To understand the fundamentalists’ strong reaction against anything that even looked like the Social Gospel, it is necessary to distinguish the liberal Social Gospel from the kinds of evangelical social concern that we have been discussing. It was absolutely essential to the earlier evangelical support of public or private social programs that they be understood as complementary outgrowths of the regenerating work of Christ which saved souls for all eternity. The evangelicals’ theological stance theoretically in no way should have been threatened by a commitment to social action per se. The necessary first step in the Christian’s life was repentance for sin and total dependence on God’s grace. Good works should follow. The only question was what form these should take—individual or public, private or political.
The Social Gospel, however, put almost all the weight on the second half of the equation. Following the lead of philosophical pragmatism, proponents of the Social Gospel held that the only test of truth was action. “Religious morality,” said Walter Rauschenbusch, is “the only thing God cares about.”28 The implication was that theological doctrine and affirmation of faith in Christ and his deeds were irrelevant, except as an inspiration to moral action, more specifically social action. The Social Gospel, at least in its classic form as represented by Rauschenbusch, did not deny outright the validity of specific beliefs, but took the pragmatist position that we cannot know anything about their validity until we see what they do.29 In sharp contrast, conservative evangelicals held that truth could be known directly and not only by a pragmatic test. Moreover, in their view God cared as much about our beliefs as about our actions, although the two were never seen as entirely separable.
The threat that conservative evangelicals perceived in the Social Gospel was not that it endorsed social concern—evangelicals themselves often made similar endorsements. It was rather that the Social Gospel emphasized social concern in an exclusivistic way which seemed to undercut the relevance of the message of eternal salvation through trust in Christ’s atoning work. In the nineteenth century some revivalists, and some confessionally oriented conservatives, had already warned against putting too much emphasis on social concerns. Now, however, the question was not simply one of balance. Traditional Christian belief seemed to be at stake. The Social Gospel was presented, or was thought to be presented, as equivalent to the Gospel itself.
Those evangelicals and conservatives who had warned that social interests would inevitably undermine concern for right belief and salvation of souls, now appeared to have confirmation for their claim. Prominent exponents of the Social Gospel were specifically contrasting their own social views with the old individualist soul-saving evangelicalism. Furthermore, the liberal and Social Gospel emphasis on the kingdom of God as realized in the progress of civilization was readily contrasted with premillennialist eschatological hopes. The dichotomy between the Social Gospel and the revivalist Gospel became difficult to ignore. As the attacks on liberalism heated up, the position that one could have both revivalism and social action became increasingly cumbersome to defend.30 In any case this attempt at balance declined in proportion to the increase of strident anti-modernism.31
By the 1920s the one really unifying factor in fundamentalist political and social thought was the overwhelming predominance of political conservatism. Whether they spoke as pietists who would use government merely to restrain evil, or as Calvinists preserving Christian civilization, or even when they sounded like radical Anabaptists opposing all Christian involvement in politics, they were (with few exceptions) anti-liberal. In part this was simply part of the wider social expression of middle-class desire for normalcy. But among fundamentalists these tendencies were reinforced by the close relationship between the Social Gospel and the progressive movement in politics. Rejecting the one seemed to demand rejecting the other.
Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, revivalist Protestants in America reflected fairly closely the patterns and shifts of the political thought of the times, often providing their own Christian versions of prevailing trends. Sometime around 1900 this parallel development was interrupted. To employ a psychological analogy, it was as though a series of shocks had arrested an aspect of personality development. The shocks were religious, intellectual, and social, sharpened by the disruption of World War I. The result was almost as if the positive aspects of the progressive political era had not only been rejected but even obliterated from memory. To continue the analogy, fundamentalists emerged from the experience not so much without social or political views as fixated on a set of views that had been characteristic of middle-class Americans in the last years before the crisis occurred. Their social views were frozen at a point that had been the prevailing American political opinion around 1890, save that the fundamentalists of the 1920s had forgotten the degree to which their predecessors—and even they themselves—had earlier espoused rather progressive social concerns.32
XI. Holiness and Fundamentalism
The death of D. L. Moody in 1899 and the end of the nineteenth century coincided with the beginnings of serious fragmentation within the evangelical revivalist movement. The dispensationalist movement began to break apart over the issue of whether the secret rapture would remove believers from earth before or after the “tribulation” of the end times. Although contact among the leaders of the two camps continued (with the Scofield-Gaebelein pretribulationists dominant), the controversy brought the demise of the important Niagara Bible Conference in 1901 and a cessation of the “international” prophetic conferences from 1901 to 1914.1
Of greater consequence was the revolution in the Methodistic Holiness wing of revivalism. In 1901 Charles F. Parham carried the prevalent “Pentecostal” insistence on “Baptism of the Holy Spirit” (as described in Acts 2) to the conclusion that tongues should still be the sign of a Pentecostal experience. Parham’s student, W. J. Seymour, popularized this new Pentecostalism beginning in 1906 at the Azusa Street revival in Los Angeles, after which this movement grew into its own many varieties.
