Did most of what I intended, but didn’t wield the hammer and tongs as much as I had imagined. Cleaned up the first section a bit, and pasted in the temperance stuff for forty pages. The later is still incongruous with the former, but I like the temperance stuff and kind of want to consider it as part of the larger section before altering it too much.
Found out where the German Reformed churches are hiding their manuscript records. Going over their catalog, however, revealed a provocative opportunity for interpreting discipline and temperance, but I want to consult with my local GR expert before I go overboard with that. Could be wrong, as always.
Had to move the William Usery case to the temperance section. (Actually, I had already used it in the previous temperance section and I like it better there.) So I’ve got to go find another case. I used it primarily because of its ordinariness. Usery got drunk, expelled, received back in, drunk again, expelled again, received back in again, drunk again, and expelled for good. This process took about two years and there never seemed to be any hard feelings on either side (admittedly, we don’t have Usery’s actual perspective.) The point is, it’s not sensational or scandalous like Warren Harrington or Maranda Sharpe’s cases, which are excellent windows into the gender dynamics of a congregation, but not really representative of the day-to-day experience.
Wrote a couple of pages on Quaker discipline. Quakers seem to forbear smaller transgressions until they add up. No one is disciplined for missing meetings, dressing fashionably, or being drunk. But quite a few people are disciplined for missing meetings, dressing fashionably, and being drunk, all at once. I take this to mean that individual and informal vigilance in the Quaker community took care of the small stuff, and the resort to official discipline happened when someone had gotten quite out of control. Also, Quakers were not evangelical and understood salvation and living in grace a bit differently from everyone else. So that has something to do with it. The most frequently disciplined action for Quakers was marrying without the permission of the Meeting.
Spent some time reading on Wesleyanism and Holiness and I’ve finally resolved some confusion in my thinking. What I have now is this: Wesleyanism and Holiness is not the same as the influence of John Wesley and the anxiety over achieving a state of perfection. (I know, you thought they were the same thing.) Wesleyanism should properly, I think, refer to the abolitionist-oriented, liberal theological movement associated with Orange Scott, the Wesleyan Methodist Church, and Crooks and McBride. Holiness is connected to Phoebe Palmer and an impulse to make immediate, earthly, devotional decisions with the assurance that once accomplished, a state of perfection has been achieved. In the 1850s, these things have obvious theological distance from southern religious belief, but the two are deviations of the same eighteenth century impulse harnessed and directed by John Wesley. (And yes, I will suggest eventually that various Calvinists—ahem, Presbys and Baptists—in the south had drifted further than we give them credit for into Arminianism.) Southern religious people did read John Wesley’s Plain Account of Christian Perfection and some did pursue a post-conversion state of “entire sanctification.” They did make ascetic decisions about their daily lives based on these aspirations. The difference being that this journey for southerners seems to have been more fraught with anxiety than in Holiness practice, and thus much more pessimistic about achieving perfection, and losing it.
Anyhow, I’m working on that thought now and writing it out here really helps.
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