Okay, thank you.
My talk this afternoon focuses on three Canadian wesleans whose
careers flourish right around the time that Pentecostalism is being born.
And at the end I'm going to offer some brief reflections on what these sort of
snapshots might tell us about experience and theology.
But my main priority today is simply to tell bit of the story of Canadian
Wesleyanism because it's not very well known even by Canadian Wesleyans.
And the three figures I'm going to draw on
are Nelson Burns, Ralph Horner and Nathaniel Burwash.
Now, they're not all necessarily offered as examples to be followed.
In fact, the first one is quite the opposite.
So Nelson Burns lived 1834 to 19 four.
He was a Methodist minister active west of Toronto.
He's notable as the first the leader of
the first holiness body or organization of Canadian origin,
the Canada Association for the Promotion of Holiness, also sometimes known as the
Christian Association, which formed in 1879.
Now, there were holiness groups in Canada, but this is the first Canadian born one.
Okay? It was not originally a denomination.
It was one of many associations that were
working towards sort of special services for the promotion of holiness.
And Burns and his colleagues generated the usual sort of opposition
that other holiness preachers generated from establishment minded Methodists.
But he soon attracted attention and
censure for another reason his controversial teachings on divine
guidance, found in his 1889 book of the same title.
So Burns's discussion of divine guidance
builds upon the kind of dispensational framework that was common among holiness
teachers and can trace its roots back to John Fletcher and Donald Dayton.
Alluded to this this morning.
Fletcher was John Wesley's chosen
successor, who died before John Wesley died, so never got to take up that mantle.
Now, his dispensationalism is not what
we're often familiar with premillennial dispensationalism.
It's not that kind of elaborate scheme.
It was more of a simple division of history into three ages.
The age of the Father, which looked forward to the coming of the Messiah, the
age of the Son, which began with John the Baptist and looked forward to the
outpouring of the Spirit, and then the age of the Spirit, which began at Pentecost
and looked forward to the return of Christ.
So this, as Dr.
Dayton was saying, this has the effect of emphasizing the role of Pentecost in
salvation history, focusing on the Luke Acts literature and emphasizing the role
of the Spirit in the life of the believer and in the church.
Right? So the connections to Pentecostalism are
pretty obvious at this point, as we'll also see with Ralph Horner.
Now, Burns takes up this scheme and uses it in a crude way to provide biblical
support for his extreme views on divine guidance.
So he starts with John 1613, which says
that the Spirit will guide you into all truth.
He says, well, all truth must mean every truth or it means no truth.
Then he looks to biblical history.
And he argues that in every age there were
people who were given specific divine conscious guidance.
And therefore he argues that what we
experience in the dispensation of the Spirit must be superior to, for example,
what Abraham experienced or what David experienced.
It has to be a definite, unmistakable, minute conscious guidance for the believer
on all matters of life, no matter how trivial.
This leads to his definition of divine guidance.
He says it is some intimation to our consciousness by the Holy Spirit whereby
we know that we are taking that course in all things from moment to moment, which is
best possible, which is the best possible under the circumstances, and which is
therefore pleasing to God and satisfactory to ourselves.
Less than this could not be divine guidance.
More than this can hardly be desired.
So, Burns, his understanding of all truth is not speculative, it's practical.
He wants to know with certainty what the
will of God is in every situation so that he can live a holy life.
And he believes the Spirit's presence as a personal guide means that he can, and I
quote with comparative ease, may prove at all times and in all places
what is good and acceptable in the perfect will of God.
So basically what he means is if a person
asks for the Spirit's guidance in a particular situation and they believe
without wavering that they will receive it, they will receive it and they will
have no doubt they will have infallible divine guidance.
This radical position leads Burns to say
that the Spirit might require us to follow him with reckless faith when he guides us
contrary to our notions of Bible teaching or even what is reasonable.
His biographer and successor, Albert Truax, claimed that near the end of his
life, burns even said that it was possible that the Spirit might tell him to end his
life and that that would be right to do so.
