81
Are the Golden Oldies Still Worth
Playing? Reflections on
History Writing among Early
Pentecostals
Grant Wacker*
When
religious
movements are
young they rarely
exhibit much interest in their own
history. Undoubtedly
the
principal
reason for that trait is that
they
are
preoccupied
with the
urgency
of proclaiming
their
message. Moreover,
movements
invariably
believe that their
origins
were
supernatural,
which is to say,
forged
outside the
ordinary processes
of history. In time, however, as movements become self-conscious about who
they
are and where
they
fit on the religious landscape, they
become curious about their
origins.
Their initial
attempts
to trace their
beginnings are, however,
almost always triumphalist
and uncritical. The construction of a
self- critical account that can withstand the
scrutiny
of
nonpartisan readers
rarely appears
until second or
third-generation
members enter
graduate programs
in secular universities and write doctoral dissertations on their tradition.
Nonetheless,
the work of first- generation
historians
usually
merits
attention,
for it often contains data not available
anywhere
else
and,
more
importantly,
reveals a great
deal about the moods and motivations of the movement itself. The
early
historians of the
pentecostal
revival fit this
pattern.
Their writing
was
fiercely apologetic,
but it was
packed
with information gleaned
from first-hand observation
and,
more
significantly,
it bristled with rich evocations of the cultural texture of the
early days.
When we look at the work of the
early historians,
three broad questions
come to mind.
First,
how did
they interpret
the nature of history
itself? What social mechanisms made it move? Where was it going? Simply stated,
what was their
general philosophy
of history? The second broad
question
is how did the
early
writers conceive the theological, geographical,
and social
origins
of the movement? What was pentecostalism? Where did it begin? What kind of people converted? And
finally,
how did the first historians
interpret
the long range meaning
or
significance
of the movement? Where did it fit in the
sweep
of world
history?
What did it signify about the end of
history?
Before
examining
the
way
that the
early
historians dealt with those
questions,
it
may
be
helpful
to review who the
principal writers were and what the
corpus
of their work looks like.
They
fall into two .broad
categories.
The first
group
consisted of authors who
self-consciously
under- stood themselves to be writing a general account of the movement’s
1
82
beginnings. Significantly,
no one
attempted
a work of that sort for the first fifteen
years,
but in 1916 B.F. Lawrence
published
The Apostolic
Faith Restored.
Although
the latter
purported
to be a survey
of
pentecostal origins,
the focus was
upon
events in the lower
Midwest, especially
Texas. About a third of the volume consisted of Lawrence’s
personal recollections,
while the
remaining portion
consisted of extracts from
periodicals
and letters from leaders. The book was
singularly valuable, partly
because it was, as far as I
know,
the first serious historical
study
written
by
a pentecostal,
and
partly
because it contained
lengthy
extracts from periodicals
that later were lost. In 1925 Frank Bartleman
published How Pentecost Came to Los
Angeles-How
It Was in the Beginning. Although
this work was
largely autobiographical, Bartleman was a central
figure
in the California
revival,
and a bit
player
in
subsequent stirrings
in the Northeast. Thus his recol- lections revealed a good deal about broader
developments.
Like all of the
early writers,
Bartleman was a
relatively
uneducated
man, but he
possessed
shrewd historical instincts. He had a fine
eye
for significant details,
and
displayed
a colorful
writing style
filled with memorable one-liners
(the ” `Pillar
of Fire”‘, he deadpanned, “had gone up
in
smoke”).
The
following year Stanley
Frodsham published
“With
Signs Following”
The
Story of
the
Latter-Day Pentecostal Revival.
Perhaps
four-fifths of this work consisted of extracts from
periodicals
and letters from converts in all
parts
of the world.
Although
Frodsham was more a
compiler
than a historian,
his book broke out of the
parochial geographical scope and reflected a much
greater range
of sources than those
by Lawrence and Bartleman. In 1958 Ethel E. Goss
released,
The Winds
of
God: The
Story of
the
Early
Pentecostal
Days (1901- 1914)
in the
Life of Howard
A. Goss, as told
by Ethel
E. Goss. This volume
is, apparently,
a redaction of her husband’s
personal diary, but since the latter is not
publicly available,
it is difficult to know to what extent
they
differ. In
any event,
Goss was a key figure in the development
of the movement in the lower Midwest. Thus his autobiography,
like
Bartleman’s,
bears a broader
significance
than the title
suggests. Finally
we should note The Phenomenon
of Pentecost:
(a history of “The
Latter
Rain’), published by
Frank J. Ewart in 1947.
Although
written
many years
after the
flowering the
of
revival,
Ewart’s account
probably
should be ranked with the ones mentioned above. He was on hand
nearly
from the
beginning (taking
over William H. Durham’s mission in Los
Angeles
in 1912), and his book seems to have been based
upon
careful
diary
notes. Ewart
emphasized developments
on the West Coast and the movement’s
expansion
in the Orient
1
°
2
Cotton,
who
sought consciously
historical
fashion,
by
,
expositions following general sequence
83
Zelma
Argue,
and Mother Emma
and
by less well known figures
such
and Elizabeth V. Baker. Such
.
‘
.
The second
category
of primitive historical
writing
that we shall consider
might
be called “incidental”
history.
This
group
includes authors like
Henry Tuthill,
to tell the
story
of the
early days
in a self-
but devoted
only
one or two articles to the task. It also includes
theological
and
polemical expositions
well known
figures
such as Charles Fox
Parham,
William J. Seymour,
and A.J.
Tomlinson,
as A.A.
Boddy,
J.G.
Campbell,
are relevant to this
essay-and frequently
cited in the
pages-when they
contained recollections about the
of events or state of affairs in the
early years.
A final source embraced under the rubric of “incidental”
history
were studies
by contemporary
outsiders.
Examples
include the five- volume
autobiography
of Alma
White, The Story of My Life
and Pillar
of Fire,
and Charles W.
Shumway’s
1914 A.B. thesis at the
of Southern
California,
“A
Study
of the ‘Gift of
was
principally
in the
history
of
in Christianity, but he included considerable data on the
of the movement in the United States based
upon personal interviews with or
questionnaires
sent to
pentecostal
leaders.2
University
Tongues.’” Shumway glossolalia
origins
‘
starting point history
pentecostals
partly dependent upon
interested
II
historians
Let us
begin by asking
how the
early pentecostal
understood the nature of
history
itself.
Simply stated,
what was their
philosophy
of
history?
At the most
general level, pentecostals,
like most
Christians, assumed that
history
was
linear, moving by divine guidance
from a
to an
ending point.
