High Calling Magazine

The official publication of The Francis Asbury Society

A Proliferating Memory
BY DR. DENNIS KINLAW

There is something about memory that seems analogous to the eternal nature of God. For Him, there is no past nor future but only an eternal present. Jesus Christ expressed this, you will remember, when He said, “Before Abraham was, I am.” In our imaginations we may try to explore the future, but our abilities there are very limited. When it comes to memory, it is surprising how real the return of a moment can be.

I remember one such experience for me. I must have been about thirty-seven years of age when it occurred. It had to do with personal relationships when I was a freshman at Asbury. When I came to Asbury as a freshman, I was seventeen, which means that the experience of which I now speak had occurred twenty years before. I was sitting in my study when the phone rang. As I answered the phone call, I quickly realized that the person speaking was the one who had been my freshman sponsor twenty years before. It was Phil Hinerman. I found myself in a bit of shock, but worse, I was as nervous as a cat. He was calling to invite me to come to Minneapolis to speak in his church. I began to stutter like a freshman as I responded. Suddenly I was a seventeen year-old freshman again as I talked with him.

There were reasons for my stuttering. He had influenced me profoundly when I was a student. I knew Phil’s roommate who told me about the pattern for Phil’s life. He said that it was Phil’s custom to arise every morning at 5 a.m. After a quick shower, by 5:15 a.m., Phil was on his knees beside his bed. When the roommate arose at 6 a.m., Phil turned to his Bible and read while his roommate prepared for his day. When the roommate left for breakfast, Phil went back to his knees for another thirty minutes before heading for breakfast. This account impressed me greatly because Phil was a big man on campus. He was bright academically, an excellent athlete, and one of the most respected persons in the student body. I remember how that in the middle of a basketball tournament at the end of the season in a very close game when the ball went out of bounds and the referee had thrown it to Phil to put back into play, Phil tossed it back to the referee and said, “Oh, I touched it last.”

Phil was also, to me, the best speaker on campus. In his duties as freshman sponsor I had an opportunity to hear him a number of times. I thought: “If only I could communicate with an audience like that!” I think I unwittingly adopted some of his mannerisms in speaking that affected my own speech for years. He was really my hero.

Phil went on to be an effective preacher with a remarkable ministry. The key to my relationship, though, was to be found in a conversation one night after class prayer meeting during that freshman year. When I asked him if I could talk with him a bit about my spiritual life, he said, “Let’s take a walk.” As we started down the campus between Morrison and the administration building, I said, “Phil, I am not satisfied with my prayer life.” His response was, “Kinlaw, how much time do you spend in prayer?” I lied, and he said, “Well, double the time.”

I was working every morning in the college bakery at that time to help pay my way. I had to be at work at 5 a.m. After that conversation, I began to set my alarm for 4 a.m. Many mornings I slept on my knees in Wesley dorm between 4 a.m. and 5 a.m. But, do you know, that set a pattern that ultimately became the most determinative factor in my knowing Christ and in my learning what life in Christ really should be. I realized that before I met anyone else, I needed to meet Christ and to spend some time with Him. That ultimately became the pattern for my life. It was not easy, because I was not as disciplined as Phil was. In fact, I was one of the most undisciplined kids that ever hit the campus. It is one thing, though, to be undisciplined; but it is another thing to be content with a lack of discipline. Phil forever destroyed my ability to be satisfied with the way I was. Phil and the Asbury context gave me a pattern for life.