But thankfully, he didn't get that message from the Spirit.
Now, we don't need to dwell too long on
Nelson Burns because his ideas are clearly extreme and heterodox.
Maybe even we could say heretical they're
outside the stream of mainstream Christian belief.
And he himself was actually aware of this,
and he took a very sectarian stance and he said basically he knew no one else was
teaching this and it was because the whole church was corrupted and it was the truth.
Now, on the surface, his arguments were quite biblicist, right?
He doesn't start with experience, he
starts with the Bible, and he tries to make his case.
He doesn't explicitly appeal to experience
in the first place, although he does provide experiential examples.
But most importantly, his reading of Scripture leads him to them.
This is the most dangerous kind of
experiential theology, one that proposes infallible direct, individual, inward
guidance by the Spirit beyond reason and beyond even what we think Scripture says.
So why talk about him well, because he's an example from our own Canadian Wesleyan
history of an experiential theology which has gone awry.
So it will not surprise you to discover
that eventually the Guelph Conference of the Methodist Church deposed him in 1894.
Now his association continued on in its efforts, it became increasingly isolated.
And Ralph Horner, you can find comments
from him around the same time disputing Burns's ideas.
But they eventually did establish some
churches here in Ontario and they sort of faded from the scene around 1920.
I don't know exactly what happened to them.
A second example is Ralph Horner.
He's at around the same time that Nelson
Burns is being deposed from the Guelph Conference of the Methodist Church.
Ralph Horner is being deposed from the
Montreal Conference of the Methodist Church.
And they're both holiness revivalists.
So there's some descriptive similarities,
at least, even if not theological similarities.
So he's better known to us in the many of us in the room because he's arguably the
most important figure in Canadian holiness history.
He founded two Holiness denominations the
Holiness Movement Church and the Standard Church of America.
Lesser known is that he was sort of an indirect inspiration for two others, the
Gospel Workers Church, which was started by one of his followers, Frank Goff, who
moved to Gray County northwest of here and started some churches.
And then the Bible Holiness Movement,
which was started in British Columbia, grew out of the ministry of a retired
Salvation Army officer named William Wakefield in 1949.
They adopted Horner's theology quite explicitly.
Now the three Ontario based Hornerite denominations don't exist anymore,
but the churches that he started, some of them still do.
And all of those denominations were folded
into existing holiness denominations, as many of you know.
So the Gospel workers folded into the Nazarene Church in 18 1958.
The Holiness Movement church joined the Free Methodist, 1959.
And in more recent memory, the Standard Church joined the Wesleyans in 2003.
So three of the Wesleyan denominations
that are represented here today are directly impacted by Horner's legacy.
Now, he's also well known to students of
Canadian Pentecostal history because several early Pentecostal leaders and many
early Pentecostal members came out of Hornerite churches.
The theological, and we could talk about some of them if we had time, people like
Robert McAllister, who was a Hornerite evangelist and preacher before he became a
founding father of Pentecostalism in Canada.
So the theological connections, though, are also important because Horner's
preaching and teaching, it had long been filled with the language of Pentecost,
and this was not unique amongst holiness teachers.
And again, Donald Dayton was talking about
this this morning in his book The Theological Roots of of Pentecostalism.
You can trace this out how after about 1850 718, 58, that big revival holiness
teachers increasingly turned to the language of Pentecost
and to the used a Fletcher like dispensational reading of Scripture and
salvation history and the increasingly identified entire sanctification with
baptism in the Holy Spirit as a sort of instantaneous experience.
Now, Horner is part of that trend, but his special emphasis on pentecost is even more
pronounced because he disassociates entire sanctification and spirit baptism.
Instead of a second blessing theology, he teaches three blessings, right,
regeneration, entire sanctification, and then spirit Baptism, which he taught as an
extraordinary anointing for soul winning for evangelism.
And in telling the story of his own
spiritual experience, this comes through very clearly.
He claims that he experienced a definite
conversion, and then five minutes later he was entirely sanctified.
