Vision
For The Lost, or Lost Vision? William Booth's Legacy 100
On
by Harold Hill
A paper prepared for the Thought Matters Conference
17-18 August 2012
My field is history rather than theology, so I propose to
offer some historical context for our theological discussion.
To frame that context I will put four questions:
1. What was Booth’s vision?
2. What do we now see?
3. How did that happen?
4. What now? Can the vision be re-found?
What was Booth’s vision?
When William Booth burst in the door of his Hammersmith home
late one night in 1865 and exclaimed, “Darling, I have found
my destiny!” he’d been walking through the slums of the East
End of London. That glimpse of hell on earth constituted
Booth’s primary vision; hell was the East
End
writ large and forever. Commissioner Wesley Harris once asked
Commissioner George Joliffe, once secretary to William Booth,
what motivated the Founder. Joliffe replied, “His vision of
Hell!”
Booth was fond of vision imagery, even collecting a series of
articles in one volume entitled
Visions in 1906.
One of these says (I abbreviate):
I saw a dark and stormy ocean. …
In that ocean I thought I saw myriads of poor human beings
plunging and floating, shouting and shrieking, cursing and
struggling and drowning; and as they cursed and screamed they
rose and shrieked again, and then some sank to rise no more.
And I saw out of this dark angry ocean, a mighty rock that
rose up with its summit towering high above the black clouds
that overhung the stormy sea. And all around the base of this
great rock I saw a vast platform. Onto this platform, I saw
with delight a number of the poor struggling, drowning
wretches continually climbing out of the angry ocean. And I
saw that a few of those who were already safe on the platform
were helping the poor creatures still in the angry waters to
reach the place of safety.…
As I looked on, I saw that the occupants of that platform were
quite a mixed company. … But only a very few of them seemed to
make it their business to get the people out of the sea. …
though all had been rescued at one time or another from the
ocean, nearly everyone seemed to have forgotten all about it.
Anyway, the memory of its darkness and danger no longer seemed
to trouble them… These people did not seem to have any care –
that is, any agonising care – about the poor perishing ones
who were struggling and drowning before their eyes…
[1]
You know where the rest of this was going… To serve that
vision, the Army was called into existence.
And Booth believed that “If you were to take hell out of our
doctrine, The Salvation Army would soon disappear”[2]
Booth did imagine scenes other than of hell; visions of the
millennium, and of heaven.
He speculated in 1900 that London could become the New Jerusalem, with Hyde Park
roofed over to become “The World’s
Great
Grand Central
Temple”.[3]
His vision of the Millennium looked remarkably like a
Salvation Army International Congress. And like those grand
Congress occasions, the purpose of his sharing this vision was
to motivate his followers to greater efforts on behalf of the
lost. He visited heaven and interviewed participants in the
Acts 2 account of Pentecost in order to bring back a hurry-up
message from the Apostles and Saints to shirkers in the ranks.
The focus was not the attainment of bliss but the compulsion
to rescue people from hell.
But there was a further vision. Although acts of mercy and
service were part of Booth’s Wesleyan dna and long featured in
the Christian Mission’s agenda, from the late 1880s on Booth
was persuaded that the depth of social deprivation the Army
encountered made it too difficult for many people to hear and
understand the message of Salvation. He had to do something
about hell on earth as well as hell hereafter. While the Army
was already engaged in social action, Booth came to see the
need for more fences at the tops of cliffs as well as more
ambulances at the bottom. Sometimes he even tried to do
something about the levelling cliffs themselves. He saw that
society, as well as the individuals comprising it, needed to
be saved.
So he began to describe another, extended vision. Here’s an
example, as reported by former Commissioner Alex Nicol:
In one of his most inspired moments he delivered an address to
his Staff upon the Salvation Army of the future. He called it
a vision. He saw:
ˇ
Homes for the Detention of Tramps.
-
Transportation Agencies for Removing Slum Dwellers from
one part of the world to another.
ˇ
Steamers owned and chartered by the
Salvation Army for the purpose.
ˇ
Stupendous factories, splendid stores,
colossal workshops, and vast industrial enterprises.
-
Inebriates' Home for “men and women who drink distilled
damnation in the shape of intoxicants.”
ˇ
Rescue Operations of many orders for the
deliverance of fallen women.
