Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (154 page)

Some American Churches split over the issue, including the largest, the Methodists and the Baptists, in the 1840s.
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The border was very clearly marked out by state boundaries, with the Quaker fountainhead of abolitionism, Pennsylvania, next to slaveholding Maryland. The tensions exploded into fighting between the Federal government and the Confederate Southern States in 1861, ostensibly not about slavery but about individual states' rights to make decisions on slavery for themselves. The Republican president who led the Federal war effort, Abraham Lincoln, was a rationalist Unitarian who had left behind his childhood strict Calvinist Baptist faith for something more like the cool creeds of the most prominent Founding Fathers, but that did not lessen his commitment to the war as a profoundly Christian moral cause.
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Already the rhetoric of the struggle had been cast in terms of Christian moral crusade, thanks to the barely sane actions of a fervent Calvinist from a family long committed to the abolitionist cause, John Brown.

Brown came from the same generation as Joseph Smith, and he remains just as controversial a figure, though nature endowed him with more potential than Smith for looking like an Old Testament prophet (see Plate 64). Proud of a New England Puritan heritage but unusual among abolitionists in embracing violence for the cause amid the rising tide of violence in the Midwest, he reversed the dictum of the High Priest Caiaphas on the death of Jesus, proclaiming that 'it was better that a score of bad men should die than that one man who came here to make Kansas a Free State should be driven out'. Accordingly in 1856 he was responsible for the kidnapping and murder of five pro-slavery activists, but despite that hardly defensible crime, his Northern canonization as an abolitionist martyr came as a result of his seizure of an undefended Federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry three years later.
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When the raid failed to arouse a black insurrection, Brown sat tight in the arsenal and waited to be martyred, which the Commonwealth of Virginia duly did, for the moment casting oblivion over the crazy character of his campaign. A Massachusetts newspaper editorial picked up the mood: 'no event . . . could so deepen the moral hostility of the people of the free states to slavery as this execution'.
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The Northern soldiers' spontaneously composed verses about John Brown's body, with their unforgettably jaunty camp meeting tune, were turned during the course of the war towards the Boston abolitionist Julia Ward Howe's more decorous but still stirring 'Battle Hymn of the Republic', in which her words about Christ might be reapplied to Brown: 'As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.'
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During the course of the war, a presidential proclamation declared slavery abolished (though only in the Confederate States fighting the Northerners), a move ratified and extended throughout the Union by Congress after the final defeat of the South, in the Thirteenth Amendment to the American Constitution. The suddenness of the change in Southern society, the freeing of four million human beings, was a deep trauma to add to the sheer destructiveness and death of the war itself: the end of an institution which in 1861 had seemed to be flourishing and even expanding. After the Confederate surrender, many angry defeated Southerners took revenge on black Christians, even though they shared their Evangelical faith. They still saw them as inferior beings to whites, and still used the old biblical and Enlightenment arguments to justify themselves. They also viewed their own plight as that of an endangered victim culture. For the prominent Southern Baptist pastor in South Carolina and Alabama E. T. Winkler, that sense justified his defence of the Ku Klux Klan to Northern Baptists in 1872 as an example of necessary 'temporary organizations for the redress of intolerable grievances'. It was unlikely that he would apply the same argument to any temporary organizations which threatened blacks might form.
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White control of the South and the allotting of second-class status to African-Americans were not effectively challenged until the 1950s, and much of the challenge arose from the black Churches, which now remained the only institution through which African-Americans could have any effect on politics. The scars persist in American society to this day.

Yet in the decades after the Civil War, movements arose which eventually gathered together all the varied strands of American religion and culture into a new force: Pentecostalism. Pentecostals take their name from the incident described in the Book of Acts when, at the Jewish feast of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit descended on the Apostles and they 'began to speak in other tongues', so that the huge variety of pilgrims gathered in Jerusalem could all hear them speaking in every language represented in the crowds.
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Their roots are in the extraordinary variety of American Protestant religion and they have no single origin. Echoing in Pentecostalism are the jerking, barking, running 'exercises' of the Kentucky camp meeting, which had their precedent in the extrovert emotion of the Moravians, but there is much more.

Besides the revivals of the years around 1800, a 'Holiness' movement sprang out of the teaching of the early Methodists, proclaiming that the Holy Spirit could bring an intense experience of holiness or sanctification into the everyday life of any believing Christian. While John Wesley had preached a doctrine of Christian perfection, it seems to have been John Fletcher, an Anglican priest of Swiss origins whom Wesley would have liked to have made his successor in leading the English Methodist Connexion, who first popularized a view of sanctification in the Christian life as being effected by a 'baptism with the Holy Ghost'. In the next century, the much-travelling American revivalist Mrs Phoebe Palmer developed these themes into a doctrine expressed in dramatic language of 'entire' or instant sanctification. Mainstream American Methodism did not find it easy to contain the Holiness Movement, which created yet more institutions in order to express itself.
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Reformed Christians, heirs of Jonathan Edwards, were also fascinated by the idea of this 'Baptism of the Holy Spirit' or 'Second Blessing', but their Reformed tradition made them wary of Wesleyan Holiness teaching about the possibility of instant perfection in the Christian life. They made a different contribution. Many continued to proclaim, like Edwards, that Christ would be returning soon in association with a thousand-year rule of perfection. However, they significantly modified his views on the millennium, developing a set of ideas generated by that strange Reformed byway which we have already encountered in British Evangelicalism: the self-styled 'Catholic Apostolic Church' inspired by Edward Irving (see p. 829). In its conferences at Albury the CAC had evolved a tidy scheme of a series of 'dispensations' structuring world history, a scheme just as comprehensive as the pronouncements of Joachim of Fiore; the dispensations would culminate (and that quite soon) in Christ's Second Coming before the millennium. Deeply interested in this dispensationalist scheme was a former Irish Anglican priest, John Nelson Darby, who left his Church for a loose grouping called the Brethren, among whom he became the most prominent leader.

