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Creedal Faith
Depth

The Modern Church

Revivalism and the "second blessing"

Wesley's Christian perfection, the Holiness movement's second blessing, and Charles Finney's "new measures" - the origins of the altar call and the sinner's prayer.

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Two developments of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries shaped almost every movement that followed in this section.

The second blessing. John Wesley, a priest of the Church of England, taught that after conversion a Christian could receive, by faith and in a moment, "Christian perfection" or "entire sanctification": a heart so filled with love for God that it no longer commits deliberate sin. In nineteenth-century America Phoebe Palmer simplified this into a "shorter way": lay everything on the altar, believe God's promise, and claim the blessing at once. The Holiness movement that followed taught a second work of grace after conversion, increasingly called the "baptism of the Holy Spirit". Pentecostalism would add a third.

The revival as technique. Charles Finney, a lawyer turned evangelist, taught in 1835 that "a revival is not a miracle"; it is "the right use of the constituted means". His "new measures" - protracted meetings, praying for sinners by name, and the anxious bench, where those under conviction came forward to be prayed over - are the origin of the modern altar call. Finney also denied that human beings inherit a sinful nature from Adam; sin, he taught, is always a voluntary choice. The sinner's prayer - a set prayer by which a person "accepts Christ" - came later still, spreading through twentieth-century evangelistic tracts.

Across both developments the centre of gravity moves. Conversion becomes a decision made at a meeting; holiness becomes an experience received at a moment; the Christian life is measured by crises one can date.

The historic Church teaches that the new birth is given in baptism, that sanctification is the work of a lifetime, and that no one in this life is without sin. The Council of Trent condemns the claim that anyone can avoid all sins, even venial ones, throughout life; the Thirty-Nine Articles say that "all we the rest, although baptized, and born again in Christ, yet offend in many things"; and the Councils of Carthage (418) and Orange (529) condemn Finney's denial of inherited sin.

Verdict: a second blessing of instant sanctification and revival by technique are eighteenth- and nineteenth-century developments, and Finney's teaching on sin contradicts the councils.

What is believed

The second blessing, as a Holiness Christian would put it: at conversion God forgives your sins, but the root of sin - the inbred tendency to sin - remains. In a second, distinct work of grace, received by consecration and faith, God cleanses the heart from that root and fills it with perfect love. You can know the moment it happened. Afterwards you still make mistakes, but you need not wilfully sin.

The revival, as a revivalist would put it: God has given the means by which sinners are converted. When the gospel is preached plainly and urgently, when people are pressed to decide now, when they are given a way to respond publicly, revival follows. Delay is dangerous. Anyone can be saved today by turning to Christ.

The altar call and the sinner's prayer, as most evangelicals would put it: at the end of the sermon, those who want to receive Christ come forward or raise a hand, and pray a short prayer confessing their sin and asking Jesus into their heart. That moment is when they are saved.

Where it came from

Wesley and Christian perfection

John Wesley (1703-1791) was an ordained priest of the Church of England and a fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford. On 24 May 1738, at a meeting in Aldersgate Street, London, while someone read Luther's preface to Romans, he felt his "heart strangely warmed" and received an assurance that Christ had taken away his sins. From 1739 he preached in the open air to crowds the parish churches did not reach, and organised his converts into societies, classes and bands within the Church of England.

Wesley taught that Christians may attain in this life Christian perfection: "loving God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength", so that "no wrong temper, none contrary to love, remains in the soul". He was careful to define the sin it removes as "a voluntary transgression of a known law", and he insisted that the perfect still make mistakes and still need Christ's atonement. He taught that it is usually received in an instant, by faith, after a gradual work, and that it can be lost. He set it out in A Plain Account of Christian Perfection (1766). He never claimed it for himself.

Wesley drew on real sources - the Eastern Fathers, especially Macarius, and the Catholic mystics - and he was no enthusiast in the sense Luther meant. When the Bishop of Bristol, Joseph Butler, told him in 1739 that "the pretending to extraordinary revelations and gifts of the Holy Ghost is a horrid thing, a very horrid thing", Wesley denied that he did. He preached a sermon, The Nature of Enthusiasm (1750), warning against it. In 1762-63 one of his own London preachers, George Bell, claimed perfection and the gift of healing and prophesied that the world would end on 28 February 1763; Wesley publicly disowned him, and the day passed.

Wesley also did something that bears on later chapters. In 1784, without episcopal authority, he laid hands on Thomas Coke as "superintendent" for the American Methodists. His brother Charles wrote, "How easy now are bishops made / By man or woman's whim." The American Methodists organised as a separate episcopal church that Christmas.†

American Methodism and the camp meeting

On the American frontier, Methodists, Baptists and Presbyterians held camp meetings - several days of preaching in the open air. At Cane Ridge, Kentucky, in August 1801, a crowd of perhaps ten to twenty thousand gathered for a Presbyterian communion season that became a week-long revival. Observers recorded people falling to the ground, jerking, dancing, laughing and barking. The Methodists introduced the mourners' bench, a front row where those seeking salvation came to be prayed over.†

Phoebe Palmer and the shorter way

In 1835 Phoebe Palmer (1807-1874), a Methodist laywoman in New York, and her sister began the Tuesday Meeting for the Promotion of Holiness in their home. In 1837 Palmer claimed entire sanctification, and in The Way of Holiness (1843) she offered a "shorter way" to it, which became known as altar theology: Christ is the altar; the altar sanctifies the gift (Matthew 23:19); so a believer who lays everything on the altar is sanctified, and should believe and testify to it at once, whether or not he feels anything.

What had been for Wesley a gift usually received after long seeking became something any believer could claim immediately by a decision of faith. Palmer also defended women's preaching in The Promise of the Father (1859), arguing from Pentecost and Joel 2.

The Holiness movement

After the Civil War, the National Camp Meeting Association for the Promotion of Holiness (first meeting, Vineland, New Jersey, 1867) spread the teaching across America. When the Methodist Episcopal Church cooled towards it, Holiness people formed their own churches: the Wesleyan Methodists (1843), the Free Methodists (1860), the Church of God (Anderson, 1881), the Church of the Nazarene (1908) and many smaller bodies. In Britain the Keswick Convention (from 1875) taught a Reformed-leaning "higher life" of victory over sin by faith.

Two shifts in the language matter for what followed. First, the second blessing came increasingly to be called the baptism of the Holy Spirit, and Pentecost rather than perfect love became its model. Second, some went further. In the 1890s the Fire-Baptized Holiness preacher Benjamin Hardin Irwin taught a third blessing, "the baptism of fire", after sanctification - and then further "baptisms" of dynamite, lyddite and oxidite.† In 1900 Irwin confessed to "open and gross sin" and left the movement. The expectation of successive post-conversion experiences, each with its own evidence, was in place. Charles Parham would supply the evidence.

