Dr. Leonard Allen・04/16/19

This is the first article in a series of three articles by Dr. Leonard Allen of Lipscomb University on the Holy Spirit in Churches of Christ. I hope you will follow this series closely. Part 2 will post May 4. Part 3 will post June 8.

All of this is a lead up to Lipscomb's Summer Celebration that is happening June 26-28. Please check out what is going on at Lipscomb with this event. Churches of Christ are in desperate need to reconnect with their history on the Holy Spirit (it is not as uniform as some might think), which is why we are posting this series of articles. We also must get back in touch with a biblical view of the person and work of the Holy Spirit from the Bible itself.

I will be presenting a class this year and I cannot begin to tell you how excited I am about that!

Please click this link to get more info on Summer Celebration and their emphasis on the Holy Spirit this June.

Here is Part 1 of Dr. Allen's series on the Holy Spirit for Wineskins,

From Revival Ridge to Bible Deism Valley:

TheOdd History of the Holy Spirit among Churches of Christ

Part1, Cane Ridge and the Spirit’s Fire

By Leonard Allen

Iwas raised in a very conservative church that had virtually lost the languageof the Spirit. That didn’t mean, of course, that we had entirely lost the HolySpirit—for there were signs all around, as I look back, of the Spirit’spresence in our community. But the “grammar” of the Spirit was missing. Almostentirely.

Dallas Willard (and before him, J.D. Thomas) gave a name to the doctrine of the Spirit on which I was raised:Bible deism—the view that one “experiences” the Spirit solely throughimplanting the words, the ideas, of the Bible in one’s mind. This doctrine emerged,not at the beginning of the Restoration Movement that gave rise to modernChurches of Christ, but a few decades into the story. So when we trace thedoctrine of the Holy Spirit, we find an odd history: beginnings at Cane Ridge(1801)—“America’s Pentecost”—and eventually, after some twists and turns, aresidence in Bible deism valley.

Cane Ridge and the Spirit’s Fire

In August 1801, Barton Stonepresided over the famous Cane Ridge Revival in central Kentucky. Attendanceestimates ranged from 10,000 to over 20,000 (at a time when the population ofnearby Lexington, Kentucky's largest town, was less than 1,800). So manyexperienced intense emotional and physical responses, falling to the ground,that some portions of the grassy ridge looked like a battlefield scattered withbodies. Many were converted.

Theserevival gatherings usually have been called camp meetings. But that term ismisleading. They were actually communion festivals following a two-hundred-year-oldtradition rooted deeply in Scotch-Irish Presbyterianism.[i] Seekingto imitate the New Testament observance, the church leaders served communion onlong dinner tables set up in the aisles of the church buildings. At a largecommunion service as many as ten waves of communicants might fill the tables, andthe communion meal might last all day.

Bythe mid 1600s this communion service had expanded into a three to five-dayevent. It usually began on Friday or Saturday with intense preparation sermons.Ministers warned people about coming to the table unprepared, without purehearts. They carefully screened candidates and gave admission tokens to thosejudged fit to commune. Following the all-day communion service on Sunday, athanksgiving service on Monday ended the event.

Thecommunion festivals became the highlight of the church year. For seriousbelievers they were times of intense self-examination and spiritual renewal;for young people they were times of conviction and conversion. Sometimes thesecommunion festivals exploded with revival, including intense physical andemotional effects such as fainting and trance-like states.

Theserevivalistic communion services aroused controversy and division in thePresbyterian Church of Scotland and Ireland. The Seceder branch of the church,to which Thomas and Alexander Campbell belonged, deeply opposed such trends,viewing them as disorderly and excessive.

AsScotch-Irish Presbyterians immigrated to America, they brought the communionfestival with them. Indeed, it was precisely this kind of communion servicethat took place at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, on August 8, 1801.

Yearlater, in 1827, Barton Stone looked back on the events of 1801 with heartyapproval. “The doctrine preached by all was simple, and nearly the same,” hewrote. “All urged faith in the gospel, and obedience to it, as the way of life.The spirit of partyism, and party distinctions, were apparently forgotten....The spirit of love, peace, and union, were revived. . . . Happy days! Joyfulseasons of refreshment from the presence of the Lord.”[ii]

Thebeginnings of modern-day Churches of Christ are rooted precisely here. Stoneand other pro-revival ministers soon formed the Springfield Presbytery, thenquickly dissolved it, issuing one of the founding documents of our heritage, “TheLast Will and Testament of the Springfield Presbytery.” A new movement emerged.Under Stone's leadership the new “Christian” movement grew rapidly, so that by1811 it could claim about 13,000 members, mostly in a swath running from centralKentucky through Middle Tennessee to Alabama.

Thecentral themes of the movement were freedom from all creeds and coercive humantraditions, restoration of simple New Testament Christianity, the transformingpower of the Holy Spirit, separation from the fashions of the world, and themillennial unity of believers. This unity Stone called “fire union,” for hebelieved that any lasting unity could be forged only in the fire of God'sSpirit.

BartonStone remained an ardent supporter of revival practices for the rest of his life. Some of the physical “exercises” present in the 1801 revival,particularly the one Stone described as holy laughter or singing, apparently continued to be a part of the Cane Ridge and Concord churches for a decade orso under Stone’s ministry.Next month I will focus on Alexander Campbell’s new rational view of the Spirit that soon eclipsed Stone’s view.

Notes

[i]Leigh Eric Schmidt, HolyFairs: Scottish Communions and American Revivals in the Early Modern Period(Princeton: Princeton University, 1989), and Paul Conkin, Cane Ridge: America's Pentecost(Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1990).

[ii] BartonW. Stone, “History of the Christian Church in the West,” Christian Messenger 1 (February 24, 1827), 74-79.