A History of the Charismatic Movements CH510 …...God. Some call it entire sanctification. Wesley prefers to call this third stage perfection, second blessing, holiness, perfect love,

A History of the Charismatic Movements

Transcript - CH510 A History of the Charismatic Movements © 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.

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LESSON 03 of 24CH510

John Wesley and Charles Finney

A History of the Charismatic Movements

We begin our third lesson today on the history of the charismatic movements by turning to the ideological wellspring of the movement itself, and that is two people, as far as I can tell by the literature, one of which is the great John Wesley, the eighteenth-century revivalist preacher who changed, in a way, by God’s great grace, an entire century. And his teachings and example are still changing us. The other key figure is that of Charles Finney. So, as we begin today, what we are doing is we’re discussing the background of the Holiness Movement in America and around the world with the assumption that things go something like this. Out of the Holiness Movement comes classical Pentecostalism, and out of classical Pentecostalism, though the story will need to be nuanced, will come the charismatic movement.

To understand the Holiness Movement, however, is to understand two key, very important figures, John Benjamin Wesley II and Charles Finney. So the assumption is this, that the ideological foundation of, at least, classical Pentecostalism, which has the doctrine of sanctification at its core, is recognized by most if not all scholars of this movement to be rooted in Methodism. The essence of Methodism in this connection is the doctrine of perfectionism, often designated as the second blessing by Mr. Wesley. Vinson Synan in his important history of the movement says that “the spiritual and intellectual father of the modern holiness and Pentecostal movements is John Wesley.” Damboriena in his book Tongues as of Fire pointedly says,

Pentecostals are children of Wesley. Bruner in his book on the doctrine of Holy Spirit has this insightful comment, “Methodism is the most important of the modern traditions for the student of Pentecostal origins to understand, for 18th Century Methodism is the mother of the 19th Century American holiness movement, which in turn bore 20th Century Pentecostalism. Pentecostalism is primitive Methodism’s extended incarnation. ‘The holiness

John D. Hannah, PhD Experience: Distinguished Professor of

Historical Theology, Dallas Theological Seminary



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movement,’ concluded a Jesuit student of Pentecostalism in Latin America, ‘is Methodism brought to its ultimate consequences.’”

So to understand the ideological foundation of the charismatic movements today is first to understand Wesley, and now second to understand the great American evangelist Charles Finney. Finney is crucial because he began to speak of the baptism of the Holy Spirit for endowment for ministry after conversion. Finney is the key theologian between Wesley and the Holiness Movement. While Wesley spoke of second blessing, Finney spoke of baptism as that blessing. Classical Pentecostals borrow from both and add a tangible sign gift evidence of that second mighty work of God’s grace. So today, first Dr. Wesley.

John Wesley, as to his person, literally spans an entire century. He was born in 1703 and died in 1791. The son of a Anglican father and a Puritan-background mother, Samuel and Suzanna Wesley. He was the seventeenth child in a very large family. And like his grandfather and great-grandfather and father, he matriculated at Christ Church College in Oxford, where he studied for the ministry, eventually being ordained as a priest in the Anglican Church. After teaching as a fellow at Lincoln College in Oxford, he went to Georgia as a missionary to the British subjects who were filling that new-founded colony. While he was gone, Charles and some of his friends, including George Whitfield, founded the now-famous Holy Club, a group that met for pietistical exercises and were dubbed Methodists. Pentecostal and Holiness scholars recognized the Holy Club as the initiation of the Holiness Movement within the established church. Wesley began to develop his ideas of sanctification in the early 1730s preaching at Saint Mary’s Church. The English Holy Club became the precedent for the American Holiness Movement.

