Keswick
unbiblically depreciates the importance of sanctification as a process, as
progressive growth. This fact is evident
in direct statements such as that, for Keswick, “[s]anctification is primarily
and fundamentally . . . no[t] a process”[1]
and that the “conventional threefold division” which considers sanctification
as positional, progressive,[2]
and ultimate is not characteristic of Keswick in the way the crisis, gift,
process division is.[3]
This neglect of progressive sanctification also evidences itself in that
Barabas spends only half a page on this aspect of the doctrine. While he spends forty pages describing sanctification
as a crisis and a gift, progressive sanctification gets 1.25% the treatment
that the other aspects receive in Keswick.
Indeed, considering the entire scope of Barabas’s discussion of “God’s
Provision For Sin” and “Consecration,” where the Keswick doctrine of
sanctification as crisis, gift, and process is explicated and contrasted with
the views he deems erroneous, the discussion of progressive sanctification
receives attention only 0.75% of the time.[4] This vast underemphasis stands in stark
contrast to the tremendous amount of Biblical material dealing with progress in
sanctification.
What Barabas
writes in his half page on progressive sanctification is, however, sound; although
it is not properly prominent, nonetheless Keswick is said to accept the
classical doctrine that “experimental sanctification is the day-by-day
transformation of the believer into the image of Christ, and is progressive in
nature. Beginning at regeneration, it
continues all through life, but is never complete.”[5] Barabas indicates his dependence in his
discussion of progressive sanctification upon the exposition of The Law of Liberty in the Spiritual Life
by Evan Hopkins.[6]
Hopkins learned the Higher Life theology from William Boardman and Mr. and Mrs.
Pearsall Smith[7]
and was brought to adopt Keswick theology after looking at the placid face of
one who had received it,[8]
having sat at the feet of the Smiths and Mr. Boardman from the time of the
first spiritualist-hosted Broadlands Conference onwards[9]
even to the last one.[10] In fact, Hopkins “was for years the
acknowledged leader of the Keswick teaching” and “the theologian of the
movement. . . . He spoke at the first Keswick Convention, and appeared at
Keswick as a leader for thirty-nine years without a break. No one was regarded with greater respect
there than he.”[11] While
Hopkins was deeply influenced by the heretics surrounding him at Keswick and
Broadlands, what he states in the section of his book on which Barabas depends[12]
is as Scriptural[13]
as what Barabas derives from him.
Hopkins even admirably affirms, quoting another writer, that in
sanctification “the whole aspect of human nature is transformed.”[14] Barabas claims Keswick acknowledges that the
process aspect of sanctification includes “a soul that is continually
increasing in the knowledge of God, and abounding in fruits of righteousness .
. . [and] continued progress in the development of Christ-like character.”[15]
Such an affirmation is certainly Biblical.
What is unusual
about such affirmations by the Keswick advocate is that they sound remarkably
like the statement by Warfield that the “Holy Spirit . . . cures our sinning
precisely by curing our sinful nature; He makes the tree good that the fruit
may be good,”[16]
yet Barabas inveighs against Warfield’s doctrine as an unscriptural position
that Keswick opposes. If there is no
real difference between the doctrine of Keswick and that of Warfield, Barabas’s
attack on Warfield is, at this point, inexplicable and unjustifiable; if there
is a difference, Barabas does not make its character clear at all. It would have been of great value to see
Barabas attempt to reconcile the classical model of sanctification as
positional, progressive, and ultimate and the “more characteristic” division of
sanctification by Keswick as process, crisis, and gift. Had he successfully done so, one could not
claim that such a reconciliation is impossible.
Unfortunately, Barabas simply asserts that Keswick accepts, although it
deemphasizes, the classic model alongside of its usual and characteristic
process, crisis, and gift model, without the slightest explanation of how the
two apparently strongly divergent positions can both be true. The palpable contradictions between the two
models are ignored, probably because the “Convention is not interested in
academic discussions of theology or ethics, or even adding to the store of
Bible knowledge of those who attend”[17]
and “Keswick furnishes us with . . . no carefully prepared, weighty discourses
of a theological nature.”[18]
Since the classic position that sanctification involves the progressive
transformation of the believer into the image of Christ appears to directly
contradict the Keswick position that God the Holy Ghost does not make the
Christian himself more inwardly holy and less sinful, Keswick’s affirmations
that “purity [is] never a state,”[19]
and that “holiness does not consist in a state of purity”[20]
seem utterly irreconcilable with the classic doctrine of progressive
sanctification it claims to uphold.[21]
Keswick’s affirmations of both its
characteristic crisis, gift, and process model and the classic doctrine of progressive
sanctification appear unintelligible.
