Running head: JIMENEZ1
The Impact of Pentecostalism on the Stone Campbell Movement and on the Understanding of the Holy Spirit within Churches of Christ
By
Amy Jimenez
Advanced Restoration History
BIBH 664.W1
Dr. Wes Crawford
November 19, 2013
JIMENEZ1
Introduction
The American frontier, at the turn of the Nineteenth century, was hungry for religious freedom and innovation. A spirit of revivalism was palpable, and a call to restore a simpler church was undeniable. As Presbyterian, Methodist and Baptist leaders struggled to stake a claim on the then Western frontiers of Kentucky and Tennessee, they discovered common ground in large revivals and tent meetings that drew thousands of people, hungry to experience God in a new way. Out of these revivals, many new religious movements were born. Two such movements, the Stone-Campbell Movement and the Shaker/Pentecostal Movement, stake a claim to the great Cane Ridge Revival of 1801 as part of their origins.[1] Though these two movements share a common heritage, they developed radically different beliefs regarding the Holy Spirit, polarizing one another to extreme positions. The influence of Pentecostalism within the Stone-Campbell Movement and specifically upon the Churches of Christ has contributed to a diminished emphasis on the power and work of the indwelling Holy Spirit in the expressive life of believers. Stark differences emerged in Biblical interpretation relating to the role of emotions in the Christian life and the specific nature and gifts of the Holy Spirit as they affect the church. As one examines these differences as well as the parallel growth of the two movements, patterns of possibility emerge to bridge the vast gap between Pentecostal churches and Churches of Christ today, ushering in a new spirit of Holy Spirit led revivalism.[1]
Shared History of the Pentecostal and Stone Campbell Movements
The Great Awakening of Europe and subsequently the New England Colonies of the United States in the mid Eighteenth century has been described as “an emotional protest against the intellectual hegemony of the age.”[2] It was marked by an apparent irrationalism or enthusiasm that flew in the face of the Enlightenment, or “Age of Reason.” This evangelical movement, unified by Methodist preachers like John Wesley and George Whitefield alongside Presbyterian and Baptist leaders, though deeply divided over doctrine, was unified on the principles of conversionism, crucientricism (justification by faith with emphasis on the atoning work of Christ as agency of salvation), Biblicism (devotion to the Bible), and activism in spreading a mass movement.[3]
As the “Second Great Awakening of Revivalism” made its way to southern states from 1800-1805, similar tensions began to emerge on this western frontier. The Anglican and Presbyterian churches were vying for position among the more rural inhabitants of this region. By 1800 in the state of Kentucky, more than 220,000 people were not associated with organized congregations of churches. Many young people seemed indifferent to religion.[4] Unimpressed with reason of the Enlightenment theologians and high church traditions, the Methodist and Baptist movements were gaining ground, more simplistic in their lay leadership and emotionally demonstrative worship services, and opposing the materialism and arrogance of plantation aristocracy.[5] James McGready, called the father of the great revival in the West, was a Scotch Irish Presbyterian. Scotch Irish Presbyterians had been known for emotionally intense and physically demonstrative 3-4 day communion services as early as the 1720’s. McGready and Barton W. Stone, greatly influenced by McGready, were drawn to the Methodist Wesleyan doctrine of sanctification, a call to “perfect holiness” via baptism of the Holy Spirit. Accounts of emotional revivals, full of emotional swooning and shouting with massive conversions were the accounts of sanctification that moved McGready and Stone and resonated with their traditional communion services.[6]
Many evangelical churches, from their Eighteenth century revivalist roots, stressed a sense of purpose and community and placed a high value to a conversion experience, emphasizing an emotional response to sin of “contrition and worthlessness” leading to a radical acceptance of God’s grace and an emotional high when God’s redemption was accepted. It was into this atmosphere that the camp meeting revivals, large outdoor worship services with thousands of people, multiple ministers preaching at the same time, emphasizing intense emotional persuasion became popular. One such revival, the Cane Ridge Revival in 1801, would launch Barton W. Stone on a path to pioneer the Stone Campbell Movement of ecumenical unity, but would convince many in the Pentecostal Stream, [2]of the vital importance of outward signs or manifestations of the power of the Holy Spirit in the life of a Christ follower.
