Democratized Holiness

In this reflection I want to highlight how holiness was democratized by the Keswick movement in Britain. I am mainly drawing from D. W. Bebbington’s book, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A history from the 1730s to the 1980s. The Keswick movement started in the later nineteenth century. The name of the movement is derived from the town Keswick where its conventions were held.

 

Instead of addressing all the intricacies of the movement, I want to focus on two things: First, we will take a brief look at the movements teaching on sanctification. Second, we will look at the cultural context of the time and what its connection is with the theological development of the doctrine of sanctification.

 

In the Evangelical world there seems to be two camps, when it comes to the doctrine of sanctification. Basically, there are those who believe in a gradual process of sanctification and those who belief sanctification is sudden. Sanctification refers to the present dimension of salvation and it is agreed that it differs from initial salvation (regeneration or being born again). The Keswick movement held that sanctification was sudden. Holiness comes by faith. Thus the movement rejects the idea of sanctification as a process. One of the proponents stated, “Which will you have – sanctification by works or sanctification by faith” (151)? Robert and Hannah Persall Smith, an American couple in England were one of the most important early proponents of this view in England.

 

One thing that makes Bebbington’s book worthwhile reading is that he does not only describe the doctrine of the Keswick movement, but he places it in its cultural context and shows how it is intertwined with the mood of the age. Bebbington points out that the Keswick movement was an expression of Romanticism thought permeating Evangelicalism. The movement was in part a reaction against Enlightenment thinking. Bebbington notes:

“The primary intellectual source of the notions about effort, improvement and the goal of independence was the Enlightenment. These notions constituted a variant, forged by the experience of industrialization, of the idea of progress. Likewise the opponents of Persall Smith were defending an Enlightenment inheritance: the belief that sanctification is slow, steady, progressive. Gradualism was the ideology of the social consensus of the high Victorian years, and it was this bastion that Persall Smith assaulted” (166). Romanticism was a countermovement to Enlightenment thinking. People were dissatisfied “with simplistic notions of progress. Enterprise, technology and economic growth were seen as false idols whose veneration had led to the sacrifice of the aesthetic and the humane” (166). Thus, when one looks at what lies at the heart of Romanticism you can see in which way it is reacting to the Enlightenment. According to Stanley J. Grenz in the Pocket Dictionary of Theological Terms, “Romanticism emphasized a subjective, expressive and existential outlook; engagement with the natural, sensual world; and the priority of the imagination over things rational and ordered” (103-104). The “ordered and notion of progress” are rejected and subjective sudden experience of sanctification is seen as a normal and possible experience. Thus the Keswick movement appealed to the spreading Romantic sensibilities of its time to gain support for its doctrine of sanctification. Holiness had become immediately available through faith – thus we have democratized holiness.

 

Why is it helpful to have an understanding of Evangelical history and the Keswick movement particular? Let me answer this question from my own church experience. A few years ago I served in a church where some of the members were attending seminars where a Keswickian notion of sanctification was being taught (the possibility of instant sanctification). This caused quite a stir in the congregation since ten percent of the church who attended those seminars adopted its teaching. The members who had these experiences got frustrated with the pastor because his teaching on sanctification was not instantaneous but gradual.

As a church leadership we did not have any historical understanding and vocabulary to talk about these differences in the doctrine of sanctification. Thus we were not able to address the arising conflict properly. I am convinced that if the church leadership (me included) would have been able to pinpoint where this teaching comes from and what it entails, we could of dealt with the arising conflict in a more constructive way and avoided a lot of hurt and frustration.