ˇ
Land Colonies evolving into Salvation
cities.
ˇ
Orphanages becoming villages and
Reformatories made into veritable paradises.
ˇ
The working out of my idea for a World’s
University for Humanity.
ˇ
A Salvation Citadel in every village, town, and city.[4]
The post-millennial character of the Army’s vision is evident
in this 1895 American article:
When we consider in our times, and appreciate the fact that we
are in the very beginning of the glorious Millennium, we have
cause to rejoice… It has not been the reconstruction of
society and government – the paternal – modelled after Bible
times and practised by General Booth in his early Army – I say
it has not been these improvements, although they have helped.
The great power, as we are all aware, is the fact that people
have been saved and cleansed from all sin by the Blood of
Jesus. This is the power that has brought about this reign of
unselfishness and love among the people of the earth. This is
the reason the entire world speaks the same language, and the
word “foreigner” is obsolete… It was upon the debris of social
ruin that The Salvation Army built up a grander civilization –
one that honored [sic]
and served God… The Lord was with His Army as He promised
(Joel 2:11). In the year 1900 A.D., The Salvation Army
numbered 20,000 field officers, in 1925 A.D., 200,000, when
every city, village, and hamlet in the entire world had corps.
Whole cities had been converted. … In 1950 the world was about
conquered and the devil so discouraged that he gave up the
fight.[5]
So what was Booth’s vision? A vision of hell. But by late in
Booth’s life his vision encompassed not only Salvation from
hell in this world for heaven in the next but the Salvation
of this world as well.
What do we now see?
Admitting that the 1950 millennial prediction was a tad
premature, does what we now see look like Booth’s vision?
To begin with, how about saving people from hell? An
early-days Salvationist was an uncomfortable person with whom
to share a railway compartment. You would be ear-bashed on the
subject. Today, many of us are more anxious to demonstrate our
inoffensive normality. The fact that many Salvationists have
become less motivated to engage in personal evangelism
probably indicates a slackening commitment to the doctrines
underlying such activity. A diminished conviction that our
neighbour is going to hell renders us less inclined to risk
giving offence by trying to save him from it.
But lest we think this only came in with Rob Bell’s book
Love Wins,
here’s ex-Commissioner Nicol again, a hundred and one years
ago. Commenting on the Fifth Doctrine, “We believe
that our first parents were created in a state of innocence,
but by their disobedience they lost their purity and happiness
and that in consequence of their fall all men have become
sinners totally depraved and as such are justly exposed to the
wrath of God,” Nicol wrote, “The Army is committed for all
time to this doctrine and many others equally contentious, and
some of which Staff officers no more believe in than they do
that Bacon wrote Shakespeare.”[6]
Really? Perhaps Nicol had the integrity to resign because he
no longer believed those doctrines. Perhaps many of us have
since found ways of re-interpreting them to our satisfaction,
just as Anglican clergy once pledged a token adherence to the
long-outmoded Thirty-Nine Articles of 1571.
This is not to say that modern Salvationists do not believe,
or that sinners are no longer brought to salvation by our
witness – they are, thank God – but Booth would probably
consider some of us to be people “who do not seem to have any
care – that is, any
agonising care” – for the lost.
And what of Booth’s other vision, of the salvation of society?
All over the world, battalions of Salvationists and employees
are engaged in alleviating social distress. Sometimes they not
only attend to the consequences of social evil but also seek
to engage with its structural causes. For many years this last
was somewhat understated, partly because of the increasing
social conservatism of the Army’s constituency and a fear of
all things “political”, but in recent years it has been given
a more prominent place in our mission. The mission statement
of the Army in New Zealand is, “Caring for people,
transforming lives, reforming society”.
Any hesitations? Booth’s “Darkest England” scheme of “social
salvation” in this life was intended to support,
to complement, not to replace, his commitment to
“spiritual salvation” for the next life. He feared that
service could become an end in itself. Today many of those
working for the Army in this field are not Salvationists, and
need not be Christians, and may not be particularly in
sympathy with that aspect of the Army’s mission. In 2004 some
New York
employees sued the Army for insisting on it. They claimed that
“When the Salvation Army’s religious mission was made
mandatory in our work place, it changed the climate in a way
that caused us fear and concern about our ability to ethically
deliver services.”[7]
Although Salvation Army leaders have always been reluctant to
allow donors, government or private, to determine our policies
and values, we cannot resist the bait of those assiduously
cultivated funds. Booth would take money from the devil
himself and wash it in the tears of the widows and orphans –
but the devil usually has his terms.[8]
I know that there is a strong argument that our mission must
be holistic, not confined to “saving souls”, and that even
giving a cup of water in Jesus’ name contributes to the
salvation of the world, but would Booth have been entirely
satisfied that his vision was being embodied in all we do,
both Word and Deed?
