J. Excursus XI: An Analysis and Critique of Keswick Theology as Set Forth Particularly In So Great Salvation: The History and Message of the Keswick Convention, by Steven Barabas1 1.) The Background and History of the Keswick Convention and Keswick Theology Stephen Barabas’s So Great Salvation is widely considered the standard interpretation of Keswick theology. In a preface to the book by Fred Mitchell, “Chairman of the Keswick Convention Council, 1948-1951,” Mitchell states that Barabas’s book is “faithful and accurate; it is well annotated with sources of his information; it is saturated with an appreciative spirit, for he himself has been so much helped by Keswick. The book will form a text-book and a reference book on this unique movement.”2 Thus, its contents accurately represent the theology of the original Keswick movement. Indeed, “Steven Barabas[’s] . book So Great Salvation is perhaps the single best interpretation of the message of Keswick.”3 “The most objective account and appraisement of the . Keswick . movement is So Great Salvation: The History and Message of The Keswick Convention—an extraordinarily exact account . [written] after exhaustive research.”4 Keswick’s “standard interpretation is Steven Barabas, So Great Salvation.”5 Consequently, the analysis of the Keswick system below will engage Barabas’s book in detail while also evaluating other Keswick classics. Barabas notes that in “the early 1870s . the Keswick movement had its rise in England.”6 The “friends [Quakers] introduced the subject”7 of the Higher Life, although 1 So Great Salvation: The History and Message of the Keswick Convention, Steven Barabas. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2005. Orig. pub. 1952. While Hebrews 2:3 is the most likely source, it is possible that Barabas took his title from a book by Keswick leader George MacGregor wrote of the same name in 1892 (pgs. 105-107, The Keswick Story: The Authorized History of the Keswick Convention, Polluck). While the Author of Hebrews would disagree, MacGregor believed that a man such as Robertson Smith was “a reverent and believing critic . of the Bible” (pg. 106-107, ibid), although Smith brought Wellhausen’s Documentary Hypothesis to the English-speaking world and was expelled from the Free Church College at Aberdeen for heresy. “W. Robertson Smith, a cleric in Scotland, was subject to a heresy trial by the Scottish Presbyterian Church. He was accused of denying the deity of Christ. He responded, ‘How can they say that? I have never denied the divinity of any man, let alone that of Jesus Christ’” (pg. 59, The Speaker’s Quote Book, Roy B. Zuck. Grand Rapids, MI: Kregek Publications, 1997; cf. pg. 758, Christian Theology, Millard J. Erickson. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1998). 2 Pgs. ix-x, So Great Salvation, Barabas. 3 “Keswick and the Higher Life,” http://www.seeking4truth.com/keswick.htm. 4 Pg. 20, Keswick’s Authentic Voice, ed. Stevenson. 5 Pg. 112, Theological Roots of Pentecostalism, Dayton. 6 Pg. 15, So Great Salvation, Barabas. Barabas follows W. H. Griffith Thomas in claiming that Walter Marshall’s The Gospel Mystery of Sanctification, written in 1692, is a Keswick antecedent. 1 there were also very significant background influences of Roman Catholic mystics and heretics such as the monks “Thomas á Kempis8 [and] Brother Lawrence,”9 and especially the Catholic mystical quietist “Madame Guyon.”10 Catholics and Quakers were essential theological background for the rise for the rise of the Keswick movement. However, “the Keswick view is incompatible with Marshall’s because the Keswick view is influenced by a Wesleyan second work of the Spirit that is conditioned on the believer’s consecration. Despite their claims to the contrary . Keswick theology is both historically and theologically novel” (pg. 72, 211 Let Go and Let God? A Survey and Analysis of Keswick Theology, Andrew D. Naselli). A more accurate and less historically revisionistic view of Marshall’s work is that the book is a “Puritan classic on sanctification” (pg. 692, A Puritan Theology: Doctrine for Life, J. R. Beeke & M. Jones). Compare also “Sanctification by Faith: Walter Marshall’s Doctrine of Sanctification in Comparison with the Keswick View of Sanctification,” Cheul Hee Lee. Ph. D. diss., Westminster Theological Seminary, 2005. Barabas also claims that William Romaine’s books The Life of Faith, The Walk of Faith, and The Triumph of Faith were Keswick antecedents. However, J. C. Ryle’s assessment that the books taught the older evangelical doctrine of sanctification, not the Keswick doctrine, is more accurate (cf. pg. xxix, Holiness: Its Nature, Hindrances, Difficulties and Roots, J. C. Ryle. London: William Hunt and Company, 1889). Barabas may perhaps be cleared somewhat from historical revisionism in that he only implies that Walter Marshall and William Romaine taught Keswick theology, without actually stating it. In the midst of his discussion of the actual origination of Keswick theology by the Pearsall Smiths, he cites Romaine and also Griffith-Thomas’s claim that the