Reading different theological perspectives. Historical readings express their authors' perspectives, including Arminian and Reformed or Calvinist traditions. Inclusion does not make an author's position settled CTS doctrine. Read with Scripture and the assigned material. A supported answer from another evangelical perspective should be assessed on its reasoning, not penalized simply for differing from the author. If an automated score rejects such an answer, ask CTS for review.

Master’s Assigned Readings (all five)

M.Div. and Th.M. students read all five assigned selections and take their separate exam after activation. The test page states the current rule; valid earlier completions remain valid.

Optional Honors (choose three)

Honors is optional on every track. Certificate and Associate students may read three honors selections without a required-reading exam. Honors does not replace either master’s exam.

The Master's textbook test: read William H. Durham, The Pentecostal Testimony (1909–1912): Selections, then take its test: twenty fill-in-the-blank questions, drawn from forty; eighteen right passes. Each answer is marked right or wrong at once. Correct answers and explanations are available after the attempt passes. It is separate from the reading test on the five digests below: passing one does not pass the other. On the M.Div. and Th.M. tracks both tests are being introduced; each test's page says whether it is in force yet. Until then any student may take them, and a pass is kept in your record.

The Master's reading test: separate from the honors invitation below. Honors asks you to read any three of these digests; the Master's test covers all five. It has twenty fill-in-the-blank questions, four from each reading, drawn from forty; eighteen right passes. Each answer is marked right or wrong at once; correct answers and explanations are available after the attempt passes. You may try again after a short wait. The test is being introduced: its page says whether it is in force yet. Until then any student may take it, and a pass is kept in your record.

Honors option: Complete any three of the five readings below. These readings supplement the course and do not replace its units or examinations.

On this site: Each of the five readings is a Chapala Theological Seminary digest, written by CTS, available in English, Spanish and French here on the site — every one opens directly from this page, with nothing to download. Each card names the work its digest is made from.

Selected: 0 of 3

Reading 1 · His Testimony and Call

The Third Time He Remained

A CTS digest of “Personal Testimony of Pastor Durham,” The Pentecostal Testimony (Chicago), March 1909, pp. 5–7

Durham tells how he joined a Baptist church without being converted, found Christ in Minnesota in 1898, and preached for years believing he had the Holy Spirit. He resisted the Azusa teaching on tongues until he saw friends in Chicago receive, then waited at Azusa Street until, on the third visit of power, he spoke in tongues.

CTS DIGESTRead the full digest — opens right here

The Chapala Theological Seminary digest — an original summary written by CTS, available in English, Spanish and French, readable offline. This is the CTS digest, not the full original source text.

The Third Time He Remained: William H. Durham’s Testimony and Call

A Chapala Theological Seminary reading — a Kentucky Baptist who was not converted, a Minnesota conversion, a Chicago pastor who resisted the Azusa teaching, and three nights on the floor of the Azusa Street Mission

A CTS digest of “Personal Testimony of Pastor Durham,” The Pentecostal Testimony (Chicago), March 1909, pp. 5–7. Durham’s text is in the public domain; the short quotations below are from it.

Pentecostal Testimony, March 1909
Primary source
1891–1907
William H. Durham

A word before you read. William Howard Durham (1873–1912) was pastor of the North Avenue Mission in Chicago and editor of The Pentecostal Testimony. Within five years of the testimony studied here he became the most controversial teacher of the early Pentecostal movement, because he taught that sanctification is not a second work of grace but part of what Christ finished on the cross. This first reading comes before that controversy. It is his own account of how he was saved, how he came to the baptism in the Holy Spirit, and how he was sent to preach. Read it as testimony: a pastor telling what he experienced, in his own words. CTS presents the experiences he describes as he reported them.

1.A Church Member Without a Change of Heart

Durham was born and raised in Kentucky. At about eighteen he joined the Baptist church, sincerely, but he says plainly that he was not converted. He had “no joy or peace or knowledge of salvation,” and he knew even then that he ought to have “a real change of heart.” Without it he soon gave up his profession and drifted back into sin, and he lost some of the confidence in religion he had once had. Many pastors will recognize this story. A person can be baptized and listed on a church roll and still not know Christ. Durham does not blame the Baptists for this; he blames his own lack of a real encounter with God. His later preaching always pressed hard on the need for a definite, conscious conversion, and this is where that emphasis began.

2.Conversion in Minnesota, and a First Taste of the Finished Work

In 1898, in Minnesota, God began to deal with him again. This time conviction came through reading the Bible, not through any revival meeting. Day after day it deepened, until he resolved to yield and call on God for mercy. At that moment, he writes, the Spirit showed him Jesus on the cross and said, “Christ died for your sins.” He believed at once, and “joy unutterable” filled his soul: he was a new creature and knew it. For months he walked, as he puts it, in a heavenly state. Then he began to lose the victory in some areas. He was told that sanctification was what he needed, and he sought it for a long time, sometimes thinking it was done and then realizing it was not. About three years after his conversion, God gave him grace “to definitely trust the blood of Christ” and to “rest my faith on His finished works.” When he did, the Spirit witnessed that he was sanctified. Notice this detail. In 1909 Durham still describes this as his sanctification, and he still thinks of it within the Holiness framework he had been taught. Yet the language he uses, resting on Christ’s finished work by faith, is exactly the language he would later use against that framework. The seed of his famous teaching is already in his own story.

3.Power in Preaching, and a “Conscious Shortage”

Durham entered the ministry about the time of that experience. The blessing was so strong that he honestly believed he had received the Holy Ghost, and he urged others to seek the same. He travelled from place to place, the Spirit seemed to rest on him when he preached, and he often saw crowded altars and people “saved, sanctified and healed.” Yet he admits that there was a “conscious shortage” in his own experience. He could never make it match the book of Acts. Like many Holiness preachers of his day, he explained the great scenes in Acts as pictures of sanctification. Looking back in 1909, he rejects that reading firmly: Pentecost was not simply the disciples being sanctified; it was the coming of the Holy Spirit. Here Durham is describing a common pattern of the period. Many Holiness people spoke of a “baptism of the Holy Ghost” and meant the second blessing of a clean heart. The Pentecostal revival forced them to ask whether they had named their experience correctly.