See here for this entire study.
[1] Pg. 88, So
Great Salvation, Barabas.
[2] Barabas’s substitution of “experimental” for
“progressive” in the division of sanctification into positional, progressive,
and ultimate on pgs. 84-85 is noteworthy.
The term “experimental” does not carry within it necessarily the idea of
progress and growth.
[3] Pgs. 84-85, So
Great Salvation, Barabas.
[4] Pgs. 61-127, So Great Salvation, Barabas, 66
pages. 0.5/66=0.75%.
[5] Pg. 85, So
Great Salvation, Barabas.
[6] Pg. 85, So
Great Salvation, Barabas.
[7] Thus, Hopkins read “Dr. W. E. Boardman’s volume on The Higher Christian Life . . . [and] a
series of papers by the American, Robert Pearsall Smith, on the subject of
Holiness,” and then went to a meeting where he heard R. P. Smith preach. Hearing Smith, Hopkins affirmed: “I felt that he had received an overflowing
blessing, far beyond anything that I knew”—and by means of Robert Smith’s
self-testifying of overflowing Christian joy—although, in truth, Robert P.
Smith was a miserable unconverted wretch who was promulgating sexual thrills as
Spirit baptism at the time—Hopkins came to adopt the Higher Life doctrine of
Boardman and Smith that was then promulgated at the Keswick Convention. The key passage that led Hopkins to the Higher
Life was Mr. Smith’s misinterpretation of 2 Corinthians 9:8, which was, Mr.
Smith averred, an affirmation that Christ “would do all, and would live in [the Christian] His Own Holy Life—the only
Holy Life possible to us,” not, as an examination of the context and
grammatical-historical interpretation would affirm, an affirmation that God
would provide physically for His people who give generously to the needy. Mr. Smith’s view of 2 Corinthians 9:8 became
“Mr. Hopkins[’s] . . . locus classicus,
his Gospel within the Gospel, the sure ground where he had cast his anchor,” so
that “[m]any a time, in the Conventions of the years that followed, Mr. Hopkins
would read this text” and lead many others to the bright discovery of the
Higher Life which was taught by it, when ripped from its context and interpreted
allegorically (pgs. 52-55, Evan Harry
Hopkins: A Memoir, Alexander
Smellie). In 1875 Hopkins took over the
work of Robert P. Smith’s magazine, The
Christian Pathway to Power, after Smith’s public disgrace as a result of
being caught in a woman’s bedroom teaching the erotic baptism. Hopkins continued to edit the magazine until
1913, renaming the magazine The Life of
Faith in 1883 (pgs. 73-74, Ibid). Even forty years later in 1913, Hopkins
testified at the Keswick Convention to the centrality of the teaching he had
received from Robert P. Smith in 1873 (cf. pgs. 24-25, 38-39, Transforming Keswick: The Keswick Convention, Past, Present, and
Future, Price & Randall).
[8] Pg. 176, Account
of the Union Meeting for the Promotion of Scriptural Holiness, Held at Oxford,
August 29 to September 7, 1874. Chicago: Revell, 1874.
Many at Broadlands, it seems, had special-looking faces that, at least
in a culture strongly under the influence of Romanticism, validated the truth
of the Higher Life theology, and formed part of the indissoluble link between
Higher Life spirituality and the continuationistic Faith Cure—that is, the
Higher Life for the soul and for the body.
“So many faces quite changed their character in those days” of the 1874
Conference (pg. 128, Memorials [of William Francis Cowper-Temple, Baron Mount-Temple], Georgina Cowper-Temple). The transformation was comparable to the
miraculous “shining of [the] face . . . of Moses” (pg. 131, The Life that is Life Indeed: Reminiscenses of the Broadlands
Conventions, Edna V. Jackson. London:
James Nisbet & Co, 1910). At Broadlands “Hannah Smith was radiant,” (pgs.