After Wesley returned from the experience of Georgia, we all know that he had his miraculous conversion by the grace of God. On the 24th of May, 1738, at a quarter before 9 in an evening, he describes in his journal that his heart was strangely warmed as he experienced the wonder of redemption upon the hearing of the reading of Luther’s preface to his commentary on Romans. And that literally changed John Wesley’s life. His ministry from 1739 through 1791 was one of laboring to bring revival to the Church of England. One writer said that he left nothing behind but a well-worn clergyman’s gown, a huge library of books, a much-abused reputation, and the Methodist Church. He was a giant in his



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day, preaching on the average of fifteen times a week, traveling annually five thousand miles on horseback. He gave over forty-two thousand sermons, wrote over fifty books, organized an amazing complex of circuits over England and Ireland, establishing societies and classes and bands. Dr. Wesley must go down as one of the truly used figures in the history of our Lord’s work. As John Wesley relates to us and our study, his comments on the doctrine of sanctification are what is crucial. And what John Wesley did is he understood salvation to come to us in incremental stages. We can gain this both from his preaching, from the sermons we read, and from his plain account of Christian perfectionism or perfection. What I’d like to do is explain briefly John Wesley’s understanding of sanctification because it’s so crucial and integral to the birth of Methodism, out of which came the Holiness Movement and of course the great Pentecostal charismatic movements.

Wesley’s system is unique in this sense, that he believed in original sin. He was quite Reformed or Calvinistical in his understanding of sin. So he understood that we are born guilty already, not by sins of activity but by sin of nature that is inherited from Adam. So that man is born with complete morrow and spiritual inability. And yet Dr. Wesley was faced with the clear commands of Scripture that seem to suggest ability and duty on man’s part. So he organized his theology with three works of grace. The first work of grace is called prevenient or proprietary grace. This is a work that occurs upon the hearing of the gospel which essentially annuls your inability, giving you ability if you choose to repent, and if you repent then God would save you. In his book The Scripture Way of Salvation, he says that prevenient grace given to us implies some tendency toward life, some degree of salvation, the beginning of a deliverance from a blind unfeeling heart quite insensible to God and the things of God. So upon the hearing of the gospel one receives ability to believe if they choose to, and the choosing is evidenced by a repenting of moral sin and seeking to do right. And if you do that, Dr. Wesley taught, then God would give you saving grace or convincing grace. So, convincing grace became a second stage on the way to salvation. He says, for instance, in the work The Lord Our Righteousness, we must repent before we can believe the gospel.

We must be cut off from dependence upon ourselves before we can truly depend upon Christ. We must cast away all confidence in our own righteousness or we cannot have a true confidence in His. Until we are delivered from trusting in anything we do, we cannot thoroughly trust in what He



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has done and suffered. First we must receive the sentence of death in ourselves. Then we trust in Him who died for us.

That’s the second step. So first he would say upon the hearing of the gospel God gives all people proprietary grace, or initial grace, which enables them to repent, and if they do God will give them saving grace. He comments upon it this way in one of his sermons: “These works,” that is, the works of repentance, “are not the effective cause of his acceptance with God. Yet God expects them and looks upon them with favor because they are the necessary token that the profession of penitence is indeed sincere. Thus, good works meet for repentance a sincere attempt to amend from wrongs done to one’s neighbor are in a sense the previous condition of justification.” So if we will use our ability and seriously repent, then God will give us more grace, and He will save us. That begins the Christian life. He’s not saying that we’re saved by works or that we’re justified by works. He is saying that, it’s a little difficult to grasp him here, he’s saying that good works are not the cause of justification but God looks for sincerity that’s expressed in faith and repentance, and when He sees that, then He grants grace that saves.

But there is also a third work, and this is what’s important to grasp, it’s a work after salvation that is crucial for walking with God. Some call it entire sanctification. Wesley prefers to call this third stage perfection, second blessing, holiness, perfect love, sanctification, and entire sanctification. What it is is a third work of grace that cleanses the heart entirely from sin. He says, for instance, so he teaches perfectionism as a work of God’s grace after salvation. He says in his work A Plain Account of Perfection that

there is such a thing as perfection for it is again and again mentioned in Scripture. It is not so early as justification, for justified persons are to go on onto perfection. It is not so late as death, for Saint Paul speaks of living men who were perfect. It is not absolute. Absolute perfection belongs not to man, nor to angels, but to God alone. It does not make a man infallible. None is infallible while he remains in the body.

