Christian History Home > Issue 82 > The Cleansing Wave
The Cleansing Wave
The 19th-century holiness revival took many forms as it swept across denominational boundaries.
Edwin Woodruff Tait | posted 4/01/2004 12:00AM
The cleansing stream I see! I see!
I plunge, and oh, it cleanseth me!
Phoebe Palmer's hymn celebrating the sanctifying power of Christ's blood joined a chorus of American voices seeking to be made clean.
One of the strongest of these voices emerged from a small college in the forests of northern Ohio. Built in a key town on the Underground Railroad, Oberlin College was a novelty in its day, admitting women and integrating black students. Its reforming vision came straight out of another kind of integration: the belief that evangelical piety and social reform must be indivisible.
Oberlin's first president, Asa Mahan, and its first theology professor, the famous evangelist Charles Finney, did not hold the traditional Calvinist view of total depravity and predestination. They taught instead that sinners had the "natural" ability to believe, and that evangelistic methods could overcome their "moral" inability through the persuasive power of the Gospel. They understood saving faith as an act of ...
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