submit . . . wholly to Him,”[19]
a clear anti-eternal security position.
However, since she had become a universalist before becoming a Keswick
preacher, denying eternal security had became largely a moot point for
her. Since Robert and Hannah Smith held
extremely compromised views of the gospel, and Hannah even avowed, “I cannot enjoy close contact with [those
who] . . . preac[h] . . . a pure gospel,”[20]
it was not surprising that those who loved the true and pure gospel violently
opposed the Keswick movement.
Christian evangelicals, recognizing the command of the Great Commission to
preach the gospel to every creature (Mark 16:15), objected to the fact that
“Robert . . . did not try to convert unbelievers; his call[,] [he believed,] was
to [preach] a state of Holiness in those who already believed, whatever their
creed.”[21] What is more, both Robert and Hannah Smith
“belie[ved] in the inner light [doctrine of Quakerism,] to which they [were] .
. . united in sentiment. . . . Mr. P. Smith [and his wife’s writings] embod[y]
the mysticism of Madame Guyon and the medieval mystics, as well as the
semi-Pelagianism of Professor Upham.”[22] Consequently, both Mr. and Mrs. Smith
rejected the evangelical fundamental, sola
Scriptura—Robert, for example, proclaimed:
“I get one half of my theology from the Bible, and the other half by
watching my children,” citing “Coleridge” as support for this astonishing
affirmation.[23] Both the Smiths also anticipated Word of
Faith heresies.[24] The demonism and spiritualism of the
Mount-Temples and their influence on the Smiths and Keswick through the
Broadlands Conferences also constituted a matter of grave concern. Thus, evangelical rejection of Keswick
theology was entirely natural.
Nevertheless, despite vociferous and continuing evangelical opposition, Barabas
indicates that both Mr. and Mrs. Smith began to preach to large audiences a
“doctrine of sanctification by faith [alone that had been] allowed to lie
dormant for centuries, unknown and unappreciated . . . it remained for Keswick
to call the attention of the Church to it.”[25]
Great Salvation, Barabas; cf. pg. 193, Transforming
Keswick: The Keswick Convention, Past,
Present, and Future, Price & Randall.
must not confuse Mrs. Smith’s memoir of her son Frank, who died at eighteen
years of age (cf. pgs. 33-37, Remarkable
Relations, by Barbara Strachey), entitled The Record of a Happy Life (New York, 1873), with Mrs. Smith’s
classic statement of Higher Life doctrine, The
Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life (Boston, 1875; often reprinted). One hopes that Barabas has not done so but
has simply cited Mrs. Smith’s far less influential biography of her son for
some reason instead of her far more influential Keswick classic. Both works do contain Higher Life theology.
Fanaticism, Strachey.
17-18, So Great Salvation,
Barabas. Compare the discussion of
Hannah W. Smith and her writings above.
Christianity Today
19:18 (20 June 1975): 6-8.
Pentecostal-Charismatic Origins, ed. Vinson Synan.
Salvation, Barabas.
Puritans: Their Origins and Successors,
D. M. Lloyd-Jones.
Salvation, Barabas.
228-229, Transforming Keswick: The Keswick Convention, Past, Present, and
Future, Price & Randall, citing pg. 94, The Keswick Week, 1906, & So
Great Salvation, Barabas.
Future, Price & Randall.
“Increasingly, the teaching at Keswick in the later decades of the
twentieth century would owe more to traditional Reformed thinking about
sanctification as a process than to Keswick’s nineteenth-century and earlier
twentieth-century views . . . [t]he change in emphasis can be traced by looking
at the way in which expositions of the letter to the Romans were given” (pg.
80, Transforming Keswick: The Keswick Convention, Past, Present, and
Future, Price & Randall).
Salvation, Barabas.
163, 45, The Unselfishness of God,
Hannah W. Smith. Princeton, NJ: Littlebrook, 1987. Note Hannah’s false gospel of salvation by
works.
Salvation, Barabas.
Great Salvation, Barabas.
T. D. Harford-Battersby, Harford.
The specific reference in the quotation is to the leaders of evangelical
Anglicanism. However, English
nonconformity opposed Keswick even more strongly than the evangelical Anglicans
opposed it.
Carr Glyn Moule, Bishop of Durham: A
Biography, John B. Harford & Frederick C. Macdonald.
Movement,” in Perfectionism, Vol. 2,
B. B. Warfield; see pgs. 55-57, Account of the Union Meeting for the Promotion of Scriptural Holiness,
Held at Oxford, August 29 to September 7, 1874. Chicago: Revell, 1874.
reproduced in the entry for January 12 of The
Christian’s Secret of a Holy Life, Hannah W. Smith, ed. Dieter.