That meant that
ultimately
was
providential, progressing inexorably
from Creation to the Final
Judgment,
whether human
beings cooperated
or not. But unlike
many Christians,
or at least
many
modern
Christians,
also believed that God’s
governance
of
history
was
human
responses. Theoretically
the situation was
logically contradictory.
God was
sovereign
and immutable
yet
to human entreaties. Pentecostal writers seem not to
by
the
contradiction,
convinced that God intended to bring about a worldwide
men and women for the Lord’s
Coming,
but
exactly
when and where the revival would take
place
was
dependent upon
the
Christians. Bartleman was
certain,
for
susceptible have been worried
prepare
depth of repentence among
however.
They
were revival to
3
84
.
that God had sent the
earthquake
to San Francisco in
example,
order to alert
people
to their
spiritual peril.
He was
equally
certain that his own
prayers
and the
repentence
of the saints in the Los Angeles
area had
prevented
a similar disaster in that area.3
Against
that
background
of a
generally
but not
completely providential
view of history, pentecostals constructed an elaborate notion of historical
cycles
and
epicycles. Fundamentally, history was
linear, yet
in their minds
history
also
displayed
countless
cycles of spiritual coldness within the established
churches, repentence by a select
few,
God’s
blessing upon
the
latter,
who
inevitably slipped into
spiritual pride, organization, ossification,
and
finally outright apostasy.
At that
point
a new
cycle
would
begin.4
Pentecostals were certain,
of
course,
that their revival
represented
an authentic reform
movement,
but
they rarely
considered the
possibility
that someday they
too would backslide into
apostasy
and that another renewal would
displace
them.
Probably
there were two reasons. First, they expected
the Lord’s return
momentarily,
and thus did not
imagine
that there would be enough time for a relapse.
Second, they
believed that the historical time line was
curving
back to the beginning, forming
a full circle. That meant that the current revival represented
not
merely
another
epicycle
of decay and
renewal,
but the final
epicycle
that would
bring history
full circle.
Simply stated, the
present
revival had
nearly
become a perfect
replication
of the beginning
of the Christian
era,
and when that
process
was complete,
when the
present
became a mirror of the
beginning, history
would come to an end.
First-generation pentecostals
sometimes talked about
providence, successive waves of
renewal,
and the full circle of
history,
but ordinarily they
described those events in a different
vocabulary. They
called it the
promise
of the Latter Rain. The structure of Latter Rain
theology,
and the cultural
assumptions
from which it emerged,
have been discussed at some
length
in another context and need not be
repeated
here. At this
point
it is sufficient to
say that the Latter Rain
theology principally
asserted that the
signs
and wonders-including,
most
notably, speaking
in
tongues-that characterized the
apostolic
church would
reappear
at the end of history. Differently stated,
when the miracles of the
apostolic church
finally reappeared
after centuries of
apostasy
and
disuse, Christians would know that the end of history and the Lord’s return was near.5
,
The
early
writers’ conviction that their revival
uniquely replicated the beliefs and
practices
of the
apostolic
church
partly
accounts for their deliberate disinterest
(as opposed
to a simple lack of interest) in the centuries of Christian tradition
stretching
from the second to
4
85
the twentieth centuries. The older
denominations, Lawrence judged, had existed
long enough
to “establish
precedent,
create
habit, formulate custom.”
In this
way they
have become
possessed
of a two-fold
criterion of doctrine-the New Testament and the church
position. [But pentecostals]
do not recognize a doctrine or
a custom as authoritative unless it can be traced to … the
Lord and His apostles. This reversion to the New Testament
[is] responsible
for … the absence of any serious effort … to
trace an historical connection with the
primitive
church. ..
The Pentecostal Movement has no such history; it leaps the
intervening years crying,
“BACK TO PENTECOST!”6
It should be admitted that the disinterest in Christian tradition sometimes was more
apparent
than real. From time to time pentecostal
historians
compared
their leaders with Martin
Luther, George Fox,
and John
Wesley,
or
portrayed
their revival as the direct successor to the
Irvingite
and holiness revivals of the previous century.
The reasons for this ambivalence are
easy
to see. Fear of being depicted as schismatics-or
worse-prompted
them to claim some measure of
continuity
with the main
body
of Christians.8
Nonetheless,
there can be little doubt that the movement’s fundamental was to
deny
its rootedness in Christian tradition and the final
‘
.
impulse
to
insist,
as noted
above,
that it represented
renewal that would
complete history by bringing
it full circle.
To summarize, the
early pentecostal
view of
history
was simul- taneously providential, cyclical,
and restorationist.
Beyond that, pentecostal
historians had
virtually
no sense of what modern scholars call historicism: the
assumption
that all social and cultural patterns
are
products of,
and therefore
explainable
in terms
of, antecedent social and cultural
patterns.
I say “virtually” because they instinctively employed
historicist
principles
when
they sought to
explain (or
more
precisely, explain away)
the motivations of their
opponents.
But when
pentecostals
tried to account for their own
beginnings
and
development, they readily
wove natural and supernatural
forces into a seamless web.
Examples
are countless. Bartleman was
certain,
for
example,
that the devil tried to keep him from
attending
a revival service
by electrocuting
the motorman on the streetcar he was
riding.
When a
Baptist
church
expelled members who
spoke
in
tongues,
Ewart
triumphantly pointed
out that the
meeting
house burned down and the
pastor
died. Goss similarly
noted that a real estate
agent
was “struck down” in a fatal car accident when she refused to sell a lot to a pentecostal prayer band. Pentecostals were
equally
hard on each other. When Parham got
into a
fight
with William H. Durham over the
timing
of sanctification,
he
publicly prayed
that God would smite dead
‘
.
5
86
whoever was
wrong-and
crowed about the results when Durham died six months later.9 –
The
early
writer’s
disposition
to weave natural and
supernatural causes,
and their
corresponding
inclination to avoid historicist principles
of
explanation (except
for
polemical purposes), helps explain
their readiness to attribute the movement’s
origins
to direct supernatural
interventions in the historical
process.
No idea was more
pervasive
than the
implication
that the revival
dropped
from heaven like a sacred meteor. That theme tended to take two forms. One was the insistence that the movement
emerged
without human leadership-or
as
Seymour put it,
“the source is from the skies.” Again
and
again pentecostals suggested
that
although spokesmen such as
Parham, Seymour,
and Tomlinson were as great as any in the
history
of
Christianity, they were, nonetheless, essentially accidental to the inner life of the movement. An unnamed historian writing
in the
(Tomlinson)
Church of God’s
Faithful
Standard characteristically proclaimed
that “THE HOLY GHOST
[has been]
THE LEADER-not
any
man.” Elizabeth V. Baker extolled the “absence of human
machinery.”
This determined denial of human
causality helps
account for its lack of
curiosity
about its beginnings.
