Dr. Nathan Busenitz · The Master's Seminary · 58 minutes
Lecture by Dr. Nathan Busenitz, from The Master's Seminary's public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
Nineteenth-century American Christians set out to make society better, and this lecture weighs what happened. The temperance movement won its constitutional amendment and reaped organized crime; the social gospel kept the good works and threw away the gospel that motivates them; and at the stroke of the new century a Kansas Bible school birthed Pentecostalism, a movement whose defining experience failed its own biblical test on day one. Three cautionary tales, one thread: whenever something other than the word of God becomes the authority, the church loses the very thing it hoped to keep.
From a 1785 medical case against intoxicants grew a century of temperance societies, denominational bans, and the Anti-Saloon League, culminating in the Eighteenth Amendment and Prohibition from 1919 to 1933. The result of legislating morality onto an unregenerate society was, in significant part, organized crime and smuggling. The lecture's balance: government rightly enforces morality, but the church's primary calling is the Great Commission, and the redemption of society comes through redeemed sinners, not statutes.
The classroom discussion widens to the Moral Majority era and beyond: the danger is not moral conviction but the eclipse of evangelism by political preoccupation, including partnerships that mute the gospel to preserve coalitions. The story of a man whose Christian friends in politics never shared the gospel with him, lest they lose a political ally, makes the point unforgettably: he was later saved, and rightly offended.
The anti-slavery cause split the nation and split the denominations with it, giving American church history its Northern and Southern Baptists, divided Methodists, and a Southern Presbyterian church. Urbanization, immigration, and labor abuses drew Christian responses: rescue missions, Goodwill, the Salvation Army, the YMCA and YWCA, mercy ministries born from gospel motivation before any government safety net existed.
Out of Ritschl's liberalism came the social gospel: redemption redefined from the sinner's salvation to society's improvement. Washington Gladden, its father, stood downstream of Horace Bushnell's progressive orthodoxy and Nathaniel Taylor's new divinity; Charles Sheldon popularized it through In His Steps, the original home of What Would Jesus Do; and Walter Rauschenbusch, its most influential promoter, published Christianity and the Social Crisis in 1907, with the Federal Council of Churches issuing its Social Creed in 1908. The problem was never the mercy; it was the amputation of the gospel that mercy was meant to adorn.
The lecture sketches the liberal creed: a genial fatherly God, basically good humanity, Christ as ideal example, the atonement as self-sacrificial love, the kingdom as present social progress, and the Bible as inspiring but neither authoritative nor historically true. Harry Emerson Fosdick's sermon Shall the Fundamentalists Win said the quiet part aloud, denying the virgin birth and the substitutionary atonement and doubting any intelligent person believed them, and one liberal pastor declared Christ's blood of no more saving value than Pilate's wash-water.
Within the mainline denominations three parties formed: liberals attacking the fundamentals, fundamentalists defending them, and the group Machen dubbed the indifferentists, believers in the fundamentals who would not act against the liberals for the sake of peace. The majority's indecision decided everything: the liberals captured the denominations and the fundamentalists were expelled, founding new denominations and schools, Westminster Seminary among them, when Machen was forced from Princeton.
The American on-ramps to liberalism line up: Unitarian rationalism, Taylor's new divinity, Bushnell's progressive orthodoxy, Finney's pragmatism, and the social gospel, each a step away from Scripture as final authority, whether toward reason, results, or respectability.
The third great stream of the coming century begins here. Wesleyan holiness teaching carried Wesley's perfectionism forward: a post-conversion crisis, the second blessing, renamed by Fletcher the baptism of the Holy Spirit, flowering in Keswick deeper-life theology and the Nazarene claim of a life without willful sin, a claim, the lecture notes, hard to square with 1 John 1, where those who say they have no sin deceive themselves.
Charles Parham, a Methodist holiness pastor, set his Topeka Bible school students to studying Acts and praying for the baptism of the Spirit. At a midnight prayer meeting welcoming the new century, Agnes Ozman reportedly spoke in Chinese, and other students in a dozen languages. Because Acts 2 plainly describes real languages, Parham announced that missionaries could now skip language school, and roughly a dozen sailed on that conviction, returning disillusioned when their tongues communicated nothing.
Faced with the mismatch, the movement chose to reinterpret Scripture rather than submit the experience to it: tongues were redefined from the languages of Acts 2 to private angelic speech. Surviving samples of Ozman's written tongues, published in the papers of the day, are demonstrably not Chinese. Parham's own later career, failed healings, scandal, a fruitless treasure expedition, and worse, makes him, in the lecture's dry phrase, not the founder you want; but his student William J. Seymour carried the teaching to Los Angeles, where the Azusa Street revival gave the movement its momentum.
The first wave is classical Pentecostalism from 1901. The second, the charismatic renewal from 1960, began when Dennis Bennett, an Episcopalian pastor in Van Nuys, spoke in tongues, and Pentecostal experience swept the spiritually dead mainline denominations and the Roman Catholic Church, which now counts some hundred million charismatic Catholics, a fifth of the movement worldwide. The third wave rose in the 1980s at Fuller Seminary through C. Peter Wagner and John Wimber of the Vineyard, bringing Pentecostal practice into broad evangelicalism, and later spawning the New Apostolic Reformation, with Wagner claiming a restored apostleship and credit for ending a European cattle disease.
The lecture's closing verdict ties the day together: liberalism replaced biblical Christianity with social respectability; the charismatic movement, whatever true believers it contains, replaced biblical authority with experience, belief in the continuation of miraculous gifts combined, as the lecture puts it, with an inability to do any of them for real. In every case the question is the old one from the Enlightenment lectures: what is your authority?
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Key TermsTap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all fourteen are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. The lecture's verdict on Prohibition is that
2. The story of the political operative whose Christian allies never evangelized him illustrates
3. The Northern and Southern branches of the major denominations arose from
4. The father, popularizer, and most influential promoter of the social gospel were, respectively,
5. The social gospel's fatal flaw, per the lecture, was
6. Fosdick's sermon Shall the Fundamentalists Win
7. Machen's indifferentists were
8. Pentecostalism's doctrinal soil was
9. Because they believed the tongues of Acts 2 were real languages, the first Pentecostals
10. When experience failed the biblical test, the movement
11. The Azusa Street revival was led by
12. The second wave began in 1960 when
13. The third wave is associated with
14. The lecture's closing description of the modern charismatic movement is belief in
All fourteen correct. Lecture 25 is complete.
Prohibition won the law and lost the culture. Where do you see churches today investing more hope in legislation than in the gospel, and what would the right balance look like?
The indifferentists believed the truth but would not defend it, and their caution decided the century. When does peacemaking become complicity?
The first Pentecostals rewrote their reading of Scripture to save their experience. What experiences, good or bad, most tempt you to read the Bible through them rather than the other way around?
If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.
The lecture points to Iain Murray on revivalism's legacy, the Strange Fire material on the charismatic movement's history, and Rauschenbusch's Christianity and the Social Crisis as the social gospel's primary text.