29, Remarkable Relations, Strachey;
Italics in original.
Relations, Barbara Strachey. Robert
Smith’s call was “communicating” the Higher Life “to Christians of all
names and connections alike” (“Die
Heiligungsbewegung,” Chapter 6, Perfectionism,
B. B. Warfield, Vol. 1).
of the Union Meeting for the Promotion of Scriptural Holiness, Held at Oxford,
August 29 to September 7, 1874. Chicago: Revell, 1874.
Likewise, Hannah W. Smith preached at the Broadlands Conference: “I have learnt to know God in my nursery with
my children on my lap” (pg. 222, The Life that is Life Indeed: Reminiscences of the Broadlands Conferences,
Edna V. Jackson. London: James Nisbet & Co, 1910.).
Convention: “[B]e sure to say [Christian
language] aloud—there is marvelous power reflected by thoughts put into
spoken words. Keep on saying [such
language], even when the heart rebels” (pg. 221, Account of the Union Meeting for the Promotion of Scriptural Holiness,
Held at Oxford, August 29 to September 7, 1874.
Chicago: Revell, 1874; cf. pg. 42). Hannah similarly
advised: “[I]f thee continually talks of
thyself as being old, thee may perhaps bring on some of the infirmities of age”
(pg. 187, A Religious Rebel: The Letters of “H. W. S,” ed. Logan
Pearsall Smith, reproducing Letter to her
Daughter, Mary Berreneson, March 5, 1907).
Salvation, Barabas. Barabas
qualifies his admission that the Keswick doctrine of sanctification was unknown
for centuries with the statement “except by a few isolated Christians,” since
to admit that the Keswick doctrine was unknown to the church of God for over
1800 years would lead to severe doubts about its character. None of these alleged “few isolated
Christians” who believed in the Keswick doctrine before the latter portion of
the nineteenth century are named, nor do they appear to have provided any
written evidence that they ever existed, unless Barabas views idolators like
Upham as Christian Keswick advocates and refers to them.
denominate the distinctively Keswick position “sanctification by faith alone”
rather than simply “sanctification by faith.”
The necessity of faith for growth in holiness is non-controversial among
Bible-believing Christians.
Vulgarity, Meaning, Evangelicalism, Politics, and Hypocrisy
For fulfilling its particular purpose, I don’t know of a better metaphor than the pot calling the kettle black. Our culture, our society, loves vulgarity, craves vulgarity, embraces vulgarity. Evangelicalism loves vulgarity. I think most of fundamentalism loves vulgarity. Very few people dislike vulgarity in the whole United States. Along comes Donald Trump and our society and evangelicalism say they don’t want Trump because of his vulgarity. This is the pot calling the kettle black. This is not a defense of Trump. If people are going to oppose vulgarity, they should start with themselves. It really is moralistic to point out the vulgarity of someone else, really for self-righteous purposes, and then embrace it yourself, even advertise it yourself. This is what evangelicalism does, following along with the rest of culture and society. The most popular figures in social media, which some would say are the most popular people in the entire country, the biggest twitter and instagram followings, are likely the most vulgar people in the world. Evangelicalism leans toward the same measures as if they might aid its effort to expand its numbers.
Recently I watched most of an episode of James White’s program, what he calls The Dividing Line. I believe that the dividing line would be scripture. I could hope that would be the case with James White too, although for him the dividing line might be himself. It seems you have to pass the White muster to get over the most important dividing line. As part of a line being drawn that divides one side from another, such as Moses asked, “Who is on the Lord’s side?”, the Bible or God draws a line between the holy or the sacred and the profane or the common. James White would have us expect that would occur on his program. I wish I could assume that and I hope the best, even as love hopes all things.
White’s program was February 22, 2016 and it was called, “Psalm 101:3 and Worthless Things on Today’s DL.” White spent much of his time exposing the evangelical attraction to the movie, Deadpool. White was using Psalm 101 to explain that he wouldn’t go to the movie, Deadpool, because it was worthless. warning evangelicals about going to a movie like that in light of teaching there in Psalm 101.
“Worthless things” comes from some modern translations of Psalm 101:3, such as the ESV, as an example, from the Hebrew belial, which the KJV and even the NKJV translate, “wicked thing.” “Worthless thing” is a legitimate understanding of belial, but it also means “wicked thing,” and that is how believers have taken Psalm 101:3 for centuries. For instance, Matthew Henry in his commentary on this verse, writes:
In all our worldly business we must see that what we set our eyes upon be right and good and not any forbidden fruit, and that we never seek that which we cannot have without sin. It is the character of a good man that he shuts his eyes from seeing evil.