Then he raises the question: Is it sinlessness? And his reply is, “It is not worthwhile to contend for a term. It is salvation from sin. It is perfect love. It is improvable. It is admissible, capable of



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being lost of which we have numerous instances, and finally, it is constantly both preceded and followed by a gradual work.”

Now, to understand John Wesley which is so integral to Methodism and later to the charismatic movements, at least the early ones, is to understand this, that Wesley postulates three works of grace. One to prepare you for salvation, meaning it annuls your inability, one to save you upon repentance, and a third one to lift you above sin to a higher plane that he calls perfect love or baptism or entire sanctification. And that is a state in which we live above known sin. He does this by defining sin as merely voluntary transgressions. That is, sins of omission are not sin. Just simply, sins that we know we are doing are called sins. So he believed that you could come to a state by a third work of grace, the second after salvation, in which you are lifted to a sphere in which you do not practice known sin. He says in the Plain Account, for instance,

I believe there is no such perfection in this life as excludes these involuntary transgressions which I apprehend to be naturally consequent on ignorance and mistakes inseparable from morality. Therefore, sinless perfection is a term I never use lest I should seem to contradict myself. I believe a person filled with the love of God is still liable to these involuntary transgressions. Such transgressions you may call sin if you please, I do not.

So, in other words, a work of grace after salvation is required of every saint. If they fail of that second work they fall back into sin and lose their salvation. If they persevere in that work, then they are lifted to the sphere of perfection. He doesn’t mean that we don’t sin there. He just means that we do not voluntarily sin there, and that is how the great man defines sin. At that point, then, we persevere on in our sanctification, and if we are faithful, then we will obtain final sanctification or final salvation. That’s his system. Lindstrom in his book says this of Dr. Wesley.

In his general theological structure, Wesley’s view of Christianity has usually been described as a theology of experience. His affirmation of Christian experience is considered his main characteristic against the background of deism and rationalism. Wesley and the evangelical movement in England are seen as a reactionary phenomena, an emotional reaction against an earlier intellectualism. Rationalism had to give way to faith and feeling. At the



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same time the reaction marks a transition from natural to supernatural religion. Wesley emphasized the necessity of God’s self-revelation, although through the presence of the Spirit man is able to enter into immediate communion with God. Wesley’s insistence on Christian experience means that he both supersedes and conforms to the enlightenment.

Let me summarize what I’ve tried to say. To understand the classical Pentecostal movement or the charismatic movements as a whole is to find the ideological root in John Wesley. John Wesley, who is the father of Methodism, and Methodism is the child of the Holiness Movement, and classical Pentecostalism is a child of that Holiness Movement, as we will say, argued something like this. He argues that we need three works of grace in order to come to ultimate glory. We need initial grace that eliminates our inability that we inherit from Adam. Then we need saving grace following repentance. And then we need in order to be preserved a third work of grace or a second work of grace after salvation that he calls perfect love or entire sanctification. In this stage, we are elevated to a level where we live above known sin, and he calls that perfection. So he defines sin in the believer’s life as voluntary and known. Involuntary sin, sins of omission, he does not call sin, so that we can live in that perfect sphere, he would say. And the important thing is coming to that state is a work of grace after salvation. It’s a baptism. It’s an unction. It’s an anointing. It’s perfect love.