So, has the evangelical imperative become diluted? If that’s
what we now see, and if it be thought that we have lost
the vision,
How did that happen?
We naturally idealise the early Army as a time of exponential
growth, but statistically, the Australasian flood tide had
peaked by 1900. In barely a generation the initial energy had
begun to dissipate, the vision begun to fade.
Reinhold Niebuhr echoed Luther in writing that, “By its very
nature the sectarian type of organisation is valid for only
one generation… Rarely does a second generation hold the
convictions it has inherited with a fervour equal to that of
its fathers, who fashioned these convictions in the heat of
conflict and at the risk of martyrdom.”[9]
The children and grandchildren of those who had experienced
the miracle of the changing of beer into furniture did not
necessarily enjoy the same kind of vital conversion experience
of their own. They grew up within the world of the Salvation
Army and it was their familiar sub-culture, but they did not
necessarily inherit the evangelical imperative. Many found the
sub-culture restrictive and they began to slip away.
Let’s not beat ourselves up. This was a perfectly normal and
natural thing to happen. Renewal movements initiated by
charismatic leadership, always institutionalise and decline.
Sometimes they break out again in renewed vigour. This has
happened within the Christian church many times since the
original “Jesus movement” which shook the institutionalised
religion of first century Judaea. The Montanists, the Monastics, the Mendicant
Friars and late medieval movements, the radical Reformers, the
Methodists and the Pentecostals all illustrate the seemingly
inexorable progression of the seasons of divine inspiration
and human endeavour. Radical religious movements tend to arise
in eras of rapid change and transition, of cultural
liminality, of chaos, to which they are in part a response.
Because such periods often involve social and economic
dislocation, these movements are also often marked by concern
for the poor, or are identified with them. As Johan Metz put
it,
[Religious orders/congregations] are a kind of shock therapy…
for the Church as a whole. Against the dangerous
accommodations and questionable compromises that the Church…
can always incline to, they press for the uncompromising
nature of the Gospel and the imitation of Christ...[10]
We fit the template. The Salvation Army emerged in the late 19th
century as the latest body of Enthusiasts, those Max Weber
called the virtuosi,[11]
the dazzlingly skilled, the spiritual athletes. The Army was
widely recognised as a de facto new religious order
within the church. The poet Francis Thompson in an essay on
“Catholics In Darkest England” wrote, “Consider what the
Salvation Army is. It is not merely a sect, it is virtually a
Religious Order…”[12]
But, as Gerald Arbuckle writes of Catholic Orders:
Historically, once these movements cease to be prophetic,
though in Church law they may remain religious congregations,
they are no longer authentically religious. By sinking to the
level of purely human institutions they have lost their reason
for being.[13]
The Army fitted this template also.
Booth knew it was changing even in his day. Here he is in
1902:
[M]any … officers are trying to do the Salvation Army without
salvation – at any rate, with very little; trying to exemplify
the principles of the most wonderful religious organisation
that the world has ever seen with very little religion. They
get into a formal or legal way of doing things and go on doing
them without any results or with very little results because
the life and heat, and fire and passion are burned out or
almost out.[14]
So in 1904 he described another vision,
for a new order of officers. He wrote (again, I abbreviate):
I thought … I saw a new body of Officers suddenly start
into existence… … they appeared to manifest extraordinary
signs of earnestness, self-denial, and singleness of purpose;
indeed … a reckless, daredevil set. …
to welcome privations… to revel in hardships … facing
opposition and difficulties with meekness, patience, and love.
… they had
voluntarily embraced the old-fashioned vows of celibacy,
poverty, and obedience… vows … only binding upon them for a
term of years, with the option of renewal for a further term
at the expiration of that period, or of being able at that
time to honourably return to the ordinary ranks of
Officership.
