High Calling Magazine
The official publication of The Francis Asbury Society

A Remarkable Man - A Prophetic Vision
Henry Clay Morrison and the Founding of
Asbury Theological Seminary

BY DR. DENNIS F. KINLAW
 

Thinking of Henry Clay Morrison always brings to me a flood of memories. Had it not been for him, I do not know whether or not my own family would have been in the Kingdom.  The reality is that the Asbury institutions and Henry Clay Morrison together easily form the two greatest influences in my life.  It was under the preaching of Henry Clay Morrison that Elsie came to know the Lord. The personal impact of Morrison on my father changed the shape of my own family’s life and history.  The most formative influence on Elsie’s and my spiritual and intellectual development came from the two Asbury institutions, both of which had claimed Morrison as their president.  Our indebtedness to the Asbury family is profound. 

One of the great privileges of my life was to be an honor guard at Dr. Morrison's casket. I stood for an hour, half an hour at each end, and watched the noble and the mighty, the lowly and the inconsequential, the white and the black, the rich and the poor, the educated and the uneducated come back and drop their tears of gratitude as they passed. I will never get over seeing all that.  But do you know what I remember most?  When I looked at the casket -- and I had been in the pastoral ministry for many years, taken part in many funerals, and seen many caskets -- I noticed that his casket was wood covered with gray cloth.  At his order, it had been the cheapest that could be bought.  And whenever he commanded, people obeyed! And the difference between the cost of that casket and of one that normally would have been considered an appropriate one, went into support for the Asbury institutions.  That is the kind of man Henry Clay Morrison was.  We have a great heritage.

The Shaping of an Institution

It has been my observation that what makes an institution great is normally two-fold:  one is the person or persons who shape it and the other is the vision that informs it and gives it character.  There have been a number of significant persons in the development of Asbury Theological Seminary.  Of them all, it seems to me that Morrison, the founder, was the greatest and the most determinative.  The seminary was his vision, and he gave his life to give it existence.  I am not sure that we have always recognized Morrison’s true stature.  It is not unusual for a child in adolescence to go through some detachment and criticism of the parents who gave him life.  Now that we as an institution are some eighty years old, we ought to have the maturity to be a bit more objective about the stature of the man who gave us birth.

A Remarkable Man

It was my privilege to come under the influence of Dr. Morrison quite early.  The Great Depression broke across our country when I was seven years old.  The town in which I lived was a small county-seat in eastern North Carolina down in the lowlands.  To get in and out of my town one had to go through Big Swamp, Raft Swamp, Green Swamp, or Bear Swamp.  It was not easy to get in or out, but Henry Clay Morrison’s influence did both! 

My father, a lawyer, took a trip he did not want to take.  On the trip he heard Dr. Morrison preach at Indian Springs Holiness Camp Meeting.  When he came home, he said to my mother, “Sally, we have to take the children to Indian Springs to hear Dr. Morrison preach.”  He became a subscriber to the Pentecostal Herald, began providing a scholarship annually for an ATS seminary student, and began talking his colleagues and friends into subscribing to the Herald.  Henry Clay Morrison became the single greatest Christian influence in my home.  As a result, I came to Asbury and had the privilege of being under his leadership for the closing years of his life.  I heard him preach some fifty to eighty times during those years. 

Those were the days of the old Modernism, and there was not much talk in my local church of conversion or new birth.  When my father took me to Indian Springs Holiness Camp Meeting, I was confronted with whether or not I had ever really put my faith in Jesus Christ as my own savior.  I did so there and found a profound and remarkable sense of forgiveness.  That night I prayed with all the sincerity and ignorance of a thirteen year old, day-old Christian, “Lord, I will never sin against you again.”   Five nights later Morrison preached a sermon on entire sanctification.  You can imagine how little I knew about the subtleties of Wesleyan theology.  Let me tell you, though, what came through to me.  It was that Christ had loved me and given himself for me and that he wanted me to love him in return.  In actuality, he wanted to be the first love of my life, the determining love of my life.  I knew nothing about the trinity at that time, but what came through to me was that if I would surrender myself wholly to him, the very love that is the life of God manifest in the Cross would flood me and clean my heart to the depths.  I had no question about the need of that cleansing; so I surrendered and tasted. 