If the source was from the
skies,
and if human instruments were
irrelevant,
there
really
was not much about which to write. It is significant that the first
major
effort
by
a pentecostal scholar to reconstruct the
history
of the Assemblies of
God, published
as late as
1961,
was called
Suddenly … from
Heaven-a title that
hardly
could have been more
non-historical,
if not anti- historical,
in intent.10
The sacred meteor theme showed
up
in another form as well. That was the assertion that the revival had arisen in all parts of the world without
sparks
of influence from
any
other
part
of the movement. The
Faithful
Standard historian
noted,
for
example, that the “first
really great
shower of the Latter Rain fell in Los Angeles
… but before news could have reached
them,
a similar shower fell in a Mission School in India.” From there it
swept around the
world,
“even
though
no one had
brought
the
message.
It was the Lord’s
doing.”
As late as 1949 Donald
Gee, arguably
the most astute and
worldly-wise figure pentecostalism
has
produced, wrote that the movement did “not owe its origin to
any outstanding personality
or
religious leader,
but was a
spontaneous
revival appearing
almost
simultaneously
in various
parts
of the world.” Sometimes the
early
historians skirted the
question
of influence, as if the
problem
had never occurred to them. And sometimes, admittedly, they
did trace lines of connection,
pointing out,
for example,
that
Seymour
took the
message
from Houston to Los
6
87
Angeles,
or that Barratt carried it from New York to Oslo. Yet linkages
of that sort were made
haphazardly.
Circuits of information and
patterns
of influence were
interesting
bits of information perhaps,
but irrelevant to
understanding
the real reasons the movement had
emerged. ? ? I
Pentecostal historians did not
believe, however,
that the mechanisms
of cultural
change
were
entirely providential. Although they
did not
worry very
much about the
way that divine and human agencies interlocked, they
were convinced that human
repentence
and obedience-or the lack of them-had a lot to do with the
timing
and placement
of God’s
actions
in
history. Bartleman,
more than anyone,
stressed the causal
efficacy
of
self-mortifying humility. Goss, taking
a somewhat different
tack,
boasted that most of the leaders were
young,
not
formally educated,
and not affiliated with
the established denominations-which meant that
they
had
nothing to
lose, no
ecclesiastical traditions to
preserve
or educational interests to
protect.
Human failures were
just
as
important.
The fact that the revival did not
emerge
within the ranks of the established denominations came as no
suprise,
for in
pentecostal eyes
the established denominations were
spiritually dead, hopelessly entangled
in traditions and institutions. The holiness folk were almost as bad. The
Faithful
Standard historian
spoke
for countless pentecostals
when he judged that God had
by-passed
the holiness churches because
they proved
too
proud
to admit the
incomplete- ness of their
spiritual experience. They
used to experience real
signs and
wonders, he jabbed,
“but
alas,
we hear
practically
none of these
. ‘
things [now].”‘2
For the
early pentecostal historians,
in
sum,
historical
process was
anything
but
simple. History
moved
inexorably
from Creation to Final
Judgment,
to be
sure,
but within that framework there were
cycles
and
epicycles,
and the
engine
that drove the mechanism was fueled
by
an unfathomable mixture of divine
providence
and human
response.
When we turn from
questions
about their philosophy
of history to concrete
questions
about their view of the immediate
theological, geographical,
and social
origins
of the movement,
the
picture
becomes even more
complex.
.
III
When
asking
how the
primitive
historians
interpreted
the
origins of the
movement,
we first need to
recognize
that their under- standing
of what
pentecostalism was,
determined to a great extent their
depiction
of where and
among
whom it
began.
Let us
begin then
by asking
how
they
defined the movement.
7
88
Donald
Dayton
has
rightly argued
that it is anachronistic to
define
primitive pentecostalism
in terms of the doctrine that
speaking
in
tongues
is the sole initial
physical
evidence of the
Baptism
of the
Holy Spirit.
There can be little doubt that that norm
became the litmus test of orthodoxy among
pentecostals,
or at least
among
white
ones,
after World War
I,
but
during
the first ten or
fifteen
years
of the movement’s life there was considerable debate
about the essence of the
pentecostal message. Although
it would be
an overstatement to
say
that
during
this
period everything
was
up
for
grabs,
the
early periodicals
make clear that the
boundary
lines
that defined who was in or out were
extremely porous. Today
one
might plausibly argue
that John Alexander
Dowie,
A.B.
Simpson,
or even F.F.
Bosworth,
did not
qualify
as pentecostals because
they
did not have the
right
views about
speaking
in
tongues,
but
discriminations of that sort were not self-evident in the
early
1 900s. 13
The cultural and
theological fluidity
of
first-generation pente-
costalism shows
up
in the work of the initial historians. To be sure,
all of them assumed that the
“four-square” gospel
of
salvation,
divine
healing, speaking
in tongues, and
expectation
of the Lord’s
return constituted the
indispensable
core of the movement. But the
interpretation
and
priority they
ascribed to one or another of those
notions, and
the
array
of doctrines, rituals, and social
practices they
tacked on to
them,
varied
according
to time and
place. Goss,
for
example,
stressed “fast music” as a uniquely distinctive feature of
the movement. J.G.
Campbell,
editor of the
Apostolic
Faith in
Goose Creek,
Texas,
believed that the most notable
aspect
of
Parham’s Bible school in Topeka
(both
before and after
1901)
was .
the fact that all property was held in common and that no one held
outside
jobs.
In 1912 Parham himself declared that the
principle
of
conditional
immortality (that is,
the annihilation of the
wicked)
was the “most
important
doctrine in the world
today,”
and he
insisted that believers
might possess
the
gift
but not the
sign
of
tongues.
The
Faithful
Standard historian ranked
baptism by
immersion
right along
with
tongues
and
healing
as
necessary
doctrines. Homer Tomlinson claimed that in the
early days
footwashing
had been considered
just
as crucial. Elizabeth V.
Baker,
a prominent
evangelist
and a founder of the Rochester Bible
and
Missionary Training Institute,
debunked the idea that
tongues
was the
only
evidence of
baptism
of the
Holy Spirit.
To
say
that .
stalwarts like Huss and
Wesley
did not have the
baptism,
she
urged,
was the “same as to
say
that one can live the most Christ-like
life,
bringing
forth all the fruits of the
Spirit,
without the
Holy Spirit.”
A.J. Tomlinson first
spoke
in tongues in January
1907,
but did not
.