And then sometime later, he had this experience of being baptized in the
Spirit, although at first he didn't know how to interpret it.
But once he put his whole scheme together,
this was how he distinguished the third blessing from the other two.
It is different from regeneration and entire sanctification in every respect.
Regeneration was my salvation from all my actual transgressions of God's law,
and it brought me into the covenant of grace, the adopted child of God.
Entire sanctification destroyed all the
depravity that I inherited from Adam and restored my soul to the image of God.
Now, the anointing that abideth, that's a
term he uses for spirit baptism, is not salvation from my sin, but a qualification
to do wonders and miracles in the name of the Lord.
It repeats and keeps the whole soul in healthful, fresh and vigorous state.
It has been a greater wonder to me than
the conversion of my soul and the entire sanctification of my nature.
As he explains later in a tract defending standard church doctrine, the third
blessing is the tongue of fire, the gift of prophecy to bear witness for Jesus.
Now, this is his most distinctive
teaching, and initially he's distinguishing himself from the
mainstream holiness second blessing teachers.
And he uses both scriptural and experiential arguments to make his point.
I won't dwell on them, but scripturally, he says, well, Jesus experienced spirit
baptism at his baptism, the Spirit descended on him like a dove.
And that wasn't for cleansing, because he didn't need cleansing.
So it can't be about entire sanctification.
And then he suggested that the disciples
were already entirely sanctified before the feast of Pentecost.
He refers to John 16 and 17 when Jesus
talks about the disciples being sanctified.
But he also advances this two blessing critique.
And he suggests that though that many of these holiness people are entirely
sanctified, they obviously don't have the baptism of the Spirit because their
ministry is not bearing the kind of fruit he thinks it should bear.
They're not seeing apostolic results, they're not seeing dramatic revivals.
And therefore, he says, the plain facts or
the simple facts are there are entirely sanctified people who do not seem to have
this apostolic gift of pentecostal anointing.
Now, of course, this third blessing separation of spirit baptism and entire
sanctification paves the way in many respects for pentecostal.
One particular stream of pentecostalism which adopts a three blessing scheme.
However, while that Holiness influenced
stream of Pentecostalism closely approximates Horner's ideas, they
obviously differed from him in their claim that speaking in tongues was the initial
evidence, the biblical evidence of spirit baptism.
So now, after 1906, horner finds himself defending from people on two sides.
He's fighting with the Holiness, people
who teach two blessings, and now he's fighting with the Pentecostals as well.
And again, he uses scriptural and
experiential arguments against the Pentecostals.
So I don't want offending pentecostals here.
I'm just reporting to you what Horner says about the Pentecostals, okay?
And this was within the heat of battle in
which you stole a lot of his members, so he was a little bit upset about that.
So first, he turns to the prophecy of
Joel, chapter two, and he argues that the three things that are promised in Joel
chapter two are prophecies, visions, and dreams.
So he says, well, the gift of tongues was
given at Pentecost, but that's not really part of Pentecost.
That's just something different.
And then he makes the distinction between speaking in other tongues and being
understood, as you see in Acts chapter two, and speaking in unknown tongues and
not being understood, as you see in one corinthians.
And he says, Those that teach that speaking in tongues is the evidence of the
Pentecost are not understood by those that hear them, and therefore they have not
received what the apostles received when they were understood at Pentecost.
So he says he has no prejudice against speaking in tongues, but he disputes that
this is, in fact, the biblical evidence or the initial evidence.
The Pentecost argues Horner, is the tongue
of fire, but the tongue of fire is not speaking in an unknown language.
It's prophecy, which means the power to preach to the masses.
And so he says, if they would judge themselves by the word of God, they would
know that tongues was not what the apostles had on the day of Pentecost.
And then he turns to a similar
experiential argument that he used against His Holiness colleagues,
and he says, their ministry, he means the Pentecostals, who he calls the advocates,
their ministry does not bear the apostolic fruitfulness that should be expected of
one who has experienced this true Pentecostal baptism of fire.
