Reprinted from Bibliotheca Sacra, lxxviii. 1921, pp. 37–72, 172–200, 319–375.
I. The Environment
Few things are more noticeable, among the advocates of perfectionism from the opening of the second third of the nineteenth century, than their extreme reluctance to accept the name of “Perfectionists.” Many things may no doubt have coöperated to produce this attitude. Its main occasion lay, however, in the association of the name with a particular body of perfectionists, then claiming the attention of the public, with which other perfectionists were very loath to be confused. How anxious they were not to be confused with this body may be measured by the vigor of the language in which, themselves perfectionists, they repudiate all connection with “Perfectionists.” Asa Mahan, for example, writing at the beginning of this period, 1 intemperately declares that the doctrine he teaches “has absolutely nothing in common” with “Perfectionism,” “but a few terms derived from the Bible.” In order to distinguish his doctrine from “Perfectionism,” however, he requires to describe the rejected doctrine as “Perfectionism technically so called,” a mode of speech which already suggests that perfectionism, plainly understood, is—as it really is—common ground between the two. Possibly to atone for this necessary confession of general kinship, he sweepingly declares that “Perfectionism, technically so called,” is, in his judgment, “in the native and necessary tendencies of its principles, worse than the worst form of infidelity.” To William E. Boardman, writing twenty years later,2 the danger of confusion with this “Perfectionism” seems less imminent, and he is therefore able to speak of it with less passion. He is not the less determined, however, to separate himself decisively from it. This, it must be confessed, he does not accomplish, in every respect, without some apparent difficulty—describing its fundamental mystical doctrine of the indwelling Christ in terms which would not serve badly to describe the doctrine to which he himself ultimately came. It is, in point of fact, not the perfectionism of the rejected “Perfectionism” which offends him, any more than Mahan, but its antinomianism. And his real concern is to protest that not all perfectionism—not his own variety, for example—is chargeable with the antinomianism which men had been led to associate with the name through experience with the body of religionists who had arrogated to themselves, and had had accorded to them by common usage, the specific name of “Perfectionists.” How firmly this special body of perfectionists had attached the general descriptive name of “Perfectionists” to themselves as their particular designation (just as other bodies of religionists have laid claim to the names of “Christians,” “Disciples,” and the like as their specific names), is illustrated by the survival of this special use of the term, and that in an even narrower application, alongside of its more general employment, in the definition of the word “Perfectionist” (not usually of “Perfectionism”)3 in our current English dictionaries, as well as in our Religious Encyclopædias. A very good example is supplied by John Henry Blunt’s “Dictionary of Sects, Heresies, Ecclesiastical Parties and Schools of Religious Thought” (1874). Under the head of “Perfectionists,” he describes only “a licentious American sect of Antinomian Communists.”4 All other perfectionists he classes under the head of “Perfectibilists,” a distinction in designation to which he did not succeed in giving currency.5
The particular sect to which thus the name of “Perfectionists” is reserved by Blunt is no more perfectionist than other perfectionist parties; nor did it arise under influences specifically different from those to which the perfectionist parties which have most sharply repudiated relationship with it owed their own origin, nor can it be represented as without some common interests with them. It differs from them, however, not merely in drawing off to itself and forming a separate sect instead of contenting itself with acting as leaven within existing churches; but also in the particular doctrinal system which it developed for itself, and which it utilized for the support and exposition not only of its perfectionism, but also of certain radical social theories, which, having the courage of its convictions, it presently put into practice up to a very bitter end. In this perfectionist sect, we have therefore the opportunity to observe a perfectionism working itself out in life under leadership strong enough to enable it to go its own way, along the lines of a development distinctly logical, although narrow and inconsiderate, untrammeled by considerations derived from tradition, whether religious, ethical, or social, and unaffected by the universal judgment of the community in which it lived. A great deal of ability was expended in the elaboration of its underlying religious and social theory; an incredible audacity was shown in putting this theory into practice; and a certain amount of temporary success attended the enterprise. But the thinking embodied in it was as grotesque as it was acute; it was astuteness rather than wisdom which presided over its social organization; and the experiment had fairly reached the end of its possibilities of persistence in about a third of a century. There is much to be learned from a study of it; there is nothing about it which can fairly be represented as edifying.