8
89
mention
tongues
in his diary until June of that
year,
and did not use the word
pentecostal
until November of the
following year. Indeed, – as late as September
1905, long
after he had heard about
tongues
as the evidence of the
baptism
of the
Holy Spirit,
Tomlinson described the “most wonderful
meeting”
he was ever in without
mentioning tongues. “People
fell in the floor and some writhed like
serpents…. Some fell in the
road,
one seemed to be off in a trance four or five
hours. The church seemed to be
greatly
edified. “14
Theological predilections governed
the historical
imagination
in other
respects
too.
Although
the data are
elusive,
there are
good reasons to doubt that the Azusa Mission was as important as some of the
early
historians
suggested.15
Yet writers like A.A.
Boddy, who assumed that
speaking
in
tongues
constituted the initial physical
evidence of the
baptism
of the
Holy Spirit, may
have been predisposed
to
heighten
Azusa’s influence
partly
because
many
of the
persons
associated with Azusa became
spokesmen
for that doctrine. To take a different
example,
Charles
Shumway
dramatized Parham’s
importance
at the
expense
of other leaders and sectors of the movement. The reason Parham loomed
large
in
Shumway’s account undoubtedly had something to do with
the fact that Shumway,
a well educated
Methodist,
considered
pentecostalism socially disruptive
and
theologically
aberrant. While Parham’s meetings
were
hardly sedate,
Parham
seems, nonetheless,
to have enforced a
degree
of decorum that was unusual
among early pentecostals.
Under the circumstances it is not
surprising
that Shumway puffed
Parham while
downplaying figures
like
Seymour. and Tomlinson who
encouraged
a more
freewheeling style
of
worship
Personal
friendship
or
animosity
also influenced the historical imagination.
Parham offers a case in
point. Again,
the data are elusive,
but it is indisputable that he dropped out of the mainstream of the
pentecostal
movement after he was
charged
with a sexual irregularity
of some sort in 1907. ?? Tuthill, who was a close friend of Parham’s and believed that Parham had been framed
by “one who confesses to a vile life,” nonetheless
depicted
Parham as the
premier figure
of the
first-generation.
Lawrence took a middle tack.
Clearly believing
that Parham was a
good
man
gone astray,
Lawrence mentioned Parham’s name two or three
times,
but no more than necessary
to establish a connected
sequence
of events. Frodsham weighed
in at the far side of the
ring.
He wrote two
chapters
about Parham’s schools and revivals in Kansas and
Texas,
all in the passive
mode
(“a
Bible school was
opened
at
Topeka”).
Frodsham thereby managed
not once to mention Parham’s name nor even to hint that someone named Parham had existed. 18
9
90
As things turned
out, however,
no one was more adamant about getting
the
story straight
than Parham himself. His recollections about who founded the
movement,
and who did
not,
are
revealing. They
show that
very
human
feelings
of
pride
and hurt also influenced the historical
memory. “My position,”
he declared in a retrospective
article of 1912, “given July
4th, 1900,
was a God-given commission to deliver to this age the truths of a restored PENTECOST.” But the commission was “lifted” in
1907,
and an
array
of “men- leaders”
immediately
started
jostling
for
power.
The first was W.O. Carothers,
who became “crazed with the desire for
leadership
and sought
the destruction of everyone … that stood in the
way.”
Then came a “confessed
hypnotist by
the name of
[Glenn]
Cook who soon made Azusa a hotbed of …
religious orgies outrivaling
scenes in devil …
worship.”
Carothers and Cook were followed
by
Levi Lupton,
who
“spoke
no real
languages,
but
only
the
fleshly chattering”;
William H.
Piper,
who was “under the influence of a spiritualistic medium”;
Elmer
Fisher,
who “stole his
congregation from
Azusa”;
then William H.
Durham,
who “found the
sewage
of Azusa
congenial
to his influence.” But the worst was
Seymour,
who tried to “fill the earth with the worst
prostitution
of Christianity I ever
witnessed.”
In the
beginning,
Parham
allowed, Seymour acknowledged
the true
origins
of the
revival,
but as he
grew “drunken with
power
and
flattery [he]
used all his
papers
to
prove that Azusa was the
original
‘crib’ of this Movement.” The
plain truth,
Parham
concluded,
was that the
apostolic
faith started in Topeka, Kansas, January 1, 1901,
and “all who now
accept …
the wildfire, fanatical, windsucking, chattering, jabbering, trance, bodyshaking originating
in Azusa … will fall.”‘9
If there was
disagreement among
the
early
historians
regarding the
theological
boundaries of the
movement,
there was substantial consensus about the
theological
inner core. That
meant,
in
turn, that there was measureable
agreement
not about the exact
place where the movement
began,
but about the
range
of
options
that might reasonably
be considered.
Consider,
for
example,
the case of Frank S. Sandford’s Shiloh Movement near
Brunswick, Maine, which was
rarely
mentioned
by
the
early
historians.
Through
the 1890s and 1900s all of the characteristic beliefs and
practices
of pentecostalism, including
resurrections from the
dead,
took
place at Shiloh.
All,
that
is, except speaking
in
tongues. Although primitive pentecostals disputed
the theological meaning and
linguistic nature of
tongues,
none doubted that it was a coveted
part
of Christian
experience. Clearly
the absence
(or
at most, minimal
role) of
tongues
at Shiloh
precluded
it from serious consideration as a fountain of the
pentecostal
revival.2°
‘
.
10
91
The
early
historians’
disagreement-albeit
a circumscribed one-about the
theological
boundaries of the revival resulted in disagreement
about where it started. Some writers
manifestly
tried to be even-handed. Lawrence and
Goss,
for
example,
attributed the movement’s
origins
in about
equal
measure to the Houston and Los Angeles revivals;
Frodsham tossed in Zion
City.
Tuthill
suggested that the first
sprinkle
of the Latter Rain had fallen in Cherokee County,
North
Carolina,
in
1896,
but that
greater
showers had fallen in the Midwest after the turn of the
century, culminating
in the cloudburst at Azusa in 1906.
Often, however,
the
question
of origins provoked
hot
dispute.
No one doubted that there had
been authentic
stirrings
in western North
Carolina,
eastern
Kansas, southeastern
Texas,
and southern
California,
within the ten or twelve
years spanning
the turn of the
century.
The issue was the chronological
and
spiritual priority
of those events.
Seymour attributed the
beginning
of the “world wide revival” to the Azusa Mission, barely acknowledging
its connection with antecedent fires in other
parts
of the
country.
Bartleman showed visible irritation at the
suggestion
that the California
stirring
was
dependent upon others. “-We had
prayed
down our own
revival,”
he growled. “The revival in California was
unique
and
separate
as to
origin.”
A.J. Tomlinson tried to do an end run
by insisting
that the revival had no beginning.
The Church of God
simply
uncovered or made
explicit what
always
had been
present-albeit covertly-since
the
days
of the
apostles.
