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‘Signs and Wonders That Lie’: Unlikely Polemical Outbursts Against the Early Pentecostal Movement in Britain
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
The phenomenon of speaking in tongues was manifested at All Saints’ Parish Church, Monkwearmouth, Sunderland, during the autumn of 1907. This outbreak rapidly became the object of criticism and opposition from a variety of sources, but one of the most vehement, if unexpected, emanated from an organization known as the Pentecostal League of Prayer. This non-denominational body had been established by Reader Harris Q. C. in 1891, and integral to its aims was the promotion of ‘Holiness’ teaching which advocated an experience of sanctification distinct from, and subsequent to, conversion. A network of branches had been established across England, and the Revd Alexander A. Boddy, vicar of All Saints’, had been actively involved in its Sunderland branch prior to 1907. Harris, who was in Sunderland at the time of this new departure in All Saints’, objected to the identification of the ‘gift of tongues’ with what he perceived to be genuine Pentecostal experience. One of the principal ironies of the situation is that his opposition was promulgated in the Pentecostal League’s periodical Tongues of Fire. It is contested that this local controversy represents not only a curious chapter in the history of Protestant polemics against the miraculous, but that it embodied broader ramifications than might first appear, not least in the impetus generated toward the establishment of distinctive Pentecostal identity and orthodoxy.
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References
1 ‘Revival Scenes: Alleged Healing’, Daily Chronicle, 5 October 1907, 6; a more reverential account of ‘the strange figure’ at the centre of the Welsh Revival of r 904–6 is to be found in D. M. Phillips, Evan Roberts: the Great Welsh Revivalist and his Work (7th edn, London, 1923).
2 ‘Revival Scenes’, 6. In the memoir which he later compiled, Barratt commented on the ‘sweet epithets’ to which he had been subjected, see T. B. Barratt, When the Fire Fell and An Outline of My Life (Oslo, 1927), 155.
3 Gee, Donald, The Pentecostal Movement: a Short History and an Interpretation for British Readers (London, 1941), 180 Google Scholar. This was for many years the sole significant work which dealt with British Pentecostalism’s expansion during its early decades. A denominational leader and chronicler, Gee has been described as ‘Pentecostalism’s most penetrating thinker and most prodigious writer’, see Ian M. Randall, Evangelical Experiences: a Study in the Spirituality of English Evangelicalism, 1918–1939 (Carlisle, 1999), 210.
4 Nils Bloch-Hoell, The Pentecostal Movement: its Origins, Development and Distinctive Character (Oslo and London, 1964), 75.
5 Alexander Boddy is the best documented leader of early British Pentecostalism, a movement whose genesis has attracted scant scholarly attention. See Edith Blumhofer, ‘Alexander Boddy and the Rise of Pentecostalism in Great Britain’, Pneuma: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies 8:1 (Spring 1986), 31–40; Peter Lavin, Alexander Boddy: Pastor and Prophet (Sunderland, 1986); Martin Robinson, ‘The Charismatic Anglican – Historical and Contemporary: a Comparison of the Life and Work of Alexander Boddy (1854–1930) and Michael C. Harper’, unpublished M. Litt. thesis, University of Birmingham, 1976.
6 See Boddy’s ‘Tongues in Sunderland: the Beginnings of a Pentecost for England’, unpublished pamphlet from the Donald Gee Centre for Charismatic and Pentecostal Research, Mattersey Hall, Doncaster [hereafter: DGC].
7 Wacker, Grant, Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (Cambridge, MA, and London, 2001), 179 Google Scholar.
8 Steven J. Land, Pentecostal Spirituality: a Passion for the Kingdom (Sheffield, 2001), 207; this aspect has been explored in Melvin E. Dieter, ‘Wesleyan-Holiness Aspects of Pentecostal Origins’, in Vinson Synan, ed., Aspects of Pentecostal-Charismatic Origins (Plainfield, NJ, 1975), 55–80, and in Donald W. Dayton, Theological Roots of Pentecostalism, Studies in Evangelicalism 5 (Metuchen, NJ, and London, 1987), 65–84.
9 Dieter, ‘Wesleyan-Holiness Aspects’, 60.
10 For a comprehensive treatment of the British situation see David Bebbington, Holiness in Nineteenth-Century England: the 1998 Didsbury Lectures (Carlisle, 2000).
11 This development has been documented in Donald W. Dayton, ‘From Christian Perfection to the “Baptism in the Holy Spirit”’, in Aspects of Pentecostal-Charismatic Origins, 39–54; for a British perspective on this ‘pneumatological shift’, see Randall, Evangelical Experiences, 30–3.
12 Andrew Murray, The Full Blessing of Pentecost: the One thing Needful (London, 1908; repr. 1944); for bibliographical details relating to the Holiness Movement in America and Britain, see Charles Edwin Jones, A Guide to the Study of the Holiness Movement (Metuchen, NJ, 1974).
13 Gee, The Pentecostal Movement, 4.
14 Ibid.
15 Mary Reader Hooker, Adventures of an Agnostic: Life and Letters of Reader Harris Q.C. (London, 1959), III.
16 Hooker, Adventures of an Agnostic, 116.
17 ‘Pentecostal League Centre Meetings’, Tongues of Fire, February 1905, 11.
18 ‘The Annual Meetings’, Tongues of Fire, June 1905,3.
19 Jack Ford, What the Holiness People Believe: a Mid-Century Review of Holiness Teaching among the Holiness Groups of Britain, J. D. Drysdale Memorial Lecture (Birkenhead, 1954), 51.