Charles Finney and the new measures

Charles Grandison Finney (1792-1875) was a lawyer in Adams, New York, who experienced a dramatic conversion in 1821. He was licensed by the Presbyterians in 1824, though he admitted later that he had never read the Westminster Confession he affirmed. From 1825 he led revivals across upstate New York, culminating at Rochester in 1830-31, and later became president of Oberlin College.

In his Lectures on Revivals of Religion (1835) he wrote: "A revival is not a miracle, nor dependent on a miracle, in any sense. It is a purely philosophical result of the right use of the constituted means." The "new measures" he defended included protracted meetings held nightly for weeks; praying publicly for sinners by name; allowing women to pray in mixed meetings; urgent pressure for an immediate decision; and the anxious seat or anxious bench, a front pew to which those under conviction were called so that they could be prayed for and urged to submit to God then and there. This is the direct ancestor of the altar call.

Finney's theology fitted his methods. In his Systematic Theology (1846-47) he rejected the doctrine that human beings inherit a sinful nature from Adam: sin, he held, consists only in voluntary choices, so a sinner is fully able to choose to repent and is bound to do so now. He rejected the view that Christ bore the penalty of sin in our place, holding instead that the cross upheld God's moral government. He taught a form of Christian perfection at Oberlin.

The region where Finney preached most was later called the "burned-over district", because revival after revival had swept it. Within a generation it had produced the Mormons (1830), the Millerites (1830s-1844), John Humphrey Noyes's Oneida perfectionists and their "complex marriage", and the spiritualist séance movement (1848). Finney himself later complained that the area had been left spiritually exhausted by revival excitement.

From the anxious bench to the sinner's prayer

D.L. Moody (1837-1899) replaced the anxious bench with the "inquiry room", where counsellors spoke with those who responded. Billy Sunday (1862-1935) had converts walk the "sawdust trail" to shake his hand. Billy Graham (1918-2018) invited his hearers to "get up out of your seat" and come forward.

The sinner's prayer as a fixed, printed formula - a short prayer of confession and of "receiving Christ", after which the person is assured he is saved - spread through twentieth-century tracts such as the Four Spiritual Laws (1965) of Campus Crusade for Christ and Graham's Steps to Peace with God. Historians of evangelism have found no single originator and no standard form of it before the late nineteenth century. †

Pause and thinkPause: what question did the earliest Christians answer that the altar call and the sinner's prayer replaced?

What the historic Church taught

On sanctification. The Church has always taught that holiness is the goal of the Christian life - "Be ye therefore perfect" (Matthew 5:48) - and has honoured those who grew far in it as saints. The Orthodox speak of theosis, union with God, as the end of salvation. But the Church has also taught that it is the work of a lifetime, not a second instantaneous experience, and that in this life no one is without sin: "If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves" (1 John 1:8). The daily prayer of every Christian includes "forgive us our trespasses".

On sin. Against Pelagius, who taught that human beings are born innocent and can choose not to sin, the Council of Carthage (418) declared that infants are baptised for the remission of sins because they inherit Adam's sin, and that grace is necessary not merely to make obedience easier but to make it possible. The Council of Orange (529) taught that even the beginning of faith is a gift of grace. Finney's denial of inherited sin restates the position these councils condemned.

On conversion. The new birth was given in baptism (John 3:5; Titus 3:5), prepared for by instruction and followed by a life of repentance, prayer and communion. Luther's first thesis of 1517 puts the historic view in a sentence: "When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said 'Repent', he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance."

The verdict

Wesley is a more complex figure than most in this section. He was a priest of the Church of England who drew on the Fathers, kept the sacraments at the centre (he received communion on average every four or five days) and wanted his people to stay in the national Church. His doctrine of perfection, however, introduced the expectation of a second, datable crisis after conversion, and that expectation has driven every "second blessing" movement since.

The Holiness movement turned perfection into an instant blessing claimed by faith, and then renamed it the baptism of the Spirit. The doctrine that a Christian can in this life be cleansed from all inward sin contradicts the Church's teaching that the baptised still sin and still pray "forgive us our trespasses".

Finney's teaching that human beings do not inherit a sinful nature was condemned by the councils of the ancient Church. His treatment of revival as the "philosophical result" of the right means, and of conversion as an act the sinner can perform on demand, is the root of the decisional evangelism of the last two centuries.

How the four traditionsthe Catholic Churchthe Orthodox Churchthe Lutheran Churchthe Anglican Communion responded

Lutheran

Lutheran teaching on sin and sanctification runs directly against both perfectionism and Finney. Augsburg Confession II teaches that since Adam's fall all men "are born with sin, that is, without the fear of God, without trust in God, and with concupiscence; and that this disease, or vice of origin, is truly sin", and condemns the Pelagians "and others who deny that original depravity is sin". Article XVIII teaches that the human will cannot without the Spirit work the righteousness of God. The Formula of Concord (Article II) rejects the view that the unconverted can by their own powers decide for God.

Luther's teaching that the Christian is simul iustus et peccator - at once righteous and a sinner - is the opposite of a second blessing that removes inward sin. The Christian lives in daily repentance, returning to his baptism, until he dies.

American Lutherans fought the "new measures" in their own church. In the 1830s-50s an "American Lutheran" party around Samuel Simon Schmucker adopted revivalist methods and in the Definite Synodical Platform (1855) proposed revising the Augsburg Confession to remove baptismal regeneration and the real presence. The confessional reaction, led by Charles Porterfield Krauth (The Conservative Reformation and Its Theology, 1871), defeated it, and American Lutheranism returned to the Confessions.

Catholic

The Council of Trent, in its decree on justification (Session VI, 1547), canon 23, anathematises anyone who says "that he is able, during his whole life, to avoid all sins, even those that are venial, except by a special privilege from God, as the Church holds in regard of the Blessed Virgin". That is the Catholic answer to entire sanctification: holiness is real and growth in it is possible, but the claim to be free of all sin belongs to Our Lady alone.

Trent's decree on original sin (Session V, 1546) restates the teaching of Carthage and Orange against the Pelagian denial of inherited sin that Finney revived.

The Catholic Church has its own tradition of preaching for conversion - the parish missions of the Redemptorists, Passionists and others, which flourished in the same nineteenth century - but they led penitents to confession and communion, not to an anxious bench. The Catechism describes conversion as a continuing process: "this second conversion is an uninterrupted task for the whole Church" (CCC 1428).

Orthodox

The Orthodox Church teaches that the goal of the Christian life is theosis - deification, participation in the life of God - and some Orthodox writers have noted the kinship between this and Wesley's longing for perfect love, which drew on the homilies of Macarius. But theosis is a lifelong ascent through repentance, prayer, fasting and the sacraments, and the saints who reached furthest in it are those who most often called themselves the chief of sinners. Saint Sisoes the Great, at the point of death, is recorded as saying that he did not know whether he had yet begun to repent.