… they wore a novel kind of uniform … evidently proud of their
colours.
… refused to accept any money or gifts … were pledged not to
own any goods of any kind… except the clothes they wore. …
great wanderers… on foot, … and speaking to the people in the
streets… wherever they had opportunity, about death, judgment,
eternity, repentance, Christ, and salvation… … I saw their
number… very, very small at first, gradually increase until
they reached quite a multitude. And the educated and
well-to-do, charmed with this simple Christ like life, swelled
its numbers, coming from the universities and the moneymaking
institutions and other high places.[15]
Booth was describing officers as he had expected them to be
twenty five years earlier – and clearly recognised that they
were no longer. He didn’t admit that his troops were now too
burdened with canvassing for funds, reporting statistics and
managing the already-saved, all concomitant with the
institutionalising of his vision, but he knew he now needed a
new Order. Had he
been 50 years younger, he would have
founded it himself.
But he didn’t, and his “old” order is now 100 years older. It
will be obvious that in this I’m speaking of the Army in the
West – of which Australasia
is a part. The present surge of growth the Army enjoys in the
“Developing World” may appear to parallel that of the Army’s
early days, but that’s another study. It’s the decline of the
West with which I’m concerned here.
So how did it happen? Quite naturally and humanly. The reasons
are as much sociological as spiritual.
So what now? Can the vision be re-found?
Can the Army of the West be re-founded? Gerald Arbuckle
would say not only can but must! Arbuckle is a
New Zealand Marist priest who works out of Sydney consulting with
Catholic religious congregations (Orders) internationally. He
draws a distinction between “renewal”, which is really just
tinkering with the existing responses to a situation, and
“refounding”, which is about in-depth, radical change in the
face of change.
He defines refounding as “a process of returning to the
founding experience of an organisation or group in order to
rediscover and re-own the vision and driving energy of the
pioneers.”[16]
There is a need for such a rediscovery when society enters a
renewed period of change and chaos. The mission which
responded so aptly to the challenges of an earlier period may
now be stuck in the form created to address conditions which
no longer obtain. Of course society is always in transition
but sometimes change becomes exponential. As a time of rapid
change and transition, of cultural liminality and chaos, the
last half of the twentieth century has been equal to the era
of the Army’s founding.
Arbuckle says that “when people own their powerlessness, they
return to the sacred time of the founding of the group. There
they can ask fundamental questions about their origins, about
what is essential to the founding vision and what is to be
kept, and what is accidental and to be allowed to go.”[17]
It is not my purpose now to draw up lists of what is
accidental and what is essential, but we’ve been debating the
non-negotiables of
Salvationism for years now. Our debate is sometimes framed
largely as an exercise in renewal, concerned with the
trappings, and which of them we want to retain or discard,
rather than focussed on the vision itself. Our nearest
approach to a reform of officership some years back managed
some comparatively minor changes – most of them subsequently
reversed – because we did not go deep enough. But can deep
change come about from the top?
Casting a vision is one of the functions of leadership.
Admittedly change in hierarchical organisations requires
permission from on high, but is that where change is
initiated? People can rise to leadership by conforming to the
established patterns, and even when they do not, their room
for manoeuvre is likely to be limited when they finally arrive
at the top.
Permission-giving is important – the classic is Commissioner
Harry Read’s liberating order of the day to the British
Territory, “Just do
something; I give you permission to fail”. But real change
begins from the bottom. What alert leadership does is read the
signs of the times. Edward Schillebeeckx makes the point that
throughout the history of the Church whenever there has been
any significant change, “on each occasion official documents
sanction a church practice which has grown up from the grass
roots.”[18]
The profound change embraced by the Roman Catholic Church
after John XXIII had called the Second Vatican Council in 1962
had been fermenting beneath the surface for several
generations.
It ferments also beneath the surface of the Salvation Army. As
Arbuckle goes on to say, after describing how prophetic
movements become human institutions, “When this happens, new
prophetic movements within the Church and/or re-founding
people arise within existing congregations to challenge them
to return to the radical demands of the Beatitudes.”[19]
A buzz-word in the evangelical community in recent decades has
been the “new Monasticism” – another way of describing an
attempt to re-found. We have their representatives within the
Army – what else were Alove and 614 and ArmyBarmy and
neo-Primitive Salvationism about? It’s significant that such
new movements almost invariably propose to serve the poor, and
include a focus on social justice. Are they the “new order”
Booth envisaged?