Asbury did a second thing for me: It enlarged my world. When I came as a freshman, I found myself sitting in chapel with two fellows who came to Asbury from the Orient. Their name was Kilbourne, so, since we were seated alphabetically, Kinlaw was next to Kilbourne. I found also that they lived in the same dorm that I did. Through them, I began to learn about Japan, Korea, China, the Orient, missions, and a world about which I had never known. Our chapel speakers further expanded my world. Speakers like Alex Reed from Africa, E. Stanley Jones and Wascom Pickett and E. A. Seamands from India, the Corbitts from Cuba, and numerous others slowly opened my eyes to that larger world and to the work of Christ in that world. During my years in college the parents of my chapel partners and those of Paul Haines, another fellow-student, were confined in prisoner of war camps in China. When they came home on the Gripsholm, I had the privilege of meeting them. When I met them, they actually seemed to take an interest in me. You can imagine something of what it meant to me to get to know persons of international Christian significance who had suffered so for Christ. You see, I came from a small town in the swamps of eastern North Carolina where one had to go through Big Swamp, Raft Swamp, Green Swamp, Black Swamp or Bear Swamp to get in or out, and not many made it either way. But now, here I was getting to know people who had traveled the world and wanted to tell me about it. What was better was that they had done it all for Christ. They were remarkable people who cast a significant influence. I remember how the father of David and J.T. Seamands, fellow students in the college and seminary, could just walk across the campus and the atmosphere would change.

My world was changing, and I was being changed. Asbury taught me about the world, but it also taught me that this is our Father’s world. It gave me a doctrine of creation. I took courses in astronomy, geology, biology, history, and French. When I went to chapel, the astronomer might have the prayer, the geologist the Scripture reading, and the historian a report on the work of God which he had experienced in Cuba. I began to realize that the world to which the curriculum had introduced me had a theological as well as a scientific character to it. There are those natural laws and impersonal forces that can explain much of the world about which I needed to know. I began to realize that behind and sustaining everything was the One whom we worshipped in chapel. I realized that chapel should be the center of my college life because it was there that we paid our respects to the One who had given and was giving to us our world and who should be the center of my life. Suddenly, I found myself thinking of the world as our Father’s world and that it was basically a good and friendly world because the One who made it for us was on our side. The eternal God behind all things was for us!

I found myself more comfortable in the world and slowly came to believe that the One who had made it cared about me and wanted to care for me. My roommate was a tall redheaded kid from Alabama, Sammy Stabler. Early one morning in early December, I was walking across campus and met Sammy returning from his morning industrial work. As we met, he said: “Dennis, could we go downstairs in Hughes Auditorium and spend some time in prayer together?” I was free for that, so we went into Hughes. When we had sat down, Sammy said, “Today is a day for thanksgiving. When I came to college this past September I came with two dollars and fifty cents in my pocket to begin school. I had to pay seventy-five cents for my room key, so I began the quarter with one dollar and seventy-five cents. Yesterday I received a check in the mail for my work in a governmental student work program; next week I will get a check from the college for my industrial work. The two checks will pay me out in the business office and will leave me enough to buy a round trip ticket to Alabama for Christmas. But in January, I will be back. God met my needs this fall. I believe He will get me through the spring. Today is a day for praise!”

Twenty years later when I was a pastor and a father of five, an inner voice said: “I want you to go to graduate school.” My response was, “Lord, that is impossible. I don’t have the money for that.” The Lord said, “Do you remember Sammy Stabler?” Three years later I had finished three years of work on a doctorate at Brandeis. Elsie and I had been offered a job at Asbury Seminary. It was a Wednesday night, and we were putting our last box on a moving van. I asked the driver, “When will you unload this stuff?” He said, “Saturday at 8 o’clock in the morning.” I asked, “And when do I have to pay you?” His reply was, “Before I take a stick of anything off.” My final question was, “And how much do you think it will cost?” His response was, “Probably about a thousand dollars.” At that moment I think I had three hundred and eighty seven dollars in the bank.

The next day I spent a good bit of time racking my brain as to whom I could turn to borrow a thousand dollars. Then I thought: “A preacher who is leaving town wants to borrow money!” And I knew I could not do that. That evening I received a phone call from a lady from the church that I had served in the area, a church from which I had resigned a year before. She said: “Dennis, tonight our missions committee at the church met. During the meeting it was mentioned that you were about to leave our area. We decided that we should give some token of our appreciation for your ministry to us. Could you come by my school in the morning? I have something for you.” When I went to her school the next morning, she handed me a sealed envelope. I thanked her, got into my car, thinking about the long trip to Kentucky, and started down the street. An inner voice said, “You need to open that envelope.” I pulled over to the curb and opened it. In it I found a check for a thousand dollars. At times, I think that when the college named the new library here, it really should have named it after Sammy Stabler because it was his influence and that of others at Asbury that convinced me that it is safe to stick one’s neck out when the inner voice says “Go”. Apart from learning that lesson, I would never have had the opportunity to serve this institution for eighteen years.

