Higher Life movement

[2] Its name comes from the Higher Christian Life, a book by William Boardman published in 1858, as well as from the town in which the movement was first promoted—Keswick Conventions in Keswick, England, the first of which was a tent revival in 1875 and continues to this day, albeit with a more mainstream reformed evangelical theology.

The Keswick approach seeks to provide a mediating and biblically balanced solution to the problem of subnormal Christian experience.

It was at this time that Methodists in the northeastern United States began to preach Wesleyan doctrine of Christian perfection or entire sanctification and non-Methodists at Oberlin College in Ohio began to accept and promote their own version of sanctification, with Charles Finney of Oberlin teaching that his doctrine was distinctly different from the Wesleyan one to which Asa Mahan was more attracted.

Methodist evangelist James Caughey, as well as Presbyterian Asa Mahan and Presbyterian-turned-Congregationalist Charles Finney began to teach the concept to churches in England and then in Ireland and Scotland.

Robert and Hannah Smith were among those who took the holiness message to England, and their ministries helped lay the foundation for the now-famous Keswick Convention, which differs from traditional Wesleyan-Holiness theology.

[13] On May 1, 1873, William Haslam introduced Robert Pearsall Smith to a small meeting of Anglican clergymen held at Curzon Chapel, Mayfair, London.

Robert Pearsall Smith was going to be the main speaker, but the public disclosure of his teaching a woman in a hotel bedroom that Spirit baptism was allegedly accompanied with sexual thrills led him to be disinvited from the meeting.

[1] Over four hundred people met under the banner of “All One in Christ Jesus.” British speakers included Anglicans, such as the J. W. Webb-Peploe, Evan H. Hopkins, and Handley Moule, as well as Frederick Brotherton Meyer,[15] a Baptist, and Robert Wilson, a Friend.

Albert Benjamin Simpson, largely accepting a form Keswickian theology with his own distinctives, founded the Christian and Missionary Alliance denomination in 1897.

[11] However, Keswick doctrine has been sharply criticized as a disguised form of entire sanctification (or "perfectionism") by other Christian traditions, particularly historical Calvinism and Presbyterianism.

W. H. Griffith Thomas responded to Warfield and defended the Higher Life movement in two articles in the journal Bibliotheca Sacra.

The Christian theological tradition of Keswickianism historically became popularized through the Keswick Conventions, the first of which was a tent revival in 1875 at Saint John's Church in Keswick . [ 1 ]