4.Resisting the Azusa Teaching

In April 1906 Durham heard of the outpouring of the Spirit in Los Angeles, with speaking in tongues. He rejoiced and told his small congregation it was a mighty work of God. What he could not accept was the teaching that tongues are the evidence of the baptism in the Holy Spirit, and he denounced it publicly. He is careful to say why. He did not doubt that the people speaking in tongues were genuine; tongues were plainly Scriptural. The problem was personal. The teaching said that he, who had claimed the Holy Ghost for years, had not yet received Him. “No man can ever convince me,” he declared, that he had not received the Holy Ghost. That honesty is one of the strengths of this testimony. Durham does not pretend that he came easily to the Pentecostal view. He tells us that pride of experience stood in the way.

5.Chicago, Los Angeles and the “Heavenly Anthem”

What changed his mind was not an argument but a person. About the beginning of 1907 the Spirit began to fall in his own Chicago missions. Among the first to receive was Elder J. C. Sinclair, a man Durham had worked beside for three years and never doubted. When Durham heard him sing and speak in other tongues, though Sinclair had never been able to sing before, he concluded that his own experience had never done anything like it. He went forward at the close of the service, only to find that he could not simply “take” the Holy Spirit by faith and go on; he had to wait until He came. He had now seen “the real thing,” he says, and nothing less would satisfy him. Because his pastoral duties in two congregations left him no time to wait on God, he went to Los Angeles, arriving on 8 February 1907. His description of his first day at the Azusa Street Mission is one of the best early pictures of that meeting. There were hundreds present, yet God seemed to be controlling everything: “No man had anything whatever to do with what was happening,” and still the order seemed perfect. Then a large number began to sing in the Spirit, what the mission called the “Heavenly Anthem.” Durham could not have sung a word of it. He saw then, he writes, the difference between the presence of the Spirit with us and the Spirit “living within us in person.”

6.Three Visits of Power and the Prophecy of Seymour

Weeks of heart-searching followed. His earlier experiences began to seem small, his good works seemed mixed with the flesh, and for a time God seemed further away than ever. He stopped struggling and simply waited, claiming the promise on the merits of the blood of Christ alone, “renouncing all my own works, good and bad alike.” On 26 February 1907, in an afternoon after-service, three believers told him to surrender everything and stop trying, and power came on him so strongly that he fell to the floor. For two hours he lay there, overwhelmed with the love of God and a fresh revelation of the blood of Christ. Then the power withdrew. Two days later the same thing happened again, with much shaking, and again the Spirit left him. Durham had settled that tongues would show that the work was finished. The next night, as he knelt at the altar, the Spirit came a third time. For three hours, he says, his body was worked on section by section, until his jaw, throat and tongue moved and “strange sounds” came that did not begin in his mind. Then he spoke clearly in other tongues. The memorial notice printed after his death dates his baptism to 2 March 1907. At that moment he heard Brother Seymour, the pastor, say, “He is through now.” Seymour told him that the Spirit had woken him that night to say that Durham would receive, and he then prophesied that wherever Durham preached, the Holy Spirit would fall on the people. This time, Durham says, the One for whom he had longed did not leave him. Remember this scene when you study Reading 5. In 1907 Seymour was Durham’s pastor at the altar, and Durham honored him. Four years later the two men would be divided.

7.What a Pentecostal Pastor Takes from It Today

First, this testimony shows why Durham believed that experience must be named by Scripture. He openly admits that he had given a large name, “the Holy Ghost,” to a real but smaller blessing. That self-correction became the heart of his later argument. Second, he models patience. He did not try to produce tongues, and he did not claim the baptism after the first or second visit of power. Third, notice his care for the Christ-centered nature of the experience. What he remembers most from those hours is not the shaking but “such a revelation of the blood” and of Christ as the only Saviour. Pentecostal pastors today can teach their people that the baptism in the Spirit should make Jesus more real, not less. Fourth, his testimony needs balance. Durham writes that a seeker “may not be baptized as I was,” and that is wise. The physical details of his experience are his, not a pattern for every believer. Finally, a pastor should notice that Durham’s position on tongues as initial evidence is the classical Pentecostal one. Other Christians, including many Charismatics in older churches, believe the baptism or filling of the Spirit can come with other signs, or that tongues is one gift among many (1 Corinthians 12:30). CTS asks students to know the classical Pentecostal case well and to describe the other views fairly.

8.Taking It to Heart

For reflection. Durham joined a church but was not converted. How does your congregation help members to know that they truly belong to Christ? He confessed that he had called a real blessing by the wrong name. Is there anything in your own spiritual story that you need to measure again by Scripture? He would not let his pride in past experience keep him from seeking more of God. What might stand in your way? And how would you counsel a believer who is seeking the baptism in the Holy Spirit and is discouraged that it has not yet come?

Select

Reading 2 · Spirit Baptism and Tongues

Two Experiences, Not Two Works

A CTS digest of “The Two Great Experiences or Gifts,” The Pentecostal Testimony (Los Angeles), Vol. I, No. 8, August 1911, pp. 5–7

Durham sets out his order of Christian experience: conversion, in which a believer receives Christ and a full salvation; water baptism; and the baptism in the Holy Spirit with tongues, “the seal of a finished salvation.” From Acts 2, 8 and 19 he argues for two experiences, not two works of grace. The digest sets beside it the three-stage reply.

CTS DIGESTRead the full digest — opens right here

The Chapala Theological Seminary digest — an original summary written by CTS, available in English, Spanish and French, readable offline. This is the CTS digest, not the full original source text.

Two Experiences, Not Two Works: Durham on Conversion and the Baptism in the Holy Spirit

A Chapala Theological Seminary reading — Durham’s map of the Christian life: conversion, water baptism, the gift of the Holy Spirit with tongues, and a life of daily walking in the Spirit

A CTS digest of “The Two Great Experiences or Gifts,” The Pentecostal Testimony (Los Angeles), Vol. I, No. 8, August 1911, pp. 5–7. Durham’s text is in the public domain; the short quotations below are from it.

Pentecostal Testimony, August 1911
Primary source
Acts 2, 8 and 19
William H. Durham

A word before you read. By the summer of 1911 Durham had moved his headquarters from Chicago to Los Angeles, and his paper was carrying his teaching on “the finished work of Calvary” to Pentecostal readers around the world. This article is his clearest positive statement of the order of Christian experience. It is the classic text of what historians call the two-stage or Finished Work view, which most later Pentecostal churches adopted. Other Pentecostals, then and now, hold a three-stage order. CTS sets out Durham’s argument and the main replies, so that students can understand each side.