Significantly, the first major split within Pentecostalism reflected differences concerning holiness among the late-nineteenth-century revivalists. The original Pentecostal teachers, Parham and Seymour, taught a Methodistic Holiness view of a “second blessing” of entire sanctification in which the sinful nature was eradicated. This, they said, was followed by a third blessing, “Baptism of the Spirit,” accompanied by tongues. By 1910, however, a significant group had developed within Pentecostalism who did not have Methodistic backgrounds. These taught a view resembling the Reformed teaching that sanctification was a continuing process rather than a distinct experience. They also held that the Baptism of the Spirit resulted not in perfect holiness, but rather (in a phrase reflecting Keswick influence) “enduement for service.” This “Baptistic” or “Keswick” Pentecostal teaching led to the formation of the Assemblies of God and was also the basis for Aimee Semple McPherson’s International Church of the Four Square Gospel, founded in the 1920s. These groups, like most Pentecostals, shared many traits with fundamentalists that reflected their common origins in the revivalism of the Moody era.2
In the meantime revivalist evangelicals who did not seek the gift of tongues were embarrassed by the emergence of these cousins in Christ. During the early decades of the century they were at pains to disclaim any ties.3 The favor, however, was not returned, as the Pentecostals were quite willing to claim antecedents in the earlier revivalism. Reuben Torrey who (unlike most Keswick teachers) had emphasized a definite experience based on Acts 2, “the Baptism with the Holy Spirit,” was a favorite theologian of Pentecostals and has even been referred to as “a kind of John the Baptist figure for later international Pentecostalism.”4 A. J. Gordon and A. B. Simpson had been champions of divine and miraculous healings. Gordon had even argued that just as the gift of healing should continue past the Apostolic age, so perhaps should the gift of tongues.5 Dispensationalism, which fit so well with the Pentecostal and holiness ideas of the “Age o
f the Spirit,” easily gained acceptance in the new Pentecostal movement, even though the Scofield-type dispensationalists maintained that tongues ceased with the Apostles.6 Despite close resemblances of Pentecostals to “fundamentalists,”7 Pentecostals were only tangentially part of the fundamentalism of the 1920s. Pentecostals often identified themselves as “fundamentalists,” read fundamentalist literature, and adopted anti-Modernist and anti-evolution rhetoric; yet other fundamentalists seldom welcomed them as allies or called them into their councils. The influence, then, was largely in only one direction, from fundamentalism to pentecostalism8 One reason was Pentecostals’ prior separation from the major denominations. Another was the fundamentalists’ antagonism. The family ties were nonetheless strong enough that adherents of the two traditions could reestablish some contacts in later twentieth-century evangelicalism.9
At the turn of the century, however, the prior controversy between Methodistic Holiness and Keswick teachers was the principal internal issue dividing the exponents of resurgent revivalism that had grown in the Moody era. Until the 1890s almost all of those who were rediscovering the work of the Holy Spirit had viewed each other as allies. Keswick teachers, A. B. Simpson, the Salvation Army, and the Holiness Camp Meeting movement all gave each other approving nods and borrowed methods and emphases. During the 1880s and 1890s, however, most of these movements with the exception of Keswick were forming independent denominations, which forced them to define their differences. Soon these differences became matters for dispute and by about 1900 these disputes were becoming noticeably sharp.
A particularly dramatic illustration of this phenomenon can be found in the writings of A. M. Hills, an evangelist and leading writer of the Nazarene movement which had then recently separated from Methodism. Hills had been a classmate of Reuben Torrey at Yale and had preached his ordination sermon. Hills had studied holiness doctrine at Oberlin and been helped in his search for the Holy Spirit by the writings of Torrey and Keswick teacher F. B. Meyer.10 In his exposition of Holiness teaching, Holiness and Power (1897), although he presented a Methodistic view, he supported his positions with numerous appeals to Keswick authors including Torrey, Gordon, Chapman, Meyer, and Pierson.11 About this same time he was invited, in another display of cordiality, to the Bible Institute of Chicago (Moody), where Torrey then presided. There, he recounted later, he had not been around for twenty-four hours before it was being whispered, “He is an eradicationist!” Within two days, said Hills, a “callow youth” sitting near him at the table said in a very loud voice for all to hear, “The doctrine of the eradication of the carnal nature by the Holy Spirit is one of the most damnable heresies that ever cursed the Christian Chruch.” The “uneducated young man,” Hills surmised, was parroting what was taught in the Bible Institute’s classrooms. Moody himself, Hills had heard it reported, had mocked and belittled those who claimed entire sanctification. As further evidence of the break, Hills noted that in 1901 he attended a ten-day Holiness convention in Chicago, which neither Torrey nor anyone else from Moody Bible Institute had bothered to attend.12 For his part, Hills in 1902 published his response, Pentecost Rejected, which included a long attack on Keswick holiness teaching as having virtually no doctrine of holiness at all.13
By 1910 the controversy was heating up on all sides. Hills published two works, one entitled The Tongues Movement, condemning those who had perverted the meaning of Pentecost, and the other, Scriptural Holiness and Keswick Teaching Compared, whose title explains its theme.14 As is common in family feuds, the ill feeling among recently estranged kin were as intense as toward the liberals whose errors were more patent. As H. A. Baldwin, a Free Methodist pastor, put it in 1911, “Keswickism” was “one of the most dangerous enemies of the experience of holiness….”15