The idea of “worthless thing” isn’t, “hey, it’s worthless, that is, it doesn’t have any eternal value, but it isn’t wrong.” No, the worthless thing is wicked. It is either wicked because it is worthless or it is worthless because it is wicked. Worthless things are not acceptable for God’s people, so they are wicked.
Just the fact that White finds the need to address his audience about Deadpool says that something stinks in Denmark, which is evangelicalism. When you hear him talk about it, he tip toes too, as if he knows this could be controversial and he could find himself in big trouble going after a movie. He even says that he himself isn’t prudish.
White spends most of the hour talking about movie-watching as related to Psalm 101:3, and admits that he goes to movies at the theater. He says there are people who don’t attend movies, and he said they were ‘King James Onlyists who wear bow ties,’ as a way to mock those people. I guess people accept this from White, expect it really. KJVO and bow ties? Who are these people? But this is typical of White to scorn people like this with his words. He does this all. the. time. It is his regular method of operation to jeer and ridicule. He gets some in return, but I’ve never seen him take as much as he gives. He does it again and again. Donald Trump has been called vulgar for using the same tactic. I’m not saying that criticism isn’t true, just that I hear this tactic used as much or more by James White. White earns capital with his viewers with the name-calling that he can spend on Deadpool. The people who love Deadpool and purchase a ticket to see it — his audience — hate the KJV and see its adherents wearing bow ties and likely living in area 51.
The movie that White endorsed as a fine one, one that had a purpose, that wasn’t worthless, that he thought was worth going to the movie theater to watch, was “Saving Private Ryan.” His reason was that Saving Private Ryan did represent actual war. He says it was given good reviews by actual World War Two veterans for its realism. A parental guide for that movie says the following (with asterisks where the foul language is):
Approximately 23 uses of “****,” 17 of “****,” 15 of “***,” 12 of “********,” 10 of “************,” 6 of “***,” 6 of “****,” 5 of “************,” 4 of “*********,” 3 of “******,” 2 each of “***************,” “*******,” “*************” and “********,” and 1 use of “*************,” 1 of “**************” and 1 of “*******”
The word used 23 times is as bad as it gets. Some of the others might be characterized the same, while many are various versions of the Lord’s name in vain.
While James White spent an hour preaching against Deadpool, he was also promoting movies like Saving Private Ryan, that are also full of vulgarity. My point, however, is that even among the most conservative of conservative evangelicals, they speak against the vulgarity of someone like Trump, and yet they pay for and sit themselves down voluntarily to watch worse than the worst of what Trump has said in this campaign. Again, I don’t say this to defend Trump, but to indicate the hypocrisy of a people who actually choose vulgarity on a regular basis.
I have already written now in a couple of previous posts that I believe that churches are most responsible for vulgarity, because they have brought it into their churches. I’m using James White merely as an example, because he is fairly well known.
What is vulgarity? Many evangelicals and fundamentalists now say they know what it is and that it is wrong, as seen in criticism of Trump. They suddenly know, they say, what vulgarity is. They are against — really, really against it — they say. They have strong contempt for vulgarity. However, they like Christian rock and Christian rap and they say they can’t judge that. They promote it. They can’t judge smoke on the stage and colored lights and Christian pianists who play like Billy Joel. Those play and sing in their churches. Those someone shouldn’t judge.
Evangelicals have a verse: 1 Corinthians 4:6, which says (in the KJV), “that ye might learn in us not to think of men above that which is written.” This is a convenient use of this one phrase in this verse, which isn’t functioning in the verse like evangelicals have found their primary and most common meaning. If you judge the music they employ to help increase their number of attendees, they say that you are judging “above that which is written.” You won’t find the words, “rock music,” in the Bible, and so you are adding to scripture. However, they can judge what “vulgar” is. They know. They see it in Donald Trump. They judge that vulgarity is wrong. And that is actually judging within what is written, well, because that just is, because they know that it is.
Merriam-Websters Dictionary defines “vulgarity,” first and second definitions: (1) the quality or state of not having good taste, manners, politeness, etc., (2) something (such as a word) that is offensive or rude.” On February 2 here, I wrote: “Trump is vulgar. Trump could be the picture next to vulgar in the dictionary,” so if I write that now about him, I had already written it the day after he lost the Iowa caucus. Marco Rubio calls him the most vulgar presidential candidate in the history of U. S. presidential elections. This was the person, Rubio, who started the conversation about Trump’s hand size. Maybe he had also forgotten about Bill Clinton. It’s pretty easy to say Trump is the most vulgar, because the entire news media and then other candidates are saying that.