1.The Map: Two Experiences and a Daily Walk

Durham opens with a bold claim. Search the New Testament as carefully as we will, he says, we find “two great, definite experiences” and no more. Alongside them we find a clear outline of how those who have received them should live. That life is progressive: it “must be lived daily” to remain in the peace and favor of God. The structure of his whole theology is here in three parts. First comes conversion, in which a person receives Christ. Second comes the baptism in the Holy Spirit, in which a person receives the Spirit. Around and after both of them comes the ongoing life of faith, obedience and growth. Notice what is missing. There is no intermediate crisis of sanctification between conversion and the Spirit. That missing step is what made this article so controversial among Pentecostals who had come from the Holiness movement.

2.The First Experience: Conversion as a Complete Change

In conversion, Durham writes, a person receives Jesus Christ, God accepts him, and eternal life is imparted to him. He passes from condemnation into peace with God (Romans 5:1). The moment a sinner accepts Christ, “he is saved; just as saved as he will ever be.” Durham is not denying growth. He is denying that a converted person is only half saved. What makes a person lost, he argues, is not first his outward sins but his birth into a fallen race and his unbelief toward the Son of God. When he believes, his nature is changed as well as his state. “To convert means to change,” Durham says. A believer is made “a new creature, not partly new”: changed from sin to righteousness, from uncleanness to holiness, from a child of Satan to a child of God. Then comes one practical step. The new believer is now a candidate for water baptism, which Durham calls the only thing required between conversion and the baptism in the Holy Spirit.

3.The Apostles’ Order in Acts

Durham’s main evidence is the preaching of the apostles. On the day of Pentecost the multitude asked what they must do, and Peter told them to repent and be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, promising that they would receive the gift of the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:38). Durham then follows this pattern through Acts: Philip in Samaria, the Ethiopian official on the road, and Paul before kings and crowds. Everywhere, he says, the message was Christ crucified and risen, “a full and complete Savior,” received by faith. Peter did not argue with the crowd about works of grace or send them “grinding in the mills in search of some mysterious something that no one can define.” He preached Christ, called for repentance and baptism, and promised the Spirit. From this Durham draws his central negative claim: no apostle anywhere led converts to seek sanctification as a second, instantaneous work. They taught converts how to live, and they led them to receive the Holy Spirit.

4.The Second Experience: “The Seal of a Finished Salvation”

Once a person has received Christ, Durham writes, he is a child and heir of God, ready to receive what God has promised His children. The next experience is the receiving of the Holy Spirit. It is “always a definite experience,” and it is “invariably accompanied by the speaking in other tongues,” as at Pentecost. This is the classical Pentecostal teaching of tongues as the initial evidence. Then comes Durham’s most memorable phrase. The baptism in the Holy Spirit is “the seal of a finished salvation in Jesus Christ” (compare Ephesians 1:13 and 4:30). For Durham the order matters. Christ finished the work of saving us on the cross; the Spirit then comes as a Person, the “third Person of the Godhead,” to live within the believer whom Christ has already cleansed. The baptism does not complete a half-finished salvation. It seals a finished one and empowers the believer to live and witness.

5.Samaria and Ephesus

Durham believed Acts 8 settles the matter. Philip preached Christ in Samaria, and the people believed and were baptized. They now had exactly what they had received: Christ, who is made unto us “wisdom, righteousness, sanctification and redemption” (1 Corinthians 1:30). In Durham’s day, he complains, such converts would be told they were justified but not sanctified, and some would remain in confusion for years. But Peter and John did not set the Samaritans seeking a second work of grace. They prayed for them and laid hands on them, and they received the Holy Spirit. So, Durham concludes, the Samaritans had “two definite experiences, but not two works of grace.” In the first they were made holy in Christ; in the second they were sealed by the Spirit. Acts 19 points the same way. Paul did not ask the disciples at Ephesus whether they had the second blessing; he asked whether they had received the Holy Spirit since they believed. Durham also uses Samaria against a different view: that every believer receives the Holy Spirit at conversion. “When we receive Christ we have Christ,” he writes, but not the Spirit until we receive Him.

6.“Stop This Thing”: Durham’s Appeal, and the Replies

Durham ends with a sweeping judgment. Much of the Christian world, he says, recognizes only one experience, conversion. Another part has seen that there are two, but has put a “definite second work of grace” where the baptism in the Holy Spirit belongs. And now some Pentecostals add a third. “Brethren, in the name of the Lord, stop this thing,” he pleads; God will confirm His Word with signs following, but “He cannot honor the theories of men.” Students should hear the other sides as clearly. Holiness Pentecostals, such as the Azusa Street Mission, the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee), the Pentecostal Holiness Church and the Church of God in Christ, kept three stages. They answered that the disciples were already clean before Pentecost (John 15:3), that Jesus prayed for their sanctification (John 17:17), and that Peter later said God purified the Gentiles’ hearts by faith when He gave them the Spirit (Acts 15:8–9). In their view the Spirit comes upon a cleansed vessel; the 1906 Azusa paper called the baptism “a gift of power upon the sanctified life.” Many evangelicals outside the Pentecostal movement replied differently again: every believer receives the Spirit at conversion (Romans 8:9; 1 Corinthians 12:13), and the delay in Samaria was a unique moment as the gospel crossed into a new people. Later Finished Work Pentecostals, including the Assemblies of God, kept Durham’s two-stage order but said more carefully than he did that the Spirit is at work in the new birth, while the baptism in the Spirit is distinct from it and follows it.

7.What a Pentecostal Pastor Takes from It Today

First, Durham keeps Christ at the center. The baptism in the Spirit is not a ladder to a better salvation; it is the Spirit sealing and empowering people who are already complete in Christ. That guards against spiritual pride among those who speak in tongues. Second, he gives new believers assurance. A person who has truly received Christ should not be told that he is only partly saved. Third, his order is simple enough to teach: believe, be baptized, receive the Spirit, and walk in Him daily. Many Pentecostal congregations still follow it in practice. Fourth, a pastor must handle his tone with care. Durham calls the teaching of other Christians “nonsense” and “theories of men.” He was writing in the heat of a quarrel, and a teacher today can hold firm convictions without contempt for brothers and sisters who read the same texts differently. Finally, the reading invites careful Bible study. Each side builds on Acts, John and Paul. A wise pastor teaches people to read those passages in context, to ask what is pattern and what is a one-time event, and to keep fellowship with Christians who reach other conclusions.