By this time the artillery fire was flying in both directions. In 1912 H. A. Ironside (who later became the pastor of Moody Church in Chicago) published the most famous attack on the separatist Holiness movements, Holiness, The False and the True. Ironside agreed with Hills that tongues-speaking Pentecostalism was an aberration, but at that point similarity ended. According to Ironside, who had been reared in the Salvation Army, such “absurd delusions” as tongues were the natural results of the impossible Holiness demands for perfection. Moreover, Ironside charged, “as to downright wickedness and uncleanness, I regret to have to record that sins of a positively immoral character are, I fear, far more frequently met within holiness churches and missions, and Salvation Army bands, than the outsider would think possible.” This condition combined with the pressure to claim perfection, said Ironside, was strewing the world with spiritual shipwrecks. “The ex-Salvation Army,” he claimed, “was many times larger than the original organization.”16
Despite such acrimony among the champions of various forms of Christian holiness, all the branches of the movement prospered during the first two decades of the century. Keswick teachings appear to have flourished most among the middle-class clientele inside established denominations, while separatist Holiness groups and Pentecostalism in particular appealed more to the socially and economically disinherited.17 Keswick teachings were somewhat less radical than those of the other groups, and it seems probable that there is a correlation between the radicalism of a view of sanctification and the social class to which it will appeal. So traditional Reformed teachings—rather moderate on sanctification—have had a socially more respectable base than any of the holiness views. Similarly, Protestant liberalism, with a strong ethical emphasis but a non-radical concept of personal sanctification, had the most affluent social base.18
The Keswick teachings, already growing in popularity, received their most important boost in America in 1910 with the conversion to the movement of Charles G. Trumbull, editor of the respectable and popular weekly, the Sunday School Times. Trumbull used his influence to familiarize American Protestants with the teaching of “the victorious life.” He also helped to formally organize the movement, initiating in 1913 an “American Keswick” conference, which settled permanently at Keswick, New Jersey, in 1923. That same year Robert McQuilkin, Trumbull’s associate, founded Columbia Bible School, an important center for promoting Keswick views.19 Trumbull himself soon after his conversion became a protégé of C. I. Scofield. Eventually he wrote a biography of Scofield in which Trumbull and his teacher are pictured together as “Paul and Timothy,” suggesting the close connection between the dispensational and Keswick movements.
At the American Keswick conferences, true to the English model, the emphasis was almost entirely on personal experiences of joy, peace, and “victory,” with the practical results seen in enhanced devotional life and zeal for missions.20 In contrast to earlier holiness movements in America, this seems to have lacked almost entirely a social message. For Trumbull this was a matter of principle. Writing around 1914 about Sunday schools for The Fundamentals, Trumbull argued that social service programs were particularly dangerous. They included many things “Christian in spirit,” but put fruit ahead of roots. Trumbull pointed to the popular Billy Sunday as a proper model. Sunday said little about social service in the current progressive sense, but his evangelism, said Trumbull, “lifts society as the usual social service program can never do.”21 Similarly, in response to criticism that the Keswick conferences had “no real objective outside of oneself and a personal experience,” Trumbull’s reply was that no one would make such a charge if he had seen the zeal for foreign missions shown at the conferences.22
Dr. Scofield and Mr. Trumbull in a special session of the Southfield Bible Conference, Crescent City, Florida. Friends call this “Paul and Timothy.”
From Charles Gallaudet Trumbull, The Life Story of C. I. Scofield (New York, 1920).
The early decades of the twentieth century were perhaps the years of greatest enthusiasm for foreign missions and in this area Keswick’s record was indeed strong. J. Hudson Taylor (1832–1905), a Britisher who founded the China Inland Mission in 1865, had become deeply committed to Keswick v
iews.23 The China Inland Mission became a model for independent and self-sacrificing missionary work as well as a source for much of the later fundamentalist agitation against liberalism in the mission fields. The Student Volunteer Movement, originating out of Moody’s Northfield conference, also had close Keswick ties. Many impressive young men of the era responded to these teachings by consecrating their lives to missionary service.24
Missionary and evangelistic efforts were the chief positive forces holding together a wide coalition of revivalist and conservative evangelicals. Premil-lennialists, who held that the preaching of the Gospel to all nations was a sign of the end time (Matthew 24:14), had every bit as much enthusiasm for the evangelization of the world as did the most optimistic postmillennialists, who still ardently hoped and prayed for the conversion of the world in their generation.25 All agreed that an extraordinary work of the Holy Spirit would be necessary for any success in world mission efforts. The most immediate cause for hope was the spectacular Welsh revival, which began in 1904 and soon claimed some one hundred thousand converts. Keswick influences, as well as Calvinism, were strong in this awakening which was seen as a great outpouring of the Holy Spirit. In the years immediately following, sparks from the Welsh awakening seemed to kindle flames of revival around the world.26 Prayer, which was of inestimable importance for the entire evangelical movement, focused on pleas for the continuation of such divine work.
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