Orthodox spiritual teachers warn repeatedly against seeking or trusting exalted feelings. Saint Ignatius Brianchaninov (1807-1867) describes the pursuit of spiritual consolations and the conviction that one has attained holiness as forms of prelest, spiritual delusion. The Orthodox would see the camp meeting's prostrations and the claim to instant sanctification in that light. The Orthodox response to conviction is confession to a priest and communion, repeated throughout life.

Anglican

Wesley was an Anglican priest, and the Church of England's answer to him is in its own formularies. Article XV: Christ alone is without sin, "but all we the rest, although baptized, and born again in Christ, yet offend in many things; and if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us." Article IX on original sin says it "remaineth, yea in them that are regenerated". Every service of Morning and Evening Prayer begins with the General Confession: "we have left undone those things which we ought to have done; and we have done those things which we ought not to have done; and there is no health in us."

Bishop Butler's warning to Wesley in 1739 about "pretending to extraordinary revelations and gifts of the Holy Ghost", and Bishop George Lavington's The Enthusiasm of Methodists and Papists Compared (1749-51), show how the eighteenth-century Church of England saw the revival. The Church's failure to make room for Methodism, and Wesley's own irregular ordinations of 1784, together produced a separate Methodist church after his death.

Key personalities

John Wesley1703–1791Full profile · 7 min Anglican priest whose doctrine of "Christian perfection" introduced the expectation of a second, instantaneous work of grace after conversion
Affiliation
Priest of the Church of England; founder and leader of the Methodist societies
Appears in
Revivalism and the "second blessing"
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Life

The rectory at Epworth

John Wesley was born on 17 June 1703 (Old Style) at Epworth in Lincolnshire, the fifteenth child of Samuel Wesley, the rector, and Susanna Annesley, both children of Dissenting families who had returned to the Church of England. Susanna taught her children herself, methodically, and her influence on him was lifelong. In February 1709 the rectory burned down; John, aged five, was rescued from an upstairs window at the last moment, and his mother afterwards spoke of him as "a brand plucked out of the burning" (Zechariah 3:2).

Oxford and the Holy Club

He went to Charterhouse School and then Christ Church, Oxford (1720), was ordained deacon in 1725 and elected a fellow of Lincoln College in 1726, and was ordained priest in 1728. Reading Thomas à Kempis, Jeremy Taylor and William Law convinced him that the Christian life meant the total dedication of heart and life to God. With his brother Charles and a few others he led a small society - mocked as the "Holy Club" or "Methodists" - who kept a strict rule of prayer, frequent communion, fasting, study, and visiting prisoners and the poor.

Georgia

In 1735 the brothers sailed to the new colony of Georgia as missionaries under the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. On the voyage a storm terrified Wesley, while a group of Moravian Germans calmly sang hymns. In Savannah he was a strict High Church pastor, and an unhappy courtship of Sophia Hopkey ended when he refused her communion after her marriage to another man; her husband sued, and Wesley left Georgia in December 1737 in some disgrace.

Aldersgate

Back in London, the Moravian Peter Böhler convinced him that saving faith brings an assurance of forgiveness that he lacked. On 24 May 1738, at a society meeting in Aldersgate Street where someone read Luther's preface to Romans, "I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine." He visited the Moravian settlement at Herrnhut that summer.

The Methodist movement

In April 1739 George Whitefield persuaded him to preach in the open air at Bristol to the coal miners of Kingswood. Wesley, who had thought "the saving of souls almost a sin if it had not been done in a church", did so, and continued for fifty years. He travelled perhaps 250,000 miles on horseback and preached some 40,000 sermons. He organised converts into societies, classes of about twelve under a leader, and bands; built preaching houses (the "New Room" in Bristol, the Foundery and later City Road Chapel in London); appointed lay preachers on circuits; and held an annual Conference from 1744. He separated from the Moravians in 1740 and from Whitefield's Calvinism in 1741.

He insisted throughout that Methodism was a movement within the Church of England, told his people to attend their parish churches and receive the sacrament there, and refused to let his preachers administer it.

Later years

The American Revolution left American Methodists without sacraments, as most Anglican clergy had left. In 1784 Wesley, convinced from his reading that bishops and presbyters were of the same order, ordained Richard Whatcoat and Thomas Vasey as elders and "set apart" Thomas Coke as superintendent for America. The same year his Deed of Declaration gave the Conference legal control of the chapels. He kept preaching into his late eighties.

Key dates

  • 1703 - Born at Epworth, 17 June (Old Style)
  • 1709 - Rescued from the burning rectory
  • 1725-28 - Ordained deacon and priest; fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford
  • 1729-35 - Leads the Oxford "Holy Club"
  • 1735-37 - Missionary in Georgia
  • 24 May 1738 - Aldersgate experience
  • 1739 - Begins field preaching at Bristol
  • 1744 - First Methodist Conference
  • 1751 - Marries Mary Vazeille
  • 1766 - A Plain Account of Christian Perfection
  • 1784 - Ordains preachers for America; Deed of Declaration
  • 2 March 1791 - Dies in London

Teachings and claims

Grace, faith and assurance

Wesley taught that all are sinners, that Christ died for all, and that God's "prevenient grace" goes before every person and enables them to respond. Justification is by faith alone, and the Spirit normally gives the justified an inner witness that they are children of God. He rejected the Calvinist doctrine that God has chosen some and passed over others.

Christian perfection

His most distinctive teaching was "Christian perfection" or entire sanctification: a state in which love for God and neighbour fills the heart so fully that no deliberate sin remains. He defined sin "properly so called" narrowly as "a voluntary transgression of a known law", so that a perfected Christian still makes mistakes and needs Christ's atonement. Perfection is usually received in an instant by faith, after a gradual work of growth, and can be lost. He confessed that he had never claimed it for himself.

Over time this opened the way to a two-stage pattern - conversion, then a second crisis experience - that the Holiness movement made central and Pentecostalism inherited.

Means of grace

He held a high view of the sacraments. In his sermon "The Duty of Constant Communion" he urged receiving the Lord's Supper as often as possible, and his diary records that he received it on average every four or five days. He also urged prayer, Scripture, fasting and "Christian conference" as means of grace.