132-134, Memorials), for “her face
gained a soft, Madonna-like beauty . . . her . . . sparking glance . . . [and]
pure face spoke for her. . . . She looked as if she knew the [spiritual]
secret. Fair and pure and glad, a piece
of nature fresh and racy, and simple, and full of vitality” (pgs. 49-50, 160,
222, The
Life that is Life Indeed).
Even many an “inspired face” was present at Broadlands
(pgs. 132-134, Memorials & pg.
59, The Life that is Life Indeed). It was not in Hannah Smith alone that the
“inner light” shone in the “inspiration that came from her shining face” (pgs.
121-123, The Life that is Life Indeed). The
“face” of the universalist “George MacDonald . . . [was] very beautiful . . .
very like the pictures of our Lord” (pg. 57, The Life that is Life Indeed), such pictures apparently being good,
not sinful and idolatrous (cf. Exodus 20:4-6).
Indeed, “looks that were Christ’s . . . on human faces” were found at
Broadlands, where “a desire for the heavenly light . . . sh[one] on [many an]
uplifted face,” in line with truth learned from “Swedenborg” (pg. 82, Ibid).
Such glowing faces were similar to the faces of the cute baby-like
cherubs that allegedly helped God make Adam out of dust, as seen in a painting
of Michelangelo—“how their faces shine” as they usurp the uniquely Divine work
of creation! Like such mythic cherubs,
the perfectionist “Amanda Smith” possessed a “glowing face” as she petitioned
the moon and the stars to tell God that she was a sinner and ask Him to forgive
her (pgs. 73-74, 130, The Life that is
Life Indeed). The hell-rejecting
theological liberal F. D. Maurice was a paradigmatic example of the fact that
the “faces of some of God’s children
shine” (pg. 199, Ibid. Italics in original.). Ian Keith Falkoner had an “angel face.” Theodore Monod possessed such a “glowing
countenance” that one “felt” he was in the presence of a holy man, for “his
face was transfigured” and “holy fervor and deep reverence were expressed in
face and . . . revealed, in a way no words could do . . . the blessedness of
communion with God.” His face revealed
communion with God in the way that no words could do, not even the words of Scripture,
according to the Higher Life system taught at Broadlands. Canon Carter of Truro had a “sweet, pure face
with morning peace upon it.” The
“radiant . . . lovely face[s]” of the “queens of beauty of [their] time” were
present at Broadlands; indeed, “the whole company” went “streaming through the
garden with radiant faces” at the Conferences (pgs. 76, 85, 102, 130, 176, 221, Ibid).
Mr. Mount-Temple gained, through the truths proclaimed
at Broadlands, a “sacred illumination of face, too sacred to speak of . . .
[which] was noticed . . . and tenderly recorded . . . [a] blessed face . . .
placid and often illuminated with wonderful flickerings of light from beyond”
pgs. 132-134, Memorials). After all, at especially spiritual times “a
radiant, joyous, wondering glow often lights up the face of [those] who have
soared beyond the shadow of our night” (pg. 170, Ibid), even as “such brightness [had] appeared in [the] angelic
face” of the Catholic monk “St. Cuthbert” (pgs. 7-8, The Life that
is Life Indeed: Reminiscences of the
Broadlands Conventions). Thus, the
generality of the “goodly company” at Broadlands “were beautiful, and what an
attraction there always is in beauty! . . . [P]hysical beauty is . . . a source
of real bliss, and . . . it takes the impress of the spiritual . . . Beauty
always attracts us; we enjoy it, wish for it . . . beauty is truly an
expression of character” (pgs. 35-36, Ibid). Consequently, the shining faces at Broadlands
proved the truth of the Higher Life, since “[s]uch faces are truly . . .
windows, through which we see the soul” (pg. 46, Ibid). Such validation of Higher Life teaching by
shiny faces and other similarly utterly unauthoritative and extra-Scriptural
chimeras passed through Broadlands to the Keswick movement.
[9] Both the Smiths and Boardman were Higher Life teachers
at Broadlands, as well as at the Oxford and other Higher Life gatherings; cf. pg.
20, The Keswick Story: The Authorized History of the Keswick
Convention, Polluck; pg. 20, Account
of the Union Meeting for the Promotion of Scriptural Holiness, Held at Oxford,
August 29 to September 7, 1874. Chicago: Revell, 1874.