Homer Tomlinson claimed that all branches of the pentecostal
movement
grew
from the little band of believers that his father had discovered in North Carolina in 1896. One
by one,
he argued, Parham, Seymour,
Florence
Crawford,
E.N.
Bell,
even the Church of the
Nazarene,
had
split
from his father’s
group.21
Just as there was circumscribed
disagreement
about what the pentecostal
movement was and where it
began,
so too there was limited
disagreement
about what kind of
people
the first
pente- costals were.
Although
there was some discussion about
Wesleyan versus Reformed
patrimony,
so far as I can
tell,
none of the
early historians was
particularly
concerned about which denominational groups
the initial converts
represented.
Nor did
they say
much about their racial or ethnic
backgrounds.
Almost all of the historians made incidental comments about the interracial and multi-ethnic character of the
early meetings,
and Bartleman made a minor
point
of the fact that the direction of the
pentecostal movement on the West Coast was soon taken over
by whites,
while Mother Emma Cotton
emphasized
its black
origins.22
But no one seems to have been
strongly
interested in the
question. They were, however, very
much interested in the movement’s social
composition.
.
.
,
.
.
11
92
Two tendencies
prevailed.
One was to stress its lower class character.
Seymour,
for
example, pointed
out that the revival had started
among poor
colored and
Spanish people.
If God had waited for
(middle class)
folk in the established churches to
open
their hearts to the
Spirit,
it never would have
happened.
The other-and seemingly opposite-tendency
was to stress the movement’s middle or even
upper
middle class character. Goss boasted that some of the “best
people”
in Texas attended his services. L.C. Hall
proudly noted how one
meeting
was held in the
“neighborhood
of three large
universities.
Many
attended from these and some of the theologues
were
baptized.”
A.W.
Orwig
remembered that the Azusa Mission attracted all
types
of
people,
“not a few of them educated and refined.” Pentecostals
rarely
missed a chance to excoriate secular
entertainment,
but also
gloated
about converts from that world. “One of the results of the revival
[in Copenhagen],” Frodsham
wrote,
“was the salvation of a
great
Danish
actress, Anna Larsen…. Another Danish
actress,
Anna
Lewini,
was also saved and filled.” Remarks like these
probably
reveal more about the status
hunger
of the writers than the actual social
position
of the converts,
but
they
do indicate that the movement was
not,
in its own historical
perception
at
least, uniformly
drawn from the most destitute ranks of society.23
.
.
.
IV
.
If the
early
historians evinced
healthy disagreement
about the theological, geographical,
and social
provenance
of the
movement, they displayed
remarkable
unanimity
when
they
assessed its significance
in the
history
of
Christianity.
For all of
them,
the revival bore “a meaning that
might
be called cosmocentric. That meant,
for one
thing,
that
they
were certain that the
eyes
of the world were
upon
them. In January 1907 Seymour headlined a brief survey
of the movement’s
development
with the words:
“Beginning of World Wide Revival.” Eleven months later Bartleman
exuberantly wrote that the California work was “spreading
worldwide.” Parham, not
surprisingly,
insisted that the
epicenter
of the
global
revival was to be found in southeastern
Kansas;
A.J. Tomlinson
thought western North Carolina more
likely.
The
Faithful
Standard assured its readers, in any
event,
that this was the ‘
“greatest
revival the world has ever known.”24
But it was more than that. It was the fulcrum of human
history
as well. As noted
above,
the
early
historians
(like
all
pentecostals) were certain that the
present
revival betokened the Latter
Rain,
the
12
93
final
epicycle
of history that would
bring
the human
saga
full
circle, thus
ushering
in the
apocalyptic
events of the Last
Days.
This is to say
that the
“signs
and wonders” of the revival were
regarded
as dispensational signals,
divine
outpourings,
as Elizabeth Baker
put it, designed
to “ripen the
grain
before the Husbandman
gathers
it.” In A.J. Tomlinson,’s
words,
the
purpose
of the revival was to
bring about the
“evangelization
of the
world, gathering
of
Israel,
new order of things at the close of the Gentile
age.”No one captured
the cosmocentric orientation of their vision better than Ewart:
“By
one great revolutionary
wrench
[God]
is lifting His church back over the head of
every sect, every creed, every organized system
of theology,
and
[putting]
it back where it was in power, doctrine and glory,
on and after the
Day
of Pentecost.” And the
Day
of Pentecost-we can almost see the
grin-“was
the most
important day
in the
history
of the human race.” for all other
great days
of Christian
history “emptied
themselves in essence into the
great day of Pentecost.”25
Robert Anderson has argued that “fratricidal warfare” constituted one of the most
pervasive
features of
early pentecostal
life. He is right, yet
it is
important
to see that
many
of those brawls were arguments
not about each
other, per se,
but about their
place
in history. Jostling
for
pride
of place entailed endless
disputes
about which branch of the movement was
going
to win in the
long
run. Ewart,
who stood on the Reformed side of the
tradition,
wrote off his
Wesleyan
rivals as
“inconsequential
… die-hards.” Parham dismissed those who were
attempting
to organize the Assemblies of God as a “bunch of imitating, chattering, wind-sucking, holy-roller preachers.”
The latter were
riding
toward their
fall,
he warned, for “God is truly
separating
the wheat from the tares to
gather
them into his
garner.” As
for the holiness
people
who had
rejected
the pentecostal message,
there was no
hope
at all.
Most,
intoned the Faithful Standard,
are now back into “formal
churches,
or out all together….
It is difficult to find a little
group
of Holiness
people anywhere.”
The wonder is not that
pentecostal
writers made harsh judgments
of this
sort,
but that
they
did not make them more often. Pentecostals were convinced
beyond question
that
they-and they alone-were
riding
the crest of
history.
When Frodsham drew an analogy
between the
Apostle
John’s effort to write a narrative of the ” `things
which Jesus did”‘ and his own effort to describe “how the
Holy Spirit
fell in … this twentieth
century,”
he
may
have revealed more about his
assumptions
than he intended.26
‘
13
94
.
v
That
brings
us
finally
to the
question
we started with: Are the
golden
oldies still worth
playing?
The initial answer is no, not if we
expect
them to serve as reliable
representations
of what
“really
happened.”
All historical works are of course
interpretive;
none
offers a God’s-eye view. But some come closer than others. And
by
the’standards of
modern, professional
historical
scholarship,
the , studies
by
self-ascribed historians like Bartleman and
Frodsham,
not to mention the historical recollections of popular leaders like
Parham and Tomlinson, are far from reliable.
There are several reasons.
Although
the works of all of the
early
writers were marred with
simple
factual errors of name, date,
place,
and
sequence, my sense is that the
errors were not so numerous as to
render those works
automatically
unfit.