And he says, Well, I've had people in my own services speaking in tongues for 20
years, and they haven't been great revival leaders.
So that's not what that gift is about.
Now, I'm not sure if he dropped that claim in later years as the Pentecostal revival
took off and became this great evangelistic force.
As I continue to read Horner, I'll be trying to see if he keeps that going.
This is from right around the initial
response to Pentecostalism so experientially.
He says, they're looking for the wrong kind of evidence.
So here's a quote from Horner, which is from right around 1907.
I haven't been able to track down the exact date.
Here's what he says.
The man who takes sound, fire, prophecy and other tongue visions or dreams for the
evidence of Pentecost is not yet endued with power from on high for soul winning.
The whole of them are no evidences.
These are all right in their places, but
the man who has the Pentecost has more than the whole of them together.
He has the Holy Ghost giving him divine evidence that he is anointed for service.
And furthermore, their claim that speaking in tongues is the initial evidence itself
shows that they do not have this true Pentecostal experience.
So he says, Those who call it the evidence
of Pentecost prove to us that they do not know what Pentecost is by experience.
If they had the Pentecost, they would know
it to be greater than speaking in tongues, because they have not the Pentecost.
They can be deceived by false teachers.
They can be made to believe that speaking in tongues is the Pentecost.
Now, on the one hand, it's a much more moderate claim that Burns was making.
But there's a similar logic here about the spirit guiding people into the
truth, that only people who have this gift can understand it.
And these people obviously don't have it because they don't seem to understand it,
which means they don't, of course, agree with him, as did Burns.
Horner.
He tries to just start with a simple reading of Scripture and then use
experience to confirm his reading of Scripture.
But clearly, he's using his own experience as a lens through which he's reading it.
Now, to be clear, I'm not equating Horner's ideas with Burns's ideas.
Horner is much more Wesleyan than burns.
He generally follows a fairly standard Wesleyan holiness perspective on salvation
as it was understood at that time, except for his third blessing ideas.
But there are some similarities there that are worth pondering.
My third and final example is Nathaniel Burwash, and he is a Wesleyan of a very
different stripe, but he's of the same era as Burns and Horner.
And in fact, Burwash was the dean of
theology at Victoria College in Coburg when Horner studied there as a student.
So he was his teacher.
And Burwash, he's a towering figure in
Canadian Methodist history and mainline Methodist history.
Indeed, he's a significant figure in Ontario history in general, because he
played an important role at the University of Toronto and the university system here.
He would eventually become the president of Victoria College, overseeing its move.
It was originally in Coburg.
He moved it to Toronto, federated it with the University of Toronto,
and that's not to mention other various roles that he played in civic and other
organizations and his extensive influence as a churchman.
He's arguably the most important Canadian Methodist theologian.
Now, he could be described as an
evangelical progressive, or I've even seen him and others from this era described as
evangelical liberals, although that seems like an oxymoron to people today.
But you have to understand, he was living
in a transitional time in church history in Canada.
He self identifies as an evangelical, and even he self identifies with revivalism.
And yet he's plugged into intellectual
currents of his day, and he's open to new ideas.
And he's trying to reconcile Christianity
with emerging ideas from science, including Darwinism, and he's open to the
ideas of Biblical criticism, which more conservative Evangelicals were not.
So he's trying to harmonize a certain
brand of evangelical revivalism and contemporary intellectual trends.
So as a window into the role that
experience plays in his thought, I want to talk about his 1912 defense of church
union between the Methodist, Presbyterian, and Congregationalist churches.
And this is the union that eventually produces the United Church of Canada.
So he published these four articles in the
Christian Guardian in 1912 defending the proposal for Christian unity.
So he begins with Scripture, with John,
chapter 17, as is often the case when we start to talk about Christian unity,
arguing that it must be spiritual and visible in order to achieve its
evangelistic purpose, that the world may believe right.
But Burwash's appeal for church union also rests upon a reading of the national
Canadian experience and personal Christian experience, sort of two levels.