Note the lists of names of those who met at Broadlands, where Evan
Hopkins, Webb-Peploe, and other early Keswick leaders are listed along with the
Pearsall Smiths, on pgs. 118, 148, of Memorials [of William Francis Cowper-Temple, Baron Mount-Temple], Georgina Cowper-Temple.
[10] Pg.
202, The Life that is Life Indeed: Reminiscences of the Broadlands Conferences,
Edna V. Jackson. London: James Nisbet & Co, 1910. Thus, Hopkins regularly was present and
preached often at at the Broadlands Conferences, as he was present and preached
at the Keswick Conventions.
[11] Pgs. 158-159, So
Great Salvation, Barabas. Polluck
affirms that Hopkins, after skipping the first Keswick Convention, attended the
next forty-one, not thirty-nine as Barabas stated, without a break (pg. 39, The Keswick Story: The Authorized History of the Keswick
Convention, Polluck). Hopkins
learned the Higher Life doctrine “after listening to Robert Pearsall Smith on
the subject of Holiness,” and an address by Hopkins “was the means of winning
T. D. Harford-Battersby,” co-founder of the Keswick Convention with the Quaker
Robert Wilson, “over to the Higher Life movement” (pgs. 158-159, So Great Salvation; cf. pgs. 75ff., Evan Harry Hopkins: A Memoir, Alexander Smellie).
[12] Pgs. 99-102, The
Law of Liberty in the Spiritual Life, Hopkins.
[13] Unfortunately, other things Hopkins taught were not a
little less Scriptural; for example, his preaching at the Oxford Convention
that one must “begin” in the Higher Life by rejecting the active obedience of
Christ in redemption (pg. 93, Account
of the Union Meeting for the Promotion of Scriptural Holiness, Held at Oxford,
August 29 to September 7, 1874. Chicago: Revell, 1874), is, one hopes, simply loose
language.
[14] Pg. 101, The Law of
Liberty in the Spiritual Life, Hopkins.
[15] Pg.
123, So Great Salvation, Barabas. While Barabas does not have a specific
section on sanctification as a process other than half of pg. 85, scattered
statements about process are occasionally found within his comparatively
massive discussions of sanctification as gift and as crisis.
[16] Pg. 71, So Great Salvation, Barabas, quoting Warfield, Perfectionism
Vol. 2, pgs. 579-583.
[17] Pg. 108, So Great
Salvation, Barabas.
[18] Pg. 51, So
Great Salvation, Barabas.
[19] Pg. 47, So
Great Salvation, Barabas.
[20] Pg. 49, So
Great Salvation, Barabas. The page
adds the qualifier “apart from Christ,” but its point in context is not simply
to assert the obvious fact that Christ is the Author of all spiritual strength,
life, and growth. Rather, it denies the
progressive inward renewal of the believer and the progressive death of the
principle of indwelling sin to affirm that nothing happens within the Christian
besides counteraction.
[21] Barabas does not clearly set forth the insufficient view
that progress in sanctification is merely an increased appropriation of Christ,
while the person himself remains unchanged—indeed, his quotation of Hopkins appears
to deny this view—but other Higher Life writers have done so. Warfield refutes this position while
discussing the doctrine of the German Lutheran Higher Life leader Theodore Jellinghaus
(who affirmed
typical Lutheran heresies, such as baptismal regeneration and opposition to
eternal security, among other very serious errors on the way of
salvation). Jellinghaus had learned of
the Higher Life from Robert Pearsall Smith and his associates. Keswick’s leading to the rise of German
Pentecostalism brought Jellinghaus to renounce the Higher Life as he saw its
fruits more clearly. Warfield records:
[The Higher Life doctrine of Jellinghaus is that] [a]s
we received forgiveness of sins at once on our first believing, so do we
receive our full deliverance from the power of sin at once on this our second
believing. But, along with this, emphasis is thrown on the continuousness of
both the cause and the effect. Jesus saves us now—if I believe now; and
the believer is to live in a continuous believing and consequent continuous
salvation. This is, of course, the well known “moment by moment” doctrine of
the Higher Life teachers. The main purpose of this teaching is to prevent us
from supposing that the source of our holiness is in ourselves. But it has the
additional effect of denying with great emphasis that the seat of our
holiness—any of it, at any time—is in ourselves. It thus makes our holiness in
all its extent purely a holiness of acts, never of nature. What we obtain by
faith is Christ—as a Preserver from sinful acts. By continuous faith we obtain
Him continuously—as Preserver from sinful acts; and only from those particular
sinful acts with which we are for the moment threatened. We do not at any time
obtain Him as Savior from all possible sins, but only as Savior from the
particular sinful acts for protection from which we, from time to time, need
Him. Thus we are never made “holy” in any substantial sense, so that we are
ourselves holy beings. And also accordingly we are never made “holy” in any
conclusive sense, so that, being holy in ourselves, naturally we continue holy.