Documented controversies

  • "Enthusiasm". Bishops and clergy accused him of claiming special inspiration and encouraging disorder. In 1739 Bishop Joseph Butler of Bristol told him: "Sir, the pretending to extraordinary revelations and gifts of the Holy Ghost is a horrid thing - a very horrid thing." His early meetings saw people cry out, fall and convulse, which Wesley at first took as signs of God's work but later treated more cautiously.
  • Perfectionist excess. In 1762-63 one of his London preachers, George Bell, claimed perfection and the gift of healing and predicted that the world would end on 28 February 1763. Wesley disowned him and tightened his teaching.
  • The ordinations of 1784. His brother Charles protested that ordination is separation from the Church of England, and Anglicans have generally regarded the ordinations as irregular. The American Methodists formed the Methodist Episcopal Church that December.
  • Calvinist controversy. His breach with Whitefield and later bitter pamphlet wars with Augustus Toplady and others over predestination.
  • Marriage. His 1751 marriage to the widow Mary Vazeille was unhappy; she objected to his constant travel and correspondence with women, and they lived apart from the 1770s.

Death

Wesley died at his house beside City Road Chapel, London, on 2 March 1791, aged 87, still a priest of the Church of England. His reported last words were "The best of all is, God is with us." He was buried behind the chapel; at his wish there was no hearse, and six poor men were paid to carry the coffin.

Legacy

Methodist and related churches - Methodist, Wesleyan, Holiness and many others - number some 80 million people worldwide. Methodism separated from the Church of England in the years after his death, which he had always said should not happen.

Through his doctrine of perfection, he is the ancestor of the Holiness movement and, through it, of Pentecostalism. He was also a man of extraordinary discipline, organisational genius and care for the poor: he opened schools, dispensaries and a lending fund, wrote a popular book of remedies (Primitive Physic, 1747), and in his last letter urged William Wilberforce to fight the slave trade.

Measured against the creeds

Wesley affirmed the creeds, the Thirty-Nine Articles (abridged for America into twenty-five) and the Book of Common Prayer, and he was steeped in the Fathers - especially the Eastern writers on holiness, such as "Macarius". His insistence on grace for all, on the sacraments and on holiness of life has much in common with the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, which also teach that the Christian is called to real transformation (theosis, in Orthodox language).

The difficulty lies in how he defined and timed perfection. By narrowing sin to voluntary transgressions and expecting an instantaneous second blessing, he made possible a teaching in which Christians claim to be free of sin by a single act of faith. Lutherans hold that the Christian remains simul iustus et peccator, at once righteous and sinner, until death; Catholics and Orthodox hold that sanctification is a lifelong co-operation with grace through the sacraments, not a datable second event. Wesley himself hedged his teaching with care; his heirs often did not.

His ordinations of 1784 also departed from the order of the historic Church, which reserves ordination to bishops.

Major writings

  • Sermons on Several Occasions (from 1746), including "Salvation by Faith", "The Witness of the Spirit" and "The Duty of Constant Communion"
  • Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament (1755)
  • Journal (published in parts, 1740-91)
  • A Plain Account of Christian Perfection (1766, revised to 1777)
  • Primitive Physic (1747)
  • With Charles Wesley, A Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People Called Methodists (1780)
Barton Warren Stone1772–1844Full profile · 6 min Host of Cane Ridge and co-founder of the Restoration Movement, who dissolved his own presbytery in 1804 to be "simply Christians"
Affiliation
Presbyterian minister; host of the Cane Ridge revival (1801); leader of the "Christian" movement that merged with the Campbells' Disciples in 1832
Appears in
Restorationists and date-setters, Revivalism and the "second blessing"
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Life

Maryland and North Carolina

Barton Warren Stone was born on 24 December 1772 near Port Tobacco, Maryland. His father died when he was a child, and the family moved to Pittsylvania County, Virginia. In 1790 he enrolled at David Caldwell's academy in Guilford, North Carolina, intending to study law. There he heard the revival preaching of James McGready and, after a long struggle over whether he was among the elect, was converted under the preaching of William Hodge, who spoke of God's love.

A Presbyterian minister

He was licensed to preach by the Orange Presbytery in 1796 and moved west to Kentucky, where in 1798 he was ordained pastor of the congregations of Cane Ridge and Concord in Bourbon County. When asked at his ordination whether he accepted the Westminster Confession, he answered, "I do, as far as I see it consistent with the word of God."

Cane Ridge

In 1801, after attending the revival at Logan County led by McGready, Stone invited neighbouring ministers to a communion season at Cane Ridge. The meeting, held from 6 to 12 August 1801, drew crowds estimated at between ten and twenty-five thousand. Presbyterian, Methodist and Baptist preachers spoke from several stands at once, day and night. Many fell, some lay unconscious for hours, and others experienced "jerks", dancing, running, laughing and barking. Stone defended these "exercises" as the work of God, though he warned against excess. Cane Ridge became the most famous event of the Second Great Awakening in the West.

The Springfield Presbytery

The revival exposed tensions in Presbyterianism over predestination and the creeds. Several revival preachers, accused of Arminian teaching, withdrew from the Synod of Kentucky in 1803 with Stone and formed the independent Springfield Presbytery. On 28 June 1804 they dissolved it in The Last Will and Testament of the Springfield Presbytery, a satirical document in which the presbytery "willed" that it "die, be dissolved, and sink into union with the Body of Christ at large", and that the people take the Bible as their only rule. They called themselves simply "Christians".

Losses and growth

The movement suffered early defections: in 1805 two of its founders, Richard McNemar and John Dunlavy, joined the Shakers, and in 1811 two others returned to the Presbyterians. Stone continued, and the Christian churches spread through Kentucky, Ohio and Tennessee. He adopted believer's baptism by immersion around 1807, though he did not make it a condition of fellowship. He married Elizabeth Campbell in 1801; after her death in 1810 he married Celia Wilson Bowen. From 1826 he edited The Christian Messenger.

Union with the Campbells

In the 1820s Stone came into contact with Alexander Campbell, whose "Reformers" shared his rejection of creeds and his call for unity on the Bible alone. They disagreed on several points - Campbell emphasised reason and baptism for the remission of sins, Stone the Spirit's work and Christian unity - but on 1 January 1832, at a meeting in Lexington, Kentucky, their followers agreed to unite. Stone moved to Jacksonville, Illinois, in 1834.

Key dates

  • 24 December 1772 - Born near Port Tobacco, Maryland
  • 1790 - Enters David Caldwell's academy; converted
  • 1796 - Licensed by the Orange Presbytery
  • 1798 - Ordained at Cane Ridge, Kentucky
  • 6-12 August 1801 - The Cane Ridge revival
  • 1803 - Withdraws from the Synod of Kentucky
  • 28 June 1804 - The Last Will and Testament of the Springfield Presbytery
  • 1805 - McNemar and Dunlavy join the Shakers
  • 1814 - Address to the Christian Churches on the Trinity and atonement
  • 1826 - Founds The Christian Messenger
  • 1 January 1832 - Union with the Campbells' Reformers
  • 1834 - Moves to Jacksonville, Illinois
  • 9 November 1844 - Dies at Hannibal, Missouri

Teachings and claims

No creed but the Bible

Stone taught that creeds and confessions divide Christians and should not be tests of fellowship; the Bible alone is sufficient, and Christians should unite on it as simply "Christians".

