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424 l PROTESTANTISM—EVANGELICAL PROTESTANTISM 1857–58: Interpreting an American Religious Awakening (1998); and Edith Blumhofer, Aimee Semple McPherson: Everybody’s Sister (1993). Additional important works include Martha Blauvelt, “Women and Revivalism,” in Women and Religion in America, vol. 1, The Nineteenth Century: A Documentary History , ed. Rosemary Radford Ruether and Rosemary Skinner Keller (1981), 1–45; Nancy Hardesty, Your Daughters Shall Prophesy: Revivalism and Feminism in the Age of Finney (1991); Jeannette Hassey, No Time for Silence: Evangelical Women in Public Ministry around the Turn of the Century (1986); and Leonard Sweet, The Minister’s Wife: Her Role in NineteenthCentury American Evangelicalism (1983). HOLINESS MOVEMENTS Nancy A. Hardesty HOLINESS REFERS TO the Christian doctrine and experience of “sanctification” (becoming holy or righteous ), attaining “Christian perfection,” or “perfect love.” It also came to be referred to as “baptism with the Holy Spirit.” The notion is based primarily on Jesus’ injunction in Matthew 5:48 (New Revised Standard Version [NRSV])—“Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect”—and Leviticus 19:2—“You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy.” The slogan for many participants was “HOLINESS UNTO THE LORD,” found in numerous places in Hebrew Scriptures (see Exodus 28:36, 39:30; Zechariah 14:20). In the King James Version of the Bible, the phrase is usually printed in capital letters. Women played a variety of critical roles in two distinct North American strands: Wesleyan and Keswick Holiness. Women defined these American theologies, preached, and taught them. Holiness compelled women to testify to their experience and gave them the inner strength to do so. Subsequent generations of Holiness women preached this doctrine and founded denominations . Many taught a doctrine of healing and founded healing homes. Many were empowered to work in a variety of social reforms. Subsequent to the Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles, California, which began in the spring of 1906, many Holiness women and men spoke in tongues and moved into Pentecostalism. Wesleyan Holiness The American Wesleyan Holiness movement was de- fined and fostered by the two Worrall sisters of New York City: Sarah Lankford (Palmer) (1806–1896) and Phoebe Palmer (1807–1874). Their father Henry was an English Methodist, their mother Dorothea Wade an American. Both sisters experienced Christian conversion at early ages. Sarah married an architect, and Phoebe a physician, Walter C. Palmer (1804–1896). Both sisters sought the experience of sanctification. Sarah found it first on May 21, 1835. She had been attending two prayer meetings (at Allen Street and Mulberry Street Methodist churches), so she invited both to meet together at the home the Lankfords shared with the Palmers . It became the famed “Tuesday Meeting for the Promotion of Holiness,” which survived for more than sixty years and spawned similar meetings around the world. Phoebe experienced sanctification on July 26, 1837. Until 1839 the Tuesday Meeting was for women only, but that December Phoebe L. Upham wanted to bring her husband along: Thomas Upham, Congregational clergyman and professor at Bowdoin College. From then on men and women, lay and clergy, from across the United States and around the world visited the Tuesday Meeting. John Wesley (1703–1791), the founder of the Methodist Church, had published A Plain Account of Christian Perfection (1766, 1777). While Martin Luther (1483–1546) had emphasized “justification by faith,” he declared that one is always simul justus et peccator, simultaneously justified and yet sinful. One is never perfect . Wesley, however, had studied the theology of the Eastern or Orthodox church, which teaches that human beings certainly do sin and require God’s forgiveness but still retain the possibility of perfection, or divinization (theosis). Wesley preferred to speak of the goal as “perfect love,” being able to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind . . . [and] your neighbor as your self” (Matthew 22:37, 39; see Leviticus 19:18; Deuteronomy 6:5). For most people, Wesley thought this would be a lifelong process. However, some of Wesley’s colleagues claimed to have attained such a state, and he eventually conceded that they possibly had. The notion of holiness was first transmitted to American women through such works as the Life of Hester Ann Rogers (1756–1794), and The Life of Mrs. [Mary Bosanquet] Fletcher (1739–1815), as well as stories about the lives of women preachers and workers who followed Wesley, for example, Grace Murray (1715–1800) and...

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