You won’t generally get in trouble for saying Trump is vulgar. You will get patted on the back for that amazing observational talent you’ve got there, before you turn on some even more vulgar television or music and gulp it up like a slurpee, running down your chin. Can anyone say that most of the Super Bowl halftime shows are not packed with vulgarity? Good thing nobody watches those, huh? My daughters go to state university and they see and hear vulgarity every single day from the teachers, not just from the students. My son saw it, heard it, and continues to see it and hear it every single day in the Army. Vulgarity also makes up a big chunk of the literature department in state universities if students wish to choose that field. The vulgarity they are exposed to make the public Trump not look vulgar, but like he is a bright shining exhibition of pristineness.
If Trump were elected, maybe he would be the most vulgar president too, except that he’s got a lot to beat there. He’s at least got the teenaged interns recruited by Kennedy for swim time and affairs in the White House. Of course, you have Bill Clinton and his young intern Monica Lewinsky and the dress and the cigar. I’m not saying those were White House behavior to which to aspire. The left especially and really should stay quiet about vulgarity. You can’t come from the left and act offended. You welcome it by denotation. Perhaps some of you remember when the left wanted federal, taxpayer funding for the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition.
I’m not defending vulgarity. I’m not defending Trump’s vulgarity. I say, if we are against vulgarity, then let’s get rid of vulgarity. Most television and the commercials are vulgar. Most of the most popular radio personalities and programs are vulgar. People watch and listen to vulgarity all the time. Trump comes along and they act like this is new. Most of these same people watch regular almost non-stop vulgarity from the night time television talk show hosts. They keep up with the vulgarity of Saturday Night Live.
RCP carries some clips from Bill Maher and just Saturday night one appeared there of his interview of a Raheel Raza and right toward the end (after 2:20), where she said to Bill Maher of all people that she was a grandmother and she would have to cover her ears at some of what Trump said. Anyone who knows who Bill Maher is knows that was some of the biggest irony in history. Bill Maher and most of his guests are known for their extreme foul language, far more than anyone has yet heard from Trump. She said that statement to Bill Maher on his show and his foul audience, who almost always laughs and applauds the extreme vulgarity of Maher, clapped in agreement with her.
Phil Johnson has an excellent argument against Trump the man, which is worth considering for anyone. Here are the pivotal sentences in my opinion from a bunch of material he’s written on his facebook page:
John the Baptist did not challenge Herod’s political stance, odious as that was to the Jewish people. What he got in Herod’s face about was his openly immoral lifestyle.
I wonder if anyone has gotten in the face of Trump for his immoral lifestyle. Maybe someone has. I don’t think he should divorce his third wife, but someone should ask him if he still believes in what he said to Howard Stern, whom he calls his good friend, about his lifestyle in the late 90s through the 2000s.
I don’t want to write anything positive about Trump in this piece, so I’m not, but I am writing about his vulgarity, because it in a very plain way indicates that professing evangelicals and worse think about vulgarity. They are either attempting to smear Trump or they really do hate vulgarity. If they can spot and diagnose vulgarity, then that means that they think that some type of behavior can be vulgar. They are saying that certain behavior is vulgar. When Trump calls Senator Rubio, “Little Marco,” they see that as uncivil or his being a bully or again, vulgar. They are judging Trump.
Recently I wrote that judgment must begin in the house of God. Before they look at Trump, evangelicals, if they think they represent the house of God (which I doubt), then they should start with their own vulgarity. They should start with their own hatred of it. They shouldn’t start with Trump, because the problem of vulgarity starts with the house of God, and the house of God, as it pertains to even conservative evangelicals, doesn’t seem to hate its own vulgarity.
The Gospel and Separation: What’s Worth Separating Over?
The Apostle Paul writes in Galatians 1:8-9:
8 But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed. 9 As we said before, so say I now again, if any man preach any other gospel unto you than that ye have received, let him be accursed.
The Lord’s Supper: Close, Closed, or In-Between?
debate among Baptists about whether the correct position on the Lord’s Supper
is close communion, where baptized members of Baptist churches other than the
assembly in which the ordinance is being celebrated partake along with the host
church’s members, or closed communion, where the ordinance is restricted to the
members of each particular assembly only.