Before we pass off of Dr. Wesley, let me summarize what he is saying, first negatively and then positively. John Wesley’s doctrine of salvation denies constitutional sin. To him sin is not intrinsic or inherent. It’s not a possession. Sin is a oppression. So to Dr. Wesley, the locus of difficulty is with man but not in man. It’s what man does. It’s not what man is. And therefore, Dr. Wesley has a great hope of the immediacy of victory in one’s life. He stresses the active aspects of sanctification, not the passive aspects. What I mean by that is he stresses what we are to do. Dr. Wesley’s theology is a theology of doing, not so much the emphasis upon the passive aspects or the aspects of what Christ has done for us. So he denies constitutional depravity in the Christian. Second, he denies the positional aspects of justification and sanctification. He tends to see the active voice of Scripture more than the passive voice of Scripture.



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And third, he denies the unity between justification and sanctification.

Or to state what I am saying positively about the great Dr. Wesley, I can say three things. To Dr. Wesley, sin is a voluntary condition, not a condition of nature. It was involuntary until prevailing grace came to us. But after we received, or initial grace. After we received initial grace, then sin is voluntary. It’s our problem. Second, to Dr. Wesley, sanctification is optional, whereas in the more Reformed circles, sanctification is the result of justification. To Dr. Wesley, sanctification is not necessitated by justification. It’s optional. And third, Dr. Wesley would argue that God is interested in the saint’s sanctification, but his manner is desiring it, not causing it. It is our duty to do.

Now, if you understand that in summary and as you look at the notes we provide, the charts and things of that nature, that might become more clear to you. But it’s absolutely important, I think, in order to understand the birth of this great movement is to understand John Wesley’s three works of grace in which he puts a mighty work of grace after salvation that lifts you above known sin and allows you to voluntarily live in what he calls the state of perfection. And he gives different names to that third work of grace or second work of grace after salvation. So what I’m saying is when you come to understand the differences between the non-charismatic position and the charismatic position, one point of distinction would be how many works of grace does it take to bring a person to victory in Christ. Wesley would say that it takes two and an improvement chronologically in the second work of grace over time. Others would say it takes but one and there is no second work of grace. So that’s a major point of distinction in these movements.

The other major foundation of the ideology or the basic foundational assumptions of the charismatic movements is the teaching of the great American evangelist Charles G. Finney, Charles Grandison Finney. Finney, as I said before, is the key theologian between Wesley and the Holiness Movement. Wesley spoke of second blessing, entire sanctification, perfect love as a work of grace mandated after salvation. But it’s Mr. Finney who speaks of that second work of grace as a baptism of the Holy Spirit, and that makes him important to our study. Let me first say something about this great evangelist.



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Dr. Finney, as you may know, was America’s first and the greatest professional evangelist I think that He has given us. He was born in 1792, and the Lord gave him a long life. He died in 1875. Obviously there is lots of controversy that swirls around his life, usually associated with various techniques that he brought into his ministry of gospel preaching. But let me say something about Charles Finney before we get into all that. Dr. Finney was born in Warren, Ohio, raised in what we would call the Finger Lake district of New York or central New York, attended Hamilton Oneida Academy, and later taught. Later he taught school in New Jersey, and as his parents became older, Dr. Finney moved back to New York State where he began the study of law. Dr. Finney has a sharp, logical, brilliant mind, and I think that’s part of his law study. He studied under a George Wright, Judge George Wright of Adams County, New York, in 1818.

In 1821, Dr. Finney experienced the wonder of redemption. While he was studying law, apparently in the study of law he became attracted to the Mosaic code and through that to the Bible, and he began to read the Bible. But he also heard the preaching of a Presbyterian by the name of George Gale. And in that context, on the 10th of October of 1821, according to his memoirs he was converted to Christ. What’s interesting about the dear man’s conversion is that it is in three separate stages. And I think as I study the charismatic movements, at least the earlier ones that had more of a rigid technical differentiation of theological events, they are in stages. Remember in Mr. Wesley it’s initial grace, prevailing grace, perfect love or ultimate sanctification after redemption. And we need to be careful how far we push the word ultimate and how far we push perfectionism even in Dr. Wesley. But according to Dr. Finney and his conversion, it happened in three separate stages.