Indeed,
far more often
than
not, their
factual assertions
prove
corroborable. The real
problems
have to do with defensivness and the absence of critical
standards.
Defensiveness showed
up
most often as a determination to omit
any
data that
might
reflect
poorly upon persons
the author wanted
to
protect
or
upon
the movement as a whole. Bartleman and
Parham tended to let the
chips
fall where
they would,
but most
writers elided
any person
or
any aspect
of the
story they
found
distasteful.
Indeed,
Frodsham was
quite explicit
about
this,
acknow-
ledging
that he did not intend to
say anything
about
anyone’s
mistakes. The sentiment was laudable, but the result was
not,
for in
his zeal to
protect
the movement he omitted the names of
many
deserving figures
whom he disliked or considered
theologically
unsound. The most
egregious omission,
as
noted,
was of
Parham,
but others such as
Goss,
Maria
Woodworth-Etter,
and Aimee
McPherson also failed to make his roster. The kind of defensiveness
Frodsham and most of the
early
writers exhibited also
proved
counterproductive. Sanitizing
the
story
rendered it less than
believeable,
thus
guaranteeing
that
unsympathetic
outsiders would
step
in to fill the lacuna with
exaggerated
tales of sexual and
financial
turpitude.2?
A more serious
deficiency
in the work of the
early
historians was
their lack of critical standards.
By that
I mean that
they
were unable
or
unwilling
to see that sound historical
writing
consisted of a
recitation
of publicly
available facts and an
interpretation
of those
facts in terms of
publicly
available theories of human motivation
and social
change. Simply stated, they
failed to
recognize
that
history
was not
theology. Figuring
out what God had or had not
done in human
history
was not the business of the historian but of
14
.
But
pentecostal
They rarely God unpersuasive
to outsiders.
.
house-the rules
by
But
unreliable as
‘
institutional
early
‘
it was
history
Seized
upon
as
against light,
gender
bias.
95
historians
rarely
understood
this.
of the
of pentecostal
history
abound. One
,
the
theologian.
realized that when
they openly
and
deliberately placed
“at the center of the action”
they
were
making
their works
That was not because outsiders were
necessarily irreligious,
nor even unsympathetic, but because
theological
assertions
smuggled
in as historical “facts” violated the rules of the
which the
game
was
supposed
to be
played.28
that is not the end of the
story.
If the
golden
oldies are
conventional historical
works, they are, nonetheless,
useful as “ritualized” works.
By
that I mean that
they present
a
version of the
past
that was
congruent
with the
theological
and
needs of the movement at the time
they
were written.
Consequently
the data were filtered and the
interpretations
data were
simplified
and dramatized in order to make them serve
the
larger purposes
of the movement. Davis Bitton’s assessment of
Mormon
history writing
is relevant to
early pentecostals’s.
Ritualized
history,
he has
pointed out,
“was not invention.” Rather
cast in the form of a morality play.
a useful symbol of the struggle of darkness
of the
triumph
of the latter, and of God’s
…
providential
care over his Saints, the incident was simplified,
dramatized and commemorated…..New converts, as part of
their assimilation into the body of the faithful, could
easily
master the simplified
history
and accept it as their own.29
Examples
of the ritualization
of the more
egregious
was white racial bias. The
problem
was not so
much that the role of blacks was elided as that the influence of black
culture
upon
white
pentecostal worship patterns
and folk
theology
was
ignored.3°
A more serious distortion was
persistent
male
There
are,
for
example, tantalizing
indications in the
primary
evidence that
Lucy
Farrow
may
have been as instrumental
as William
Seymour
in
bringing
about the Azusa Street revival,.31
women
pastors
and
evangelists
Maria Woodworth-Etter, Carrie Judd
Montgomery,
Elizabeth V. Baker, and Susan Duncan was systematically eclipsed.
Rather than
offering
a lengthy
potpourri
of additional
examples,
it
may
be more useful to examine one in some detail. , The ritualization of early pentecostal
history
is well illustrated
by
the manner in which the
sequence
of events at Parham’s Bible
school in Topeka in the fall of 1900 was depicted
by Parham and,
as
far as I know,
by all pentecostal
historians after him. In Parham’s
autobiography, published posthumously
in
1930,
he stated that in
December 1900 he and his students determined
diligent study
of Acts
2,
“what was the Bible
The
pivotal
role of McPherson,
however,
such as Aimee
.
to
learn, through evidence of the
15
96
baptism
of the
Holy
Ghost.” Parham then left the school for three days.
When he returned the
morning
of December
31st,
he asked the students what their
study
of the Bible had revealed. “To
my astonishment,”
he
wrote, “they
all had the same
story,
that while
.. there were different
things
which occured when the Pentecostal blessing fell,
that the
indisputable proof
on each occasion
was,
that. they spake
with other
tongues.”
That
night,
when
Agnes
Ozman asked that hands be laid
upon
her so that she
might
receive the baptism
of the
Holy Ghost, “glory
fell
upon
her … and she
began speaking
in the Chinese
language. “32
There was a subtle but
important
difference between this 1930 account and Parham’s
description
of those same events in a sermon preached twenty
one
days
after
they
took
place (that is, 22 January 1901).
In the sermon he stated that “in the
closing days
of the fall term of 1900″ the students
sought
to discover the “real Bible evidence of this.
Baptism
so that we
might
know and obtain it.” Soon Ozman “desired hands laid
upon
her that she
might
receive the
gift
of the
Holy
Ghost
[and she] spake
with other
tongues. “33
What should be noticed here is that in the 1901 account Parham stated that Ozman
sought
the
gift
of the
Holy Ghost,
but he did not say
that she knew beforehand what the
gift
would be. At least three . additional bits of information corroborate this earlier document. First,
in October
1906, Seymour
wirote in his
newspaper
that when the twelve students had started to speak in tongues on January
3rd, 1901
(two days
after Ozman had done
so),
Parham entered the room and
as’ked, ” `O, God,
what does this mean?”‘ The second bit . of information comes from Charles
Shumway,
who interviewed Parham
presumably
in 1913 or 1914. When Parham entered the room that fateful
night, Shumway reported,
Parham asked: ” ‘What did it mean?’
Unobserved,
he
slipped
in and knelt down to pray
and ask for the
explanation.” Finally,
and most
importantly, Ozman herself wrote in 1912 that she had
spoken
“three words in another
tongue” in
December 1900. Even
so,
after the
experience
of January lost, 1901,
she
wrote,
“there was a searching of the Word for light
on the
“gift
of
tongues,’ and
as I remember … I was
greatly surprised
to find so much written on the
subject.”