The view of open communion is clearly unscriptural and will not be examined
in this post.
communion are strong. 1 Corinthians
10-11 identifies the Supper as the “communion of the body of Christ” (1
Corinthians 10:16), and the body of Christ is the local, visible assembly (1
Corinthians 12:27) to which one is added by baptism (1 Corinthians 12:13). Furthermore, both baptism and the Supper are
church ordinances, and since the church is a local, visible assembly, the
ordinance is naturally understood as pertaining to each assembly and its
members alone. The members of the church
are to discern the body (1 Corinthians 11:29) to avoid judgment. Pastor Brandenburg makes a good case for closed communion in his expository sermons on the relevant passages in 1 Corinthians,
and J. R. Graves likewise makes a good case in Chapter 7 of his book Old Landmarkism.
communion argument that the Apostle Paul partook of the Supper with the church
at Troas in Acts 20, many believers in closed communion argue that there was no
church at Troas at all. Others argue
that the breaking of bread at Troas was a common meal, not the Supper, since
the breaking of bread can be a reference to a simple meal (Acts 27:35). Furthermore, they argue that examples must be
interpreted in light of precepts, not the other way around, so the precepts in
1 Corinthians require that the example of Acts 20 does not involve Paul taking
the Supper with the Baptist church at Troas.
very attractive, and if it has a reasonable explanation for Acts 20, its
position is conclusive.
affirm that Paul partook of the Supper with the church at Troas in Acts 20, so
closed communion cannot be required by Scripture. They believe that, as the study here argues, it is not possible to explain Acts 20 as anything less than an assembly
of a church and a participation in the Lord’s Supper. They argue that the verb sunago, “came together” in Acts 20:7, is a church assembly word,
since the verb is used for church assemblies in Matthew 18:20; John 20:19; Acts
4:31; 11:26; 14:27; 15:30; 20:7, 8; 1 Corinthians 5:4 (cf. also Acts 15:6). The
references to sunago in the perfect tense in Acts only speak of church assembly
(Acts 4:31; 20:7, 8; cf. Matthew 18:20; John 20:19). The related word sunagoge is used for the Christian place
of assembly in James 2:2. The related word episunagoge
is used for the Christian “assembling” in Hebrews 10:25 in the classic command,
“Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together.” The grammar in Acts 20:7,
“the first day of the week, when the disciples came together,” is very similar
to that of the church assembly of John 20:19, when “the first day of the week .
. . the disciples were assembled.”
Therefore, they argue, church assembly is in view in Acts 20:7, a view
supported by other exegetical arguments, as well as historical evidence for a
church at Troas from Scripture and early church history (see here).
communion argue that the reference in Acts 20 to the “breaking of bread” is to
the Supper, not just to a common meal, because the purpose of the gathering in
Acts 20:7 was the breaking of bread; they “came together to break bread,” a
purpose clause. In the view of advocates of close communion, the fact that the
purpose of their getting together was the breaking of the bread proves it was
the Supper, not a common meal. If the breaking of bread was just eating some
food in this passage, it would hardly have been the reason that the church at
Troas assembled. On the night before the great apostle Paul and his fellow
laborers in the work of God were leaving, would they have come together, not to
bid him farewell, but to fill their bellies? Would the rare, precious
opportunity to be taught by and fellowship with the apostle to the Gentiles
have been passed over as a reason for assembling, in favor of eating some food?
Paul’s preaching was hardly a surprise. would they have been so ungodly as to
have said, “we are not gathering together to hear the apostle Paul preach, but
we are coming together for the more important purpose of having dinner.” Only
if this breaking of bread is the Lord’s Supper is it reasonably given as the
purpose for the church assembling. If the “breaking of bread” is the holy
Supper of the Lord, and the church at Troas was coming together to obey that
great command, “This do in remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19; 1 Corinthians
11:24-25), the importance placed on this event as the most important part of
their celebration is natural, and preaching in conjunction with a church
service is expected. Coming together for the purpose of celebrating the Supper
is also the pattern in 1 Corinthians 11:20, which has similar syntax to Acts
20:7. While they quite likely had a meal
as well as taking the Lord’s Supper (taking a break for refreshments somewhere
in the process of many hours of preaching is very natural—as it is natural to
expect that they did not send the apostle and his companions away on empty stomachs—especially
since Paul was going to walk to Assos from Troas, v. 13, a distance of c. 20
miles), this does not alter the fact that the purpose of their coming together
and their breaking of bread referred to the church ordinance. What is more, why would they wait until the
first day of the week to “come together” to eat a normal meal? Finally, advocates of close communion argue
that while the breaking of bread is not always the Lord’s Supper, it very
commonly—the large majority of the time—is (Matthew 26:26; Mark 14:22; Luke
22:19; Acts 20:7, 11; 1 Corinthians 10:16; 11:24; also Acts 2:42).