Let’s tease out further what is involved in “refounding.”
Arbuckle suggests
that the “most powerful myth is the group’s creation story”
[20],
which in our case is Booth’s vision. Arbuckle says that every
founding myth contains within itself polarities, such as the
tension between individual rights and the common good in a
free, democratic society. Just so, the polarity between
individual and social salvation is intrinsic to our
Salvationist myth and our vision. It is Booth’s own
multifaceted vision that has left us with this theological
dilemma between Word and Deed, between “saving” and “serving”.
It’s encouraging that Booth’s polarities
of personal and social salvation are maintained and perhaps
better integrated in today’s emerging Army.
Divergent views of
what Salvation consists of – and its application to this world
or the next – need to be held in tension.
There are related polarities, such as the one encapsulated by
Booth’s lament that
“I have been trying all my life to stretch out my arms so as
to reach with one hand the poor, and at the same time to keep
the other in touch with the rich. But my arms are not long
enough.”[21]
This is an area of both theological and ethical challenge for
the Army today, if we are still reluctant to challenge
unequivocally the structural greed which divides rich and poor
in our societies, divides the rich and poor nations, and
threatens the very survival of the biosphere. As Anglican
Bishop Peter Selby has written recently in The Tablet,
“Our
slavery to the principalities and powers represented by what
money has been allowed to become has to be broken.”[22]
We could be thinking – and speaking – more radically about
these things, but would that offend our donors?
But there are other polarities, also likely to be exposed by
the shifting world-values around us. What of the challenge
offered by the intellectual dislocation of secularisation and
post-modernism, the continuing fall-out of what Callum Brown
has described as “the pretty comprehensive nature of the
collapse of Christian culture in the 1960s”?[23]
The
Army has been able to respond to some social and economic
trends; we have been less ready to comprehend, let alone
respond to, the secularisation of society and the loss of
fundamental religious identity this has involved.
Has our theology has equipped us to
address this change? Let me fly a kite here.
Does recovering Booth’s vision for the lost necessarily mean
reverting to his theological frame of reference? Indeed, can
another polarity, this time between conservative and
innovative theology also be discerned even in the Founder
himself? Certainly he had no interest in the Higher Criticism
of his day but read of his enthusiastic reception of new
translations of Scripture – he placed a copy of the Twentieth
Century New Testament in the hands of each officer in 1904. He
had no truck with the literal verbal inerrancy which came to
be identified with fundamentalism – he wrote against it. Or
even reflect that as an early adopter of Phoebe Palmer’s new,
streamlined theory of holiness, Booth was running ahead of the
Wesleyan majority of his time. Or that his radical resolution
of the debate on sacramental usages was an attempt to cut
through a Gordian knot which still binds the church at large?
Or that his commitment to the role of women in ministry was
counter-cultural? Again,
has Booth’s own
vision left us an inheritance of theological diversity? If so,
can we embrace it?
We have not done that well. Like a certain other hierarchical
ecclesiastical institution, we have a history of making it
difficult for people who think outside the square to remain in
our ranks. Nicols resigned in 1910. Fred Brown was forced out
in 1970. How many others have simply slipped away unnoticed?
Were not Alexander Nicol and Fred Brown, with hearts for the
lost as well as questioning minds, also legitimate inheritors
of the Founder’s vision, equally with those who were content
to parrot the formulae and proof-texts of the Doctrine Book?
We can ill afford to lose those who ask the hard questions
about our theology. Captain Matthew Clifton recently announced
his resignation, explaining that
Energising as the covenant was while evangelical belief could
be sustained, I have the wrong kind of personality to have
foreclosed enquiry by binding myself to religious truth
claims.[24]
That was his choice of course, but do we
want to “foreclose
enquiry”? Can we afford to? More than half a century ago
Colonel Catherine Baird wrote to General Kitching in defence
of allegedly “modernist” Salvationists whom she claimed were
being “witch-hunted”:
Surely [she wrote] anyone should be ashamed to have, after 30
years, no deeper, clearer understanding of the atonement,
holiness, last things, and other great doctrines, than he had
at the beginning. And surely, this deeper knowledge does not
mean that he has departed from that which he first knew. Given
the alphabet, a child can write simple words and little more.