The passage of the years has never wiped out the memory.  The glory of the vision that captured my heart that night has been the most determinative factor in my spiritual and intellectual life ever since.  Even in later days when I wanted to qualify my surrender to Him, I could not escape the appeal of the call.  It was as if an inner voice insisted, “Kinlaw, you know that this is the thing for which you were made.”  It has fitted my need.  Consequently, the concept of perfection in love has never been a problem for me.   I have known that it simply means permitting Christ to become the supreme and determining love of one’s life. I had not read Wesley yet; but when I did read him, I found the same affection for the concept that Wesley had held when he asked:  “Can you find anything more amiable than this?  More desirable?” 

Morrison was a great preacher.  He was dramatic, but one never felt that he was acting.  People came from everywhere to hear him preach and often to hear him preach the same sermons again.  And he preached almost everywhere.  He was like Wesley and Asbury before him.  When he died, a close colleague wrote:

Dr. Morrison held 1,200 revivals (many of them ten-days or two weeks), preached not less that 15,000 times, traveled over 500,000 miles (without airplanes) and saw more than 30,000 people converted during his ministry.

In 1925 the Christian Century listed what it considered the twenty-five most important preachers in the United States.  Morrison was included in the list.  The Century had little sympathy for this holiness evangelist’s Gospel but had to recognize his greatness. 

When Morrison died, his obituary, recorded in the Journal of the Kentucky Annual Conference of the Methodist Church, included this paragraph.      

Dr. Morrison was a preacher for preachers.  But few men ever had such rare opportunities as he in this regard.  When he completed his engagements in the fall of 1941, he had conducted the Evangelistic services at fifty-five Annual Conferences of the Methodist Church, but he was equally as popular as an Evangelist in great city churches, camp meetings and tent meetings . . . .  Had he remained in the pastorate, he would doubtless have been one of the great Bishops of the Methodist Church.  Though not in the regular pastorate, he was elected a number of times to the General Conference . .  where he always served with distinction.

Morrison was a churchman who seems to have preached in more annual conferences in the American Methodist Church than did any bishop or anyone else in Methodist history other than Francis Asbury himself.  But Morrison was more.  He was a writer and a publisher, founder of the Pentecostal Publishing Company.  At one time the Herald, then known as The Pentecostal Herald, had a subscription list larger than that of The Christian Century, the premier liberal Christian publication in the country.  He was also an educator, the president for more than twenty years of Asbury College and the founder of Asbury Theological Seminary.  He was a statesman known across this country and across the larger Christian world.  Preeminently, though, he was a preacher and an evangelist.

The all-determining factor in his life was the fire that burned in him to share the good news of the Gospel in all of its fullness as he understood that fullness. 

Though he was the president of the seminary, editor of The Pentecostal Herald, and head of the Pentecostal Publishing Company, he traveled until his death.  During those last days, his health was not good.  Pastors invited him because of his greatness; but when he came, they wondered if he would die on their hands.  When he was not well, he would simply say:  “Get me to the church.”  When they got to the church, he would say, “Get me to the pulpit.”  When his time came to preach, the anointing would come, and he would preach with great power. 

I personally remember hearing him tell how he would like the end to come.  He would want it to be in a revival meeting during the altar service. 

I would like to see an old alcoholic stumble his way to the penitent form.  I would like to go down and kneel next to him.  I would like to mingle my tears with his, and while the angels are writing his name in the Lamb’s Book of Life, I would like this old white head to drop over as my spirit makes its way to the Father’s house.

He actually did die in a revival meeting.  The last night he said, “Get me to the church.”  When they arrived at the church, he said to the pastor, “You’d better take me back to the parsonage.”   Back at the parsonage, he sat down in a chair in the living room while the pastor went to get him a drink of water.  When he returned to the living room, Morrison’s body was slumped in his chair, but his spirit had gone to a better world.  He had a passion, like Paul, like Wesley, like Asbury, that drove him, and it was nothing other than the love of Christ which he felt he must share.  One of the ways of sharing that passion was through preaching.  Another that was very dear to his heart was through the institution that we know as Asbury Theological Seminary. 