8.Taking It to Heart

For reflection. How would you explain to a new believer the difference between receiving Christ and receiving the baptism in the Holy Spirit? Durham called the Spirit “the seal of a finished salvation.” What does that phrase add to your understanding of Spirit baptism? Which passages would you use to present the two-stage view, and which would a Holiness Pentecostal use to present the three-stage view? How can your church teach its own position clearly while speaking respectfully of believers who hold another?

Select

Reading 3 · The Finished Work of Calvary

Complete in Him

A CTS digest of “Sanctification: The Bible Does Not Teach That It Is a Second Definite Work of Grace,” The Pentecostal Testimony, Vol. I, No. 8, August 1911, pp. 1–3; and the lead article of January 1912, pp. 1–3 (heading illegible in the scan text)

In two articles Durham argues that no Scripture teaches sanctification as a second work. In conversion the believer comes into Christ the Sanctifier and is made holy; what follows is the overcoming life of faith, not another crisis. He honors Wesley while disputing him, and answers Holiness leaders from Romans 6. The digest gives the Wesleyan reply.

CTS DIGESTRead the full digest — opens right here

The Chapala Theological Seminary digest — an original summary written by CTS, available in English, Spanish and French, readable offline. This is the CTS digest, not the full original source text.

Complete in Him: Durham’s Finished Work Teaching on Sanctification

A Chapala Theological Seminary reading — two of Durham’s articles on holiness: sanctification as a state entered in Christ at conversion, the overcoming life that follows, and his challenge to the teaching of a second work of grace

A CTS digest of “Sanctification: The Bible Does Not Teach That It Is a Second Definite Work of Grace,” The Pentecostal Testimony (Los Angeles), Vol. I, No. 8, August 1911, pp. 1–3, and of the untitled lead article on the Bible standard of salvation in the January 1912 issue, pp. 1–3 (its heading is not legible in the scan’s text). Durham’s text is in the public domain; the short quotations below are from it.

Pentecostal Testimony, 1911–1912
Primary source
Romans 6
William H. Durham

A word before you read. “The finished work of Calvary” was Durham’s name for his message. He first preached it widely in 1910, and an article in the February 1911 issue of his paper set off what he later called “the great battle of nineteen eleven.” These two articles show the teaching at its fullest. Most Pentecostals of 1911 had come out of the Holiness movement and believed that sanctification is a second, instantaneous work of grace after conversion. Durham told them they were mistaken. CTS presents his case and the Wesleyan-Holiness answer side by side. Neither side denied that God calls His people to holiness. They disagreed about how and when God makes a believer holy.

1.“Not Even One Scripture”

The August 1911 article begins by explaining why Durham kept writing on this subject: his earlier article had caused so much discussion and so many letters that he felt he had to continue. His starting point is simple. From the time the Spirit showed him that “there is not even one Scripture” teaching sanctification as a second work, he had studied the subject, preached on it and discussed it with hundreds of people. He calls the second-work theory one of the weakest doctrines taught in the Pentecostal movement. His main argument is from silence. The New Testament records one conversion after another, and one case after another of people receiving the Holy Spirit. If sanctification were a second definite work, he says, we would expect at least one example of someone receiving it. There is none. Durham then notes that many defenders of the second blessing do not argue from Scripture at all. They appeal to Wesley or another great leader, or to their own personal testimony.

2.Wesley Honored, and Questioned

Durham’s treatment of John Wesley is worth noticing, because it is more respectful than his tone elsewhere. He believes that Wesley and many who taught the second blessing were “real men of God.” God raised Wesley up to preach “holiness unto the Lord,” and his message blessed the world. But Durham thinks Wesley was mistaken on this point, and he argues that Wesley himself was less rigid than his followers. In A Plain Account of Christian Perfection, Durham says, Wesley allows that a person may enter sanctification in the first work of grace, and also that it may come by a gradual process. Durham also charges that Wesley’s teaching on this subject rests mainly on experience rather than on Scripture. Wesleyans would answer that Wesley built his doctrine of perfect love on many texts, including 1 Thessalonians 5:23 and 1 John 4:17–18, and that he tested experience by Scripture. Students should read Durham here as one side in a debate about how to interpret Wesley.

3.Misnamed Experiences and the Overcoming Life

Durham’s pastoral diagnosis is that “many of us have called our experiences by the wrong name.” A believer is saved and full of joy, grows careless, loses the joy and falls into confusion. He is then told he needs to be sanctified. When he repents and returns to the place he was in at conversion, he calls it a second work of grace. Durham says that “reclamation would be a much better name” for it. His positive teaching follows. “Sanctification is a state,” he writes, “and an experience or life as well.” In conversion we come into Christ our Sanctifier and are made holy as well as righteous, under the cleansing blood. The believer is then told in Romans 6 to reckon himself dead to sin and to present himself to God as alive from the dead, not to seek another crisis. What has been missing, Durham argues, is clear teaching about the overcoming life: the daily cross, prayer, vigilance and dependence on Christ. “We are saved by faith,” he says, “and by faith we keep saved.” It takes as much faith to keep right with God as it did to get right in the first place.

4.Galatians, Corinth and Ephesus

Durham then reads the troubled churches of the New Testament in this light. Holiness teachers, he says, made a great mistake in teaching that the Galatians were justified but not sanctified. Paul’s concern was that they were turning from faith in Christ to the works of the law; having begun in the Spirit, they were ending in the flesh, and so were in danger of losing their place in grace altogether. The same is true of those in Asia who forsook Paul and of Demas, who loved this present world. These people had once walked with God. What they needed was not a second work of grace but to repent and return to the grace they had lost. When Christ rebuked the church at Ephesus (Revelation 2:1–5), He did not tell them to get sanctified. He told them to repent, because they had left their first love, which Durham takes to be the holy love given at conversion.