10-12, advocates of close communion argue that the passages do indeed teach the
Supper is a church ordinance, but that this fact does not eliminate the
possibility that a church can allow other baptized saints to participate. They argue that it is still the communion of
the body of Christ even if a tiny percentage of people who are not part of that
particular body are present, just as it is still the communion of the body if
unconverted people who are false converts yet are church members partake. Furthermore, many advocates of close
communion argue that 1 Corinthians 10:16, because of its parallel references to
the “communion of the blood of Christ” and “communion of the body of Christ,”
refers to the actual physical body and blood of the Redeemer rather than to the
church as the body of Christ.
hearing comments, arguments, and interaction with the material above for close
vs. closed communion in the comment section below, I would in particular be
interested in hearing comments on the following proposed mediating position. This mediating position argues:
a church ordinance from 1 Corinthians 10-12, and so is properly the domain of
the members of each particular Baptist church.
that Paul partook of the Lord’s Supper with the church at Troas. However, this does not by any means establish
that a church is obligated to let people who are baptized members of other
assemblies participate with them in the Supper.
It is a different thing for a church to have the option of allowing others
to partake and for a church to be obligated to allow others to partake. Furthermore, the Apostle Paul was clearly
right with God, was the preacher on that occasion, and was the one God used to
organize the assembly in that location.
Thus, the church at Troas had as good a reason to believe Paul was right
with God as they did any of their own church members. It is a different thing for a church to allow
a preacher from a church that it works very closely with, and one who that
church knows is right with God, to participate in the Supper and for a church
to allow strangers who claim to be members of a Baptist church somewhere to
partake. The former allows the assembly
to still take care that unworthy participation is excluded, while the latter
does not.
is stricter than the large majority of churches that practice close communion,
in that it only permits outside participation—if a church wants to exclude
everyone other than its own members, it has the liberty to do so, and practice
entirely closed communion. Furthermore,
it only derives from Acts 20 the lawfulness of participation of people that the
particular assembly knows very well are right with God, not anyone who simply professes
to be a Baptist or a Baptist separatist.
In this way, this mediating position contends that it can deal fairly
both with the evidence in 1 Corinthians 10-12 and Acts 20.
practice closed and of churches that practice close communion. Bethel Baptist Church, where Pastor
Brandenburg shepherds the flock, switched from close to closed while I was a
member there, a decision of which I was glad.
As a local-only church advocate, an opponent of alien immersion, a
believer in an actual succession of churches, a believer that Bible-believing
Baptist churches are the only true churches on this earth and that (in this
dispensation, though not in eternity) Christ’s bride is the church, I naturally
really like closed communion. However, I
have difficulty explaining Acts 20 in a totally closed way. Thus, at this particular time I am
essentially at what I have called the “mediating position” above—more closed
than the large majority of “close” churches, but more open than the strictly
“closed” churches.
with Biblical, exegetical, and theological arguments to leave my mediating
position one way or the other in the comment section—or to support me in my
mediation.
Repent of Original Sin? Yes!
so many years before we were born?
repentance prevent judgment, then it might prevent those that are inflicted for sins of others, progenitors. The Lord often punishes for their sins; if we would not suffer for them, we should repent of them. And if of others’ sins, then of that which is ours; and this is ours by imputation. And justly is it imputed to us. For by all human laws, children are charged with their fathers’ debts, the father’s treason taints his posterity.
Omissions From the Gospel, Important to Consider: Follow-Up Three
You wrote, “Lordship is either included with the gospel or it isn’t.” No problem there until we learn how the advocates of Lordship Salvation define His lordship. What decisions(s) the LS preacher insists must be made by a lost man about Christ’s Lordship to be born again, justified.
The Lordship Salvation (LS) controversy revolves around the requirements for salvation, not the results of salvation. This is where the divide over the gospel is and where the FBFI should debate the issue.
A genuine conversion should evidence itself in genuine results. New believers will vary in levels of growth, but growth should be evident to some degree. The focal point of controversy is Lordship’s requirements for the reception of eternal life, i.e. how to become a Christian.
