From The Biblical Review, iv. 1919, pp. 376–406, and 561–590: published by The Biblical Seminary in New York.
I
It was a very remarkable campaign which was conducted by Robert Pearsall Smith in Great Britain and Germany during the years 1873–1875 in the interests of what is known as “the Higher Christian Life.” It has left behind it two imposing monuments. One of them, the great “Keswick Movement,” is known wherever the English language is spoken. The other, a parallel movement in Germany, spoken of there as “Die Heiligungsbewegung,” the “Sanctification Movement,” deserves to be better known than it appears to be. It took a peculiar form, which was given it by the circumstance that it made its way primarily in, and always by means of, “the Fellowships” (Gemeinschaften) which had come down from the times of Pietistic ascendency, and were now given new life and set upon a career of rapid self-propagation, by the impulse received from Pearsall Smith. Thus the “Sanctification Movement” inaugurated by him became in its form a great “Fellowship Movement,” which has spread throughout Germany and has extended itself everywhere in a stable organization and numerous instruments of activity. The center of its public manifestation is the great Gnadau Conference.
One of the remarkable features of this “Sanctification Movement” has been that it took its color very largely from the teachings of one man. This man was Theodor Jellinghaus, who received his Higher Life doctrine from Smith and his colleagues at the great Oxford Union Meeting for the Promoting of Scriptural Holiness, in the early days of September, 1874, and who returned thence to Germany having before him his life-work of propagating it. In 1880 he published the work which became very much the doctrinal text book of the movement, under the title of “The Complete, Present Salvation through Christ.”1 Through this book, in its successive editions, and the Bible school which he founded for the training of workers for the movement, Jellinghaus was able to give to the movement its doctrinal character. This doctrinal character, while following in the main, and at first very closely, the teachings of Smith, did not exactly coincide with them in all its details, and departed more and more from them as time went on, though never fundamentally. This was clearly marked in the successive editions of the book. A particular quality of its own was thus acquired by the German Sanctification Movement, which differentiated it as a distinct species of Higher Life teaching, while it retained its generic character.
Its development on these lines proceeded with great and fruitful quietness throughout the last quarter of the nineteenth century. With the twentieth century, however, a period of turmoil set in. Fanatical tendencies showed themselves, with ever increasing violence. A consequent Perfectionism endeavored to substitute itself for the moderate Perfectionism of the Higher Life teachers, and especially of Jellinghaus, the most discreet of them all. The excesses of the Welsh Revival were imported into Germany. Worst of all, the Fellowship circles were invaded by the fanaticisms of the “Pentecost Movement”—the “Los Angeles Revival,” which brought ruin in their train. The ultimate result was an immense revulsion of feeling. The whole Higher Life system which had supported the doctrinal basis of the movement from its beginning was undermined and discredited. Jellinghaus himself, who had given his life to its propagation, published, in a remarkable book, his recantation of it.2 When the Great War lowered its curtain over the land and shut off observation of the course of religious events in it, it looked very much as if the Fellowship Movement had definitely ceased to be a Higher Life movement and had returned with happy decisiveness to the Reformation for its doctrinal basis.
Inclined as we thus are to look upon the Fellowship Movement as a thing of the past so far as it was distinctively a “sanctification movement,” that is to say, so far as it was a continuation of the Higher Life Movement conveyed to Europe in 1873–1875 by Robert Pearsall Smith, it becomes desirable as a matter of history that we should make an attempt to understand the precise character of its teaching as a “sanctification movement.” It has already been pointed out that this is practically the same thing as to undertake an exposition of the Higher Life teaching of Theodor Jellinghaus.3 He wrote a number of books;4 but it is particularly his massive volume on “The Complete, Present Salvation through Christ” which claims our attention here. We have already intimated that it advances a little from edition to edition in its departure from Pearsall Smith’s teachings. It will not be necessary for us, however, to trace this advance in detail. It is not Jellinghaus’ personal growth that we are interested in; we are seeking merely to obtain through him a clear conception of the type of Higher Life teaching prevalent in the Fellowship Movement in Germany for the forty years from 1875 to 1914. We shall, then, merely take the fourth edition of Jellinghaus’ work, published in 1898—about the middle point of our period—and observe by means of it how the matter was presented to the Fellowships near the end of the quiet development of the movement, and before the turmoil of the twentieth century set in. This is the way the adherents of the movement were being taught to think at the period of its most uninterrupted development. This is the way, in other words, in which the Fellowships connected with the Gnadau Conference have been accustomed to conceive their distinctive doctrine of full salvation through faith alone.5