Today we are witnessing the re-emergence of a Protestant perfectionist vision of the Christian life. This vision has at least two forms, an Anabaptist understanding of the church as embodying a set of practices that realize the Kingdom of God and a Wesleyan optimism of grace in which the people of God must progress to deeper levels of union with God that in turn fuels love for neighbor in the world. The story of the emergence of this Protestant perfectionism has yet to be told in full, but I do not think one can fully understand Protestantism since 1970 without it.
When Reinhold Niebuhr described Billy Graham’s New York crusade as another variety of Christian perfectionism in 1956, he was playing into a particular typology that he had utilized at least since Moral Man and Immoral Society. In that 1932 work, Niebuhr attacked the optimistic view of humanity he found residing behind liberal Protestantism, lumping it with a host of moralists who like John Dewey assumed that the progressive development of humanity, either through scientific progress or a social gospel, could bring about a “peaceable kingdom.” In many ways, Niebuhr’s thought embodied the ongoing tension between various forms of Protestant perfectionism and Magisterial Protestant ideas that one still finds at work in evangelicalism.
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