DARIUS L. SALTER. The Demise of the American Holiness Movement. Wilmore, KY: First Fruits Press, 2020. Pp. 500.
“May I know grace to embrace my own finite smallness in the arms of God’s infinite greatness” (Pete Greig).
In 2009, I found myself serving in a booming youth ministry at a small Brethren in Christ church. It would take another five years before I discovered that this small church had some denominational distinctives. In the decade I worked for that church a second work of grace never once came up in conversation, let alone teaching. By all appearances, this church was yet another American evangelical church. It would take the denominational licensing process and my years at Asbury Theological Seminary to introduce me formally to John Wesley and the holiness movement. With that said, I am by no means an expert in the field. I’ll write as a pastor passionate about seeing each denomination bring their theological treasures into the kingdom (Rev 21:24).
A child of the holiness movement, Salter has lived and pastored within the Church of the Nazarene for much of his life. He brings this experience to his exploration of the rise and fall of the American Holiness movement beginning with Wesley and the Methodist movement. The aim of his book is to demonstrate that “the American Holiness Movement has lost its identity primarily because it has been unable to negotiate modernity” (3). The text provides ample insight into both the historical realities as well as the theological nuances of the movement. Carefully walking the reader from Wesley, to Taylor, and on to Wynkoop and Kinlaw, Salter exhibits an intimate knowledge of the movement’s history. He succeeds in demonstrating that as the holiness movement engaged with a broader world—one facet of modernity—it was swallowed up by larger movements.
Given that modernity is marked first and foremost by a hopeful triumphalism, Salter does well to expose Wesley’s shortcomings, specifically those failures in his marriage: “‘This evening she was buried though I was not informed of it until a day or two after’. . . The theologian of perfect love did not realize that the litmus test for his relationship to God was his relationship with his wife” (42). When the man at the headwaters of the movement professing the perfect love empowered by the Spirit fails to love his wife well, we are left questioning if sinless perfection is achievable. The experience being preached by the holiness movement is a second definite work of grace that would make this sort of moral behavior anomalous. Salter is generous throughout the text and gives Wesley credit for his nuanced treatment of sin and perfection and yet doesn’t let Wesley off the hook: “Unfortunately, [Wesley] passed on a minimalist definition of sin to his American descendants” (36). Wesley saw a complex world, where proponents of a second blessing preached a simplistic formula.
Moving to the American continent, Salter makes the important observation that the majority of Methodist leaders “would interpret the Scriptures by the illumination of the Holy Spirit without scholastic apparatus and formal education” (56). The foundations were laid—Salter does well to trace this thread throughout the movement—so that in preaching and church life, experience and emotion trumped solid exegesis and reason. With limited attention to exegesis for those working the pulpits, a way was made for a reductionistic view of entire sanctification to blossom.
Salter could have said more about how Methodist/holiness movements on the frontiers shaped this tendency away from deep intellectualism. I wondered what recourse the movement had for well-trained preachers who would travel across the Appalachian mountains away from civilization.
Without naming the linkage between modernity and globalization directly, Salter does well to demonstrate how the American holiness movement came into contact with an ever-shrinking world. Specifically, his crucial treatment of the Pentecostal movement, another movement that places a high degree of emphasis on the significance of baptism in the Spirit, aids in understanding the story of the holiness movement in America. He notes a paradigm shift from “holiness purity to Pentecostal power” (431). As the 1994 Toronto Blessing and other encounters with the broader charismatic movement crossed the holiness movement’s doorstep, Salter suggests that those within the holiness movement concluded that the Pentecostal paradigm “seems better than the competition” (426).
If in fact he sees the holiness movement giving way to Pentecostalism, he could have said more about the theological gains and losses of this trade-off. He does comment on the sociological elements of what happened in Toronto, making note of both the evidence of genuine rebirth as well as what he finds to be frivolous emotionalism. For Salter, Pentecostalism’s explanation of the baptism of the Spirit and sanctification do not seem to be clearly superior to the holiness movement. Yet despite these concerns, he takes a trusting posture flowing out of his conviction that Christianity is about seeking God rather than an experience (137). He consistently takes a hopeful posture that holiness folk aren’t the only ones pursuing God.
Salter brings into focus one of the main downfalls of the American Holiness movement. Lifting his own Nazarene Theological Seminary up as an example, he decries again the movement’s reductionism. The seminary declared that: “the primary purpose of the institution shall be to conserve, maintain, advocate and promulgate the great Bible doctrine of ‘entire sanctification’ as a second distinct work of divine grace wrought in the heart of the believer subsequent regeneration” (163). The movement was thus reduced to defending one last stronghold. It had lost the holistic view of the gospel and traded it in for a singular crown jewel. Salter’s tone critiques this as a false step on behalf of the movement.
In my analysis, the demise laid out in the history highlighted by Salter has more to do with globalization than modernity, although they are closely linked. I am left wondering: in a globalized world, to what degree can a movement maintain a distinct identity—especially a movement whose identity was forged by men and women who sought to passionately pursue people outside of their circles?
As Brethren in Christ, we do well to take note of the holiness movement’s decline and the rise of Pentecostalism. As a niche denomination, we should ask questions about how to maintain denominational distinctives while not retreating to cloistered communities, like our forebears. Like the Asbury Theological Seminary president, we must ask, “how far [can we] enlarge the periphery without weakening the center?” (217). Does this little denomination have a robust enough teaching on the work of the Holy Spirit to create an identity of its own, or will the broader charismatic movement corner the market on all such matters? And how does our teaching on the Spirit shape our peace position? We could ask similar questions about integrating other doctrines. How are pastors equipped to shepherd their flocks in nuancing, critiquing, accepting or rejecting doctrinal positions of neighboring Spirit-led movements and churches?