Asbury taught me many things, as I have indicated, but the most important thing was not about our world and how to live in it. It was about the nature and character of God, the One who gave us our world and who wants to draw us into an intimate fellowship with Himself. The full richness of the understanding of God that I learned here and the extensive implications of that insight did not fully dawn on me while I was here. It took a while for me to realize that implicit in what I had been given was a conception of God that was really quite different from that of many evangelical Christians whom I otherwise knew as brothers in Christ. I found myself more comfortable with it as the years passed because I found it spiritually stimulating and intellectually satisfying.

The power and the creative character of what I had learned have come home afresh to me in recent days through reading in a new history of religion in America, Mark Noll’s America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. In this work Noll traces the development of religious thought and life in the United States from the middle of the eighteenth century to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in the mid-nineteenth century. He explains how the theology that dominated the religious life in the early days of the United States was descended from “the colonial awakenings, the Puritan movement, and the Protestant Reformation” and that the most influential figure in those early days was, without question, Jonathan Edwards. As a result, the religion of the colonies in the opening years of the American republic, in the Puritans, the Congregationalists, the Baptists, and the Presbyterians was primarily Calvinistic, a theology that found its roots basically in the Genevan Reformation.

Over the next century, however, a remarkable change took place in the religious ambience of the country. At the heart of that change was the person after whom this college was named, Francis Asbury. He and his itinerant preachers with the theology that they had derived from John Wesley changed the character of the religious climate in the new nation. It really is a remarkable story.

In 1771 when Asbury came to this country, there were three hundred Wesleyans and four Methodist preachers in America. Before Asbury died that three hundred had grown to some 180,000, of whom some 140,000 were white and some 40,000 plus were African-Americans. A million people could be found in their camp meetings. By 1860, one of every three church members in the United States was a Methodist. But perhaps more significant, Noll tells us that theology generally “was moving in an Arminian or a Methodist direction” and that “many of America’s traditionally Calvinistic denominations were coming to sound more and more Methodistic...” and Methodism “was becoming America’s most successful religion . . .” (p. 341)

It should be noticed that the theology that produced this transformation in the American religious scene was what the Congregationalists, the Presbyterians, and the Baptists, those who had had the center of the religious stage, considered heterodox, a departure from orthodoxy. It was, in fact, discontinuous with that of Jonathan Edwards and the others who had been the primary factors in determining the religious character of the eighteenth century in the life of the country. The key figure in all of this change, as we said, was Francis Asbury who was the primary spokesman for this different theology and who also, because of that theology brought a different approach to ministry to the country. He found he could not be content to settle comfortably in the East and determined to proclaim the Gospel as he and his itinerants understood it as far as they were able in every village and cabin and to every person in the new nation. And their theology was a prime factor in their passion.

But what was that theology? Noll is quite clear in his presentation of it. He acknowledges that Asbury’s men held some things in common with their evangelical brethren. They believed firmly “that all humans were lost in their sins and incapable as lost sinners of returning to God or of living for God. They also believed that repentant sinners were made into true Christians when they received the justifying grace communicated by Jesus Christ.” In these respects they could claim to be a part of the common orthodoxy. All need Christ. As for other aspects of their faith, Noll says, the Calvinists found the Methodist faith to include “dangerous innovations.” (p. 335) These “heterodox” and “dangerous innovations” Noll identifies under five headings.

