Second blessing First

In previous posts, I’ve shown how the Charismatic “second experience” of the Holy Spirit has radically changed its meaning over three centuries of Christian history, which makes it rather difficult to identify for certain as a work of God, rather than as a psycho-social phenomenon. This is especially so since it does not correspond to anything found in Scripture, but does strongly resemble an experience also seen in non-Christian religions. Is it for sinless perfection, as Wesley taught, or for the ability to resist temptation, as the Holiness Movement taught, or to provide power for service, as Jessie Penn-Lewis taught, or to provide “joy unspeakable,” as Martyn Lloyd-Jones taught, or to enable sign gifts, as the Pentecostals taught, or to bring end-times revival, as Latter Rain taught, or to release worship on a repeated basis, as seems the pattern currently?

At this point I want to take things back even beyond John Wesley, to the leader of the Moravian Church who mentored him through missionary Peter Bohler, that is, to Count Nicolaus Zinzendorf, who founded the Moravian “commune” of Herrnhut. This village had started as a refuge for persecuted Protestants of various shades, but its deep theological and personal divisions were sorted out, apparently, by a sudden (and to us familiar) work of the Holy Spirit as they prayed intensely together, as well as through Zinzendorf’s persuasive powers. Now, the interesting thing is that he did not teach a second experience of the Spirit, but just one, encompassing both conversion and the sinless perfection that Wesley later began to espouse:

Nicolaus Zinzendorf taught that “We are sanctified wholly the moment we are justified, and are neither more nor less holy to the day of our death; entire sanctification and justification being in one and the same instant.”

Something like this seems to be what Peter Bohler advocated to the despondent failed missionary, John Wesley. It was intimately linked by Bohler to the doctrine of salvation by faith alone – which the Arminian high-churchman Wesley had trouble accepting. Note, though, that to Bohler, and hence to Wesley, that saving faith was not a proposition to be embraced actively, but a passive experience. When Wesley bemoaned his lack of such faith to Bohler, the latter advised him, “Preach faith till you have it; and then, because you have it, you will preach faith.” In a later conversation Bohler attested to the holiness and happiness that would surely result from this one-off conversion event (in line with Zinzendorf’s teaching above).

The first person Wesley tried it on was a condemned prisoner named Clifford, who after hearing the gospel and much prayer, received such assurance of forgiveness in Christ that he went calmly to his execution. Yet Wesley himself remained troubled for another three months, until the famous meeting in Fetter Lane where, hearing Luther’s preface to his Romans commentary read, he felt his heart strangely warmed, felt that he indeed trusted Christ alone for salvation, and gained a deeply personal assurance of forgiveness. This he considered to be his conversion.

But here’s a thing – far from experiencing perfect holiness, he still felt buffeted by temptations, and lacked the promised sense of joy, “that a man could at once be thus turned from darkness to light, from sin and misery to righteousness and joy in the Holy Ghost.” He concluded that God only sent that to some people. “Why is there not a more sensible change?” he wrote, and after a couple of weeks decided to repair to Germany for further Moravian advice.

And so we see that the original “second blessing” of Wesleyan sinless perfection teaching was actually the result of the failure of Count Zinzensdorf’s account of conversion – and indeed, Wesley never claimed to receive in himself the second blessing he attributed to others. But it appears no coincidence that the Great Awakening fostered a climactic experience even of conversion, which has set the template for revivalism to this day. In the hands of Charles Finney and his successors, whatever produced sufficiently strong emotion would serve as evidence of conversion. By the time of the Toronto Blessing or the Lakeland Revival, and even before (eg in the Welsh Revival or in Azusa Street meetings), the preaching of the gospel was entirely optional as long as the Spirit manifested.

Before leaving Zinzendorf, let’s observe that the promise of the Holy Spirit in John’s gospel, intended to remind the disciples of all Jesus’s teaching and reveal more to the Church, was as far from the Count’s Holy Spirit blessing as it is from that of the Charismatic Baptism of the Spirit. The latter not only led Michael Harper to leave Anglicanism over women’s ordination, yet led David Watson to embrace it, but is as comfortable with the veneration of Mary among Catholic Charismatics as it is with Unitarianism in oneness Pentecostalism. To Zinzendorf, too, unity came from the inner experience of God, doctrine being a matter of indifference:

From 1735 on, in public writings, Z. expressly declared himself for the Lutheran confession of Augsburg, but in private letters he declared indifference to any confession; that is, the Catholic, Reformed and Lutheran churches as “sects” called, that is an adherence to Jesus Christ without any doctrine, and finally his own church as the center of this, and including threats to those who would oppose him… Which Jesus he is referring to, is also unclear, because it is a Jesus without certain content.

This, of course, is pure mysticism.

I’ve been pondering whether this dramatic conversion experience is in any way related to the earlier teaching of English Puritanism, as laid out in William Perkins’s Ten Steps of Conversion. I pointed out in a previous post how Jonathan Edwards sagely noted that, in practice, most conversions failed to match the pattern of prolonged and agonised conviction of sin, followed by sudden enlightenment and assurance through the gospel. Edwards observed that a wide variation of conversion experience tended to be moulded in the retelling to fit the standard narrative. Once more, sociological forces were at work even then.

But I conclude that we do not see the mystical experience like Zinzendorf’s in Puritan conversion, but rather strong emotional responses to gospel truth, though sometimes heightened by impassioned preaching and social expectation. However, it does resemble the “blessing” in making an emotional crisis central to saving faith, and I want to explore next whether that matches what we see in the New Testament. After all, the Bible is our pattern both for doctrine and practice. “If it ain’t in the Bible, it ain’t biblical.”

But I think I’ll leave that discussion to the next post.