In a 1922 letter recently
discovered in the Pentecostal
Evangel files,
Ozman was even more
explicit.
“Before
receiving
the
Comforter,”
she
recalled, “I did not know that I would
speak
in tongues when I received the Holy
Ghost for I did not know it was Bible…. I will put in print and say
I did not know then that
any one
else would
speak
in tongues. For I did not know how the
Holy
GHOST would be manifested to others.”3a
–
16
97
The 1930 description of those events
represents
a ritualization of the earlier
descriptions.
That is because the former
suggests
that the normativeness of
speaking
in
tongues
was self-evident to
anyone who read Acts 2 with an open mind and honest heart. As J. Roswell Flower
put
it in 1950 in a
typescript history
of the Assemblies of God,
“these students had deduced from God’s Word that in
to be the
apostolic times,
the
speaking
in
tongues
was considered
initial
physical
evidence of a person’s
having
received the
baptism in the
Holy Spirit….
It was this decision which has made the Pentecostal Movement of the Twentieth
Century.” Flower’s
last sentence is
revealing.
From the
beginning
the traditional
pente- costal denominations have
distinguished
themselves from other evangelicals,
and
especially
from their holiness
rivals, by
their insistence
upon
the
necessity
of
speaking
in
tongues.
Yet that doctrine
perennially
has been
disputed,
not
only by outsiders,
but also
by
a , vocal
minority
from within the movement. Thus institutiorial needs have determined that a
particular
version-a ritualization-of the events that took
place
in
Topeka
in 1901 would
prevail.35
In sum, the
golden
oldies are not
satisfactory
for all
purposes. By definition, they
are
simplified. They
celebrate that which is celebratable. “Those who
probe
more
deeply,”
as Bitton
wrote,
“are bound to discover that men of the
past
were not one dimensional and,
more
essentially,
that the
past
was not that
simple.
Historians have a
duty
to criticize and correct
inaccurate, inadequate,
or oversimplified
versions of the
past.”
Yet it is equally important to remember that
arguments
about one’s true
history
are
usually struggles
between forms of legitimacy, not between
legitimacy
and illegitimacy.
Students
of pentecostal history
need to
learn,
in short, how to take the
golden
oldies in stride, use them for what
they
are worth, respect
them for what
they
stood
for,
and remember that ‘ we all see
through
a glass darkly.36
*Grant Wacker is associate
professor
of religion at the
University of North Carolina,
Chapel
Hill.
Lawrence, The Apostolic
Faith Restored
(St.
Louis:
Gospel Publishing House, 1916).
Frank Bartleman, How “Pentecost” Came to Los
Angeles-How
It Was in the
Beginning (Los Angeles: printed by author, 1925).
All quotations in this essay are taken from an unabridged reprint: Bartleman,
Azusa Street
(Plainfield,
NJ:
Logos International, 1980).
The “Pillar of Fire”
quip
is on p. 67. Ethel E. Goss, The Winds of God: The Story of the
Early
Pentecostal
Days (1901-1914)
in the
Life of
17
98
Howard A. Goss, as Told by Ethel E. Goss (New York: Comet Press Books, 1958).
Frank J. Ewart, The Phenomenon
of Pentecost: (a history of “The Latter
Rain’) (Houston:
Herald
Publishing House, 1947).
2Alma White, The Story of My
Life and the Pillar of Fire
NJ: Pillar of
(Zarephath,
Fire, 1935), 5 vols. C.W. Shumway,
“A Study of the ‘Gift of Tongues,’ ”
A.B.
thesis, University
of Southern
California,
1914.
3Bartleman,
Azusa
Street, 9, 19, 49,
90. See also
Bartleman,
“The
Earthquake,” Way of Faith, (November 1907).
4Bartleman,
Azusa
Street, 75,
153. See also William J.
Seymour, Apostolic
Faith
[CA], (October 1906), 1 ; Homer A. Tomlinson (editor’s remarks)
in Homer A. Tomlinson,
ed., Diary of A.J.
Tomlinson
NY: The Church of God World
(Queens Village, Headquarters, 1949), 1 :11. For
a similar
expression by the premier
historian and
theologian
of the second generation,
see Donald
Gee,
The Pentecostal Movement:
Including
the Story of the
War Years ( 1940-1947) (London: Elim
rev. ed.
Publishing Company,
1949 [ 1941 ]), 16-19.
5See my “Another
Time,
Another World: The Primitivist
American
Impulse
in
Pentecostalism,”
in Richard T.
Hughes, ed.,
Primitivism in American
Culture, (Urbai8a: University
of Illinois
Press, forthcoming). 6Lawrence, Apostolic Faith, 12.
‘See for
“The
example Ewart, Phenomenon, 34,
and
(author anonymous)
Wonderful History
of the Latter
Rain,” Faithful Standard (June 1922), 6.
81 owe this
point
to William W. Menzies of California
Theological Seminary, personal correspondence,
December 1986.
9Bartleman,
Azusa
Street,
5. Ewart, Phenomenon, 53. Goss,
Winds, 85. Parham, Apostolic Faith [KS], (July 1912), cited
in Edith L. Waldvogel [Blumhofer], “The `Overcoming
Life’: A Study in the Reformed
Evangelical Origins
of Pentecostalism,”
(Ph.D. diss.,
Harvard
University, 1977), 188.
loseymour, Apostolic Faith, [CA] (October 1906), 4. Faithful Standard, “History
of Pentecost”
(November 1922), 8. Elizabeth
V. Baker, Chronicles oja
Faith
Life (New York: Garland Publishing, 1984, [1924]), 134. Baker’s reference was to the 1904-1905 Wales revival, but she drew no distinction between that and
“pentecostal” stirrings
in the United States. Carl Brumback, Suddenly
From Heaven: A History of the Assemblies
of God (Springfield,
MO:
Gospel Publishing House, 1961).
I owe the
“sacred meteor”
metaphor
to Russell P. Spittler, “Scripture and the Theological Enterprise,”
in Robert K. Johnston, ed., The Use of the Bible in Theology: Evangelical Options (Atlanta:
John Knox
Press, 1985), 63.
“”Wonderful
History,” Faithful
Standard
(June 1922), 7. Gee,
Pente- costal
Movement,
3. See also Frodsham,
Signs Following, 42,
and Lawrence, Apostolic Faith,
45.
‘2Bartleman,
Azusa
Street, passim. Goss, Winds, 147, 154. “History
of Pentecost,” Faithful Standard, (July, 1922),
6.
‘3Donald W. Dayton, Theological Roots
of Pentecostalism (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow
Press, forthcoming), chap.
1.