5.“A Man Is Not Saved Till He Is Sanctified”

The January 1912 lead article opens with Hebrews 12:14, “without holiness no man shall see the Lord.” Durham fully accepts that standard. The question is when a person becomes holy. The Bible’s answer, he says, is that the only safe place is in Christ, and all sound teachers agree that we come into Christ at conversion. Can a man who is in Christ still have the “old man” in him? Durham says no: our old man was crucified with Christ (Romans 6:6). There is no halfway ground between condemnation and justification. So he turns the usual formula around: “A man is not saved till he is sanctified.” He blames much confusion on the slogans “Justification is pardon” and “Sanctification is cleansing,” as if conversion were only an outward work. Conversion, he says, changes a person’s nature. He lists the terms Holiness writers used for what remains in a believer, such as “inbred sin” and “the Adamic nature,” and asks how a new creature in whom all things have become new (2 Corinthians 5:17) can still carry the carnal mind, which is enmity against God (Romans 8:7). He admits, with a touch of humor, that from their point of view he is a heretic.

6.Identification with Christ, and the Holiness Answer

Durham presses the argument by naming Holiness leaders. W. B. Godbey, in his book Sanctification, taught that all must have it before entering heaven, and Bishop Ralph Horner was quoted as saying that if he had died before his second blessing he would have been lost. Durham replies that Wesley himself thought the churches Paul first wrote to had not received the second blessing. If both claims were true, Paul’s first readers would be lost. “We agree with Wesley,” Durham writes, that Paul had not received it, “for there is none to receive.” Durham’s alternative is identification with Christ in Romans 6. Faith unites us with Christ in His death; in baptism we are buried with Him; and now, in living faith and in the Holy Spirit, we live unto God. “No second work of grace mentioned here,” he says, “none needed.” The Wesleyan-Holiness tradition answered with care. Wesley taught that sanctification begins at the new birth, when sin no longer reigns, though it still remains (his sermon “On Sin in Believers”). Entire sanctification, in this view, is God’s later cleansing of the heart for perfect love, received by faith, often in a crisis, and followed by growth. Holiness writers feared that Durham’s view made holiness a matter of standing and weakened the call to a cleansed heart. Some historians note that Durham’s view sounds close to the Baptist and Keswick teaching on sanctification he would have known.

7.What a Pentecostal Pastor Takes from It Today

First, Durham gives believers assurance and a Christ-centered holiness. Holiness is not a ladder we climb; it is life in Christ, who has been made our sanctification (1 Corinthians 1:30). Second, he does not lower the standard. Durham insists that God demands we remain pure, and he calls for the daily cross and the overcoming life. A pastor who teaches the Finished Work view must teach that part too, or the doctrine can become an excuse for careless living. Third, the Wesleyan answer has its own pastoral strength. It takes seriously the believer who is saved and yet struggles with a divided heart, and it offers hope of a deeper cleansing and perfect love. Fourth, history matters here. The Assemblies of God, formed in 1914, and most later Pentecostal churches followed the Finished Work view. The Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee), the Pentecostal Holiness Church, the Church of God in Christ and others kept the three stages: salvation, sanctification and the baptism in the Holy Spirit. Both families of churches have produced holy men and women. Finally, CTS asks pastors to know their own church’s teaching well and to describe the other view in terms its own holders would accept.

8.Taking It to Heart

For reflection. Durham said that many believers had called their experiences by the wrong name. How do you describe the moments of deep blessing in your own Christian life? How would you explain Romans 6:11, “reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin,” to a struggling believer? What strengths do you see in the Wesleyan teaching of entire sanctification, and what strengths in Durham’s teaching of the finished work? How do you call your congregation to holy living without either discouraging them or making holiness seem optional?

Select

Reading 4 · The Controversy

“Change Its Name”

A CTS digest of “The Second Work of Grace People Answered,” The Pentecostal Testimony (Los Angeles), Vol. I, No. 8, August 1911, pp. 7–9

Durham answers the questions Holiness Pentecostals put to him: what Jesus meant by “sanctify them” in John 17, why Paul urged holiness on Spirit-filled churches, and how the carnal Corinthians could speak in tongues. His counsel to anyone with a misnamed experience is “change its name.” The digest adds the Holiness replies and the later history.

CTS DIGESTRead the full digest — opens right here

The Chapala Theological Seminary digest — an original summary written by CTS, available in English, Spanish and French, readable offline. This is the CTS digest, not the full original source text.

“Change Its Name”: Durham Answers the Second Work of Grace People

A Chapala Theological Seminary reading — the controversy at its sharpest: Durham’s replies to the questions most often put to him on John 17, the Epistles and the carnal Corinthians, and what happened to the debate after his death

A CTS digest of “The Second Work of Grace People Answered,” The Pentecostal Testimony (Los Angeles), Vol. I, No. 8, August 1911, pp. 7–9. Durham’s text is in the public domain; the short quotations below are from it.

Pentecostal Testimony, August 1911
Primary source
John 17; 1 Corinthians 3
William H. Durham

A word before you read. Durham wrote this article in the middle of the Finished Work controversy, when mission doors were being closed to him and many former friends treated him as a heretic. It answers the questions that Holiness Pentecostals most often asked him. It is polemical writing, and at times harsh. CTS asks students to read it as one side of a real argument among sincere believers, and to weigh the Holiness replies, which are given alongside his.

1.What Counts as Evidence

Durham begins by saying that very few people actually claim the Bible teaches two works of grace. Most of his questioners, he says, point to something else: the experience or teaching of some leader, the poor state of the church, the many honest Christians who have had wonderful experiences after conversion, or the saints of the past who knew nothing of present-day teaching. None of these, he insists, settles what Scripture teaches. His rule is plain. He accepts only the Word of God, and testimony that agrees with the Word. He does not doubt that people have had real and good experiences, but he believes that most of them “call their experiences by the wrong names.” He even names this “the mistake of the age.” He points to his own movement as proof. Since the Pentecostal revival began, thousands who believed they had the baptism in the Spirit came to see that they had “magnified some mere blessing.” Their honesty did not change what the experience was. So, he concludes, believers should search the Scriptures for an experience like theirs, called by the same name, and if they cannot find it, leave their experience with God and line up their teaching with the Word.