A Prophetic Mission

At the beginning we said that there are normally two prime factors that determine a great institution, the person or persons that bring and keep it in existence and the vision that causes it to be formed.  Morrison was a remarkable man, but he had an even more remarkable vision.  The vision actually was more determinative of his distinction than were his natural gifts.  Great institutions are never clones.  Great institutions -- and I claim that ATS is a great institution -- always have something different about them.  They have a sense of mission that makes them distinct.  In our case, the distinction lay in Morrison’s understanding of the Gospel.   It was different, and the difference was one that put him in tension with other evangelical believers on occasion and even at times with his own church. In fact, he paid a rather high price for that difference on occasion, but he felt that he had no option.  It was not that Morrison wanted to be different.  Above all, he had no intention to try to be original.  His concern was faithfulness to Christ and to the Gospel that had redeemed him and that he loved fully.   

Orthodoxy

Part of Morrison’s strength lay in his strong sense of history.  He believed that God had revealed himself in Israel, in Christ, and in the Scriptures of the early Church.  The Bible was for him the ultimate authority, so he did not hesitate to use words like infallible and inerrant when he spoke of its authority.  Revelation was closed for him with the canon of the Old and the New Testaments.  But he did not believe that the full understanding of the significance and the content of the biblical revelation were completed with its deliverance by the Spirit to the Church.   The Bible for him was not a systematic theology.  It was rather God’s revelation of himself and of his divine purposes, and it was left to the Body of Christ to work its way to an understanding of the truth and truths contained therein.  There were questions that had to be answered such as what is the true nature of Christ?  Was he man or God or both?  There was the question of whether God was simply one being in unicity, or was he more than one?  Were there really three persons in the Godhead?  If three persons, what was their relationship to one another and to the world? And what does it mean to be a person?  These questions faced the early church and had to be answered.  The answers that Morrison found acceptable definition were largely formulated in the first five centuries of the existence of the Church.  Morrison did not question the historic conciliar creeds of the Church.   So Morrison was orthodox. 

Protestant

He also believed that in the Reformation Luther and Calvin had broken through to a better understanding than had most of the Church yet understood of the nature of grace, of salvation through faith by grace alone the doctrine of justification by faith.  He accepted and preached joyously the possibilities of justification by faith.  So Morrison was a Protestant. 

Wesleyan

But he believed something more.  He believed as Emile Cailliet of Princeton suggested that because we can solve only one question at a time, we do not look to the Reformers for the full definition of the biblical doctrine on the possibilities of personal holiness for the Christian believer.  Morrison believed that John Wesley had taken the Protestant principle of salvation by grace through faith alone farther than the Reformers had taken it and had applied it to the larger question of the sanctification of the believer just as Luther and Calvin had applied it to the justification of the sinner.  He found himself in agreement with Wesley in this fuller understanding of the soteriological provisions for us in the Incarnation, the Cross, the Resurrection, and Pentecost.

In cruder terms, while the Reformers clarified the question of how to get the sinner into the Kingdom, Wesley developed a profound concern about how to get the Kingdom into the believer so that the believer could enjoy an intimate fellowship with a holy God in a life that reflected the original divine purposes for human existence.   Jesus’ promise that the pure in heart were blessed because they could see God seemed to Wesley a promise of more than forgiveness.  And for him the true end for the human creature was not just a momentary vision of God but a joyous union with him in all of his holiness, a union that he was sure Christ intended now.  (John 17:17-26)   

For Morrison who accepted Wesley's perspective, salvation was a broader term than it tended to be for the Reformers.  Morrison carried the same concern that they did about the forgiveness of sins, but he carried a further concern:  the cleansing of the inner psyche of the believer.  He noted that the angel who informed Joseph of the coming birth of the Christ said that he would save his people from their sins, not in their sins. (Matt. 1:21)  He was also influenced by such passages as “Follow peace with all, and holiness without which no one will see the Lord;” (Heb. 12:14) and “Wherefore Jesus also, that he might sanctify the people with his own blood, suffered without the gate.  Let us go forth, therefore unto him without the camp bearing his reproach.” (Heb. 13:12-13)  Morrison, in agreement with Wesley,  preached on these texts often.

Morrison’s Historical Perspective

Linking Past & Future

We must be careful here that we do not misunderstand Morrison.  He had a strong sense of history, as we said.  He had no interest in fads.  He was a prophet, and the thought of living by the latest theological Gallup polls of his day would have had no appeal to him.  He believed that there was a line of eternal truth, the philosophia perrennis, that had been revealed to Abraham and that had been maintained down through the ages to the present moment; and he believed that the key to the future is to be found by positioning oneself in the very middle of that line.  He was aware that it is not always easy to find that line and that at times, it might seem to wander over the cultural map, sometimes to the right and at other times to the left.  It might even at times seem to disappear.  Morrison believed, though, that if one could get a long enough historical view, one would discover that this line of eternal truth is as straight as a die and that it is the cultures that wander.  If it seems to disappear, Morrison believed that, if one would dig a little, one would always find that it is still there.  He was convinced that to lose connection with that line of truth is to consign oneself to the ephemeral and to the transient.  The guarantee that one would be part of God’s future would be in finding one’s place in the very center of that line.   This saved him from being captive to his own culture.  He could be different, not just to be different, but actually for the sake of the very culture that at times held him in reproach. He was determined to be a part of tomorrow as well as of today. 

