Antinomianiism Defined (Rewritten)

 John Fletcher once wrote:

"An Antinomian is a professor of Christianity, who is antinomos, against the law of Christ, as well as against the law of Moses. He allows Christ's law to be a rule of life, but not a rule of judgment for believers, and thus he destroys that law at a stroke, as a law; it being evident that a rule by the personal observance or non-observance of which Christ's subjects can never be acquitted or condemned, is not a law for them. Hence he asserts that Christians shall no more be justified before God by their personal obedience to the law of Christ, than by their personal obedience to the ceremonial law of Moses. Nay, he believes that the best of Christians perpetually break Christ's law; that nobody ever kept it but Christ Himself; and that we shall be justified or condemned before God, in the great day, not as we shall personally be found to have finally kept or broken Christ's law, but as God shall be found to have, before the foundation of the world, arbitrarily laid, or not laid, to our account, the merit of Christ's keeping His own law. Thus he hopes to stand in the great day, merely by what he calls 'Christ's imputed righteousness'; excluding with abhorrence, from our final justification, the evangelical worthiness of our own personal, sincere obedience of repentance and faith, -- a precious obedience this which he calls 'dung, dross, and filthy rags' just as if it were the insincere obedience of self-righteous pride, and Pharisaic hypocrisy. Nevertheless, though he thus excludes the evangelical, derived worthiness of the works of faith, from our eternal justification and salvation, he himself does good works, if he is in other respects a good man. Nay, in this case, he piques himself on doing them, thinking he is peculiarly obliged to make people believe that, immoral as his sentiments are, they draw after them the greatest benevolence and the strictest morality." This brings to mind the testimony of a Universalist woman: "That she had come three miles to attend this prayer-meeting, so as to show that the Universalists are as pious as the Orthodox."

Fletcher's Doctrine of Three Dispensations (rewritten)

John Fletcher

John Fletcher, in his well‑known portrait of St. Paul as the model evangelical preacher, insists — strongly — that a minister cannot do his work well without a clear understanding of what he calls the three great eras of spiritual life. He names them the dispensation of the Father, the dispensation of the Son, and the dispensation of the Holy Ghost.

Anyone unfamiliar with the distinct experiences of these three dispensations, Fletcher argues, will struggle to apply Gospel truth correctly or fully fulfill their ministry. Although these dispensations appeared successively in history, they now exist at the same time. Among people accepted by God and living on the earth today, some are living primarily in the dispensation of the Father, some in that of the Son, and others in the dispensation of the Holy Spirit.

Things From Which We Are Not Yet Delivered (Rewritten)

Christ offers to free believers in this life not only from sinful actions, but from the sinful, selfish bent that comes with fallen humanity. Now we need to name some things that do come from sin — and can look a lot like sin — but don’t actually have its moral character. In other words, they aren’t on the list of things Jesus promises to remove for us in the present life. They are —

First: Spiritual warfare — which, of course, includes temptation. Jesus himself faced temptation. “As he is, so are ye in this world.” “The disciple is not above his Lord.” The Christian life is a long battle, and our weapons come from Christ’s promised presence, the power of his word, and the gift of his Holy Spirit. Still, we do insist that we can be delivered from the most distressing and dangerous kind of war: a civil war — a revolt against Christ raging inside the believer’s own heart. 

Love Revealed (Rewritten)

Love is a mystery. We can’t pin it down with a neat definition. The best we can do is describe the moments when it awakens in the soul. If human love already stretches beyond explanation, divine love goes infinitely further. It is an ocean so deep that neither human reason nor even angelic intellect can sound its depths. Anyone who has never personally known the love of God will find this subject closed to them intellectually. It opens only with the key of experience.

Love is not something the mind manufactures. It does not come from logic or analysis. It arises freely from the soul when it encounters what it loves. God is not merely loving — God is love made visible. And God’s perfect love toward humanity is meant to awaken a corresponding love for God in the human heart. The mirror that reflects this love may be cracked and uneven. Human souls, even at their best on earth and even under grace, are fractured by weakness and enduring flaws. Still, a person’s love for God can surge forward with the full strength of their being.

Witnesses to the Indwelling Spirit

In all the Christian ages there have been witnesses to the conscious indwelling of the Holy Spirit. These have been few and discredited in eras of rationalism, and stigmatized as mystics and fanatics in periods of formalism; but they have been numerous and received with credence in the most spiritual eras and sections of the Church. Their testimony is confirmed by their deadness to sin and self and fullness of joy. "It happens sometimes that the indwelling of Christ and God and his Spirit signalizes itself with such energy in the believer, that the human individual life is overflowed and swallowed up by the divine, as a river of delight" (Delitzsch, Biblical Psychology, p. 418). Delitzsch quotes the case of the "holy Ephrem who experienced such wondrous consolation that he often cried, 'Lord withdraw thy hand a little, for my heart is too weak to receive such excessive joy.'" John Fletcher at times offered a similar prayer. There are now on the earth witnesses to the conscious indwelling of the Holy Ghost in larger numbers probably than ever before. I know a man in Christ twenty-eight years ago — in the body, or out of the body, no matter which — into whose consciousness the Comforter came and took up his permanent abode, in a day and hour never to be forgotten either in this world or in that to come. Invisible himself he glorified Christ whom he revealed within as a bright reality, as he did in Paul, when God revealed his Son in him.