So on this national level, he begins with his article from January 31, 1912,
discussing three signs of the times that point to why the Methodists and
Congregationalists and Presbyterians should join together.
And the first is that these churches themselves had experienced internal
reunions in the 19th century, and he believes God had blessed them.
So if you know Methodist history in Canada
in the 19th century, it's a bewildering variety of different names and
organizations that are merging and they're splitting, and it's very confusing.
You need a flow chart to figure out all the different Methodist groups.
But by the 1880s, they all mostly had come
together except for the except for the free Methodist.
They had all come together to form one main Methodist church.
And he says, God bless those efforts.
Similar things happen with the Presbyterians.
Secondly, revivalism, he says, is this common thread that is drawing together all
of these Protestants from these three denominations.
Now, we don't think of mainline
Protestants as being revivalistic today, but they were at this time and in the time
before leading up to this through the 19th century.
And so, he says, this has led to an almost
complete unity of feeling and expression amongst us.
And thirdly, he identifies a continuing influx of immigrants from non evangelical
backgrounds as this profound challenge to the Canadian church.
And he says we need to get past our unholy rivalries and unite to evangelize the
nation with all these immigrants who are coming in.
So that's the one sort of providential
reading of Canadian history which is kind of experiential.
But then he emphasizes also the personal
experience of salvation as a foundation for Christian unity.
And this is connected to the second point I was just talking about with revivalism
and how Revivalism was drawing together these different kinds of Protestants.
So he's answering objections that union with Presbyterians and Congregationalists
is going to mean abandoning Methodist distinctives.
And he says, well, this is what Methodist distinctives are.
Was not this the characteristic quality of methodism from its beginning?
Its emphasis on a definite religious
experience of salvation, of faith by faith?
He continues, has it not lived and grown by this fundamental experience ever since?
And is this not the experience?
Is not this experience the fundamental
thing today with a Congregational Moody, with a Presbyterian Drummond as well as
with a Methodist Sanki or Hugh Price Hughes?
Believe me, brethren, this it is which we are setting before us
as the end of our united efforts for Canada today.
And while that is the case, we shall not
get it far away from the essential quality of methodism.
So the personal conversion was at the
center here and he believed this is what the United Church was going to be about.
So he claims there is this sort of inner
oneness of spirit which made it easier for them to find
commonalities in doctrine and church polity.
Now, the significance of this definite
experience of conversion through repentance and faith as the essence of
Christianity is not only evident from the way he saw it as having a unifying
character, but also he saw it as a barrier to unity with other Christians, namely the
Catholic and Anglo Catholic Sacramentarians, as he calls them.
He says between what he calls the Evangelical Protestants that's his camp
and these churches, there is no hope of unity.
They differ so widely that they scarcely
acknowledge the validity of the Christianity of each the other.
I think it's significant here that Burwash does not consider the common core of
classical Christian theology on Trinity and incarnation to be a basis for unity,
which he shares this with his Catholic brothers and sisters.
What's more important is this evangelical
experience of conversion and pursuit of holiness.
So he's an interesting figure because he's trying to hold together this vision
of evangelical essentials while remaining open to the intellectual trends of his day
and trying to be up to date with the culture.
And his vision of Christianity is
certainly experiential, although if you read his manual Theology, you'll see he's
very careful to try and propose an experiential Christianity that's grounded
in divine revelation and subject to verification by reason.
And he was also very careful to keep the message of personal evangelical conversion
at the center of his vision for the church's mission in Canadian society.
And that prioritization is lost as the
United Church continues into the 20th century.
While he was successful in helping to lead
this charge towards church union, the careful balance of revivalist spirituality
and intellectual openness that he had tried to preserve would not hold for
future generations in the United Church as we all know.
So these are really three snapshots.
What can we say out of them?
And I offer these just sort of as points
of discussion, and I'm interested to know what all of you might think as you've been
listening to me talking about these examples.
First, as it's been said a number of times today, the word experience is a rather
slippery word, and we need to stop and reflect on what
kind of experience we're talking about in relation to these three examples.