The Cane Ridge Revival and the Holy Spirit
The Cane Ridge Revival climaxed a season of Scotch Irish Presbyterian communion services. Barton W. Stone, minister of the Cane Ridge Presbyterian Church, presided over this communion service/tent revival on August 6, 1801. Even as a promoter of ecumenical cooperation, Stone could not have anticipated the enormous attendance and emotionally charged response of people hungry for religious renewal. Of the 10,000 in attendance, between 500-1000 were converted to faith in Jesus Christ.[7] The physical exercises that accompanied these conversions included fallings, a result of the shame associated with acceptance of sin, and described as a deep coma state where people would lie in a semi-unconscious state proceeded by symptoms of seizure and hysteria.[8] Upon awakening from the “falling,” those who were converted would arise with shouts of joy, exhorting others to experience this intense grace of God. Other physical exercises included “jerks,” or rhythmic dancing. One minister, present at the revival described the scene as follows:
“Sinners dropping down on every hand, shrieking, groaning, crying for mercy, convoluted; professors (of religion) praying, agonizing, fainting, falling down in distress, for sinners, or in raptures of joy! Some singing, some shouting, clapping their hands, hugging and even kissing, laughing; others talking to the distressed, to one another, or to opposers of the work, and all this at once – no spectacle can excite a stronger sensation. And with what is doing, the darkness of the night, the solemnity of the place and of the occasion, and conscious guilt, all conspire to make terror thrill through every power of the soul to rouse it to awful attention.”[9]
Responses to Cane Ridge: The Role of Emotion in the Christian Life
Biblical interpretive differences regarding the importance of the role of emotion and physical response as related to the work of the Holy Spirit were born out of the Cane Ridge Revival experience. Two Presbyterian ministers and close colleagues of Stone, John Rankin and Richard McNemur, testified to the validity of the physical manifestations at Cane Ridge as signs of the Holy Spirit.[10] Convinced of this mark of the Spirit, as it pertained to the unity that would draw all Christians to a primitive New Testament ecclesiology and thus unity, along with Stone, these men became pioneers in the Stone Campbell Movement. Later, however, Rankin and McNemur were mesmerized by Ann Lee’s restorationist message that the primitive church had lost the spiritual gifts of the Spirit. With an intense call to perfectionism, her followers, the Shakers, espoused to eliminate greed, pride, and sexual desires with fervent dancing ceremonies, where they would “shake off sin” and “trample evil underfoot” to rid self of evil desires. McNemur and Rankin along with members of their congregations left the Stone Campbell movement to become Shakers in 1805. Through the mid Nineteenth century (1825-1850), spiritualism flourished among these Shaker societies, and would influence the larger Pentecostal movement at the turn of the twentieth century.[11] Cane Ridge, often referred to as America’s Pentecost, is often viewed as the starting point of a movement that emphasized “that the signs and wonders that took place were not some kind of spectacle, but rather a harbinger of God’s new day.”[12]
Roughly a century later, an explosive revival among African American and Latino Christians on Azuza Street in Los Angeles in 1906 launched a renewed interest in Pentecostalism in America, where speaking in tongues was the flagship sign of the Spirit’s emotionally charged empowerment. Ordinary untrained missionaries of all races were launched around the globe from this revival.[13] Emotionalism when combined with reason, according to Meyer, motivates people to action at a much deeper level. He proposed that the shame associated with public confession of sin, prevalent at Cane Ridge and subsequent Pentecostal revivals, created vulnerability among participants and physiological “falling effect” opened the mind to the power of God.[14] Current statistics says that Pentecostalism is the “fastest growing Christian movement on earth,” accounting for one in every four Christians.[15] Clearly, Pentecostalism is a movement that has continued the emotionally charged evangelistic appeal initiated at Cane Ridge. As its appeal has reached across all races and nationalities, perhaps the experiential expression of religious fervor associated with Pentecostalism still retains the unifying quality that Barton W. Stone would find so compelling at Cane Ridge.
For Barton W. Stone, the events at Cane Ridge further distanced him from his Presbyterian roots. Many Presbyterian clergy members were threatened by role of emotionalism at Cane Ridge because of their strong religious tradition tied to systematic doctrine. Having justified the deep feelings and emotionalism of experiential religion in the context of proper understanding and orthopraxy, what they perceived to be oversimplified theological understandings frightened them.[16] Stone, already struggling with many tenets of Presbyterianism, saw the physical and emotional manifestations of the Spirit at Cane Ridge as a confirmation of the work of the Holy Spirit in conversion. He saw the “trembling, jerking, barking, running, all of these powerful manifestations were not the result of the direct interposition of the Holy Spirit, but of the overwhelming power of Gospel truth.”[17] He saw the dramatic effects of the Holy Spirit as a draw for God to convict through the Word. He believed that “God transforms sinners through the Gospel, without a previous work of the Spirit.”[18] Because Cane Ridge involved multiple preachers from different denominations preaching at the same time, Stone believed the physical responses that inspired converts to speak and convert others was a clear sign of unity and inspired a deep sense of ecumenism that would propel him to join Thomas and Alexander Campbell in a movement to restore a primitive, New Testament ecclesiology.[19] Nonetheless, Artman said, “Stone walked a delicate line in his acceptance of religious excitement and sometimes found himself in reluctant competition with groups such as the Shakers and Holiness Methodists, and often in disagreement with his colleague, Alexander Campbell.”[20]
Thomas and Alexander Campbell recognized the dangers of emotionalism, while advocating the need for holiness in the life of the believer. Blaming the emotionalism associated with early revivals for McNemar and Dunlevy’s alignment with the Shakers, Alexander Campbell was often in disagreement with Stone regarding any benefit to emotionalism in Christian practice. Combating the Calvinism of the day, Campbell felt strongly that no emotional proof was needed of the Holy Spirit’s direct action of conversion because the Holy Spirit acted through the word.[21] Campbell said that emotional preaching “converts more persons by an anecdote, a shout, and a denunciation; or by the word “damnation” at the top of the voice, or by “hell-fire,” uttered in the midst of great animal excitement, than by all the gospel facts or arguments from Genesis to Apocalypse.”[22] He strongly downplayed the revival emotionalism of Cane Ridge. After Stone and Campbell’s deaths, emphasis in the Stone Campbell Movement turned to the spirit of unity at Cane Ridge rather than the revival’s emotional and physical manifestations.