20 ‘The Pentecostal Baptism’, Tongues of Fire, June 1905, 7.
21 Ibid. It is interesting to note that in his survey Charles Booth presented an unflattering assessment of Harris and his modus operandi: see Booth, Charles, Life and Labour of the People of London, 3rd ser., Religious Influences, 7 vols (London, 1902), 5: 222–5 Google Scholar.
22 Speaking in Tongues: Rival Pentecostals’, Sunderland Echo, 2 October 1907, 4.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid.
29 Mary N. Garrard, Mrs. Penn-Lewis: a Memoir (London, 1930; repr. Bournemouth, 1947), 178, 181, 194; Mrs Penn-Lewis co-wrote a book with the central figure of the Welsh Revival in which they advocated a ‘Holiness’ conception of the ‘Baptism of the Holy Spirit’: Jessie Penn-Lewis and Evan Roberts, War on the Saints (3rd edn, Leicester, 1922), 282–5.
30 DGC, Jessie Penn-Lewis, Letter to Alexander A. Boddy, 9 November 1907.
31 DGC, Jessie Penn-Lewis, Letter to Alexander A. Boddy, 28 October 1907.
32 Wacker uses the term ‘radical evangelicals’ to incorporate both principal American Holiness groupings, ‘Holiness Wesleyans’ and ‘Higher Life fundamentalists’: see his Travail of a Broken Family: Evangelical Responses to Pentecostalism in America, 1906–1916’, JEH 47 (1996), 505–28, 506–8, 510.
33 Jessie Penn-Lewis, ‘An Hour of Peril’, The Christian, 9 January 1908, 12.
34 ‘Sunderland: A Joyful Gathering’, Confidence, December 1908, 7–8.
35 ‘Speaking in Tongues: Rival Pentecostals’, 4.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid.
38 Ibid.
39 Oswald Chambers, ‘Tongues and Testing’, Tongues of Fire, January 1908, 3.
40 Reader Harris, ‘The Gift of Tongues’, Tongues of Fire, November 1907, 1.
41 Chambers, ‘Tongues and Testing’, 3.
42 Ibid.
43 Robinson, ‘The Charismatic Anglican’, 63.
44 David Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: a History from the 1730s to the 10.80s (Grand Rapids, MI, 1992), 198, 178–9.
45 On the growth of Pentecostalism, see David Martin, Tongues of Fire: the Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America (Oxford, 1993) and idem, Pentecostalism: the World their Parish (Oxford, 2002); Harvey Cox, Fire from Heaven: the Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the Twenty-First Century (London, 1996).
46 Confidence, edited by Boddy between 1908 and 1926, has been described as ‘the official organ’ and for a number of years ‘the authoritative voice of British Pentecostal leadership’: see Gee, The Pentecostal Movement, 45–6. It has more recently been the subject of doctoral research by Malcolm John Taylor, ‘Publish and Be Blessed: a Case Study in Early Pentecostal Publishing History, 1908–1926’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Birmingham, 1994.
47 ‘A London Declaration. The Baptism in the Holy Ghost: What we teach concerning the Evidence and the Results’, Confidence, December 1909,287–8.
48 Ibid.
49 Wacker, ‘Travail of a Broken Family’, 524.
50 See T. Rennie Warburton, ‘Organisation and Change in a British Holiness Movement’, in Bryan R. Wilson, ed., Patterns of Sectarianism: Organisation and Ideology in Social and Religious Movements (London, 1967), 106–37,109.
51 R. T. Hackett, ‘Heart Purity as a Necessary Preparation for Pentecost’, Confidence, July 1912,156.
52 ‘Croydon: Times of Blessing’, Confidence, March 1912, 67.
53 ‘Pentecostal Items’, Confidence, March 1913, 61.
54 A A. Boddy, ‘The Pentecostal Movement: the Story of its Beginnings at Sunderland and its Present Position in Great Britain’, Confidence, August 1910, 194. Although Boddy retrospectively refers to this pamphlet, no copies appear to have survived. The present writer has no reason to contradict Robinson’s observation that ‘unfortunately, to date, none are extant’. See ‘The Charismatic Anglican’, 42.
55 Luke 24, 49 and Acts 1, 8.
56 Oswald Chambers, He Shall Glorify Me: Talks on the Holy Spirit and Other Themes (London, 1941), 22, and idem, If Thou Wilt Be Perfect: Talks on Spiritual Philosophy (London, 1939), 16–18.
57 Ford, What the Holiness People Believe, 27, 42–51.
58 Wacker, ‘Travail of a Broken Family’, 509.
59 Ibid., 505–6, 526–7.
60 T. B. Barratt, ‘The Truth about the Pentecostal Revival: Lecture given by Pastor T. B. Barratt in Zurich, London, and elsewhere’, unpublished pamphlet now at the Pentecostal Archive, Regents Theological College, Nantwich, Cheshire [1908], 15.
61 Gee, The Pentecostal Movement, 180–1. Boddy never promoted or envisaged the establishment of a Pentecostal denomination or ecclesiastical structure; see his article ‘Unity, not Uniformity’, Confidence, March 1911, 60. This transition would only occur when his influence had considerably waned in the 1920s. On the origins and development of the Assemblies of God, see William K. Kay, Inside Story: a History of the British Assemblies of God (Mattersey, 1990) and idem, Pentecostak in Britain (Carlisle, 2000).