From Joel Carpenter’s Revive Us Again:
“Keswick perfectionism, for all its sweet demeanor, could prompt people to be very hard on themselves in their quest for holiness. And once they felt they had entered the ‘higher Christian life‘ they could be extremely judgmental toward more ordinary Christians. Assurance of this personal spiritual victory apparently gave Trumball a similar certainty of his doctrinal and ethical rectitude and helped justify his merciless attacks on those whose views differed from his own. The surrendered life’s perfectionist ideals could be twisted to support the sanctimonious debates over doctrinal details and the personal rivalries that marked so much of fundamentalism’s internal affairs.
“Perfectionism also could turn community life into an emotional pressure cooker. Earnest young people might be directed by their counsellors at church or in Bible School to see the inevitable friction in their personal relationships as evidence of insufficient surrender. The same might be told them about the conflicts many felt between their natural desires and abilities and their ‘call’ to a particular field of service. At its worst, ‘surrendered life’ teaching could be twisted to provide those who held power with a self-righteous cover for their meanness and a tool for manipulating their followers into submission” (85).
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Interesting. I’ve heard Keswick theology referred to here and there in missionary biographies and read parts Trumbull’s writings. I have to confess I never quite “got” what it was all about. It sounded like you just surrender to God and let Christ live His life through you, which is true in a sense — yet there are all those actions verbs in Scripture’s instruction to us. We can only obey by His grace and with His help, yet it isn’t totally passive on our part, as the references I’ve seen to Keswick sound. Goes back to that old dilemma, I guess, about what is our part and what is His.
I lived in that precise environment for the better part of 20 years. I was even forced to push those ideals as a camp counselor last summer. It wasn’t until that time that I started seeing inconsistencies with what the evangelists were preaching and what Christ actually taught in the gospels. I learned this one thing while there: If you want to get a bunch of fundamentalists mad at you, question camp preaching. And if you want to get them more upset, completely dismantle their arugment. Oh it felt good.
Give it time, Justin. Give it time. đŸ™‚
But is it a waste of time? That’s the question.
Don’t know a ‘dang’ thing about Keswick theology! So don’t understand what I don’t know. “I know noooothing!” If teaching is ‘good’, it can still be used in a ‘bad’ way. As when people get uppidity and arrogant and think they’ve arrived. Teaching that causes people to act like that, strut around like a ‘puffed up Peaocks’, always makes me just a little suspicious of their possibly having an ‘ungenuine, inauthntic religious experience. If teaching is ‘not good’, ie not helpful to the pilgrim, it can be used in a worse way than if it was good to begin with and wrongly used. If teaching doesn’t really help anybody people to find and connect with the truth that they need about whatever they are trying to learn and understand about the faith, how to live and walk it, and set them free from whatever binds them and holds them back from true spiritual growth and maturity, can any of us really ‘call’ such teaching, really based on ‘truth’ at all?
‘How’ certain teaching affects those who assume it has improved their lives when all it has done is to make them self-righteous and judgemental, makes me susicious of the credibility and authenticity of ”where’ the teaching really came from i the first place? From God or from man? Jesus said, “You will know them by their fruits.” Well meaning christians believe in being filled with the Spirit, something that is very scriptural, yet convey little more than ‘being filled with themselves’ and all their egos. I’ve seen what happens to lay led communities, run and volunteered by and with christians who, have become ( not all of them, but some of them ) a bunch of big egos on high horses. It’s happening in our parish right now1 and wait did the heas pastor hears about it, and he will! Because he needs to know. Some egos are going to need to be ‘reigned in’ and start ‘walking in more honesty and transparency’ with their head pastor. And they’re not going to like being told that. They like their independence, knowing that no one has been supervising them. Well their reign of unsupervised independence is soon to be over. God isn’t raising independent lone rangers. He’s raising obedient servants. And HE, God desires to ‘reign’ in our hearts, not ‘us’ aroggantly reigning over other people because we think we know everything. I think God used revival leaders because of their relationship with Him, not because of their strange theology. God’s power flows through ‘relationship’, not doctrine’ nor theology.I think that’s why God used revivial leaders in previous centuries in the ways that He did, ‘in spite o’f their theology. God wanted to touch people’s lives, He saw something good in the hearts of leaders that He could use, and so He poured out revivals through such men in answer to their faith and their prayers, ‘not’ their doctrines and theology. Just my opinion though. Can I help it if I just might be right! Interesting post.