A Wheel Within a Wheel
A Wheel Within a Wheel

Author: Briane K. Turley

Publisher: Mercer University Press

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 9780865546301

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This study examines the rise of the holiness movement in Georgia following the Civil War. Employing a blend of social and intellectual historical methods, the study pays particular attention to the shifting cultural conditions occurring in Georgia and the rest of the Southeast around the turn of the century and shows how these changes influenced the movement.The study offers two major theses regarding the Wesleyan-Holiness movement in the United States. First the Holiness movement which emerged in the North after 1830 emphasizing the speedy attainment of human perfectibility failed to attract receptive audiences in the South due primarily to the cultural conditions of the region. Southern Christians were deeply affected by the culture of honor and the frequent violence it spawned. Moreover, Southerners were reluctant to subscribe to the Northern formula of Phoebe Palmer's quick and easy means to achieve perfect love when they recognized the ambiguities of the slave system -- a system most Southerners understood as a necessary evil.Second, during the Reconstruction period, at a time when most Southerners were searching for new beginnings, the Wesleyan doctrine of immediately acquired perfect love began attracting widespread support in the Southeast. The study examines the Holiness movement's emergence in Georgia, and demonstrates that contrary to the views of several historians, a significant number of Wesleyan Holiness advocates in the New South were not drawn from the ranks of the dispossessed, but were in fact members of the region's burgeoning middle class.

The Gentlemen Theologians
The Gentlemen Theologians

Author: E. Brooks Holifield

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2007-10-01

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 1725220717

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Professor Holifield locates the southern theologians in their broader American setting and in the context of European debates about reason, revelation, science, and moral philosophy. He thus explores a wide range of topics that clarify the history of southern--and American--religion: the presuppositions of liberalism and the logic of conservatism; the influence of Scottish Common-Sense Philosophers, British theologians, and German Biblical critics; the foundations and functions of southern social ethics; the didactic uses of ritual; and the continuing effort of nineteenth-century theologians to demonstrate the reasonableness of both the Christian religion and the whole natural order.

The Sacred Flame of Love
The Sacred Flame of Love

Author: Christopher H. Owen

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 9780820319636

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Attempting to restore subtlety and nuance to the study of southern religion, The Sacred Flame of Love ranges across the entire nineteenth century to chronicle the evolution of the institutions, theology, and social attitudes of Georgia Methodists in light of such phenomena, trends, and events as slavery, class prejudice, republicanism, population growth, economic development, sectional politics, war, emancipation, and urban growth. In connecting Methodist history with the larger social transformation of nineteenth-century Georgia, Christopher H. Owen uncovers a story of considerable complexity and variety. Because Georgia Methodists included people from every social class, few generalizations apply properly to all of them. For many years they were loosely united by common adherence to the ideals of Wesleyan evangelicalism, but economic and political developments would gradually accentuate Methodist social divisions and weaken even this bond. Indeed, deviating far from the conception of unchanging and asocial southern religion often held by scholars, Owen sees both church and society undergoing enormous change in the nineteenth century.

The Times Were Strange and Stirring
The Times Were Strange and Stirring

Author: Reginald F. Hildebrand

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 1995-07-24

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 0822381931

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With the conclusion of the Civil War, the beginnings of Reconstruction, and the realities of emancipation, former slaves were confronted with the possibility of freedom and, with it, a new way of life. In The Times Were Strange and Stirring, Reginald F. Hildebrand examines the role of the Methodist Church in the process of emancipation—and in shaping a new world at a unique moment in American, African American, and Methodist history. Hildebrand explores the ideas and ideals of missionaries from several branches of Methodism—the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, and the northern-based Methodist Episcopal Church—and the significant and highly charged battle waged between them over the challenge and meaning of freedom. He traces the various strategies and goals pursued by these competing visions and develops a typology of some of the ways in which emancipation was approached and understood. Focusing on individual church leaders such as Lucius H. Holsey, Richard Harvey Cain, and Gilbert Haven, and with the benefit of extensive research in church archives and newspapers, Hildebrand tells the dramatic and sometimes moving story of how missionaries labored to organize their denominations in the black South, and of how they were overwhelmed at times by the struggles of freedom.