Number 18: Phoebe Palmer

Phoebe Palmer (1807-1874) comes in at number 18.  She was an important lay evangelist who played a key role in the renewal of the Methodist understanding of Christian perfection.  She read Wesley and relied on him as a source, but she actually took the doctrine in some ways that Wesley did not.  

Just as John Wesley came to overshadow his brother Charles in the original Methodist movement, so Phoebe Palmer took over a movement that was started by her sibling, Sarah Lankford.  In 1835, Sarah had started the Tuesday Morning Society for the Promotion of Holiness meetings in New York City.  By 1837, Phoebe Palmer had assumed the leadership of the movement and was beginning to make a name for herself.  Although the meetings were begun for women, by 1839 men had started to come and sit at Phoebe's feet.  Among those who came to hear her speak were Methodist preachers, theologians, and bishops.  As her popularity as a speaker continued to grow, she was invited to speak at churches, camp meetings, and conferences.  She would speak to thousands at a time.  For a woman to command this much attention in the area of religion had been unheard of; in some ways, she helped pave the way for later female theologians such as Georgia Harkness, although theologically they were quite different.  In Palmer's book, The Promise of the Father (1859) she made one of the first systematic attempts to reconcile the practice of women preaching with the Scriptures.  In this way, she was one of the forerunners of modern feminist theology.

 The name Phoebe Palmer is almost synonymous with the Holiness Movement in American church history.  As a leader of the Holiness movement in the United States, she is revered especially among the Nazarenes.  As Harold Raser notes:

"Why does the Church of the Nazarene affirm that God calls and gifts women for ministry?" It is partly because of our debt to Phoebe Palmer.  The fingerprints of this remarkable woman can be found nearly everywhere in the holiness tradition. In fact we, as Nazarenes and "holiness" believers, are to a great extent the "children" of Phoebe Palmer.  Perhaps as Paul said about Abraham—"those who believe are children of Abraham" (Galatians 3:7)—we might say of Phoebe Palmer—"those who love and seek after holiness are children of Phoebe." 

Holiness, Phoebe Palmer believed, carries ethical implications, so she became involved in an inner city rescue mission  and in societal moral concerns.  After the Civil War, she was a leader in the National Camp Meeting Association for the Promotion of Holiness and continued to be a prominent spokeswoman for entire sanctification.

Her most famous publication as The Way of Holiness (1850) in which she put forward her own unique spin on the Wesleyan doctrine of sanctification.  In contrast to John Wesley's deliberate, meticulous, slow way of exploring the gradual work of sanctification, Phoebe Palmer asserted:

Yes, brother, THERE IS A SHORTER WAY!  O!  I am sure this long waiting and struggling with the powers of darkness is not necessary.  There is a shorter way. ... (speaking of herself in the third person) On arriving at this point, she was enabled to gain yet clearer insight into the simplicity of the way. And it was by this process. After having taken the Bible as the rule of life, instead of the opinions and experience of professors, she found, on taking the blessed Word more closely to the companionship of her heart, that no one declaration spoke more appealingly to her understanding than this: " Ye are not your own, ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God's." (1 Cor. vi. 20.) By this she perceived the duty of entire consecration in a stronger light, and as more sacredly binding, than ever before. Here she saw God as her Redeemer claiming, by virtue of the great price paid for the redemption of body, soul, and spirit, the present and entire service of all these redeemed powers.

Palmer went on to expound on what became known as her "altar theology."

It was thus, by "laying all upon this altar," she, by the most unequivocal Scripture testimony, laid herself "under the most sacred obligation to believe that the sacrifice became " holy and acceptable," and virtually the Lord's property, even by virtue of the sanctity of the altar upon which it was laid, and continued " holy and acceptable,." so long as kept inviolably upon this hallowed altar. At an early stage of her experience in the " way of holiness," the Holy Spirit powerfully opened to her understanding the following passage, as corroborative of this view of the subject: " I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service." 

From these important considerations she perceived that it was indeed by the Spirit's teachings she had been led to " enter into the bonds of an everlasting covenant to be wholly the Lord's," inasmuch as, by the removal of this offering from this hallowing altar, she should emand for the "living sacrifice," having purchased all, body, soul, and spirit, unto Himself.

Phoebe Palmer, the mother of the Modern Holiness movement, comes in at number 18.  She Americanized and democratized Wesley's vision of sanctification, simplifying it and making more accessible to the common people.  One does wonder, however, if she oversimplified it by making it immediately accessible to anyone who simply puts their life on the altar.  True, John Wesley also allowed for immediate sanctification, but the whole structure of his theology (with its emphasis on the means of grace, small group accountability and continual need for repentance) gave precedence to a gradualist account of sanctification.  With Palmer, sanctification took on a pneumatological focus (as opposed to Wesley's Christological focus), and it became more readily available to everyone, even those who did not submit to sustained communal disciplines.  Nevertheless, Palmer's influence spread quickly, she prepared the way for later female preachers, and she reminded Christians of the importance of living a sanctified life.