2.“Chapter and Verse”

Durham then lays down a challenge for teachers. A teacher should be ashamed to teach any experience that he cannot teach directly from the Bible, “giving chapter and verse.” He accuses some defenders of the second work of turning to texts that teach holiness when asked for texts that teach a second work, as if the two were the same. Everyone agrees that God calls His people to holiness; the question is whether the Bible teaches that holiness comes as a second, instantaneous work. Durham says that one clear Scripture would be enough to stop him preaching that one work of grace is all the Bible teaches. Holiness teachers of course believed they had such texts. They pointed to Paul’s prayer that God would “sanctify you wholly” (1 Thessalonians 5:23), written to believers, and to Peter’s words that God purified the hearts of the Gentiles by faith when He gave them the Spirit (Acts 15:8–9). The disagreement was not about whether to obey Scripture, but about how to read it.

3.John 17:17 and the Meaning of “Sanctify”

The first question is about Jesus’ prayer, “Sanctify them through thy truth” (John 17:17). The disciples were already saved, so why did Jesus pray for their sanctification unless it was a second work? Durham answers from the context. Jesus had already told them they were clean through the word He had spoken (John 15:3). In the same prayer He adds that He sanctifies Himself (John 17:19). No one, Durham says, believes that Christ was sanctified as a second work of grace, or that the roots of carnality were removed from Him. So the word cannot mean that here. “Sanctify means to set apart for a holy use,” he writes. Jesus was about to be set apart for the cross, the greatest work ever done, and He prayed that His disciples would be set apart in the fullest sense for God and His service. The Azusa Street teaching had read the same chapter differently. Its 1906 statement used John 17:15–17 to show that the disciples were sanctified, in the sense of cleansed, before Pentecost, and so were ready to receive the Spirit.

4.Growth in Grace and the Exhortations of the Epistles

A second question concerns Paul’s many calls to holiness. If the Epistles do not aim to get believers sanctified as a second work, what do these exhortations mean? Durham answers that every Epistle was written to people who were already saved, sanctified and filled with the Holy Spirit, many of them with spiritual gifts. Paul urged them to persevere in a holy life, to grow in the grace Christ had given, and to return to it if they had fallen. Here Durham finds common ground. “The most radical advocates of experimental holiness” are the strongest believers in growth in grace, he writes, “and we heartily agree with them.” But growth is gradual and ends only at death or at the Lord’s coming, so it cannot be called a definite second work. It is a continual operation of the free grace of God. In Galatians, he adds, Paul is not dealing with two works of grace but with law and grace. If a believer falls from under the blood, he must humble himself and return through the blood of Christ “as one who has sinned.”

5.The Carnal Corinthians and “Carnal Babyhood”

The third question was a favorite of the opponents of tongues: Paul called the Corinthians carnal (1 Corinthians 3:1–4), yet they spoke in tongues more than any church. Holiness Pentecostals used the same passage to show that tongues-speaking believers still needed to be sanctified. Durham answers that Paul calls the Corinthians sanctified in Christ Jesus and saints (1 Corinthians 1:2), enriched in all utterance and lacking no gift. Their carnality was not the lack of a second experience but the lack of faithfulness and growth: jealousy, strife, and one saying “I am of Paul” and another “I am of Apollos.” Then Durham turns the passage on his own world. Holiness people say “I am of Wesley,” “I am of Booth,” “I am of Horner” or “I am of Godbey,” and quote their leaders like a child saying, “My papa said it.” He calls this “carnal babyhood.” The Pentecostal movement suffers from it too, he says: some set themselves up as leaders and spend their time defending their claims, becoming “spiritual dwarfs.” Every church and movement, Durham concludes, needs a radical purging of such things.

6.“Brother, Change Its Name”, and After Durham

The article closes with a pastoral question: “What am I to do with my experience?” Durham’s answer has become famous: “Brother, change its name.” If an experience hinders you from seeing Christ and His truth, throw it away. But do not deny what the Lord has done for you. Give up the great names you have given your experiences, cling to Christ, and you will find that you have “wisdom, righteousness, sanctification and redemption” in Him (1 Corinthians 1:30). What is needed is not more definite experiences, but to overcome by the blood and the word of testimony (Revelation 12:11) and to abide in Christ and walk in the Spirit. Durham did not live to see how the debate ended. He died in Los Angeles on 7 July 1912, aged thirty-nine. The Assemblies of God, organized at Hot Springs, Arkansas, in 1914, adopted the Finished Work view, as did most later Pentecostal bodies, while the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee), the Pentecostal Holiness Church, the Church of God in Christ and others kept three stages. Between 1913 and 1916, after Durham’s death, the Oneness or “Jesus’ Name” movement arose among Finished Work Pentecostals, and Frank J. Ewart, who had worked with Durham in Los Angeles, became one of its leaders. In 1916 the Assemblies of God adopted a Trinitarian statement, and many Oneness ministers left. Durham’s own writings in these issues speak of the Holy Spirit as the third Person of the Godhead.

7.What a Pentecostal Pastor Takes from It Today

First, Durham’s rule is sound for every pastor: test experience by Scripture, and do not give an experience a name the Bible does not give it. That protects people from chasing experiences and from despair when theirs do not match someone else’s. Second, his counsel to “change its name” is gentle at its heart. He does not ask believers to deny what God has done, only to describe it truly and to hold on to Christ rather than to the experience. Third, his warnings about rival leaders and “spiritual dwarfs” are still needed in Pentecostal and Charismatic churches, where gifted personalities can draw followers to themselves. Fourth, notice his own failure in tone. While condemning carnal strife, Durham calls his opponents’ views “nonsensical” and their loyalty to leaders “disgusting.” A pastor can learn from his arguments and from his mistakes. Finally, the history shows that doctrinal disputes shape churches for generations. Today Finished Work and Holiness Pentecostals work together in many fellowships and councils. A wise pastor holds his church’s position with conviction and charity, and does not make it a test of Christian fellowship.

8.Taking It to Heart

For reflection. Durham called misnaming experiences “the mistake of the age.” Where do you see that mistake in churches today? How would you answer someone who uses 1 Corinthians 3 to argue that speaking in tongues proves nothing about holiness? Do you see signs of “carnal babyhood,” loyalty to leaders over loyalty to Christ, in your own movement? And how would you counsel a believer who asks, “What am I to do with my experience?”

Select

Reading 5 · The Azusa Street Dispute

How It Began and How It Ended

A CTS digest of “The Great Revival at Azusa Street Mission — How It Began and How It Ended,” The Pentecostal Testimony (Los Angeles), Vol. I, No. 8, August 1911, pp. 3–4

Durham describes crowded altars at Azusa Street in the spring of 1911, then sharply criticizes William J. Seymour, who returned, reclaimed his pulpit and locked the doors on 2 May. CTS reads this as Durham’s side of a historical dispute, presenting Seymour’s position as founding pastor, the racial dimension and the Holiness Pentecostal answer fairly beside it.