Christian unity

Unity was his lifelong passion. "Let the unity of Christians be our polar star," he wrote.

The Trinity

He rejected the term "Trinity" as unscriptural and held that the Son was begotten of the Father before creation, deriving His being from Him, and was not co-eternal or co-equal in the sense of the Nicene Creed; the Holy Spirit he described as the power and energy of God rather than a distinct person.†

The atonement

He rejected the doctrine that Christ's death satisfied divine justice or bore the penalty of sin, teaching instead that it demonstrated God's love and reconciled sinners to God by moving them to repentance.

Election and free will

He rejected Calvinist predestination and taught that God's love is offered to all, and that the sinner can respond to the gospel.

Documented controversies

The exercises

Critics, Presbyterian and otherwise, regarded the bodily exercises of Cane Ridge as fanaticism and disorder.

Doctrinal views

His views on the Trinity and the atonement were attacked by Presbyterians and later by some of Campbell's followers, who regarded them as Arian. Campbell himself avoided Trinitarian terminology but defended Christ's full deity more clearly.

The Shakers

The defection of two of his co-founders to the Shakers was used by critics as evidence of where his principles led.

Death

He died on 9 November 1844 at the home of his daughter in Hannibal, Missouri, aged 71, while returning from a preaching journey. He was later reburied at Cane Ridge.

Legacy

Stone is honoured, with Thomas and Alexander Campbell, as a founder of the Stone-Campbell or Restoration Movement, from which descend the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), the Christian Churches and Churches of Christ, and the Churches of Christ (a cappella). Cane Ridge meeting house is preserved as a shrine of the movement. His slogan of unity on the Bible alone, and his rejection of creeds, became a defining principle of large parts of American Protestantism and of the non-denominational churches that later followed.

Measured against the creeds

Stone's longing for Christian unity is the longing of the Lord's own prayer (John 17:21), and his charity towards Christians of other denominations was genuine.

But his solution - unity on the Bible without creeds - shows in his own life why the Church wrote creeds. The Nicene Creed was written precisely because Arius and his followers also claimed to take the Bible alone; the Church found that a confession of what Scripture means was necessary to preserve what it says. Stone's own teaching on the Son, which denied that He is co-eternal and "of one substance with the Father", is the very position the Council of Nicaea rejected. His teaching on the Spirit departs from the Constantinopolitan confession of "the Lord and Giver of life, who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified".

His rejection of satisfaction in the atonement also departs from the teaching common to the four traditions that Christ "bore our sins in his own body on the tree" (1 Peter 2:24) and gave Himself as a sacrifice for sin. The movement he founded, intended to end division, itself divided several times within a century, illustrating that unity without a common confession is difficult to keep.

Major writings

  • The Last Will and Testament of the Springfield Presbytery (1804, with others)
  • An Address to the Christian Churches in Kentucky, Tennessee and Ohio (1814; rev. 1821)
  • Editor, The Christian Messenger (1826-44)
  • The Biography of Eld. Barton Warren Stone, Written by Himself (1847)
Charles Grandison Finney1792–1875Full profile · 6 min Revivalist whose "new measures" and anxious bench became the altar call, and who taught that revival is the result of the right means
Affiliation
Lawyer; licensed Presbyterian evangelist (1824); later Congregationalist; professor and president of Oberlin College
Appears in
Revivalism and the "second blessing"
Profile
Link to this profile

Life

Lawyer at Adams

Charles Grandison Finney was born on 29 August 1792 at Warren, Connecticut, and grew up on the New York frontier in Oneida and Jefferson counties, where his family had moved. He had little formal religion as a boy. He taught school, briefly considered Yale, and in 1818 began training in law at Adams, New York, in the office of Benjamin Wright. Reading Moses's law in his law books led him to buy a Bible.

He attended the Presbyterian church of George Washington Gale and argued with the pastor's Calvinism. On 10 October 1821, after days of anxiety, he went into the woods to pray and later that evening, alone in the law office, experienced what he described as "a mighty baptism of the Holy Ghost... like a wave of electricity going through and through me... like the very breath of God." The next morning he told a client: "I have a retainer from the Lord Jesus Christ to plead his cause, and I cannot plead yours."

Evangelist of the Burned-over District

He studied theology privately with Gale, refusing to go to Princeton, and was licensed to preach by the St Lawrence Presbytery in 1823 and ordained in 1824. When asked if he accepted the Westminster Confession, he said yes, though he later wrote that he had not read it. Working first as a missionary in the villages of upstate New York, he moved to the towns of the Mohawk valley - Western, Rome, Utica, Auburn, Troy - in 1825-27.

The region was later called the "Burned-over District" for the waves of revival and new religious movements that swept it. Finney's meetings were intense. He prayed for sinners by name, spoke in a direct, conversational, lawyerly style, allowed women to pray aloud in mixed meetings, held "protracted meetings" lasting days or weeks, and introduced the "anxious seat" - a front bench where those under conviction sat to be prayed for and urged to submit to God at once.

Rochester and New York

Despite opposition from eastern ministers, he went on to Philadelphia, Boston and New York. His revival at Rochester in 1830-31 was the most celebrated: the town's churches added well over a thousand members and its businessmen were transformed. In 1832 he became pastor of the Second Free Presbyterian Church in New York, meeting in the Chatham Street Theatre, and in 1836 of the Broadway Tabernacle, built for him. His Lectures on Revivals of Religion (1835), given there, became a manual for evangelists.

Oberlin

In 1835 he accepted a professorship of theology at the new Oberlin Collegiate Institute in Ohio, on condition that it admit Black students. He taught there for forty years, serving as president from 1851 to 1866 and as pastor of the First Congregational Church. He made evangelistic tours, including to Britain in 1849-51 and 1858-60. He married three times; his first wife, Lydia, died in 1847, and his second, Elizabeth, in 1863.

Key dates

  • 1792 - Born at Warren, Connecticut, 29 August
  • 1818 - Begins legal training at Adams, New York
  • 10 October 1821 - Conversion and "baptism of the Holy Ghost"
  • 1824 - Ordained by the St Lawrence Presbytery
  • 1825-27 - Revivals in Oneida County
  • 1827 - New Lebanon Convention with Beecher and Nettleton
  • 1830-31 - Rochester revival
  • 1835 - Lectures on Revivals of Religion; joins Oberlin
  • 1846-47 - Lectures on Systematic Theology
  • 1851-66 - President of Oberlin College
  • 16 August 1875 - Dies at Oberlin

Teachings and claims

Revival by means

Finney's best-known claim opens his Lectures on Revivals: "A revival is not a miracle, nor dependent on a miracle, in any sense. It is a purely philosophical result of the right use of the constituted means." Just as a farmer who sows and tends gets a harvest, the church that uses the right measures will see conversions. He defended "new measures" - the anxious seat, protracted meetings, plain preaching, public prayer for named individuals - as tools that God expects His people to adopt and adapt.