Disillusioned with Anglicanism, Darby saw the future pattern of history in terms of apocalyptic and imminent struggle. He made two crucial assertions about millenarianism. First, in a notable innovation, he looked at Matthew 24.36-44 and saw there Jesus's prophecy of a 'Rapture' in which one man would be taken and one man left.
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Second, completing the 'dispensations', he asserted that Christ would return to reveal the final mystery in this Rapture and lead the saints in the last thousand years, just as the Albury conferences had envisaged. So, to uncover a further specimen of theological in-talk, Darby's picture of Christ's coming was 'premillennial' and not post-millennial like Edwards's (see p. 759), and it did not encourage any sunny Enlightenment optimism about human prospects: only Christ could effectively change the world, not human effort. Premillennialism stressed division and separation within society, to gather in the elect, and its frostiness to Enlightenment projects of social reform contributed to that peculiar process by which 'liberal' has become a word of abuse in the United States, in sharp contrast to its esteem in European society. From the 1870s, this theology was promoted through the series of semi-institutional conferences held at Niagara-on-the-Lake in Canada and Keswick in northern England, and other gatherings connected with them (or often deliberately not connected - premillennialists have a habit of falling out with each other).
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This was the milieu which also bred the defensive proclamations of the Fundamentalist movement (see pp. 862-3).

Amid this clash of Evangelicalisms, there remained the longing of Protestant blacks for full acceptance in American society, a widespread weariness at denominational barriers amid so much shared Evangelical rhetoric and an equally widespread instinct that Protestant emphasis on sermons and the intellectual understanding of the word of God did not give enough room for human emotion. Around 1900, speaking in 'tongues' began playing a major role: in a new enactment of the first Christian Pentecost described in Acts 2, 'tongues' created messages unrecognizable to the uninitiated, and expressing praise or worship to those within the community. The precedent was once more Irving's Catholic Apostolic Church, because it had first emerged from the excitement generated by the 'tongues' exhibited by the Scottish sisters Isabella and Mary Campbell (see p. 829). When Irving broke with the Church of Scotland, his newly founded Church continued the practice of speaking in tongues until the end of the 1870s, although it began fencing the practice around in 1847. The free expression of tongues had been effectively frozen out by an unpredictable development in the Catholic Apostolics' Church life, their penchant for some of the most elaborate liturgical ritual ever invented by a Western Church.
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The Catholic Apostolic Church itself was gradually killed off by its apocalyptic refusal to provide for ordination of subsequent generations of clergy after the first.
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Yet the Catholic Apostolic example was not forgotten and splinter groups from it carried on the tradition of tongues. There were other remarkable outbreaks of the same phenomenon around the world - for instance, in the Russian Empire in the 1850s during the Crimean War - a reflection of Christianity's growing globalization and the effects of sudden change in previously stable religious landscapes.
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Here was an unstable balance of incompatible forces (who could be more incompatible than Arminians and Reformed?). What the Pentecostals did was to kidnap the concept of Spirit Baptism from other Evangelicals in the Holiness Movement and the Keswick Conference tradition. They then made it not a Second Blessing but a
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, beyond conversion and sanctification. This Third Blessing would invariably be signalled by the sign of speaking in tongues. A favourite image of Pentecostals was to see the gift of tongues as the royal flag which flew whenever the king was in residence.
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Merely cataloguing various early emergences of Pentecostal spirit in the US around 1900 would do little to explain what happened. We can pick out particular moments, like the mixed-race congregation with its opportunities for black and female leadership, meeting in a rented former African Methodist church in Azusa Street in Los Angeles from 1906, which has become something of a founding myth to equal the first Pentecost in much writing of Pentecostal history. To give a fuller picture, it would be sensible to enrich the Azusa Street story with an account of the founding role of Charles Parham, the first Church leader to emphasize the central role of the gift of tongues in 'the Third Blessing' in 1901. His work has understandably been left in the shadows by later Pentecostals, considering his overt white racism, his eventual hostility to the Azusa Street events and his last decades of embittered obscurity after accusations of homosexuality were made against him.
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We could perhaps point to coincidental circumstances: for instance, the trauma of the great San Francisco earthquake and fire in one of America's fastest-growing and most excitable states, although the first speaking in tongues in Azusa Street actually came twelve days before the earthquake struck in 1906. More generally, the spread around the world of news about what was happening would hardly have been possible in any previous age before the telegraph, telephone and steamship. It was indeed only two decades since a great event had first been reported all round the world almost immediately: the eruption of the volcano Krakatoa in Indonesia in 1883 was a story in American newspapers only a few hours later.
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Eventually Pentecostalism affected the older Churches too, as some of those drawn to the movement did not leave their existing Churches and formed 'charismatic' groups within them. 'Charisma' means a gift of grace - in this case, a gift of the Holy Spirit. The distinctive feature of Pentecostalism is its emphasis on the Holy Spirit. Historically the Spirit has been the Cinderella of the Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity: bone of contention between Orthodox and Latin West, and frequently representing unpredictability and ecstasy within Christianity. So often the institutional Church has sought to domesticate the Holy Spirit and make it intelligible: the Spirit frees the emotions, goes beyond words. Pentecostalism sets the Spirit free - often with disastrous results, as fallible human beings decide for themselves that they best speak for the Spirit, or fall in love with the power of the Spirit and apply it to their own purposes. But the rise of Pentecostalism and its Charismatic offshoots was one of the greatest surprises of twentieth-century Christianity - in a century when most of the other surprises turned out to be unpleasant.

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Not Peace but a Sword (1914-60)