This did not mean that he believed that we were to be simply echoers of the past.  No!  If the Body of Christ had been simply an echo of previous beliefs, it would never have come to understand the true nature of Christ as divine and human, the nature of the God who had revealed himself in Jesus Christ and who had given to the Church the Spirit as triune, nor the truth that salvation is by grace through faith alone.  This was not belief in progressive revelation, however.  The closing of the canon had sealed that.  What he did believe was that, if the Body of Christ lived in the Word and listened to the Spirit, the Spirit would lead the Church into a deeper and richer understanding of the nature of God himself, of salvation, and even of human personhood.  He felt that these understandings had happened in the earlier centuries of the Church, in the Reformation, and in the theology of the Wesleyan awakening as simply a further development of the insights given the Church in those earlier moments.  So his commitment to the doctrine of sanctification by faith was for him a promise of the future, not simply a tie to the past.  So Morrison found in Wesley a richer understanding of God and redemption.  Not to declare and perpetuate that Gospel was unthinkable to Morrison.  In his mind, there had to be a seminary committed to its maintenance.

Extension of the Reformation

The focal point of the difference between Wesley and the Reformers was in their concern about what Wesley called “the sin that remains” in the believer after conversion.  The Reformers in their doctrine of justification, just as most of the Church before the Reformation, had no real soteriological help to offer their converts on how to deal with that remaining sin.  Wesley felt that the promise of Scripture was for help with the sin in the believer just as there was help for the sinner in his sins.  Did not the Scriptures promise that, if we confess our sins (I John 1:9), God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and, also, to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.  For Wesley, cleansing was different from forgiveness.  And he knew enough about the human heart that he was confident that the true Christian longed for exactly that.  He would have had problems understanding the clergyman in our area recently who ended his Sunday morning sermon by telling his congregation:  “I know that you can’t be sinless, but you can sin less.  This week sin less.”  Such a conclusion fitted neither the Bible he read nor his understanding of the power of the God he served.

In 1765 Wesley was wrestling with this question and wrote his sermon entitled “The Scripture Way of Salvation”.  Kenneth Collins of Asbury Theological Seminary in his study of Wesley calls this Wesley’s “summary sermon” for in it he deals with his understanding of the nature of faith that saves and the salvation that saving faith brings.  He addresses the question of the sin that remains in the believer after conversion.  Here I quote from Kenneth Kinghorn’s modern English version of that sermon.

With the conviction of sin remaining in our hearts is linked a clear conviction of sin remaining in our lives, still clinging to all our words and deeds.  In the best of justified Christians, we notice a mixture of sin, in either their spirits, their actions, or their attitudes.  We observe something that is not able to withstand the righteous judgment of God.

            If you, Lord, should mark iniquities,

            Lord, who could stand?’  (Ps. 130:3)

When we least suspect it, we find a pollution of pride and self-will, or unbelief and idolatry.  Justified Christians are more ashamed of their best services than of their former worst sins.  Consequently, they cannot help feeling that their best works are far from having anything meritorious in them or from being able to stand the scrutiny of divine justice.  If it were not for the blood of the covenant, we would be guilty before God for even our good works.

Wesley believed, and Morrison agreed with him, that in the atonement of Christ there is a provision for this.  The blood of Christ can make a human heart clean. 

As for the realism of Wesley’s analysis, who is there among us who has not felt far more guilt since conversion than before conversion?  Before I began to walk with Christ, I was quite confident that I was a fairly righteous person.  It was when Christ became a part of my daily inner life that I began to find something in his companionship that exposed depths of sinful self-centeredness in my own spirit that I had never sensed before and for which, in my better moments, I wished cleansing.   

