John Wesley insisted that Christians might, in this lifetime, become perfect in love or intention. With this belief the Holiness Movement was born. Wesley's belief and the experience known as "Christian perfection" or "entire sanctification" that grew out of it, found a receptive audience in antebellum North America. By the mid-nineteenth-century, three closely related groups had developed, the Methodists, Oberlin perfectionists, and the antinomian perfectionists. After the American Civil War, the Holiness Movement spread to Europe and churches subscribing to the Holiness philosophy have flourished around the globe in the twentieth-century.
The Historical Dictionary of the Holiness Movement traces the origins of the movement and focuses on the founders and shapers of holiness thought and experience. In keeping with the movement's own insistence that personal experience is a primary, though not exclusive, source of theological authority this volume closely examines the people who shaped and sustained the movement.
The Historical Dictionary of the Holiness Movement traces the origins of the movement and focuses on the founders and shapers of holiness thought and experience. In keeping with the movement's own insistence that personal experience is a primary, though not exclusive, source of theological authority this volume closely examines the people who shaped and sustained the movement.