Human ability

Finney rejected the Calvinism in which he had been licensed. He taught that sinners have full natural ability to obey God and that sin is entirely voluntary: "sin and holiness... are voluntary acts of mind." In his Systematic Theology he denied that human beings inherit a sinful nature from Adam - "moral depravity... cannot consist in any attribute of nature" - and held that regeneration is a change of the will brought about by the persuasion of the truth, which the sinner can make immediately.

The atonement

He taught a "governmental" view of the atonement: Christ's death did not pay the penalty for sin but showed God's justice and upheld His moral government, so that God could forgive the repentant without weakening the law.

Oberlin perfectionism

With Asa Mahan he taught at Oberlin that entire sanctification - full consecration to God - was attainable in this life, often described as the "baptism of the Holy Ghost". This "Oberlin theology" fed into the Holiness movement.

Reform

He held that converts must turn their lives to the good of others, and preached against slavery, alcohol and other social evils. He refused communion to slaveholders at his New York church.

Documented controversies

  • The Westminster Confession. He admitted in his Memoirs that he had not read the Confession when he affirmed it at his licensing; he later rejected its teaching on original sin and the atonement.
  • The New Lebanon Convention (1827). The Connecticut evangelist Asahel Nettleton and Lyman Beecher objected to his methods - women praying in public, harsh language, the naming of sinners, emotional excess. Beecher reportedly told him he would fight him all the way to Boston; they later reconciled.
  • Theological critics. The Princeton theologians, led by Charles Hodge, attacked his theology as Pelagian. John Williamson Nevin of the German Reformed Church wrote The Anxious Bench (1843), arguing that the new measures replaced the steady formation of faith through catechism and sacraments with manufactured crises.
  • Spiritual exhaustion. Finney himself acknowledged that some of the areas he had evangelised were left "burnt over", with many converts falling away and later waves of excitement following.

Death

Finney died at Oberlin, Ohio, on Sunday 16 August 1875, of heart failure, two weeks before his eighty-third birthday. He had spent the evening walking in the garden and listening to the hymns of the church.

Legacy

Finney is the father of modern revivalism. The anxious seat became the altar call, the "invitation" at the end of a sermon, and the evangelistic crusade; Dwight Moody, Billy Sunday and later evangelists all used methods he pioneered. His belief that the right technique produces predictable spiritual results shaped the Church Growth and megachurch movements as well.

He was also a determined abolitionist. Oberlin admitted Black students from 1835 and women to its degree course from 1837, and was a station on the Underground Railroad.

Measured against the creeds

Finney's preaching led many people to Christ, and his opposition to slavery was admirable. But his theology departed from the historic faith at its centre. By denying that we inherit a fallen nature and holding that sinners can turn to God by their own natural ability, he revived the position condemned in Pelagius at the Councils of Carthage (418) and Ephesus (431) and in the Second Council of Orange (529), which taught that even the beginning of faith is a gift of grace. Lutherans confess in the Augsburg Confession (Article II) that since the fall all are born "without the fear of God, without trust in God, and with concupiscence", and Catholics and Orthodox, though they describe original sin differently, also teach that human nature is wounded and needs grace from the first.

His claim that revival is "a purely philosophical result" of methods reverses the order of grace: the Spirit "blows where it wills" (John 3:8), and the Church has held that it works through the Word and sacraments, not through techniques that guarantee a result. The governmental view of the atonement also sets aside the Church's confession that Christ died "for us and for our salvation" as a true sacrifice for sin.

Major writings

  • Lectures on Revivals of Religion (1835)
  • Lectures to Professing Christians (1837)
  • Lectures on Systematic Theology (1846-47; revised 1851)
  • Memoirs of Rev. Charles G. Finney (1876, posthumous)
Phoebe Palmer1807–1874Full profile · 5 min Simplified Wesley's perfection into an instant "shorter way" of altar theology, and became the mother of the Holiness movement
Affiliation
Methodist laywoman, New York; leader of the Tuesday Meeting for the Promotion of Holiness
Appears in
Revivalism and the "second blessing"
Profile
Link to this profile

Life

A Methodist home in New York

Phoebe Worrall was born in New York City on 18 December 1807, the daughter of Henry Worrall, an English iron-works owner who had been converted under John Wesley's ministry, and Dorothea Wade. She grew up in a devout Methodist household with family prayer twice a day. In 1827 she married Walter Clarke Palmer, a homoeopathic physician and fellow Methodist, who supported her ministry throughout their marriage.

Grief and consecration

Their first two sons died in infancy, in 1828 and 1830, and a daughter, Eliza, died in 1836 when her cradle's netting caught fire. Phoebe came to interpret these losses as God's correction for loving her children more than Him, and resolved to give everything to God. Her sister, Sarah Lankford, had begun a women's prayer meeting in 1835; on 26 July 1837, after a long search for the experience of entire sanctification that Wesley had taught, Phoebe declared that she had received it - not by waiting for a feeling but by laying all on "the altar" and believing God's promise.

The Tuesday Meeting

From 1839 Phoebe led her sister's meeting, the "Tuesday Meeting for the Promotion of Holiness", in the Palmers' home on Rivington Street. Men were admitted from 1839, and over the following decades bishops, college presidents, ministers of many denominations and ordinary laypeople attended. The meeting became the hub of a network across America.

Writer, editor and evangelist

Her book The Way of Holiness (1843) went through dozens of editions. She and Walter travelled widely as evangelists in the United States and Canada, at camp meetings and in churches, and from 1859 to 1863 spent four years in Britain, where their meetings drew large crowds. In 1864 Walter bought the magazine Guide to Holiness, which Phoebe edited; its circulation reached some 30,000. She also helped found the Five Points Mission (1850) in one of Manhattan's worst slums, and worked with prisons, orphans and the poor.

Key dates

  • 1807 - Born in New York, 18 December
  • 1827 - Marries Walter C. Palmer
  • 1828-36 - Loses three children in infancy
  • 26 July 1837 - Claims entire sanctification
  • 1839 - Takes over the Tuesday Meeting
  • 1843 - The Way of Holiness
  • 1850 - Five Points Mission founded
  • 1857-58 - Canadian and American revivals; the "Layman's Prayer Revival"
  • 1859 - The Promise of the Father
  • 1859-63 - Evangelistic tour of Britain
  • 1864 - Begins editing the Guide to Holiness
  • 2 November 1874 - Dies in New York

Teachings and claims

The "shorter way"

Wesley had taught that entire sanctification is usually preceded by a long period of seeking and that one should wait for the Spirit's witness. Palmer taught a "shorter way" in three steps: entire consecration, faith, and testimony. The believer lays everything on the altar; since Scripture says "the altar sanctifies the gift" (Matthew 23:19) and Christ is the altar, the gift is sanctified at once; and the believer must testify to it, or risk losing it. Feelings are not needed: one believes on the authority of the Word.