Man comes to Christ for salvation (Eph. 2:8-9) and then follows Christ in discipleship (Eph. 2:10). In his critical review of MacArthur’s TGATJ, Dr. Ernest Pickering wrote, “Salvation is free; discipleship is costly. Salvation comes by receiving the work of the cross; discipleship is evidenced by bearing the cross (daily submission to the will of God). Christ here [Luke 9:23-24; 14:26-27, 33; Mark 8:34] is not giving instructions about how to go to heaven, but how those who know they are going to heaven should follow Him.”
LS teachers hold that the title “Lord,” when applied to Jesus, necessitates the lost man’s upfront submission to the rule and reign of Christ over his life, in sanctification, for both initial salvation (justification) and final salvation (glorification).
I think it would be of value to take this comment paragraph by paragraph to be clear on what we’re talking about here. First one.
You wrote, “Lordship is either included with the gospel or it isn’t.” No problem there until we learn how the advocates of Lordship Salvation define His lordship. What decisions(s) the LS preacher insists must be made by a lost man about Christ’s Lordship to be born again, justified.
Lou says, “No problem” with my statement that one gospel with Lordship and another without Lordship are different gospels, and says that the issue is “how the advocates of Lordship Salvation define His lordship.” Is that true? By how lordship is defined, he says he is referring to what “decision(s)” “a lost man” must make “about Christ’s Lordship to be born again, justified.” And is that true?
It’s true that definition of Lordship does distinguish between the false and the true gospels, as related to Lordship, but not how Lou is saying. If there is a false definition of Lordship, it is those who equate “Lordship” with deity and say that Lordship is merely deity, that Lord equals God. I had read this, and when I looked for a quote, I found Charles Bing:
So Lord is a title that primarily conveys Jesus’ deity. What this means for salvation is that Jesus has the power and authority to save sinners because He is God. What this does not mean is that sinners can only be saved if they submit to Him as the Ruler of their lives. Ruler is only one subset of deity, and it is arbitrary to make that one divine function and position into a subjective demand. As the word implies, salvation requires a Savior. Jesus came to save sinners (1 Tim. 1:15; 4:10) and He can because He is God. Sinners need a divine Savior.
It is one thing to say that to be saved a sinner must acknowledge the divine authority that Jesus has as God or as the Son of God. It is quite another thing to say that to be saved a sinner must submit to Jesus as the Ruler of his life.
I agree with Lou, but not as he presents the twisting of a definition. Men twist the definition of Lordship and essentially gut Lordship of its essential meaning. I’ll deal more later with what Bing wrote, as have others like him. However, the root problem of this false definition above is that it removes volition out of faith. He says a “sinner must acknowledge the divine of authority that Jesus has as God,” limiting faith in Jesus Christ to mere acknowledgement, resulting in intellectual salvation only. It is akin to the dead faith of the man who solely professes in both James and 1 John.
Lou’s second statement in this paragraph is typical of what I call “loaded words.” Is salvation ever called “making a decision”? Who is saying that? No Lordship proponent calls faith in Christ, “making a decision.” There is also an intimation from Lou that a lost man can’t make a decision about Christ’s Lordship, because that would be a work for him, impossible in his lost condition. All of a man’s conversion is impossible. He can’t “just decide” he’s going to believe. He believes according to a work of God’s grace, the power of the Word of God and the Holy Spirit, in his spiritually dead heart. Believing in Christ as Lord is no more a “work” than believing in Christ as Savior.
Most non-Lordship advocates also teach that after someone accepts Christ, only then can he follow Jesus as Lord, that is, only after salvation can someone decide to follow Jesus. To the non-Lordship person, someone doesn’t decide to follow Jesus until after he’s saved. This is usually called “dedication,” a second experience after salvation sometimes. In other words, He might not follow Jesus for awhile after he’s justified, because following is a matter of discipleship. They say the call to salvation is not a call to follow Jesus, but that is the call of discipleship, and it occurs an undetermined amount of time subsequent to justification. This is the message of the four spiritual laws tract, which said that at the moment of justification, Jesus is in the life but not on the throne of the life. He might be allowed on the throne of the saved person at some time in the future.
Lou talks like John MacArthur originated the teaching of “Lordship Salvation,” when Lordship salvation was biblical and historical salvation until folks like those at Dallas Theological Seminary and what it spawned, as pictured in the four spiritual law tract above. The idea is that the unsaved person is self on the throne and Jesus not in the life, but the saved person is self on the throne but now Jesus in the life. That is the new and corrupt view of salvation. Here’s the second paragraph of Lou’s comment:
The Lordship Salvation (LS) controversy revolves around the requirements for salvation, not the results of salvation. This is where the divide over the gospel is and where the FBFI should debate the issue.