First, Wesleyans believed that when Christ died on the Cross, He died for all men. They affirmed that God’s love, as they understood John 3:16, is universal and that God is not willing that anyone should perish. Thus, just as salvation is needed by all, because God is who He is, salvation is also available to all. This view of God and His love for the descendants of Edwards and his like was heterodox and dangerous. Secondly, the Methodists held that, since men are bound in the bondage of sin and cannot even will to be free, God in his love comes in a grace which they called “prevenient” and seeks the sinner, every sinner. He is not content that sinners should be lost. Thirdly, this gift of grace is not saving but restoring of a self-determining capacity that had been lost in the fall, a self-determining capacity that makes a person able to respond to the overture of grace but also responsible if he or she rejects that overture. This gift, in Noll’s terms, enables the recipient “to choose for God and for a holy life.” The fourth distinctive was the belief that after justification a believer retains free will that makes it possible for one to turn away from Christ and lose his or her salvation. Finally, as Noll says, “in an affirmation that 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.’” (p. 336) All of these, Noll acknowledges, were to most non-Methodists ‘heterodox’. They may have been unacceptable to the Calvinists, but they were found to be quite acceptable to a great majority of Americans, and they had a remarkably transforming influence on the American religious scene. This was the theology that gave the itinerants their passion, that drove them. And, it was this theology that changed the character of a significant part of the American public.

Does one’s theology actually make a difference in one’s daily life? The fact that it does has come home to me afresh recently as a result of another book that has captured my attention. It is a study by Robert Jinkins, a Presbyterian seminary professor, of the theology of atonement as it was understood by Jonathan Edwards in contrast to that of the Scottish theologian of the nineteenth century, John McLeod Campbell. Campbell was expelled from the ministry of the Church of Scotland because he believed that Christ died for all human persons. The work, entitled A Comparative Study in the Theology of Atonement in Jonathan Edwards and John McLeod Campbell: Atonement and the Character of God presents a striking study of the difference between the theology of one who believes that Christ died for a portion of the human race, the elect, and one that affirms that the Scripture is clear that God has no favorites and that He extends His offer of redemption to all.

When I had finished the two hundred plus pages on Edwards and his thought, I found that a profound and poignant sadness had engulfed me. The greatness of Edwards was clear. Without question he was a man of towering intellect. It is not hard to make a case that Edwards was the brightest theological and philosophical mind that America has yet produced. And he was deeply Christian. His devotion to Christ was most exemplary. He attained an intimacy with God, a life of prayer and devotion that few equal. He was a pastor with a shepherd’s loving concern for his flock. But he was trapped in a theological paradigm, an understanding of God that prevented him from seeing Jesus and His passion as the biblical text actually presents it. For Edwards the Cross was not a window on the nature of God. It was a window on an arbitrary decision of God. Jesus, for Edwards, came to the Cross, not for the world. He came because God had made the choice to save a portion of His creatures, the elect. The difference between this understanding of the Incarnation and the atonement for Edwards and Asbury was strikingly clear. Asbury, because he believed that God really has no favorites and that He sent His Son to die for all, could see in the Cross a window, not on an arbitrary decision of God, but into the very nature of God Himself. It is a symbol of His love for all of His creation. As John says, love is not just something God does. It is what He actually is. (I John 4:8,16)

Asbury realized that this difference had potential saving implications for all humans. He also knew that it meant that he had a responsibility to see that, if humanly possible, every person in this new country had an opportunity to receive that salvation. Suddenly, I felt I had a key to the understanding of what drove this man who in over forty years never had a post office box, a home or even a bed of his own. He slept away from home every night for forty-four years. His home was a saddle. What was it that drove him? The fact was that God had put His own love in Asbury’s heart and now he must care, as His Father did, for all. His view of the universal character of the atonement meant that there was something universal about his call. His Gospel was for everyone. Therefore it must be carried to all. So Asbury took up that burden.