‘4Goss, Winds,
129. J.G.
Campbell, “History
of the
Apostolic
Faith Movement,” Apostolic Faith, [Goose Creek, TX],
2-3. Parham,
Apostolic Faith[KS], ([January/New
Year
edition] 1912) 7; (August 1912),
6.
18
99
“History
of Pentecost,”
Faithful Standard (October 1922),15. H. Tomlinson, Diary
1:179. Baker, Chronicles, 141. A.J.
Tomlinson, Diary, 3:56, 38.
15See for
example Bartleman,
Azusa
Street, 89,
and Phineas
Bresee, “The Gift of
Tongues,”
Nazarene
Messenger,
13 (December 1906), 6, reprinted
in Bartleman, Azusa
Street,
182-184. See also Sandra Sizer Frankiel,
The
Spirit of California: Evangelicals, Liberals,
and
Mystics 1850-1915, chapter 7, forthcoming.
‘6A.A.
Boddy,
“At Los
Angeles, California,” Confidence, (October 1912), 232-233. Shumway, “Study,” 69, 164, 171,
179.
17San Antonio
[TX] Light (19 July 1907), 1, and (24 July 1907), 2.
‘8Henry
G. Tuthill, extended letter to editor, extracted in “History of Pentecost,” Faithful Standard, (July 1922), 12, 23. Lawrence, Apostolic Faith, 52-55; see also
the extract from
Goss, on 67. Frodsham, Signs Following, chaps.
1-2.
?9Parham, Apostolic
Faith
[KS] (June 1912), 7-8; (December 1912), 5.
z?Shumway, “Study,” 158,
165. William C.
Hiss, “Shiloh:
Frank W. Sandford and the
Kingdom: 1893-1948,” (Ph.D. diss.,
Tufts
University, 1978), 107, l 18, 174, 197, 290-297.
2’Seymour, Apostolic
Faith
(January 1907),
1. Seymour also seems to have claimed that
[CA],
the revival should be dated from the time the Azusa Mission was organized. K. Brower, “Origin of the Apostolic Faith Movement on the Pacific
Coast,”
9
August 1909,
in
Apostolic
Faith [Goose Creek, TX] (May 1921), 6-7. It should
be said, however, that Seymour
had been more
generous
about the
Faith
patrimony
of the revival before his rupture with Parham.
Apostolic [CA] (October 1906), 1. Bartleman, Azusa Street,
69. A.J.
Tomlinson,
The Last Great
Conflict, (NewYork:GarlandPublishing, 1985[1913]), 136-139. Homer Tomlinson, Diary, 1:25, 76, 178-179, 196, 239.
22Bartleman,
Azusa
Street,
84. Mother
Cotton,
“Inside
Story
of the Outpouring
of the Holy Spirit, Azusa Street,
April 1906,” Message of the Apostolic
Faith
(April 1939), n.p.
23Seymour, Apostolic
Faith
[CA], (November 1906), 1. Goss, Winds, 80. L.C. Hall,
Living Waters,
extracted in
Ewart, Phenomenon,
96.
Orwig quoted
in Frodsham,
Signs Following,
31. Frodsham,
Signs Following, 83-84.
24Seymour, Apostolic
Faith [CA], (January 1907), 1. Bartleman, “Earthquake,” last
paragraph. Parham, Apostolic
Faith
[KS], (October 1913),
19. Tomlinson
(and
Lillie Duggar),
Answering
the Call of
God, (Cleveland, TN: White Wing Publishing
House, 1913, 1933), l 1-12, 28. “History
of the Latter Rain,”
Faithful Standard, (June 1922), 7. The term cosmocentric is taken from C. Eric Lincoln, “Cultism in the Local Church,”paper given to the Society for Pentecostal
Studies, Cleveland, TN, November,
1983.
25Baker, Chronicles, 142. Tomlinson, Diary, 3:31. Ewart, Phenomenon, 87, 1 1.
26Ewart, Phenomenon, 74. Parham, Apostolic Faith [KS], (November 1913),
6.
Faithful Standard, (November 1922), 8; (October 1922)
9. Frodsham, Signs Following,
35.
27Frodsham, Signs Following,
149. ‘ 28The quotation is from Jan
Shipps,
Mormonism: The Story
of a
New
.
‘
.
19
100
Religious
Tradition
(Urbana: University
of Illinois,
1985),
107.
29Davis Bitton, “The Ritualization of Mormon
History,”
Utah Historical Quarterly,
43 ( 1975), 83.
30The parallels between
many of the myths
and rituals of the religions of West Africa, which persisted in Afro-American folk religion, and primitive pentecostalism,
were too
pervasive
to have been coincidental. See for example
Catherine L.
Albanese,
American:
Religions
and
Religion (Belmont,
CA: Wadsworth
Publishing Co., 1981), 23,
114-117.
3’Goss, Winds,
35. Cotton, “Inside
Story,” Workers,” “Apostolic
Faith Movement ‘In Texas’
”
n.p.
“One of the
Gospel of
the
Kingdom, (December 1909), reprinted
in Apostlic
Faith, [Goose Creek,
of the
TX], (May 1921), _5-6._K.
Brower, “Origin Apostolic Faith,” 6.
“Parham, in [Sarah
E.
Parham, compiler]
The
Life of Charles F. Parham: Founder
of the Apostolic
Faith Movement
(Baxter Springs,
KS: Apostolic
Faith Bible College, 1977 reprint [1930]) 51-52.
33parham, “Baptism
of the
Holy
Ghost…. First Sermon on Pentecost preached
… 21 days after First
Outpouring,” reprinted
in Parham, A Voice Crying
in the Wilderness
(Baxter Springs,
KS:
Apostolic
Faith Bible College,
undated
reprint
of 2nd edition, 1910 [1902]) 32-33.
34Seymour, Apostolic
Faith
166. Agnes N. Ozman, “A Witness to First
[CA], (October 1906), 1. Shumway, “Study,”
Scenes,” Apostolic
Faith
4. The
letter,
which is typed
[KS], (December 1912-January 1913),
and dated January 1,1922,
is titled: “HISTORY OF THE PENTECOSTAL MOVEMENT FROM JAN.
1, 1901.” The letter bears no salutation,
but
presumably
it was written to Stanley
Frodsham,
who was then collecting such letters for use in his book,
Signs Following.
35J. Roswell
Flower,
“Course in Church
Orientation,” 10, quoted
in Brumback, Suddenly,
23.
36Bitton, “Ritualization,”
83. The penultimate sentence of the
a
paragraph paraphrases
sentence in Shipps,
Mormonism,
105. Chapter 5 of Shipp’s book, aptly
called “Getting the Story
Straight,” provided
the
impetus
for this
essay.
I am especially indebted to her for
helping
me appreciate the functions of ritualized
history
in a religious movement.
20
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