Phoebe Palmer and the Altar Theology
As taught in the Holiness tradition
Palmer's 'shorter way': lay all on the altar, believe the promise, claim holiness now.
The nineteenth-century American Holiness movement owed much of its shape, and a great deal of its popular vocabulary, to Phoebe Palmer (1807-1874), a Methodist laywoman whose Tuesday Meeting for the Promotion of Holiness in New York drew bishops, pastors, and ordinary believers alike. Palmer took the doctrine of entire sanctification she had received from John Wesley and recast it into a method so direct that it came to be called the "shorter way." Where many Methodists understood the work of full sanctification as the distant prize of a long and uncertain struggle, Palmer taught that the believer might lay the whole of life upon the altar that is Christ, trust the promise of Scripture that the altar sanctifies the gift, and reckon the work done at once, before any change of feeling is felt.
By the end of this lesson
- Describe the three steps of Phoebe Palmer's 'altar theology' — entire consecration, faith that the altar sanctifies the gift, and testimony — and how they fit together into the 'shorter way.'
- Explain how Palmer derived the altar terminology from Romans 12:1, Matthew 23:19, and Hebrews 13:10-15, identifying the altar with Christ.
- Trace how Palmer developed and popularized Wesley's doctrine of entire sanctification, and where she sharpened or, in critics' view, altered his balance of the instantaneous and the gradual.
- Evaluate the exegetical question of whether Matthew 23:19, framed as a rebuke about oaths, can bear the doctrine of present assurance Palmer built on it.
- State fairly the objections raised by Wesleyan and Reformed critics to the 'shorter way,' without resolving the disagreement, and distinguish this lesson from a general treatment of entire sanctification.
Scripture
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