The practical implications of all of this suddenly were clear. When Edwards arose in the morning, he knew that every person that he would meet that day would need the salvation that he had to present, but he could only hope that somewhere among those whom he would meet or to whom he would preach, there would be those who could respond to his offer because God had decided to include them in His elect. When he stood to preach, he could only hope that there might be some of the elect in his congregation who could respond to the Gospel. Asbury, on the other hand, when he arose in the morning was convinced that that every person whom he would meet that day needed the salvation that he had to offer and could, because of the work of the Spirit in prevenient grace, respond positively to the Christ whom he had to offer. When he arose in those frontier cabins to preach to his small audiences, he knew that every person to whom he had the privilege of presenting the Gospel was a potential saint. This theology gave him a confidence that he did not work alone, that the Spirit of God went before him in the life of every person that he would meet. That meant that he was never first in anyone’s life. The Spirit in prevenient grace had preceded him. His role was that of a second witness, there to recommend the One who was already at work in the life of the one to whom he spoke. The passion that came from Asbury’s view of God drove him and became the cause of spiritual and moral change for the nation. That view of God’s love as not merely something God does but as what He is was implicit in the theology that I learned at Asbury. I have not learned all the implications of that view yet, but I continue to pursue them, as I have had the privilege of doing across the decades; and I am finding them both inwardly and outwardly transforming. I am grateful to Asbury for this rich understanding of God.

The theology of Asbury contained a different view of God. It contained also a different view of the purposes of the atonement and the potential contained in that atonement for those for whom Christ died. Wesley and Asbury believed in justification by faith and were one in that belief with the Reformed tradition, Edward’s tradition. But they believed that Christ died to do much more. Salvation was not just for the forgiveness of sins. It was for much more than a pass to get us satisfactorily past the final judgment. It also contained within it the power to make us new people through the coming of the very life of God in new birth into the one who would believe. That meant that with God Himself in His Spirit dwelling within us, we now have within us a greater power than that in the world. That means that sin is not inescapable for the believer. There is really a power in that divine life that now lives within us to enable us to live a life of victory and not one of defeat in respect to sin. As John says, “Greater is He that is in you than he that is in the world.” There was also the conviction that when God comes into a person in His Spirit He sheds abroad in the inner heart of the believer the love of God that the three persons of the Triune-Godhead have for one another, the love that is the very nature of God. Thus one can through that indwelling Spirit know what it means to have a clean heart if one chooses to free the Spirit to do what He wants to do within him. As Noll says about Wesley’s faith, he believed that in the blood of Christ there is potentiality for every human person “a deliverance from inward as well as outward sin”, that one could actually come to where he or she, through the indwelling Spirit and divine love, could fulfill the law that calls us to love God with all our heart and with all our soul and with all our being.

That theology was considered heterodox to most of the non-Methodist contemporaries of Asbury. That means that we must not avoid the question of whether or not Asbury and his successors made too great a claim for the redemptive purposes of God. The question is not about human capabilities. Rather, it is a question about the power of the blood of Christ. Does the shed blood of Christ have within it the power to reach into the depths of the human heart with full cleansing power? The Scripture seems clearly to teach just that possibility of a clean heart. One can surely raise the question of whether or not God would command us to do what we cannot do, to love Him with all our hearts, and not to live in sin. An illustration that comes from the days of the Second World War has helped me.

The story comes from the life of Corrie Ten Boom. After a brutal experience in a Nazi concentration camp where her sister whom she loved very dearly had died, Corrie found herself with a ministry of healing for the broken people who survived that war. She came to see that a major theme for her must be that of forgiveness, that there could really be no healing unless through the grace of God people found the power to forgive those who had so brutally sinned against them.

She was in Munich and had just finished speaking to the German audience on the necessity for Christians of forgiveness. She was greeting the people when she realized that a man standing in line waiting to speak with her had a familiar face. He was smiling eagerly and warmly as he waited. Suddenly she realized that this man had been a guard in the prison camp where she and her sister had been imprisoned and where her sister had died. In fact, he was one of the guards who stood while she and her sister and the other women in the prison took their showers. The memory of the faces of those guards flooded her consciousness. Instantly she was back in the concentration camp in that shower room with its piles of clothing, the smells, and the leering faces of the guards. As he extended his hand, she heard him say: “Thank you, Fraulein, for that wonderful message on forgiveness. To think that, as you say, He has washed my sins away.”