Wesley understood the depths of that corruption.  That is especially why he left with us in his Standard Sermons the sermons “The Repentance of Believers”, “On Sin in Believers” and “The Scripture Way of Salvation”.  He was convinced that there was a remaining sin after conversion but that there was a power in the washing of the blood of Christ and in the cleansing filling of the Holy Spirit that could make a difference there.  God in Christ through the Spirit had an answer for our pride, our self-will, our unbelief, and our idolatry.  The human heart can be united and cleansed by an all-determining love for Christ. 

This was a different understanding of salvation, and it revealed itself in Wesley’s language.  When he spoke about what Christ died to do for us, he used a succession of images that reflect more than forgiveness and hope of heaven..  He spoke of it as being “renewed in the image of God”.   He equated salvation with “the reception of the mind that was in Christ Jesus”.  He said that full salvation meant that we could “walk as Christ walked”.  It meant that we can “live in the Spirit and not in the flesh”. It meant that we can be ‘perfected in love”. His vocabulary was varied, and he used multiple expressions to explain what he meant by salvation, but the vocabulary was always biblical.   Salvation for him was more than a judicial decision that simply changed our legal state before God.  It was God’s answer to the spiritual damage that came to us in the Fall. 

Victor Shepherd, the Canadian Presbyterian theologian, in an address to the Oxford Institute of Methodist Theological Studies, has offered a helpful comment here.  He sees a change of center, or organizing principle, in Wesley’s theology from that of Luther. 

“While never denying the Reformers’ understanding of justification by faith, and never denying its place in the inception of the Christian life, Wesley consistently emphasizes the actuality of the regeneration and sanctification of the justified person.  When he writes, ‘We allow that the state of a justified person is inexpressibly great’, the reader expects him to expand on the greatness of justification; instead he speaks immediately of the blessings of sanctification.  Wesley typically has ‘sanctification’ stand for ‘justification plus sanctification’; i.e., for the whole of the Christian life.  Here he reverses Luther’s ‘shorthand.’  Plainly the doctrine of sanctification is as luminous and illuminating for Wesley as justification was for Luther.  It stands at the centre of and is the organizing principle for his  theology; every aspect of the Christian economy converges upon it and radiates from it.”  

Shepherd’s reference to Luther’s shorthand is important.  In literature or speech one must of necessity use what Shepherd is speaking of here as shorthand.  One uses verbal symbols for larger complexes of meaning .  One cannot stop to explain every time one uses a word the full implications of what is being communicated in that word.   So Luther did use the term ‘justification’ in a symbolical way.  A careful reading of Luther demonstrates that when he used that term he often means more than simply a juridical decision that changes a person’s legal status before God but not his nature.  So he used the term ‘justification’ to symbolize for his hearer or reader what Christ died on the Cross to do for us.  We should understand the same reality in operation when we find Morrison using terms like ‘entire sanctification’ and ‘a second work of grace’.  They were ‘shorthand’ for a remarkably rich understanding of what the Cross is all about and it behooves us to understand the larger implications when we read him. 

An Unbroken Succession – Wesley…Asbury…Morrison

In all of this Morrison was following the theology that permeated early American Methodism, the theology to which Francis Asbury was so committed.  For Francis Asbury was a true child of Wesley. 

In 1771 Wesley sent Asbury to the colonies that were to become the United States.  Asbury was twenty-six years of age and he never returned to his home country.  He committed himself to this newly emerging nation and became a major factor in shaping the character of this country.  Under his leadership, Methodism was transformed from a small minority movement of a few hundred Wesleyans to the major driving force in American religious life so that by the time of the War between the States, one out of every three church members in America was a Methodist; and the theology of Methodism was exerting a significant influence on those who were not formally Methodists. Mark Noll has given us a remarkable picture of its power in his analysis of American religious life from Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln in his volume America’s God.    

Noll explains that in many ways Methodism was part of the general evangelical Christian movement that was helping shape the young republic.  They were one with most of the Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Baptists and Anglicans in their commitment to the authority of the Bible.  They believed that all humans were lost in their sins and incapable of returning to God on their own.  Certainly, they could never live a Christian life apart from saving grace.  They believed firmly that the doctrine of justification by grace through faith alone was biblical, that it was the only doorway into the Christian life.  The Methodists were even more orthodox in their view of the Fall and of man's now inherent sinful than were some of the moderate Calvinists of the day.  But they also had their differences.  For many of their fellow Christians, these Methodist differences were felt to be either heterodoxical or just plainly heretical. 