First he was convicted concerning Christ that night. And then later there was a stage of the breaking of his pride. And then later that night he received the baptism of the Holy Spirit with assurance the next day. So that’s important to know that it comes in three stages, and at the end of that last stage is a mighty baptism of the spirit.

Converted in 1821, he began his ministry that would consume his life in many ways. He first began as a preacher in the smaller towns of New York, where he obtained his early reputation, places like Evans Mills and smaller towns. His ministry seems to divide as a professional revivalist by the famous Lebanon Convention of 1827.



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The Lebanon Convention was a gathering of clergymen who became fearful over what they were hearing about so-called new measures and techniques that Dr. Finney was employing in his work. They gathered together with this ordained Presbyterian cleric, Dr. Finney, and they wanted to judge his ministry. And the upshot of the Lebanon Convention of 1827 was that they not only did not judge him but they were won over to him, and that marks a different phase in his preaching because up to the Lebanon Convention he was a preacher mostly in the more rural areas of New York, but after 1827 he truly becomes a national evangelist.

So from 1825 to 1832, Dr. Finney was a itinerant professional clergymen. In 1832 to 1834, though he did not give up his evangelistic campaigns, he became a settled pastor, first in the Second Free Presbyterian Church of New York City, free because the pews were not rented, which was a way clergymen had traditionally obtained their salaries. And then he moved to the interdenominational Broadway Tabernacle. In 1835 his ministry changed again, this time to education. And in that year, 1835, he was secured as professor of systematic theology at Oberlin College. From 1835 until his retirement in 1866, Dr. Finney, though continuing his preaching ministry, is known more so as professor of systematic theology. It’s in that context that Dr. Finney wrote his theology book and his theological system became known as Finneyism or Oberlin Perfectionism. He retired, as I said, in 1866 and the Lord gathered him to Himself in 1875. Dr. Finney is truly a remarkable evangelist and has changed, I think forever, the contours and face of the methodology of preaching the gospel in America. Now, I want to come though, more importantly, to my assumption that Dr. Finney is one of the ideological wellsprings in our understanding of what will evolve into the charismatic movements around our world.

Dr. Finney, like John Wesley, taught three separate stages through which a person passes, three distinct stages. To Dr. Finney, first there is initial grace. And what I’m saying is if you look at our diagrams that are in your notes and you diagram Dr. Finney’s system and Dr. Wesley’s system, they diagram out basically the same. In other words, salvation is seen as a progressive sanctification that ultimately brings you to glory. Now, first to Dr. Finney there is initial grace, that is, a work of God that does not save but brings you into a more favorable relationship to the gospel. Dr. Finney denied the influence of the first Adam in an active, guilt-bearing relationship, that is, he rejected original sin and depravity.



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So in that sense, he differs greatly from Wesley, who did believe in original sin and depravity, though Wesley did not carry that assumption to the cross or to salvation.

So prior to salvation, according to Dr. Finney, a man must turn from sin to true holiness. He said this in his systematic theology: “A turning from sin to holiness, or more strictly from a state of consecration to self to a state of consecration to God is and must be the turning, the change of mind, or the repentance that is required of all sinners. Nothing less can constitute a virtuous repentance and nothing more can be required.” So first there is initial grace that causes repentance. And the second stage is faith, or regeneration, or justification, as we would say.

Finney said in his systematic theology that faith implies a state of present sinlessness. Remember, to Dr. Finney and to Dr. Wesley, sin is voluntary. Sin is what you do. Sin is not constitutional. Sin is only active. Describing this event of regeneration, Dr. Finney says this: “We have seen that repentance as well as faith is a condition of justification. We shall see that perseverance and obedience to the end of life is also a condition of justification. Faith is often spoken of in Scripture as if it were the sole condition of salvation, because, as we have seen from its very nature, it implies repentance in every virtue.” My purpose is to not get into Dr. Finney’s theology so much as to reflect upon his theology as it relates to our subject, which is the ideological origin of the charismatic movements in America.

