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 the words of Fred Mitchell, Chairman of
the Keswick Convention Council from 1948-1951 and writer of the book’s preface,
Barabas’s book is “faithful and accurate; it is well annotated with sources of
his information; [and] 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.”[1] 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.”[2] Proponents of Keswick generally affirm: “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.”[3] Thus, Keswick’s “standard interpretation is
Steven Barabas, So Great Salvation.”[4] 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.”[5] The Quakers introduced the subject[6]
of the Higher Life, although there were also very significant background
influences of Roman Catholic mystics and heretics such as the monks Thomas á
Kempis and Brother Lawrence,[7]
and especially the Catholic mystical quietist Madame Guyon.[8] Catholics and Quakers were essential
theological precursors for the rise of the Keswick movement.
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.[9]
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.”[10]
Barabas
claims that more orthodox writers were also antecedents to the Keswick
movement. He follows W. H. Griffith
Thomas in claiming that Walter Marshall’s The
Gospel Mystery of Sanctification, written in 1692, is a Keswick
antecedent. 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.”[11]
A more accurate and less historically
revisionistic view of Marshall’s work is that the book is a “Puritan classic on
sanctification.”[12]
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.[13]
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 Pearsall Smith’s actual origination of Keswick theology, 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 that enjoyed by the
generality of Christians.”[14]
Of course, an affirmation that Christians
can walk more closely with God could be made for nearly 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 believers 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, which carefully documents
the widespread influence of both Mr. and Mrs. Smith and their connection to
earlier and later errors in sanctification, in “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.
In addition to
Catholics and Quakers, 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”[15]
is also undisputed theological background for the development of the Keswick
theology; Barabas thus recognizes Thomas C. Upham as a Keswick antecedent.[16] 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.[17] 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.”[18]
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 sought 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[.] . . . [T]he
Familists . . . recognize the Maternal Principle as a true and distinct
Personality in the Godhead. . . . [The] Shakers . . . [and] Bible Communists .
. . [recognize] that the Divine Nature is dual in its personalities . . . and
includes the fact of a divine maternity[.] . . . [T]he Catholic Church is often
regarded . . . as embodying the idea of the Motherhood element which exists in
the Infinite, in its recognition of the holy or deific nature of Mary . . . and
in the high honors, and even worship, which it is understood to render to her.
. . . [U]nder the influence of inward suggestions, which I will not stop to
explain and define . . . [and to] the thoughtful mind . . . the duality of the
Divine Existence, written everywhere in the book of nature, necessitates a
Trinity. . . . we must supplement the eternal Fatherhood and Motherhood by the
eternal Son . . . the great and unceasing out-birth of the Divine Duality. . .
. Generically, or considered in the whole of its extent, the trinal out-birth,
otherwise called the Son of God, without which the eternal Fatherhood and
Motherhood could have neither name nor power nor meaning, is the whole of
creation from its lowest to its highest form. . . . [N]ot an insect that floats
in the air, nor a fish that swims in the sea, nor a bird that sings in the
forests, nor a wild beast that roams on the mountains; not one is or by any
possibility can be shut out and excluded from the meaning and the fact of the
divine Sonship[.] . . . All living nature then . . . constitutes the Son of
God.[19]
Upham continues to develop his
stomach-turning idolatry in the subsequent pages of his book, but the quotation
above is enough, if not far more than enough, of a sampling of his vile and
devilish nonsense to give the sense of his doctrine. Despite being an unconverted idolator, he was
very influential:
Upham . . . became a Methodist holiness
leader after contact with Phoebe Palmer.
He studied Fenelon and Guyon, writing a biography of the latter entitled
Life, Religious Opinions, and Experience
of Madame Guyon. His [works] . . .
influenced much of nineteenth and early twentieth century thinking on faith,
including A. B. Simpson . . . leade[r] of [the] CMA [Christian & Missionary
Alliance].[20]
Like many other Higher Life
writers, Upham also emphasized ecumenicalism and sought to prepare for the
one-world religious system of Revelation 17.
Thus, “[o]n the basis of his experience of the baptism of the Spirit, T.
C. Upham proposed the foundation of a League of Nations.”[21] Such a man was Keswick antecedent Thomas
Upham.
See here for this entire study.
[1] Pgs.
ix-x, So Great Salvation, Barabas.
[2] “Keswick
and the Higher Life,” http://www.seeking4truth.com/keswick.htm.
[3] Pg. 20, Keswick’s Authentic Voice, ed. Stevenson.
[4] Pg. 112, Theological
Roots of Pentecostalism, Dayton.
[5] Pg. 15, So
Great Salvation, Barabas.
[6] Pg. 224, The
Keswick Convention: Its Message, Its
Method, and Its Men, ed. Charles Harford.
[7] 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.
[8] Pg. 223, The
Keswick Convention, ed. Harford.
[9] Pgs. 97-102, Sweet
Communion: Trajectories of Spirituality from the Middle Ages through the
Further Reformation, Arie de Reuver.
[10] Pgs.
74-75, The Keswick Convention: Its Message, Its Method, and Its Men, ed.
Charles Harford.
[11] Pg.
72, 211 Let Go and Let God? A Survey and
Analysis of Keswick Theology, Andrew D. Naselli.
[12] 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.
[13] Cf.
pg. xxix, Holiness: Its Nature,
Hindrances, Difficulties and Roots, J. C. Ryle. London: William Hunt and
Company, 1889.
[14] Pg.
16, So Great Salvation.
[15] Pg. 16, So
Great Salvation, Barabas. The wider
background to the Keswick Convention included the “work of such figures as
Charles Finney; Asa Mahan; W. E. Boardman; Hannah Whitall Smith and her
husband, Robert Pearsall Smith; Charles Cullis; and others” from the Wesleyan,
Oberlin, and Higher Life perfectionisms and continuationisms (pg. 104, Theological Roots of Pentecostalism,
Dayton). Thus, for example, as noted in
more detail below, both the persons and books of Mahan and Boardman were
promoted at the Oxford Convention (e. g., pg. 90, Account of the Union Meeting for the Promotion of Scriptural Holiness,
Held at Oxford, August 29 to September 7, 1874.
Chicago: Revell, 1874).
[16] Pg. 16, So Great Salvation, Barabas.
[17] Pg.
16, So Great Salvation, Barabas.
[18] Pg.
81, Theological Roots of Pentecostalism,
Dayton.
[19] Pgs.
49-78, Absolute Religion, Thomas C.
Upham. New York, NY: Putnam, 1873, pgs.
45-67; cf. also pgs. 337-459, Warfield, Perfectionism
Vol. 2. Italics in original. The “inward suggestions” of which Upham
speaks came from the devil, who worked through the Higher Life preacher’s corrupt
and unregenerate nature.
[20] Pg.
43, Only Believe: Examining the Origin and Development of
Classic and Contemporary Word of Faith Theologies, Paul L. King. See also “The Mystical Perfectionism of
Thomas Cogwell Upham,” Chapter 3 in Perfectionism,
Vol. 2, B. B. Warfield.
[21] Pg.
21, The Pentecostals, Hollenweger.
No comments:
Post a Comment