These Methodists believed that when Christ died he died for all human persons, not just for some elect.  So every person is a potential Christian.  They also believed that the Holy Spirit is at work in every person’s life in what Wesley called prevenient grace offering to the person bound in sin the opportunity to choose to turn to Christ.  That freedom also meant that the person who chose to follow Christ was also free to turn away from Christ and become, even after becoming a partaker of grace, apostate.  But the capstone of the difference lay in something else.  This lay in an affirmation that Noll says “was as faithfully championed by Methodists as it was derided by their foes.”  They held “that it was possible by God’s grace for Christian believers to become perfectly sanctified or, in John Wesley’s phrase, to enjoy ‘a deliverance from inward as well as outward sin.’”

It was this theology that distinguished Methodists from the contemporary evangelicalism of that day, and it was this theology, derived by Morrison from Wesley and Asbury, that drove Henry Clay Morrison.  He was orthodox when it came to the great creeds of the Church.  He was Protestant when it came to the matter of justification by faith.  But Morrison was a Wesleyan and a Methodist when it came to the matter of what God can do with the remaining sin in the believer. 

The crucial question in all of this is ultimately what did Wesley and Asbury and Morrison mean by sin.  It is easy to make, if one so desires, a case that Wesley on occasion contradicted himself on this.  Of course, if one desires to do so, one can make the same case that the Scriptures are self-contradictory on this score.  The subtlety of the issue is seen in that Wesley was quite sure that it was always appropriate, yea, mandatory, that any believer, regardless of his state of grace, pray the Lord’s prayer.  Yet at the same time, he believed that the Scriptures promised a clean heart to those who would seek and believe.

It is significant that in the sermon on “The Scripture Way of Salvation,” Wesley gives us some help on this question.  In the quotation cited earlier from this message, we find this sentence:  “Where we least suspect it, we find a pollution of pride and self-will, or unbelief and idolatry.”  It must be noticed that these four elements do not reflect actions but attitudinal determiners of actions.  They speak of a condition of heart.  So Wesley’s understanding here is not a question of performance as much as what determines our performance.  Moralism was not the perfection of which he spoke.

One looking at this list, is reminded immediately of the Augustinian and Lutheran understanding of the classical theological expression Cor incurvatus ad se (a heart curved in on itself).  One will remember also that this was used to define what had happened in the Fall, that human life, originally centered in God, now shifted its orientation so that the human heart became its own center.  Ego now reigned where once the Spirit of God had been the controlling force.  At the heart of it all now was an existential distrust that bound one to see in one’s own self and its decision one’s own well-being.  That quickly meant that God was to be feared, fled, and escaped if possible.  Wesley felt that it was that distrust that closed the door to the divine presence and that hindered the full giving of oneself to God even after new birth.   Thus it must be challenged, denied,  and overcome in faith so that the fullness of God, the God who is agapeic love itself, might fill the inner being of the creature again.  That would be the restoration of the imago Dei, the restoration of the mind of Christ, the beginning again to walk as he walked, in the Spirit and not in the flesh.  This would be the fulfillment of the command to love God with all of the heart, mind, soul, and strength with the love that made one put another’s, the neighbor’s, well-being ahead of his or her own and Christ would be all in all. 

It was this theology that captured the heart and mind of Henry Clay Morrison.  For him it was to be experienced, preached and published.  In fact, it must be incarnated in an educational institution committed to keeping the witness to this biblical truth alive in the larger Church.

A Different Paradigm

We have looked briefly at the historical and biblical roots of Morrison’s faith.  It is not unfair that we should raise the question about how this theology affected his life.  Was it more than abstract theory?  I would like to share the following experience.

During my senior year at Asbury Theological Seminary, we had as the preacher during the Holiness Emphasis Week one of the great Methodist preachers in the country, Dr. John L. Brasher.  I was assigned to be one of his hosts.  One day I found myself sitting on a bench on the college campus with him.  As we sat, he looked at me and said with all seriousness:  “Son, Dr. Morrison was a great man.”  I responded with an assurance that I shared his view.  He looked back at me and spoke with a different tone:  “No, Son.  You don’t understand.  Morrison was a great man.”  Then he told me this story.