CTS DIGESTRead the full digest — opens right here

The Chapala Theological Seminary digest — an original summary written by CTS, available in English, Spanish and French, readable offline. This is the CTS digest, not the full original source text.

How It Began and How It Ended: Durham, Seymour and the Azusa Street Dispute of 1911

A Chapala Theological Seminary reading — Durham’s account of his revival meetings at the Azusa Street Mission in the spring of 1911 and of the locked door that ended them, read alongside William J. Seymour’s side and the Holiness Pentecostal answer

A CTS digest of “The Great Revival at Azusa Street Mission — How It Began and How It Ended,” The Pentecostal Testimony (Los Angeles), Vol. I, No. 8, August 1911, pp. 3–4. Durham’s text is in the public domain; the short quotations below are from it.

Pentecostal Testimony, August 1911
Primary source
February–May 1911
Durham and Seymour

A word before you read. This is the hardest reading in the course, because it is one Christian leader’s public charge against another. In the spring of 1911 Durham held meetings at the Azusa Street Mission in Los Angeles while its pastor, William J. Seymour (1870–1922), was away preaching in the East. When Seymour returned, the two men clashed, and the mission’s doors were locked against Durham. Durham’s article is the only full account from his side. Seymour left no matching account of these weeks. CTS presents Durham’s story as his side of a historical dispute, and sets beside it what we know of Seymour’s position and the Holiness Pentecostal answer.

1.Revival in the Old Mission

Durham begins with the revival itself. On 14 February 1911, he writes, meetings began at Azusa Mission, and from the first day “the power of God rested upon the meetings.” The altar was crowded at every service, extra altar space was needed, and the seekers’ meetings moved to a large room on the second floor. He says the Los Angeles work had been in a sad state, with many backslidden and praying for someone to lead them on. Soon the hall was full to the doors and many were turned away. Sometimes more than a hundred people were at the altar in one service. Believers stood up to confess that they had taken their eyes off Jesus, went to the altar, and found the anointing renewed. Sinners were saved, and on average at least ten a week were baptized in the Holy Spirit and spoke in tongues, with as many as twenty-two in one week. At times, Durham says, no one could preach or even testify: all they could do was sit “bathed in a sea of heavenly glory” and praise the Lord. He also reports many cases of healing. CTS presents these numbers and healings as Durham’s testimony.

2.The Message and the Opposition

From the start, Durham says, other Pentecostal leaders in Los Angeles opposed him. He had tried to have fellowship with the Upper Room Mission, then led by Elmer K. Fisher, but was refused permission to speak because he was “crooked in doctrine”: he did not believe that sanctification is a definite second work of grace. People were warned that those receiving the baptism under his ministry were getting false baptisms, and he was denounced all along the Pacific coast. In answer, Durham sums up his teaching in a few lines. He preaches “the finished work of Calvary”: we come into Christ and are fully saved in conversion; the next step is water baptism, and then the baptism in the Holy Spirit; no intermediate experience is required. He urges people “to hold on to Christ rather than to something He has given us.” He then tells how people from the Upper Room came to his meetings. George B. Studd, who had worked with Fisher, was baptized in the Spirit and joined Durham, and so did Fisher’s wife and some of that mission’s workers and elders. Durham’s claims about Fisher himself, that he resisted the light and left the ministry, are given only “if I am rightly informed,” and he asks his readers to pray for him.

3.Durham’s Charges Against Seymour

The center of the article is Seymour’s return. People wondered whether Seymour would accept the work or oppose it. Durham says the Spirit showed him that Seymour was trying to get home “to get possession of the work,” and would try to stop it if he could not. When Seymour came, Durham writes, he did not make the confession Durham thought he owed the people “for the way he had compromised and denied the truth.” Instead he asked for his place. Durham told him that placing him in charge at that time would ruin the work. He says Seymour showed a bitter spirit and told the people that if they did not want to hear him they could leave. The next day, a Sunday, Durham asked the congregation to choose. According to Durham, all but ten or fewer of several hundred voted for the meetings to continue as they were. On the Tuesday, 2 May 1911, Durham and his people found the door locked and bolted. Seymour, he says, had persuaded a few of the mission’s officers, “men of his own color,” to stand with him. Durham’s conclusion is severe: Seymour, “though once a mighty man, he is such no longer.” He adds that he writes sadly and asks his readers to pray for Seymour’s restoration. The congregation met for three days at the Kohler Street Mission and then leased a large hall at Seventh and Los Angeles Streets, where the meetings continued.

4.Seymour’s Side of the Story

Fairness requires us to see the same events from Seymour’s position. Seymour, the son of formerly enslaved parents in Louisiana, was the founding pastor of the Apostolic Faith Mission at 312 Azusa Street, where the revival had begun in 1906. Durham had received the baptism at that altar in 1907, and Seymour had prophesied over him (Reading 1). In 1911 Durham came as a guest during the pastor’s absence. The mission’s own paper had published its teaching in 1906: justification as the first work, sanctification as “the second work of grace and the last work of grace,” and the baptism in the Holy Spirit as a gift of power upon the sanctified life. From Seymour’s point of view, a visiting preacher had used the mission’s pulpit to teach against its published doctrine, gathered the congregation around himself, and then refused to give the pulpit back to its pastor. Durham’s “vote” was taken among crowds who had come to hear Durham, not by the mission’s trustees, who were responsible for the building. Durham never explains what “truth” Seymour had “compromised and denied,” and Seymour had in fact held the three-stage teaching from the beginning. Historians of the mission, such as Cecil M. Robeck Jr., also point to the racial side of the conflict. Azusa Street had been remarkable for Black, white and Latino believers worshiping together under a Black pastor, and Durham’s phrase about “men of his own color” shows how that unity was breaking down. Historians report that Seymour, in his 1915 Doctrines and Discipline, wrote with grief of white leaders who had left or divided the work, and reserved the office of bishop to a man of color.

