Transcription
[Music] So we're talking about the emergence of a movement that has had tremendous impact both on religion in the United States, but certainly religion globally. And that's the movement known as Pentecostalism.
Now, the origins of Pentecostalism are actually with some of the discontent within Methodism prior to the Civil War. Where there were a number of people within Methodism who thought the mainstream part of the church wasn't giving enough emphasis to what John Wesley said was our main gift to the rest of the church, which was the doctrine of sanctification.
And so, prior to the Civil War, you have a number of splits within Methodism, like the Free Methodist Church and the Wesleyan Church, and even the split between the northern and the southern Methodist churches that are about this, to some degree, about the doctrine of sanctification and how that should be lived out in the world.
Now, after the Civil War, there were still a number of folks within the main body of what was then the Methodist Episcopal Church in the North who wanted to make sure that this issue of sanctification had a continuing presence in the life of the church. And so they decided to establish a camp meeting that was geared particularly to this issue. And so they had a camp meeting—the first one was in Vineland, New Jersey—and after that meeting, which was quite successful, they decided to establish the National Camp-Meeting Association for the Promotion of Holiness.
These camp meeting associations then organized large camp meetings—one was at Round Lake, New York, and other places—that would draw from all over the country. They also allowed for a number of local camp meeting associations to establish their own, sometimes independent; and the National Camp Meeting Association, while it was almost all Methodist Episcopal preachers who were part of it, was independent from the larger church.
Now, this emphasis on sanctification had gone through some changes theologically over time, or at least different emphases. So those who are promoting this experience, this witness of the Holy Spirit in their lives—of God really freeing them from the dominion of sin—it still had as its key Wesley's emphasis on perfect love. It had also taken on the language of the baptism of the Holy Spirit, which was John Fletcher, who was one of Wesley's right-hand people in England and had actually been selected by Wesley to take over leadership of the movement. Unfortunately, Fletcher—or what Fletcher—died before John did, so that didn't happen. Phoebe Palmer, who was a major theologian for holiness in America, had given it the emphasis of total consecration; that part of what this means to—to—to be entirely sanctified is to lay it all on the altar. She had an altar theology where we—we lay our lives completely on the altar; we consecrate ourselves completely to God. There was also the emphasis on empowerment for service; that this experience of the Holy Spirit was what empowered you to—to do things like go into international missions, go into some extreme, you know, giving up of all your worldly goods to serve the poor. This was—this was an empowerment to do something radical for Jesus in the world.
And also connected with this was what was emerging within these circles with American Protestant religion: a divine healing movement; that—that not that everyone would be healed, but that God was doing something that would not only heal us inwardly but could heal us physically as well, and that there would—that would manifest itself in—in religious environments.
Now, these—the independent nature of these holiness associations meant that some of these emphases could be taken to some extremes, and also meant that people could combine them in different ways. One of these folks who was very important in the development of Pentecostalism was a guy by the name of Martin Knapp, who started a movement in Cincinnati which developed into things like God's Bible School, which is there today. And, you know, he was a Methodist preacher, and in combination with a guy by the name of Seth Reese, who was a Quaker, they founded a missionary movement—apostolic, as they called it—because they wanted to get back to the apostolic witness of folks who would gather to—to missionize the world with holiness theology.
One of the preachers who was part of this developing series of holiness communities was Benjamin Harden Earling. He was a—he was a Methodist Holiness preacher who preached in a number of these independent holiness associations, and he founded one which was known as the Fire Baptized Holiness Association. And this was part of the distinctiveness of his theology: is that he believed that not only are we justified and sanctified, but we're justified, sanctified, and filled with the Holy Ghost and with fire. And what way he kind of thought about this was: in—when we're justified, we're made; when we're sanctified, we're cleansed; and when we're baptized with the Holy Spirit and with fire, we are filled for whatever it is that God wants us to do. And he was quite radical; in his holiness associations, they would hold integrated holiness camp meetings in the deep South. So in 1898, at a holiness camp meeting that he was having in South Carolina, they formed the Fire Baptized Holiness Church. And one of the leaders of this was an African-American man by the name of William Fuller, who came to this camp meeting, saw how the kind of radical egalitarianism in the midst of South Carolina in 1898, and went home, left the leadership of his Methodist Church and joined this new organization.
And what I've described here is the kind of—these independent holiness associations, some developing holiness churches like the Church of God (Anderson, Indiana), the Church of the Nazarene (which was originally the Pentecostal Church of the Nazarene), forming out of them—which all of these renewal movements, these reform movements that were attempting to seek a deeper experience of God, form the kind of matrix of relationships out of which classical Pentecostalism emerged.
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