233 Restoring the New Testament Church

233 Restoring the New Testament Church: Varieties of Restorationism in the Radical Holiness Movement of the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries1 Steven L. Ware Phineas F. Bresee asserted rather confidently of the Church of the Nazarene in 1909: We would be glad to have it known that this church is no new or vague line, but is the Way the apostles led and the fathers trod.... We feel ourselves a part of that body of believers raised up to spread sanctified holiness over these lands, and thus that we are a part of that company who are the real succes- sors of John Wesley and the early Methodists.2 Four years later Herbert M. Riggle of the Church of God reformation movement (Anderson) preached his sermon The True Standard with equal confidence when he stated: "The Methodists say that John Wesley set the standard. We go beyond Wesley; we go back to Christ and the apostles, to the days of pure primitive Christianity, to the inspired Word of truth."3 What was in the minds of these and other radical4 holiness leaders when they made such statements? What mental image of the Christian church, its history, and its destiny, was in their minds? While a suffi- cient answer to those questions requires more space than is available to us here, we can at least begin to answer with a brief review of Restorationism as it existed in the radical holiness movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, during the decades of its ..---- - --- lThis article is a summarization of the author's Ph.D. dissertation which was com- pleted at Drew University in 1998. 2Phineas F. Bresee, "Editorial," Nazarene Messenger 14, No. 3 (July 15, 1909), 6. 3Herbert M. Riggle, sermon preached at the national Campmeeting of the Church of God, Anderson, Indiana, June, 1913. Cited from Barry L. Callen, Contours of a The Vision Church Cause: Theological of the of God Movement (Anderson, Indiana) ' (Anderson, IN: Anderson University School of Theology, 1995), 184. 4The adjective "radical" is used here to describe those holiness groups which, through one means or another, departed from the Methodist and other churches of their upbringing in the late nineteenth century, usually because of their strict adher- ence to the centrality of the doctrine and experience of entire sanctification. There were numerous other individuals in the Methodist and other established churches of the era who had experienced entire sanctification and felt it very central to their spir- ituality, but who did not separate from their ecclesiastical communions as a result of its importance to them. 234 primary theological and ecclesiastical formation. Placing it in the con- text of the popular restorationist ideology which was received from the American evangelical and revivalistic milieu, and more specifically from its roots in Methodism, we shall see that restorationism was an interpretive framework commonly used by radical holiness leaders to understand the history and destiny of the Christian church, even though it usually operated in an implicit fashion. Furthermore, it will be asserted that the unique contribution of radical holiness restorationism was that it wedded restorationism to the experience of entire sanctification, and in so doing set the stage for the more explicit restorationism of Pentecostalism as it developed in the early twentieth century. The Popularity of Restorationist Ideas In just the last twenty years restorationism has attracted the wide- spread attention of scholars of American religious history. Perhaps the most visible manifestations of this growing interest have been the two collaborative works edited by Richard T. Hughes which resulted from two scholarly conferences on the topic of restorationism.? Attention has been correctly given to such groups as the Puritans, Baptists, Disciples of Christ, Mormons, and Pentecostals. Yet relatively little attention has been given to restorationism as it operated in the Holiness Movement.6 Hence the present essay. ......... -- ...... 5 RichardT. Hughes, ed., The American Quest for the Primitive Churclr (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois, 1988) and Hughes, ed., The Primitive Church in the Modern World (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois, 1995). Further exploration of restorationism within Pentecostalism is found in the writings of Edith Blumhofer, Restoring the Faith: The Assemblies of God, Pentecostalism, and American Culture (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois, 1993), Grant Wacker, "Bibliography and Historiography of Pentecostalism [U.S.]," in Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements, ed. Stanley M. Burgess and Gary B. McGee (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1988), 65-76. Both Blumhofer and Wacker, however, seem to slight the holiness contribution to the theological, ecclesiastical, and experiential formation of Pentecostalism and place more emphasis on the contributions of non-holiness Reformed evangelicals of the same era. For instance, Blumhofer features well-known leaders such as Dwight L. Moody, Reuben A. Torrey, and J. Wilbur Chapman, who often encouraged their audi- ences and readers to seek the "baptism of the Holy Spirit" in the same manner as the holiness preachers and authors mentioned herein, even while they disagreed with the common holiness soteriological framework. See Blumhofer, 25, 29ff. 6The beginnings of exploration into holiness restorationism can be seen in Melvin E. Dieter, "Primitivism in the American Holiness Tradition," Weslevan Theological Journal 30 (spring 1995): 78-91; Susie C. Stanley, "Bumping into Modernity: Primitive/Modem Tensions in the Wesleyan/Holiness Movement," Richard Hughes, ed., The Primitive Church in the Modern World, 121-138. Hughes discusses the holiness movement briefly in "Christian Primitivism as Perfectionism," Stanley M. Burgess, ed., Reaching Beyond: Chapters in the History of Peliectionism (Peabody, .

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