This is the way Jellinghaus expresses himself . . . [w]e are, says Jellinghaus,
like a poor relation living in a rich man’s house as a dependent, and receiving
all he needs day by day from his benefactor, but never being made rich himself.
The purpose in view here is to emphasize our
constant dependence on Christ. But this is done so unskillfully as to end in
denying the possibility of our sanctification. We never are ourselves made
holy; only our acts are provided for. We ask nothing and we get nothing beyond
the meeting of our daily needs in sustaining our struggles on earth. As for ourselves,
we remain unholy, apparently forever. . . . There is a confusion here between
the source and the seat of [sanctification]. . . . [Jellinghaus writes,] “The
Christian can be pure only as a member of Christ our Head, as a branch of the
vine. In himself every Christian is a branch of sinful humanity and is prone to
sin. Only through implantation into Christ’s death and resurrection can he be
and remain holy. Separated from Christ and His purifying blood (blood signifies
the life of Christ given in death and resurrection), he is sinful and has sin.”
. . . If this be true then salvation is impossible. We are never saved. We only
seem to be saved, because Christ works through us the works of a saved soul.
That is not the way John conceived it, or Christ. Naturally most painful
results follow from such representations. For example, our aspirations are
lowered. We are never to wish or seek to be holy ourselves, but are to be
content with being enabled to meet in our unholiness the temptations of the
day. We lose the elevating power of a high ideal. And we are to be satisfied
with never being “well-pleasing to God.” . . . What the Scriptures teach is
that we shall be more and more transformed into Christ’s image until at last,
when we see Him as He is, we shall be like Him, and therefore in ourselves—as
He has made us—well-pleasing to God.
There is expressly included in this doctrine a
provision for a progressive sanctification, along the ordinary lines of the
teaching of the Higher Life Movement in this matter. We have seen Jellinghaus
in passages just quoted limiting the ability of the Christian to enter “immediately”
into the victorious power and peace-bringing leading of Christ, by such phrases
as “according to the measure of his knowledge,” and “for the needs of which he
is presently conscious.” The Christian is freed from all the sinning which at
the stage of Christian knowledge to which he has attained he knows to be
sinning; and as his knowledge grows so his objective sanctification increases.
It is apparently also repeatedly suggested that it depends entirely on the
Christian’s own action whether or not he retains his hold on Christ and so
continues in his sanctifying walk. Undoubtedly this is in accordance with
Jellinghaus’ fundamental conception of the relation of the Christian to Christ
and the way of salvation. He continually suggests that our standing in Christ
depends absolutely on ourselves. Those that believe in Christ, he tells us for
example, “have in Him forgiveness and righteousness, and also shall retain it so
long as they abide in Christ.” It is, he continues, like a king granting
public amnesty in terms like these: He who appears within a year at a
particular place, lays down his weapons, and swears fealty—to him then shall be
handed an already prepared diploma of pardon, and he will remain pardoned so
long as he maintains his loyalty. . . . Our continued justification depends therefore
absolutely on our continued faith, and the implication is that this is left
wholly in our hands. Justification cannot therefore be made to cover our future
sins—the sin, for example, of failing faith. . . . What
Jellinghaus is really laboring for here is to make room in some way for
“falling from grace.” He is possessed with the fear that if he does not limit
the scope of justification, at least with respect to the grosser future sins,
he will give license to sin, which in the end means merely that he has more
confidence in man’s efforts than in God’s grace. What he has succeeded in doing
is only to destroy all possibility of assurance of salvation. Men are cast back
on their own works, whether of faith or of conduct, for their hope of ultimate
salvation. God’s justification is valid only if they maintain their faith and
commit no sins of malice aforethought, or of conscious indifference, or
unlovingness. (pgs. 386-390, Warfield, Perfectionism
Vol. 1, Warfield, “The German Higher Life Movement in its Chief Exponent.”)
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