Holiness Movement

John Wesley taught that a believer could, in this life, be brought to a state he called Christian perfection or entire sanctification, not sinless in the sense of never erring, but cleansed of the settled inclination to sin and filled instead with perfect love of God and neighbor. Wesley treated this as a real, obtainable goal of the Christian life, though he was cautious about claiming the experience himself and never reduced it to a single formula for how or when it arrived.

A century later, Phoebe Palmer, a laywoman in New York City, gave Wesley's teaching a sharper, more immediate shape. From 1835 she hosted what became known as the Tuesday Meeting for the Promotion of Holiness, drawing clergy and laity of multiple denominations who sought entire sanctification as a definite, datable experience rather than a gradual lifelong process, laid on what she called the altar of consecration and claimed by faith in a single decisive moment. Palmer's altar theology, as it came to be called, spread through her writing and speaking well beyond her own meeting, and it fed directly into the camp meeting revivalism that carried the Holiness message across the American frontier through the second half of the nineteenth century, giving Wesley's careful, unhurried doctrine of gradual growth in grace a distinctly American, instantaneous, second-blessing shape.

By the 1880s, the Methodist Episcopal Church's official leadership had grown wary of the Holiness movement's insistence that entire sanctification was a normative experience every believer should actively seek, worried that the movement's camp meeting fervor and its independent Holiness associations were pulling authority away from settled church structures. Rather than moderate their teaching, many Holiness advocates left to form denominations built around the doctrine from the ground up, a wave of organization that produced the Church of the Nazarene, formed by merger in 1908, the Wesleyan Methodist Church and Free Methodist Church, and numerous smaller bodies across the following decades.

The movement's theological emphasis did not stay contained within these new denominations. William Seymour, the Black preacher who led the 1906 Azusa Street revival in Los Angeles, the event most often credited with launching modern Pentecostalism, had trained at a Holiness Bible school and carried its expectation of a definite, identifiable post-conversion spiritual experience directly into what became the Pentecostal movement, adding the further expectation that this experience would be marked by speaking in tongues. The historical line from Wesley's doctrine of Christian perfection through Palmer's altar theology and the Holiness denominations to Pentecostalism's baptism in the Holy Spirit is one continuous American religious history rather than three unrelated developments, even though each stage produced institutions its predecessors would not fully have recognized as their own.