essentials of Keswick are found in Marshall. The only specific claim Barabas himself makes for Marshall and Romaine is that the men taught “the possibility of fellowship with Christ closer than than enjoyed by the generality of Christians” (pg. 16, So Great Salvation). Of course, an affirmation that Christians can walk more closely with God could be made for just about every devotional book ever written in Christendom. The reader will naturally assume that Barabas is not just making an empty affirmation that Marshall and Romaine wrote books that explained how one could draw closer to God but that the two men actually taught Keswick theology. It is uncertain whether Barabas qualified his specific affirmations simply because he wrote carelessly or because he knew that neither Marshall nor Romaine actually taught Keswick doctrine. Contrast Barabas’s inaccurate and hagiographical explanation of the development of the Keswick movement with B. B. Warfield’s accurate one, where the widespread influence of both Mr. and Mrs. Smith, and their connection to earlier and later errors in sanctification, is carefully documented (“The ‘Higher Life’ Movement,” Chapter 4 in Perfectionism, vol. 2, Benjamin B. Warfield, pgs. 463-558. Note also Chapter 5, “The Victorious Life,” pgs. 559-611; and Chapter 1, pgs. 3-218, “Oberlin Perfectionism,” which examines the perfectionist errors of Mahan, Finney, and others.). 7 Pg. 224, The Keswick Convention: Its Message, Its Method, and Its Men, ed. Charles Harford. 8 Thomas á Kempis, out of his “monastic formation,” zealously practiced the anti-Christian piety that springs from the Roman Catholic false gospel. Thomas loved: Marian devotion . [believed in] the sacrificial character of the Eucharist . “meritorious” works . [and] den[ied] the crucial importance of Christ’s mediatorship and sacrifice. [In his writings, such as] The Imitation of Christ . the atoning significance of Christ’s work is overshadowed by the exemplary perspective . the Holy Spirit . remains unmentioned . throughout . [Thomas has] little to say . about the Lord Jesus as a ransom and as our righteousness . [he] cannot be considered a fore-runner of the Reformation . [but] brokers . ideas that are characteristically Roman Catholic” (pgs. 97-102, Sweet Communion: Trajectories of Spirituality from the Middle Ages through the Further Reformation, Arie de Reuver). It is, therefore, not surprising that “Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order[,] . was accustomed to reading a chapter in the book [The Imitation of Christ] daily” (pgs. 74-75, ibid). 9 Pg. 223, The Keswick Convention, ed. Harford; cf. pg. 482, Record of the Convention for the Promotion of Scriptural Holiness Held at Brighton, May 29th to June 7th, 1875. Brighton: W. J. Smith, 1875, for testimony to discovery of the Higher Life through “Brother Lawrence” at Brighton. 10 Pg. 223, The Keswick Convention, ed. Harford. 2 The “Higher Life teaching . [in] the books of the American religious leaders, T. C. Upham and Asa Mahan . [and] W. E. Boardman’s The Higher Christian Life”11 are also undisputed theological background for the development of the Keswick theology; Barabas thus recognizes Thomas C. Upham as a Keswick antecedent.12 He notes without a hint of criticism that Upham wrote Life and Religious Experience of Madame Guyon, a book which Barabas affirms contributed to “the interest of the Church in the subject of sanctification and the Spirit-filled life,” as did other works of Upham.13 What, then, was Upham’s theology? Upham “experienced [entire] sanctification under Phoebe Palmer’s influence and gave popular expression to the doctrine in a series of books drawing . explicitly on Catholic mysticism and Quietism.”14 Upham taught, in addition to his Quietistic and Romanist Higher Life doctrine of sanctification associated with Wesleyan perfectionism and Pelagianism, that God was a duality of Father and Mother instead of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. However, this Duality became a Trinity through the appearance of a Son, who is identified with the created order itself. Upham saught to prove this gross idolatry from sources ranging from ancient Gnostics such as Valentinus and Heracleon, to the Jewish Cabala, to assorted other later heretics and perfectionists. He blasphemously wrote: God is both Fatherhood and Motherhood . from the eternal Fatherhood and Motherhood . all things proceed. [A] Maternal Principle . Sophia . [exists] in the Divine nature[.] . [T]he Jewish Cabala . [speaks of] a feminine deity . called Sophia. John’s Gospel . identif[ies] the Logos and the Sophia. Sophia . was God; not only with God, but was God. [T]he somewhat mystic words of the Apostle John . [are] the announcement of the infinite Paternity and the infinite Motherhood. Valentinus . speaks of the Aeon Sophia . [T]he mystics and Quietists . recognized . the divine Sophia[.] . [T]he Sophia . or Maternal Essentia or Personality of the Godhead . incarnated itself in Christ . caused him, in a mother’s Spirit though in a male form, to endure his great sufferings[.] .