5.The Wesleyan-Holiness Answer

The quarrel at Azusa was about more than a building or a pulpit. Fisher’s Upper Room Mission, Seymour’s mission and the wider Holiness Pentecostal family believed that Durham was cutting the Pentecostal revival off from its roots. The Wesleyan teaching of a clean heart had, in their eyes, prepared the way for Pentecost: God poured out His Spirit on sanctified believers, as the 1906 Azusa statement taught. To deny a second work of grace, they argued, was to lower the call to holiness and to put the baptism in the Spirit on an unclean vessel. Church of God and Pentecostal Holiness writers in the American South answered Durham in their own papers, and these churches kept the three stages. The debate also became bitter on their side. Charles F. Parham, who had taught tongues as the evidence of Spirit baptism in Kansas in 1901, later claimed that Durham’s early death in July 1912 proved Durham wrong. CTS does not accept that kind of argument from either side: the death of a preacher does not settle a question of Scripture.

6.Did Azusa Street “End”?

Durham’s title says that the great revival at Azusa “ended” in May 1911. He believed God had overruled the lockout by separating his people from an element he considered disloyal and leading them into a larger hall. Yet the Apostolic Faith Mission did not end. It continued to meet for two decades, under Seymour until his death in 1922 and then under his widow, Jennie Evans Seymour. What ended in 1911 was the season in which Azusa Street was the center of the movement. By then Pentecostal missions had spread across North America and to many other countries, and leaders like Durham, Florence Crawford in Portland and others had their own networks. Durham’s story is therefore one part of a larger and painful pattern in early Pentecostalism: a revival that began in unity across racial lines dividing along lines of doctrine, leadership and race.

7.What a Pentecostal Pastor Takes from It Today

First, this reading teaches us to read church history with care. A vivid account from one side is a precious source, but it is not the whole story, especially when the other side left little in writing. Second, it shows how quickly revival can be followed by division. The same article that describes souls “bathed in a sea of heavenly glory” ends with a locked door. Pastors today should guard unity as carefully as they seek revival. Third, notice the danger of claiming divine revelation about another person’s motives. Durham says the Spirit showed him what Seymour intended. Pentecostals believe God speaks, but such claims about a fellow minister’s heart should be weighed with great caution (1 Corinthians 14:29). Fourth, the racial dimension must not be passed over. Azusa Street’s witness of believers of many races worshiping together was a gift, and its breakdown is a warning. Finally, both men loved Christ and both were used by God. Pentecostal churches in both the Finished Work and Holiness families trace their story to Azusa Street. A pastor can honor both Durham and Seymour while learning from their failure to resolve their conflict.

8.Taking It to Heart

For reflection. How would the events of spring 1911 look if Seymour had written the article? What questions would you want to ask each man? Durham claimed that the Spirit showed him Seymour’s motives. How should Spirit-filled believers test claims like that? What does the breakdown of interracial fellowship at Azusa Street teach your church today? And when you disagree sharply with another leader, how can you keep the dispute from destroying a work of God?

Select

Record your reading

When you have read your three chosen readings in full, enter your name and affirm it below. This record is kept on your honor, in this browser; it shows on your certificate as with honors.

Your name

On my honor, I have read in full the three readings I selected above.

✓ Recorded — this class counts toward your With Honors progress. Reading With Honors ↗

Honors Reading — recorded

affirmed on to have read, in full:

Chapala Theological Seminary · Pentecostal and Charismatic Theology · present or print this page as your honors reading record.

Further Study: Seven Public-Domain Works

These seven works are for further study, for the student who wants to go on reading. They are not part of the honors reading above: that stays as it is — the five CTS digests, any three read in full and recorded on your honor. All seven are in the public domain; each link opens the work online, and most can also be found in the Internet Archive or Project Gutenberg. Most are in English: the Chrome browser can translate a page (right-click, “Translate to…”; on a phone, the browser menu).

Every Digitized Issue · Archive Index

1. The Pentecostal Testimony, 1909–1912

William H. Durham, ed. and pub. · Consortium of Pentecostal Archives

The archive’s list of the eight issues of Durham’s paper that survive in scans, March 1909 to August 1912. Every chapter and reading of the course comes from these issues; open any of them to read a whole article.

Open reading ↗

The Whole Issue · March 1909

2. The Pentecostal Testimony, March 1909

William H. Durham, ed. and pub. · Consortium of Pentecostal Archives scan

The first issue, with Durham’s own testimony (Reading 1) and “A Word to Ministers, from a Minister” (Chapter 5). The archive’s page opens the scan of the issue; its text was read by machine, so check a passage against the page image before you quote it.

Open reading ↗

The Whole Issue · December 1909

3. The Pentecostal Testimony, December 1909

William H. Durham, ed. and pub. · Consortium of Pentecostal Archives scan

The one surviving issue the course does not use: read what Durham was printing at the end of 1909, before the Finished Work controversy. The archive’s page opens the scan of the issue; its text was read by machine, so check a passage against the page image before you quote it.

Open reading ↗

The Whole Issue · August 1911

4. The Pentecostal Testimony, August 1911

William H. Durham, ed. and pub. · Consortium of Pentecostal Archives scan

The issue behind four of the five readings: read its articles on sanctification and on the Azusa Street revival whole, beside the digests. The archive’s page opens the scan of the issue; its text was read by machine, so check a passage against the page image before you quote it.

Open reading ↗

The Whole Issue · January 1912

5. The Pentecostal Testimony, January 1912

William H. Durham, ed. and pub. · Consortium of Pentecostal Archives scan

The issue whose lead article Reading 3 draws on; its heading cannot be read in the scan’s text, so look at the page image. The archive’s page opens the scan of the issue; its text was read by machine, so check a passage against the page image before you quote it.

Open reading ↗

The Whole Issue · May 1912

6. The Pentecostal Testimony, May 1912

William H. Durham, ed. and pub. · Consortium of Pentecostal Archives scan

One of the last issues of Durham’s life, the one the textbook draws on most. The archive’s page opens the scan of the issue; its text was read by machine, so check a passage against the page image before you quote it.

Open reading ↗

The Paper · Archive Record

7. The Pentecostal Testimony

William H. Durham, ed. and pub. · Flower Pentecostal Heritage Center record

Look at the Flower Pentecostal Heritage Center’s record of the paper, which names Durham as its editor and publisher and lists the issues it holds, before you cite the paper.

Open reading ↗

Honor attestation: By selecting three readings above, you affirm that you have read those three digests in full. The digests are CTS-authored summaries that may include brief excerpts or adaptations of public-domain works.