{"id":4061,"date":"2015-02-18T19:49:05","date_gmt":"2015-02-18T19:49:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dminlgp\/?p=4061"},"modified":"2015-02-18T19:49:05","modified_gmt":"2015-02-18T19:49:05","slug":"what-goes-around-comes-around","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/what-goes-around-comes-around\/","title":{"rendered":"What goes around comes around"},"content":{"rendered":"

I enjoy reading about Christian history, even this recent history: \u201cEvangelicalism in modern Britain, a history from the 1730 \u2013 1980s<\/em><\/span>\u201d. It provides a context to the church today, and lessons to be learned. I jumped in with an open mind reading the characteristics of Evangelicalism in chapter one, and I was hooked \u2013 \u201cYep, I am one.\u201d[i]<\/a> But I soon came to chapter five, concerning a movement that is near to my heart and to my experience, for better and for worse. The topic was \u201cHoliness unto the Lord: Keswick and its Context in the Later Nineteenth Century.\u201d[ii]<\/a><\/p>\n

I grew up in northeastern New Jersey and my dad pastored a Presbyterian church. Dad was a Roman Catholic-bashing evangelical protestant with a private passion for experiencing God. When I was a kid in the 70s, we lived frugally and dad was a master of frugality; he was tight! So it stood out in my memory that he spent the money every year to go to a convention called Keswick, from which he would always return energized. This was America\u2019s Keswick but with the same holiness roots, the message of the \u201chigher life,\u201d or more familiar to me, the \u201cvictorious Christian life.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 As a kid I knew nothing about it, or what influence it might have had on my dad. I did, however, after my own teenage conversion, attend Columbia Bible College and Seminary. The president was Robertson McQuilkin, one of America\u2019s leading advocates of the victorious Christian Life, a strain of the holiness movement with its British roots in Methodism, and a devotee of the Keswick message.<\/p>\n

McQuilkin is one of my all-time favorite Christ-followers\u2014I want to be like him\u2014but as a college student \u201cthe victorious Christian life\u201d sounded like unrealistic perfectionism. But on the other hand, McQuilkin\u2019s spirit, his tone, and his actions were so full of the Spirit I couldn\u2019t help but be drawn by the person even if I didn\u2019t understand\u2014or was put off\u2014by the message.<\/p>\n

I had no special attraction to the holiness movement, with all its talk about and Spirit\u2019s further work after conversion. Nor did I care all that much about second blessings, and baptisms of the Spirit; I did, however, have a passion for overseas missions and found myself drawn toward the Christian and Missionary Alliance. After college my wife and I become part of a C&MA church and I was drawn further in by the pastor\u2019s passion for Jesus. While being discipled by Pastor Doug, I found his thinking moved towards union with God, intimacy, communion. While he never claimed to be sinless, he seemed to talk about his spirit as being in communion with the Holy Spirit. Who doesn\u2019t want that kind of communion?<\/p>\n

I soon moved towards a full-time ministry in the C&MA; in preparing for ministry in this denomination I studied the founder A.B. Simpson, a former Presbyterian who advocated the crisis of sanctification, a second work of the Spirit that resulted in a deeper surrender and holier life with victory of sin and sickness. He was very much a leader in the American holiness movement, as well as a leader in bringing the gospel around the world. Others would take the mantle for A.B. Simpson in the C&MA family, like A.W Tozer, who didn\u2019t focus so much on sinless perfection but on communion with God, and the righteousness of Christ in us.<\/p>\n

Whether it be my dad, my Bible college president, my mentor and friend Doug and influential men in the history of my denomination, they all seemed to have been influenced by and a participant in this Keswick – Holiness movement, not unlike the Quakers and Brethren. Might I be so bold, with the view of a skeptical insider, (albeit one who has benefited greatly by this movement) to offer a criticism? Setting aside the rather volatile question of whether or not, or to what extent, sinless living, post-conversion and prior to glorification is possible, the holiness movement should really be about something else altogether. Of course it\u2019s partially about the empowering of the Spirit to live our lives as God would have us live. It\u2019s also about spirit-to-Spirit communion. Whether it\u2019s Wesleyan, Brethren or Quaker there is a deeper life with Christ that is at the heart of the spiritual walk. My criticism comes by way of Krish Kandiah\u2019s book \u201cParadoxology,\u201d where he reminds us that God is both distant and close, that we\u2019re called to both intimacy and reverence that while Moses was called to come close to God and listen to him he was also told to take off his sandals and come no further.[iii]<\/a><\/p>\n

Ironically, \u2018The holiness<\/strong> movement\u2019 may have lost sight of God\u2019s holiness. Maybe we\u2019ve over-emphasized the immanence of God to the detriment of the transcendence of God. The holiness discussed throughout Bebbington\u2019s history on Keswick is the holiness of Christian living, the approach being this: experience the immanence of God and we become holy by faith (the imputed righteousness of Christ). What\u2019s being ignored is the unapproachable glory and burning holiness of God. If the holiness movement would take up the holiness of God, or the transcendence of God, and hold it in tension with what they already do so well, the immanence of God \u2013 I think we would find new fervor for this generation.<\/p>\n

[i]<\/a> David W Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: a History from the 1730s to the 1980s<\/em> (London: Routledge, 1989), 2-17.<\/p>\n

[ii]<\/a> Ibid, 151-180.<\/p>\n

[iii]<\/a> Krish Kandiah, Paradoxology: Why Christianity Was Never Meant to Be Simple<\/em> (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2014), 35-60.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I enjoy reading about Christian history, even this recent history: \u201cEvangelicalism in modern Britain, a history from the 1730 \u2013 1980s\u201d. It provides a context to the church today, and lessons to be learned. I jumped in with an open mind reading the characteristics of Evangelicalism in chapter one, and I was hooked \u2013 \u201cYep, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[12,607,608],"class_list":["post-4061","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bebbington","tag-holiness-movement","tag-keswick","cohort-lgp5"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4061","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/40"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4061"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4061\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4062,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4061\/revisions\/4062"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4061"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4061"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4061"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}