So he has first an initial grace stage that issues in repentance, then a faith stage that issues in regeneration and justification. But there’s a third stage. There’s a stage after salvation, and that’s the point I’m trying to help us to understand. He called that stage baptism or entire sanctification, by which he meant this, that nothing is acceptable to God short of full obedience to the moral law, thus true virtue or holiness. Second, holiness is not constitutional but is a matter of will and consistent obedience to the will of God as revealed in the intellect and expressed in one word: love. Now, all true saints are in a state of full obedience to all the known requirements of God. Then he says,

It is self-evident that entire obedience to God’s law is possible on the ground of natural ability. To deny this is to deny that a man is able to do as well as he can. The very language of the law is such as to level its claims to the capacity of the subject, however great or small that capacity may be.



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Thou shalt love the Lord Thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with thy mind and all thy strength. Here then it is plain that all the law demands is the exercise of whatever strength we have in the service of God. Now as entire sanctification consists in obedience to the law of God, and as the law requires nothing more than the right use of whatever strength we have, it is of course forever settled that a state of entire sanctification is attainable in this life on the ground of natural ability.

That states that we can come to on the ground of natural ability is a postconversion state. He calls it baptism. So baptism is separated from redemption and made a second subsequent work. Complaining of his pastor George Gale later he says, “There was another defect in Brother Gale’s education which I regard as fundamental. If he had ever been converted to Christ, he had failed to receive the divine anointing of the Holy Ghost.” So you’re saved but you need a divine anointing. “That would have made him a power in the pulpit and in society for the conversion of souls. He had fallen short of receiving the baptism of the Holy Ghost which is indispensable to ministerial success. I have often been surprised and pained that to this day so little stress is laid upon this qualification for preaching in a sinful world, and that qualification is a postconversion baptism of the Spirit that gives you power.” He says in another place sadly, “I was often instrumental in bringing Christians under great conviction and into a state of temporary repentance and faith, but falling short of urging them up to a point where they would become so acquainted with Christ as to abide in Him, they would soon fall again into their former state.”

That is so terribly crucial to understand in Dr. Finney. And that is this, that if we don’t have this baptism of the Spirit after salvation, we will not be able to live in spiritual victory and power as Christian people. Now, to Dr. Finney, baptism, which inaugurates a higher plane of Christian living, is indispensable to a fruitful ministry. Specifically, Finney defined the state of sanctification as temporal perfection. He says, and I quote,

Not in the sense that a soul entirely sanctified cannot sin, but that as a matter of fact he does not and will not sin. Nor do I use the term entire sanctification as implying that the entirely sanctified soul is in no danger of sinning as to need the through application of all the means of grace to prevent him from sinning and to secure his continued sanctification.


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John Wesley and Charles FinneyLesson 03 of 24

Nor do I mean by entire sanctification a state in which there will be no further struggle or warfare with temptation to which the Christian warfare will cease.

That’s very instructive because later charismatics or Pentecostals don’t see that in Dr. Finney. Struggle continues: “Nor do I use the term as implying a state in which no further progress and holiness is possible. Nor do I mean by the term entire sanctification that the entirely sanctified soul will no longer need the continual grace and indwelling Spirit of God to preserve it from sin and to secure it’s continuance in a state of consecration to God.” Now his line, “Entire sanctification, instead of implying no further dependence on the grace of Christ, implies the constant approbation of Christ by faith as the sanctification of the soul.”

There is a third work of grace. He calls it baptism. What binds Dr. Finney and Dr. Wesley together and that cannot be missed for our study is this, they hold to a work of grace after salvation that delivers you to a place of strength and power and victory. Dr. Wesley does not call that the baptism of the Spirit; he calls it perfect love. Dr. Finney calls it the baptism of the Spirit. They mean the same thing, and therefore they are crucial to our study. Thank you.

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A History of the Charismatic Movements CH510 …...God. Some call it entire sanctification. Wesley prefers to call this third stage perfection, second blessing, holiness, perfect love,