And it's not surprising that all three
think of experience primarily in personal, private, and passive terms.
That is, experience.
And this is sort of our default category as well.
When someone uses the word experience, we
think it's something that happens to us, and it's about our internal sort of
processing of that thing that's happening to us.
And once we frame experience in that way as a personal, private, passive
reality, we're getting into dangerous territory for theology because
we're getting into very subjective interpretations of reality.
And Nelson Burns, I think, just
illustrates vividly what is a more general problem.
And at this point, I think it's worth contrasting this understanding of
experience with John Wesley's use of the term.
Timothy Crutcher, who's already been
mentioned today as well, in his book Crucible of Life, argues rather
convincingly that Wesley's understanding of experience was primarily corporate,
active and public, rather than personal, passive and private.
So when Wesley appeals to experience, he's not appealing to experiences.
He doesn't even use that word.
He's appealing to the collective
experience or wisdom of the Christian people.
It's active in that it's about trying to figure things out and learning by doing.
And it's public in that it's meant to be shared.
And that's why testimony was so important for Wesley, because it's a way of sharing
experience and verifying your experience against that of other people.
In short, I think I could say Wesley's understanding of experience, it's more
like the experience of an apprentice than the experience of a mystic, right?
It's practical wisdom that you learn through doing.
And if you think of experience in that way, that does go a long way towards
warding off some of the problems that we have with experience and theology.
Second, I think it's worth dwelling for a
moment on the question of the relationship between Scripture and experience.
As I've noted, both Burns and Horner, they're sort of simplistically trying to
just argue from Scripture, thinking that they can do that and make a simple case
and then verify it from their own experiences.
But both of them are obviously reading Scripture through their own experiences.
And while we generally today have a more sophisticated approach to Scripture than
they did, I think sometimes we do share that a kind of naivete which is similar.
We all want to think our theology begins with Scripture.
We all want to think we just start with
Scripture, and then experience comes in later.
But the truth is that,
again, as we've already been talking about, we all come to the reading of
Scripture with our own experience and our own framework and our own life experience.
And our reading of Scripture is inevitably affected by that.
Now, it's not to say we can only read Scripture through experiential eyes.
It's not to say that experience is somehow an equal authority to Scripture,
but we have to be aware of the ways that Scripture is.
We're reading Scripture through the filter of our experience.
Otherwise we're simply going to be a lot
more open to be the bias of our experience.
If we think we're not biased, right?
We'll be more susceptible to that same bias.
So rather, I think we recognize that we come to Scripture with experience.
We want Scripture to interpret our experience so that over time, as that
collective wisdom gains steam, when we come to the reading of Scripture, we're
bringing a rich resource of Scripture formed experience to the table.
So then finally, a point that builds on the first two and
builds on what Peter Newman was just saying as well.
Since we can't help but read Scripture
from an experiential perspective or bias, it's essential that we examine our reading
of Scripture in the light of the collective wisdom of the church.
This is another way of saying that all three of the people I was talking about
today could use a greater grounding in theological tradition.
And the problem, again, is most pronounced in Nelson Burns.
But it's Horner and Burwash evidence in other ways themselves.
If you think of Horner, the uniqueness and
originality of his third blessing teaching should have given him pause.
No one else has thought of it this way.
That should make you sort of hold your
horses and wonder and test it against the views of others.
Burwash certainly had a better grasp on
the history of doctrine, but he tended to think he was so open to doctrinal change
that he didn't guard enough against the changes that would come later.
Now, he was himself was fairly
conservative, but he left the door open for more radical changes.
And I suspect that the strong anti
Catholic attitudes of both mainline Methodists and Holiness Methodists at
Wesleyans at this time contributed to this suspicion of tradition.
And finally so where does this all lead us?
I would say not necessarily back to the quadrilateral, but
it leads us, I hope, towards an experiential Christianity that has to be
normed by the unnormed norm of Scripture as interpreted by a guild of apprentices
who are learning from the wisdom of the saints, past and present.
Thank you.