You can’t separate requirements and results of salvation, as the two are inexorably connected. The non-Lordship position leads to a false view of sanctification, with this second “decision” or truly second blessing. Second blessing theology comes with the false view. That actually can’t be escaped. When you read the writings of non-lordship independent Baptists, they read like Charismatics on this.
Here’s paragraph three from Lou:
A genuine conversion should evidence itself in genuine results. New believers will vary in levels of growth, but growth should be evident to some degree. The focal point of controversy is Lordship’s requirements for the reception of eternal life, i.e. how to become a Christian.
Lou says “should,” not “will” in the first sentence and this is tell-tale — “should evidence” and then, second sentence, “should be evident to some degree.” Also you should notice that Lou says, “requirements for the reception of eternal life.” I know that some readers might think I’m being too picky here, but what Lou writes all fits together. There is a consistency to his presentation. Eternal life is a gift that doesn’t come by receiving eternal life. You won’t read that anywhere in the Bible. We receive everlasting life by believing in Jesus Christ. Many non-Lordship advocates will compare salvation to a gift someone receives, so that if you just receive the gift, you’ll be saved. It is a gift, but not one that comes by receiving the gift. I don’ t think this is too technical. It’s an important distinction.
Here is the next and longest paragraph from Lou:
Man comes to Christ for salvation (Eph. 2:8-9) and then follows Christ in discipleship (Eph. 2:10). In his critical review of MacArthur’s TGATJ, Dr. Ernest Pickering wrote, “Salvation is free; discipleship is costly. Salvation comes by receiving the work of the cross; discipleship is evidenced by bearing the cross (daily submission to the will of God). Christ here [Luke 9:23-24; 14:26-27, 33; Mark 8:34] is not giving instructions about how to go to heaven, but how those who know they are going to heaven should follow Him.”
Strong irony exists in this paragraph from Lou. He says “man comes to Christ for salvation.” You read it. Isn’t “coming to Christ” discipleship language? That’s the very language that Jesus uses in Luke 9:23-24, a text to which later Pickering refers in Lou’s paragraph:
And he said to them all, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: but whosoever will lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it.
I agree with Lou that “come after me” is salvation terminology. “If any man will come after me,” come to Jesus, “let him deny himself,” etc. Maybe Lou would argue that he was imprecise in his use of “come after me,” or misspoke. I would say that Lou is correct. “Come after me” is salvation terminology and so Luke 9:23-24 is a salvation terminology. The context, the next verse, shows that’s true too. If someone saves his life (psuche, his soul), he will lose it, but if he loses his life (psuche, his soul), he will save it. Someone’s soul is saved by his losing his soul.
A person must give up his life in order to be saved. That’s the same message that Jesus gives all over the gospels about salvation. You can’t hang on to your life and be saved. This is a description of the so-called “submission” Lou talks about. I don’t use the word “submission” for “losing your life,” because the word submission sounds like it must be a work. However, to be clear, I call it, “relinquishing control.” If you keep control of your life, you don’t believe in Jesus, because you are still an idolater, like the rich young ruler. You are serving yourself as god, and you can’t believe in you to be saved. It’s as simple as that. You’ll find this in very old commentaries on Matthew and Luke in the parallel passages.
In the paragraph, Lou refers to Ephesians 2:8-10, which is a reference that does not prove his point, unless someone equates saving faith with works. No Lordship advocate, whom I have read, does that. Lordship salvation says we believe Jesus is Lord, which constitutes relinquishing of the life to Him, not hanging on to it for Himself, because Jesus is King, repentance from the old way to the new way, which entails following Jesus, that is, coming after Him. You can’t believe in yourself and in Jesus, that is, you don’t put Jesus on a shelf with your other gods. That’s what Lou’s non-Lordship position does.
Pickering, who received his ThM and ThD from Dallas Theological Seminary, uses Luke 9:26-27, which is obviously salvation, especially in light of Luke 9:27-29. Luke 14:26-27 and Mark 8:34 start with the same language, “If any man come to me.” It’s the same language used in John 14:6, “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me,” same exact Greek word (erxetai). “Cometh to me” is salvation terminology.
John 6:35, And Jesus said unto them, I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst.
John 6:37, All that the Father giveth me shall come to me; and him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.
Hebrews 11:6, But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.
LS teachers hold that the title “Lord,” when applied to Jesus, necessitates the lost man’s upfront submission to the rule and reign of Christ over his life, in sanctification, for both initial salvation (justification) and final salvation (glorification).
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