Pentecost language

From the 1850s she increasingly described sanctification as "the baptism of the Holy Ghost" and spoke of "Pentecostal power". This language passed into the Holiness movement and prepared the way for Pentecostalism's teaching of a distinct baptism in the Spirit after conversion.

Women's ministry

In The Promise of the Father (1859) she argued from Joel 2 and Acts 2 that the Spirit was poured out on "your sons and your daughters", so women are called to testify and prophesy in public. She herself did not seek ordination and avoided the word "preach", but her book became a foundation for women's ministry in the Holiness and Pentecostal churches.

Documented controversies

  • Technique over grace. Methodist critics, including Nathan Bangs, the leading Methodist theologian of the day, argued that her method turned sanctification into a formula and encouraged people to claim an experience they did not have.

†

  • The witness of the Spirit. Opponents said she had dropped Wesley's insistence on the Spirit's witness and put the believer's own act of faith in its place.
  • Division in Methodism. Her teaching was debated throughout the Methodist Episcopal Church in the mid-nineteenth century; after her death the Holiness movement increasingly separated from it.

Death

Phoebe Palmer died at her home in New York on 2 November 1874 of a kidney ailment (Bright's disease), after a long illness. Walter married her sister Sarah in 1876 and continued the Guide to Holiness. †

Legacy

Palmer is called the mother of the Holiness movement. The National Camp Meeting Association for the Promotion of Holiness (1867), and through it the Church of the Nazarene, the Wesleyan Methodist and Free Methodist churches, the Salvation Army and the Church of God (Anderson), all drew on her teaching. Through them, her two-stage pattern and "Pentecost" language passed into Pentecostalism. She was also an early and influential advocate of women's ministry and of practical charity in the city.

Measured against the creeds

Palmer's devotion, her care for the poor and her call to wholehearted consecration are to be honoured. Her teaching, however, inherited Wesley's narrowed definition of sin and made sanctification a single, datable act achieved by a method. The historic Church - Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran and Anglican alike - has held that holiness is the lifelong work of the Spirit through Word, sacrament and the struggle against sin, and that no Christian in this life is beyond the petition "forgive us our trespasses" (1 John 1:8). Her reading of "the altar sanctifies the gift" was a novel use of a text in which the Lord rebuked the Pharisees' casuistry.

Her description of sanctification as the "baptism of the Holy Ghost" also separated the gift of the Spirit from baptism and confirmation (or chrismation), where the historic Church has always located it (Acts 2:38).

Major writings

  • The Way of Holiness (1843)
  • Entire Devotion to God (1845)
  • Faith and Its Effects (1848)
  • Incidental Illustrations of the Economy of Salvation (1855)
  • The Promise of the Father (1859)
  • Four Years in the Old World (1866)
  • Editor, Guide to Holiness (1864-74)
Dwight Lyman Moody1837–1899Full profile · 5 min The great urban evangelist of the Gilded Age, who carried revivalism and the "any moment" return of Christ to mass audiences
Affiliation
Congregationalist layman; independent evangelist; founder of the Moody Bible Institute (1886) and the Northfield schools
Appears in
Revivalism and the "second blessing", The Plymouth Brethren and dispensationalism
Profile
Link to this profile

Life

Northfield and Boston

Dwight Lyman Moody was born on 5 February 1837 at Northfield, Massachusetts, the sixth of nine children. His father, a stonemason, died when Dwight was four, leaving the family in debt; his mother, Betsey, kept them together and raised them in the liberal Unitarian church of the village. Moody had about five years of schooling and wrote poorly all his life.

At seventeen he went to Boston to work in his uncle's shoe shop, on condition that he attend the Mount Vernon Congregational Church. On 21 April 1855 his Sunday-school teacher, Edward Kimball, came to the shop and spoke to him about Christ, and Moody was converted. The church at first delayed his membership because he could not explain his faith.

Chicago

In 1856 he moved to Chicago and became a successful shoe salesman, but he spent more and more of his time recruiting children for Sunday school. His North Market Hall mission school grew to some 1,500 pupils; Abraham Lincoln visited it in 1860. That year Moody gave up business to work full time for the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) and his mission. He married Emma Revell in 1862. During the Civil War he served with the YMCA's Christian Commission among soldiers. His independent church, the Illinois Street Church, was formed in 1864.

In 1871 he said he had been praying for a filling of the Spirit after two women of his congregation told him they were praying that he would receive "the power". In the weeks after the Great Chicago Fire destroyed his church and home in October 1871, while walking in New York, he had an experience of God's presence so strong that he "had to ask Him to stay His hand". He spoke of it as an anointing for service rather than a second blessing of perfection.

Britain, 1873-75

Moody had visited Britain in 1867 and 1872 and met Brethren and other evangelical leaders, including George Müller and Henry Varley. In 1873 he returned with the singer Ira D. Sankey for a campaign that began quietly in York and grew into a national phenomenon: Edinburgh, Glasgow, Belfast, Dublin, and finally London in 1875, where an estimated two and a half million people attended meetings over twenty weeks. Sankey's songs, published as Sacred Songs and Solos, sold in vast numbers.

American campaigns and schools

Moody returned to America a celebrity and held great city campaigns in Brooklyn, Philadelphia, New York, Chicago and Boston (1875-77), supported by businessmen such as John Wanamaker. He founded the Northfield Seminary for girls (1879) and the Mount Hermon School for boys (1881) near his home, the Northfield summer conferences (from 1880), and the Chicago Evangelization Society (1886), later the Moody Bible Institute. At a 1886 student conference at Mount Hermon, the Student Volunteer Movement for foreign missions was born. He returned to Britain in 1881-84 and later held a massive campaign at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893.

Key dates

  • 1837 - Born at Northfield, Massachusetts, 5 February
  • 1855 - Converted in Boston
  • 1856 - Moves to Chicago
  • 1860 - Gives up business for mission and YMCA work
  • 1871 - Chicago Fire; experience of the Spirit's power
  • 1873-75 - British campaign with Ira Sankey
  • 1875-77 - Great American city campaigns
  • 1879-81 - Founds the Northfield schools
  • 1886 - Founds what became Moody Bible Institute; Student Volunteer Movement begins at Mount Hermon
  • 1893 - World's Fair campaign in Chicago
  • 22 December 1899 - Dies at Northfield

Teachings and claims

The simple gospel

Moody preached what he called the "three Rs": ruin by sin, redemption by Christ and regeneration by the Holy Ghost. His sermons were short, warm and full of stories, emphasising God's love more than His wrath. He asked hearers to decide for Christ and directed them to an "inquiry room" where trained workers prayed with them, replacing Finney's anxious bench with a quieter, more personal setting.