In manhood, he may write a sonnet. But that does not mean that
he no longer believes that “cat” spells cat.
… If we want the sort of young people who care more for truth
than for privileges and places, we shall have to consider a
matter of such vital importance without fear or prejudice.”[25]
With Colonel Baird, I believe we must encourage and nurture
our radical thinkers. We need them. I don’t believe that
retreating into reaction is a way forward for us.
Fundamentalism may seem a refuge from hard questions, and its
current surge may offer an apparent highway, but it’s a dead
end. I wonder about the latest revision of the
Handbook of Doctrine,
announced in recent weeks, described as a “correction for
clarity”. It appears to retreat from Booth’s position on
Scripture, perhaps to accommodate more comfortably our
Fundamentalist comrades?[26]
Or perhaps it just leaves more
options open. In
that case can we please move beyond the totalitarian,
sectarian ethos where any opinions expressed are assumed to be
representing the Army, and therefore must be vetted for
doctrinal soundness?
As Dean Smith has cogently argued, Liberals and
Evangelicals may not be singing from the same song sheet, but
could “agree to disagree without moral judgement.”[27]
Perhaps what I’m asking for
is,
in
Brian McLaren’s phrase, a “generous orthodoxy”.[28]
If,
like that polarity of Word and Deed,
the polarity between theological conservatism and innovation
is also intrinsic to the myth and vision inherited from
our Founders, it is in the tension of such polarities that new
vision is generated – as it was in Booth’s day. So:
1. What was Booth’s vision? One of
hell, and salvation, here and hereafter.
2. What do we now see? Perhaps not
quite the same vision, or with the same clarity of vision.
3. How did that happen? Quite naturally.
4. Can the vision be re-found? Yes! But it will look
different.
The alternation of renewal and decline as
the context within which we have attempted to place our
visionary theme reminds us that entropy and dissolution are
not the whole story. In the Salvationist micro-climate, we may
occasionally have our equivalent of what in the Catholic
Church Karl Rahner called a “winter period”, and we may regret
the repetitive pattern of institutionalisation and decline,
but we can rejoice also in the reiterated springtime which,
God-willing, ensues. May the Holy Spirit give renewed vision
for our times.
Remember Gerard Manley Hopkins’ lines:
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs –
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah!
bright wings.[29]
Bibliography
Gerald Arbuckle, From
Chaos to Mission. Collegeville MN: The Liturgical Press,
1996.
William Booth,
International Staff Council Addresses.
London: The Salvation Army, 1904.
William Booth, “The Millennium; or, The Ultimate Triumph of
the Salvation Army Principles”,
All the World,
August 1890, 337-43.
William Booth, Visions.
London: The Salvation Army, 1906 [1998].
Callum G. Brown, “What was the religious crisis of the 1960s?”
Journal of Religious History
34:4, December
2010, 468-479.
John C. Izzard (edited by Henry Gariepy), in
Pen of Flame: the Life
and Poetry of Catherine Baird. Alexandria: Crest Book,
2002.
A. M. Nicol, General
Booth and The Salvation Army. London: Herbert and Daniel,
1911.
H. Richard Niebuhr,
Social Sources of Denominationalism. New York: Meridian,
[1929] 1957.
Allan Satterlee,
Turning Points: How
the Salvation Army Found a Different Path. Alexandria VA:
Crest, 2004.
Edward Schillebeeckx,
Ministry: A Case for Change, London: SCM, 1981, 3.
Dean Smith, “Are Liberals and Evangelicals singing from the
same song sheet?” The
Heythrop Journal XLVIII (2010) 1-16.
Francis Thompson (Ed. Wilfred Maynell),
Prose Works,
London: Burns and Oates, 1913, 3, 57. (Kessinger Publishing
2003).
Max Weber, The
Sociology of Religion. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964.
P.W. Wilson, General
Evangeline Booth of the Salvation Army. New York: The
Salvation Army, [1935] 1948.
[1]
William Booth, Visions (London: The Salvation Army,
1906 [1998]) 46.
[3]
William Booth, “The Millennium; or, The Ultimate
Triumph of the Salvation Army Principles”, All the
World, August 1890, 337-43.