At the same time, there is no doubt that the Stone Campbell movement emphasized and expected personal holiness through sanctification from Christians or Disciples of Christ. Alexander Campbell said in 1839: “The immediate, proper and practical intension of the Christian Institution is personal holiness…But what is holiness? It is sanctification. And what is sanctification? It is separation or consecration to God in heart as well as in state. And what is this separation of heart, but conformity of views, feelings, and desires, or an approving and choosing the same thing? To will what God wills, to love what he loves, to hate what he hates, is holiness in principle and in heart, and to carry this out in practice is holiness in fact and in truth.”[23] While Stone, Alexander Campbell and Scott all affirm that the Holy Spirit is the divine agent in producing holiness, they emphasized the Spirit’s instrument to be the Word of God and the blood of Christ, received by faith. Rea concluded that Stone and Campbell believed that the Holy Spirit uses faith, developed through increasing knowledge of the Scriptures, to transform the heart and behavior of the believer to conform to the divine nature, rather than emotional and physical manifestations of His personal indwelling.[24]
As the effects of the Civil War bore down upon Stone Campbell Movement leaders and congregants, a southern sectarian movement arose that would divide into its own denomination, Churches of Christ. Many within this group further polarized from any emotionalism associated with their understanding of the Holy Spirit and its role in sanctification and holiness. Believing strongly in the inerrancy of Scripture and certain that the Holy Spirit could not lead believers to divine holiness apart from the Word, the Texas tradition within Churches of Christ came to see the Bible as the sole source of the Spirit’s work. Many believed that any other view of the Holy Spirit, as a person who indwelt the believer, was associated with enthusiastic, emotive forms of religion that tended to disregard scripture. Instead, they shifted their focus to “Word over Spirit.”[25] In a movement characterized by reason and logic, believing that anyone could rationally believe in Jesus, many were fearful of anything that appeared irrational and emotive. Though some from the Tennessee tradition of the Churches of Christ, like James Harding and David Lipscomb believed that only God, through an indwelling Spirit, could transform humans into the image of Christ, by 1930, the Texas tradition’s denial of a personally indwelling Spirit became the dominant view of Churches of Christ at large.[26]
By the mid twentieth century, polarizing debates arose among Churches of Christ and Pentecostal Churches arguing rationalism vs. emotionalism. Churches of Christ strongly believed that “the Spirit would not employ emotional coercion over rational persuasion.”[27] Harrell was so bold as to say that “Pentecostals became the arch enemy of the Church of Christ.” It was ironic that Pentecostals desired to reclaim the Cane Ridge legacy of emotional Christianity while Stone Campbell Churches of Christ desperately desired to leave it behind.
The Nature and Gifts of the Holy Spirit[3]
Stone Campbell and Pentecostal Christians seeking the restoration of the New Testament church after Cane Ridge, both knew that the Holy Spirit was a critical factor in the apostolic ministry of the church, but differed on the Spirit’s nature and the gifts associated with as it affected their churches. As the Shaker movement gave way to Holiness churches and the Pentecostal movement, at large, much emphasis was placed on the nature of the Holy Spirit as a person of the Godhead, who demonstrated powerful physical manifestations or signs amongst true followers of Christ. Pentecostals were inclined to seek evidence of the Spirit’s empowering presence by way of physical signs demonstrated in the lives of the people in whom He has chosen to dwell.
The rise of Pentecostalism in the early twentieth century was built on the same 18th century Wesleyan Methodist principles that had influenced Stone and McGready prior to Cane Ridge. John Wesley’s Principle of Sanctification stated that a converted Christian could grow in personal holiness through a spiritual and moral life, empowered by the Holy Spirit. The Holiness tradition churches, such as the Church of the Nazarene, the Pilgrim Holiness Church, and the Church of God furthered this doctrine with a belief in the sanctifying work of the Spirit being perfected in a second baptism – the baptism of the Holy Spirit.[28] Methodism made sanctification the purpose of baptism of the Holy Spirit and outbursts of joy the evidence. Students at a Topeka Bible College in 1900 took this notion a step farther, believing that speaking in tongues was the only evidence associated with the baptism of the Spirit in Acts. When a student Agnes Ozman, experienced this baptism by speaking in tongues, the Classical Pentecostal movement arose, claiming that ‘speaking in tongues’ was the primary evidence of baptism in the Spirit, as it happened on the Day of Pentecost recorded in Acts.[29] Charismatic churches would follow who would accept other spiritual gifts as proofs this Spirit baptism. Many scholars consider all churches that promote the use of ‘wonder gifts’ in the contemporary world as Pentecostal.[30]