The Missionary Era · 1835-1906 · N. America, Britain
The Holiness Movement
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About This Movement
Methodism had always taught that God could make a believer actually holy in this life, and in the 1830s a New York doctor's wife named Phoebe Palmer took that teaching, simplified it into a step anyone could take at once, and began hosting a Tuesday afternoon meeting in her parlour that ran for decades and drew bishops as well as neighbours. From that parlour the Holiness movement spread through camp meetings organized from 1867, through the Guide to Holiness and a flood of cheap devotional print, and across the Atlantic, where it took a quieter and more Anglican form at the Keswick Convention from 1875. Because sanctification had to be testified to out loud, the movement's native literature is ordinary people's accounts of their own experience rather than the writings of its leaders. Women were prominent throughout, and its single most remarkable voice belongs to Amanda Berry Smith, born enslaved, who preached in England, India and West Africa and wrote her own life.
In Its Own Record
Formed From
- The Methodist Revival — The Holiness movement understood itself as recovering Wesley's own doctrine of sanctification.
Sources
- Phoebe Palmer: The Way of Holiness (1843), Entire Devotion to God (1845), Promise of the Father (1859); the Tuesday Meeting records (from 1835); her Guide to Holiness editorship (primary) — Palmer's own writings, including a book-length defense of women's ministry.
- The testimony literature: Guide to Holiness (1839-); love-feast and camp-meeting testimonies; National Camp Meeting Association records (Vineland 1867, Manheim 1868) (primary) — Testimony was this movement's characteristic genre: ordinary believers testifying to their own experience of sanctification. Some of these editions and archives are not easy to access.
- Amanda Berry Smith, An Autobiography: The Story of the Lord's Dealings with Mrs. Amanda Smith, the Colored Evangelist (1893) (primary) — A formerly enslaved woman's own account of sanctification, transatlantic evangelism, and the racism she met inside the movement - one of the strongest firsthand voices from inside it.
- The transatlantic/Keswick wing: William Arthur, The Tongue of Fire (1856); Hannah Whitall Smith, The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life (1875) and letters; Keswick Convention records (1875-) (primary) — This covers the movement's British, Keswick wing. Robert Pearsall Smith's public scandal and withdrawal from ministry is part of that record and worth noting when weighing these sources.
- Melvin Dieter, The Holiness Revival of the Nineteenth Century (1980; 2nd ed. 1996), with Vinson Synan, The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition (Eerdmans, 2nd ed. 1997) (secondary)
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 8, 'The growth of voluntary religion' (Bebbington) with 'Women preachers and the new orders' (Holmes & O'Brien); ch. 22 (Noll) beside them (reference) — Exact chapter numbers for the Bebbington and Holmes & O'Brien chapters could not be confirmed; the Noll chapter is chapter 22.