Brasher and Dr. Morrison were preaching together in a camp meeting.  On Sunday morning Brasher preached.  He explained to me that the crowd was large, very attentive, and that the Spirit was present in an unusual way.  The atmosphere had its own effect on Brasher himself, and he was sure that he preached well beyond his normal effectiveness.   It was just a great service.  That night Morrison was to preach.  His text was the story of the giving of the Law at Sinai.  Morrison had a dramatic power in preaching that was equaled by few in his day.  That night Brasher told me that the lightning flashed, the thunder rolled, and the ground trembled under their feet as Morrison pictured the descent of God in fire on Sinai to give Israel the Law.  Brasher said:  “But as Morrison preached, a little suspicion began to grow within me.  Morrison was seldom equaled in his preaching.  That morning had been a glorious service.  Did that mean that tonight, with Morrison preaching, we had to have a greater service?”

When the service was over Brasher went to his tent, had his prayer, and slipped into his cot.  He was not sleepy so he lay awake for a while.  The camp quieted; and, finally, the last light was out, and all was darkness.  In the stillness, Brasher suddenly became aware that there was something moving in the grass outside his tent.  Then he realized that it was a person who was trying to get into his tent.  He decided to keep still.  The person found the flap, slipped into the tent, stumbled around in the dark until he found Brasher’s cot, knelt at the foot of the cot, buried his head in the covers over Brasher’s feet and wept as if his heart would break. 

Brasher said:  “I never said anything, and my visitor never spoke.  It was not necessary.  Spirit spoke to spirit.  Son, Dr. Morrison was a great man.”

Evidently Morrison knew when he was in the Spirit and when he was in the flesh.  Strong-minded, hard-driving man that he was, he could slip.  He obviously knew when he slipped out of the Spirit into the flesh and knew that it was sin.  But if one can know when one has slipped out of the Spirit into the flesh, it means that one can be set free from the flesh and live in the Spirit.  That is the great truth that burned in Morrison’s heart, and he felt that it must be perpetuated in the Church.  For him, it was just what the Gospel was all about, to bring people to where they lived in God and in his Spirit for Christ rather than in and for and from themselves.  He believed that such a life in the Spirit was possible for all because of Christ.  Therefore, any price should be paid to get the message out.  Part of the price for him was the establishment of Asbury Theological Seminary. 

A big question for us is whether this belief of Morrison in this theology that thrilled him so was simply a theological idiosyncrasy that arose during that period of Church history and that can now be put aside as part of the past.  I do not think so.  One of the things that I notice in this theology is that it broadened the paradigm with which Wesley – and Morrison – understood the Gospel.  The Reformation paradigm was primarily a juridical one.  It was a court-room scene in which the judge sits on the bench, the law book is there, and the prosecutor is prosecuting the one who has broken that law.  The question is how the law-breaker can be absolved.  Performance is the question, not necessarily motive or character.  For Wesley there was another paradigm that suited him better for explaining redemption.  It was familial.  Wesley left us more sermons on the new birth than he did on justification by faith.   For him it was the new birth that captured him as equally important with forgiveness and more determinative.  This put the emphasis on new nature and new life.  But Wesley had another emphasis that seems now to have been very sound and prophetic. 

It was his emphasis on love.  The court paradigm with its emphasis upon performance has nothing in it to give promise of change of character.  Its primary concern is certainly not love.  Wesley, consciously or unconsciously, was deeply determined by the familial paradigm.  The familial paradigm permits the entry of love, but it is a shared love, not an exclusive love.  It is the nuptial metaphor alone that calls for a person to forsake his father and his mother and all else and cleave to his wife.  Wesley’s emphasis upon perfection in love as the purpose of the redemptive work of Christ fits in a remarkable way with the thinking, the theology, of the church of the first few centuries.  It should be noted that more of the major church fathers wrote commentaries on the Song of Songs than they did on the book of Romans.  Justification was not their prime emphasis.  Perfection in love, union with Christ was closer to the heart of their understanding of the Gospel.  Wesley here was in remarkable consonance with the heart of the early Church. 

Asbury Theological Seminary and the Future

With the turn of attention in our time to the doctrine of the Trinity and the fact that the God that we worship is love itself, could it not be that this theology to which Morrison and his heroes, Wesley and Asbury, committed their lives is a better basis for true ecumenism than any other apparent option?  As the lines between the divisions in the Christian Church become less distinct, Asbury Theological Seminary with this theology could find itself in a better position to serve the Spirit who is ever at work to unify his Church than many of us had anticipated.  Jesus’ high priestly prayer the night before the Cross seems to point in this direction.      

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