[4]
A. M. Nicol, General Booth and The Salvation Army
(London: Herbert and Daniel, 1911) 136-137. The speech
here summarised by Nicol may be found in William
Booth, International Staff Council Addresses (London:
Salvation Army, 1904) 47-58.
[5]
The War Cry (USA) 12 January 1895, p. 4, quoted in
Allan Satterlee, Turning Points: How the Salvation
Army Found a Different Path. (Alexandria VA: Crest,
2004) 79.
[6]
Nicol, General Booth,
93-5.
[8]
See for example an address to the 1921 International
Social Conference by Commissioner Adelaide Cox in
Social Problems in Solution (London: The Salvation
Army, 1921) 39-41;
Clarence Wiseman in “Call to Renewal and
Change”, in John Waldron (Ed.) Creed and Deed: Towards
a Christian Theology of Social Services in The
Salvation Army (Toronto: The Salvation Army, 1986)
280;
Dennis Garland, “The Salvation Army and the State of
Welfare: An analysis of Text and Narrative.” MA (Hons)
Thesis, University of Western Sydney, 2004, iii.
[9]
H. Richard Niebuhr, Social Sources of
Denominationalism (New York: Meridian, [1929] 1957)
20.
[10]
J. Metz, Followers of Christ: The Religious Life and
the Church (London: Burns and Oates, 1978) 12. Quoted
by Gerald Arbuckle, From Chaos to Mission
(Collegeville MN: The Liturgical Press, 1996) 11.
[11]
Max Weber, The Sociology
of Religion (Boston: Beacon, 1964) 162-5.
[12]
Francis Thompson (Ed. Wilfred Maynell), Prose Works
(London: Burns and Oates, 1913) 3, 57. (Kessinger
Publishing 2003).
[13]
Arbuckle, From Chaos to Mission, 12.
[14]
P.W. Wilson, General Evangeline Booth of the Salvation
Army (New York: Salvation Army) [1935] 1948, 132-3.
[15]
William Booth, International Staff Council Addresses
(London: The Salvation Army, 1904) 144-147.
[16]
Arbuckle, From Chaos to Mission, 3.
[17]
Arbuckle, From Chaos to Mission, 87.
[18]
Edward Schillebeeckx, Ministry: A Case for Change
(London: SCM, 1981) 3.
[19]
Arbuckle, From Chaos to Mission, 12.
[20]
Arbuckle, From Chaos to Mission, 66.
[23]
Callum G. Brown, “What was the religious crisis of the
1960s?” Journal of Religious History
34:4, December 2010, 472.
[25]
Quoted by John C. Izzard (edited by Henry Gariepy), in
Pen of Flame: the Life and Poetry of Catherine Baird
(Alexandria: Crest Book, 2002) 112.
[26]
“On behalf of the General, I am pleased to announce a
change of wording for a paragraph found on page 11 of
the Handbook of Doctrine (Chapter 1 – ‘For further
exploration’ - 1.A.3. - page 11).
“The old wording in question includes: “The
inspiration of the Bible provides a foundation for our
understanding of the reliability of the divine
revelation in Scripture. It is uniquely inspired in a
way that is different from other writings or works of
art. However, this does not mean that the Bible is
infallible or inerrant, so that it is incapable of
misleading and contains no human error. Whereas we
believe that the overall message of the Bible is
inspired and reliable, each individual passage must be
read and interpreted carefully, in context, and with
careful reference to the whole of biblical truth.
“Effective immediately, two paragraphs will replace
the one above:
“We believe the message of the Bible is inspired and
reliable. However, each individual passage must be
read and interpreted carefully, in context and with
reference to the whole of biblical truth. “We
affirm that we can rely upon the Scriptures for
instruction and guidance in matters of divine truth
and the Christian life, because in Scripture we meet
the Word of God himself, Jesus Christ. The Holy Spirit
who inspired the writers also illumines those who read
its pages and leads them to faith.” The War Cry
(NZ) 11 August 2012, 17.
[27]
Dean Smith, “Are Liberals and Evangelicals singing
from the same song sheet?” The Heythrop Journal XLVIII
(2010) 14.
[28]
Brian D. McLaren, A Generous Orthodoxy (Grand Rapids:
Zondervan, 2006).
[29]
From “God’s Grandeur”, by Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Selection of his Poems and
Prose by W. H. Gardner (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953)
27.
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