Corrie said that she suddenly found that her hand would not move in response to his. She could not lift it. Thoughts of anger and resentment, everything but forgiveness flooded her mind. Then she saw the wrongness of her thoughts. This was one for whom Christ had died too. She prayed a silent prayer: “Jesus, I cannot forgive him. Give me your forgiveness.” As she found strength to lift her hand to his, she said that an incredible thing happened. From her shoulder down her arm and through her hand a hot current seemed to pass from her to him. Into her heart flooded a love that, she said, almost overcame her. Her biographers speak for her:
“And so I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world’s healing hinges, but on His. When He tells us to love our enemies, He gives, along with the command, the love itself.”
John and Elizabeth Sherrill in The Hiding Place, p 238

As I read this story, I was moved by the fact that it is very clear that it was not Corrie Ten Boom’s love that was manifested there. It was God’s own love, the love which the Cross of Christ reveals to us, which flooded her. That is the love that Paul says is the fulfillment of the divine law. Is it really possible, as Wesley said, for God’s law to be fulfilled in me, for the divine love to be perfected in me so that Christ’s love controls my being? Corrie’s story seems to confirm that possibility. But more, it seems to say that, if I do not know and if I do not have that love abiding within myself, it is because I have refused it. It is because I choose not to have it. Our God is a giving God, and He wants to give us Himself, and He is love. And, if I choose to receive what He offers, there can be in my life reflections of the nature of God, not because of who I am in myself, but because the holy One who is perfect love Himself dwells within.

A dentist friend of mine, an endodontist, was in Romania on a mission trip. He learned there of an experience that illustrates what I think we want to say. A Romanian layman was working in a prison with a man who was on death row for murder. He went as far as he could in witnessing to the prisoner. He found himself wishing that he could find someone with greater wisdom and understanding to help the prisoner. He called a pastor and asked him if he would visit the prisoner. When he described who the prisoner was, he immediately heard the voice of the pastor saying gruffly and decisively, “No! I cannot do that.” The layman was surprised and disappointed.

A few days later, though, he received a call from that pastor who thanked him for having called him and said that he had been to visit the prisoner. Then he surprised the lay person by saying: “I needed to go visit him for my own sake, not just for his.” “For,” he said, “I was able to lead to Christ the very person who had murdered my own son. Thank you for calling me. I needed to go.” After the layman’s call, as the Spirit had wrestled with him, the pastor knew what he had to do as a Christian. So, he let God put within him what was not naturally there, God’s own love; and he led a soul to Christ and found cleansing for his own person as well.

There seems obviously to be a potential in grace that most of us do not believe. Francis Asbury was convinced that God in Christ did a lot more for us on the Cross than merely to provide for the forgiveness of sins and our justification before the eternal judge. He believed that Christ died to share His life with us so that we can live in the power of His life, not our own. Asbury was convinced that Christ died so that the human heart can be wholly Christ’s, holy and clean, and can be filled with divine love, the love that moves the very heart of God Himself. Because of all this faith, Asbury had a great inner compulsion to share this good news with us all. Because of his faithfulness, this understanding of God and his grace has come down through the years to us in the Asbury world. I find my heart filled with gratitude to God that in His goodness He has let me be a part of this tradition. Some may call our theology heterodox and dangerous. For me, it fits what I read in the Word and what I need in my heart. That double witness gives me confidence to believe that the yearning which He puts in my spirit to please Him is a promise, a promise that can be fulfilled in the here and now through the power of Christ’s atoning blood and the filling of his Spirit. The Cross surely was God’s answer to the problem of sin now, not at or after the Resurrection. It is in the here and now that I need an answer to the problem of my sin. Must I wait until the resurrection to be clean? The Word does not seem to say so. Asbury’s conviction that it is possible in the now-time may have seemed heterodox to others. It seemed to have a remarkably beneficent influence on the moral and spiritual life of the nation. Perhaps the weakness of the Church and contemporary evangelicalism generally as it sees the integrity of the nation deteriorate is that we no longer believe what Asbury and his itinerants did believe. Perhaps that is the call for those of us in this heritage to remind the Church and the nation that there is still power in the blood of Christ to make us clean, to free us from the tyranny of self-interest, and to fill us with that agape love which, according to Paul, is the fulfillment of the divine law. Asbury thought that it was a privilege to give himself totally in such a cause. Asburians should think the same.


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