Premillennial expectation

Through Brethren contacts in Britain, Moody came to expect that Christ could return at any moment, before a millennium, and that the world would not be converted beforehand. In a well-known sermon he said: "I look on this world as a wrecked vessel. God has given me a lifeboat and said to me, 'Moody, save all you can.'" His Northfield conferences gave a platform to dispensational teachers, and his Bible institute became one of its main schools.

Power for service

He taught that believers should seek a baptism of the Spirit for service, as distinct from conversion. This "Keswick" emphasis on empowerment, taught by his associate R.A. Torrey, fed into the Holiness and early Pentecostal movements.

Documented controversies

  • Lack of training. Moody was never ordained and had no theological education. Critics in Britain and America charged him with oversimplifying the gospel and with bad grammar; he cheerfully admitted the latter.
  • Business methods. His campaigns were organised like commercial enterprises, with advertising, committees of businessmen, ticketing and careful preparation. Critics thought this made revival a product; admirers saw efficient stewardship.
  • Theological breadth. Conservatives later criticised him for inviting modernists such as Henry Drummond and George Adam Smith to speak at Northfield.
  • Race. In the American South he accepted segregated meetings, which drew criticism from Black church leaders including Ida B. Wells.

†

No significant personal or financial scandals are documented; he refused to take money from his campaigns for himself, and royalties from the hymn books went to his schools.

Death

Moody fell ill during a campaign in Kansas City in November 1899 and returned to Northfield, where he died of heart failure on 22 December 1899, aged 62. His son recorded his last words as "Earth recedes; heaven opens before me... This is my triumph; this is my coronation day!"

Legacy

Moody created the modern city-wide evangelistic campaign later carried on by Billy Sunday and others, and the Bible institute movement that trained generations of lay workers and missionaries. Moody Bible Institute, the Moody Church and the Northfield schools continue. He was also a principal channel by which premillennial, dispensational expectation entered mainstream American evangelicalism and, through it, Pentecostalism. He was generous, humorous and personally humble, and drew support across denominational lines.

Measured against the creeds

Moody's preaching of sin, redemption and new birth stood within the historic faith, and he avoided the perfectionism of many of his contemporaries. His weakness was the absence of the Church and the sacraments from his message: conversion became an individual decision in an inquiry room, detached from baptism, the Lord's Supper and the life of a congregation. The creeds confess "one holy catholic and apostolic Church" and "one baptism for the remission of sins"; in mass evangelism these were often left to others, or forgotten.

His adoption of the "any moment" return and the view that the world is a wreck to escape also helped spread an eschatology foreign to the ancient Church, which confesses simply that Christ "will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead", without a secret rapture or a separate destiny for the Church and Israel.

Major writings

Moody wrote little; most of his books are edited sermons.

  • Twelve Select Sermons (1880)
  • Secret Power, or the Secret of Success in Christian Life and Christian Work (1881)
  • The Way to God and How to Find It (1884)
  • Heaven (1880)
Bill Bright1921–2003 Founder of Campus Crusade, author of the "Four Spiritual Laws", and co-originator of the seven-spheres idea
Affiliation
Presbyterian layman; founder of Campus Crusade for Christ (1951, now Cru)
Appears in
The Seven Mountains Mandate and dominionism, Revivalism and the "second blessing"
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Teachings and claims

Founded Campus Crusade for Christ at UCLA in 1951. His tract Have You Heard of the Four Spiritual Laws? (1965) became one of the most widely distributed Christian tracts in history and included a printed prayer for receiving Christ. Commissioned the Jesus film (1979). Said he received a list of spheres of influence in 1975, as Loren Cunningham did.

Documented controversies

Critics questioned the Four Spiritual Laws' reduction of the gospel to a formula and a prayer. His involvement in conservative political causes drew criticism.†

Death

Died in Orlando on 19 July 2003, aged 81.

Legacy

Cru and the Jesus film; decisional evangelism and the printed "sinner's prayer" worldwide.

Every personality in this section

Answering a modern Christian

"When were you saved? I can tell you the date and the place." A respectful answer: "I was baptised, and in baptism God made me His child. I have been repenting and believing ever since." The question assumes that salvation is a moment of decision one can date. The New Testament speaks of salvation in three tenses - we were saved (Ephesians 2:8), are being saved (1 Corinthians 1:18), and shall be saved (Romans 13:11) - and of baptism as the moment of the new birth (Titus 3:5). A remembered experience of conversion can be a real gift. It is not the only way God brings people to Himself, and it was not how the apostles asked people to respond.

"Did you pray the sinner's prayer?" The sinner's prayer as a formula is not in the Bible and is not found in the Church's history before the modern revival movement. When people asked the apostles what to do, they were told to repent and be baptised. A sincere prayer of repentance is always good, and Christians should pray it daily. But the assurance that one is saved because one prayed a particular prayer at a particular meeting puts the weight on the believer's act rather than on God's promise in baptism and the gospel.

"I have received the second blessing. I no longer sin." Gently: John wrote to Christians, "If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves" (1 John 1:8), and the Lord taught His disciples to pray daily "forgive us our trespasses". Paul, near the end of his life, called himself the chief of sinners (1 Timothy 1:15). The saints of every age have grown in holiness and grown, at the same time, in their sense of their own sin. Wesley himself defined the sin removed by perfection very narrowly, and never claimed it for himself.

"If people are dying without Christ, why wouldn't you use every method to win them?" The urgency is right, and the four traditions should be shamed by it where they lack it. But methods are not neutral. Finney taught that revival is the "philosophical result" of the right means, and the result was a region exhausted by excitement and fertile ground for sects. The Church's own method - preaching, catechesis, baptism, the Eucharist and pastoral care, sustained over years - is slower, and it builds Christians who last.

Work with it

Check yourself

What did Charles Finney mean when he wrote that "a revival is not a miracle"?

Check yourself

What is the direct ancestor of the modern altar call?

Check yourself

Which Anglican article says that "all we the rest, although baptized, and born again in Christ, yet offend in many things"?

Check yourself

Which ancient heresy did Finney's view of sin restate?

Objection drill

You can tell a real Christian by whether they have had a definite conversion experience. Most people in the old churches were baptised as babies, confirmed as teenagers and never actually met Jesus. Revivalism exists because the state churches failed.

Memory work

Turn each card over, then say honestly whether you knew it. Cards you miss come back sooner.