— Jesus Exultant (1899) Chapter 12.

Baptism With the Holy Spirit

QUESTION: Does the baptism with the Holy Spirit entirely sanctify?

ANSWER: It does, if the believer is fu1filling the conditions by consecration and an all-surrendering faith. The Spirit may fill one who is not in this attitude and inspire in him a transient fullness of joy, which Fletcher likens to a spring freshet. At the same time the careless and. impenitent in the same assembly may powerfully convicted, and converted, if they receive Christ. Thus the manifold offices of the Paraclete may realized as predicted in John 16:8-11. The phrases, "baptism of the Spirit, and fullness of the Spirit," do not specifically designate entire sanctification, or perfect love.

— Steele's Answers pp. 155, 156.

Infirmity and Weakness

QUESTION: What is the meaning of "infirmity" in (1) Rom. 8:26, "The spirit also helpeth our infirmity," and (2) II Cor. 12:9, 10, "Gladly will I glory in my weakness"?

ANSWER: (1) A lack of strength to endure the temptations and trouble of this life; (2) a consciousness of weakness which caused Paul to ally himself with Christ so that he could say "when I am weak then am I strong." "An infirmity," says Fletcher, "is consistent with pure love to God and man; but a sin is inconsistent with love. An infirmity is free from guilt, and has its root in our animal frame; but a sin is attended with guilt and in our moral frame, springing either from the habitual corruption of our hearts, or from the momentary perversion of our tempers. An infirmity has its foundation in an involuntary want of power; and a sin is a willful use of the present light and power we have."

— Steele's Answers p. 134.

The Executive of the Godhead

For several years our mind has been laboring to invent some concise expression for the sum of all the offices of the Third Person of the Trinity, in the transformation, sanctification, and habitation of souls who fully believe in Christ Jesus. At last Dr. Hodge, [President of the Presbyterian Theological Seminary at Princeton, N.J. U.S.A.] has struck out with his die the very coin which our own mint has failed to stamp and contribute to the currency of Christian experience and theological discussion. "The Holy Ghost is the Executive of the Godhead." We telegraph our thanks to Princeton. May Dr. Hodge's mint continue to pour out its golden coin into our religious literature for many years more. This clear cut conception and expression of the work of the Spirit is exceedingly beautiful because it is indisputably true. Law emanates from the Father, and mercy and judgment are committed to the Son, while the Executive of both Persons is the ever blessed Spirit. Here we have the three departments of government: the legislative, the judicial, and the executive. Through the Holy Spirit the Father and the Son operate on human souls, reproving, regenerating, witnessing and sanctifying. We now see how a person may honor the Father, and in a measure the Son, and yet fail of obtaining the highest spiritual grace through a failure to honor the Holy Ghost, the blessed Comforter; just as a man may show all proper respect to the lawmaking and law-interpreting departments of our own government, and secure their action, and then miss his purpose at last by ignoring the last link necessary to its realization — the executive officer, without whose agency statutes and courts are ineffectual. We fear that there are many Christians who inadvertently fail in their tribute of respect, faith, and worship to the Holy Ghost, regarding him as an impersonal emanation or influence streaming from God, or as only another name for the Father, who can just as well without Him reach and transfigure their sin-stained souls, through the blood of the Lamb that taketh away the sin of the world.

Faith and Feeling

"The power of God," says Fletcher, "is frequently talked of, but rarely felt, and too often cried down under the despicable name of frames and feelings."

"If I had a mind," said the eloquent George Whitefield, "to hinder the progress of the Gospel, and to establish the kingdom of darkness, I would go about telling people 'they might have the Spirit of God, and yet not feel it,' or which is much the same, that the pardon which Christ procured for them is already obtained by them, whether they enjoy the sense of it or not."

This is the kind of faith which multitudes of souls in utter spiritual barrenness are resting in for eternal life. They are exhorted to beware of looking for any changed feeling, that feeling is inconsistent with true faith.

Editor's Note: Mark H. Mann on the Theology of Daniel Steele, etc.

It's amazing what one finds by just clicking around the Internet.

Today I found an interesting and perceptive brief overview of Daniel Steele's theology of Christian holiness over at Google books.

It is a section from the first chapter of Perfecting Grace: Holiness, Human Being, and the Sciences by Mark H. Mann (Professor of Theology @ Point Loma Nazarene University)>

It is entitled "Daniel Steele and the Theology of the Holiness Movement" and it begins on page 29 of the book.

I think Mann is correct that Steele embraced Pentecostal terminology because of his embrace of John Fletcher's doctrine of Dispensations. If we don't get that, we miss what's going on in his thinking. See: The Three Dispensations. Pentecostalism as we know it today did not arise until after 1900 & the Azusa Street revival, so Steele's use of this kind of terminology was unrelated to that. It grew out of the teachings of Fletcher, who was read side-by-side with Wesley among the early Methodist preachers.

Anyway the book is here: Perfecting Grace: Holiness, Human Being, and the Sciences by Mark H. Mann. The section on Daniel Steele begins on page 29.

But, be sure to read the whole chapter. I think it's quite perceptive.

— Craig L. Adams