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W.E. Sangster - herald of holiness

Not exactly a ‘must read’

W.E. SANGSTER — HERALD OF HOLINESS
By Andrew Cheatle
Paternoster. 242 pages. £24.99
ISBN 978 1 842 272 169

W.E. Sangster, says Andrew Cheatle, was ‘one of British Methodism’s most important mid-20th-century figures’. This book focuses on Sangster’s contribution to the Wesleyan understanding of sanctification and perfection.

It begins with a biographical survey and then examines the subject’s theological roots and developments. His twin passions throughout his ministry were evangelism and holiness, seeing the two as inseparable. In the mid-1930s, Sangster began to study Wesley’s doctrine in earnest. Cheatle identifies three interpretations of the doctrine in the century up to 1938: Classical Wesleyanism, the Pentecostal/Experiential Emphasis and the Critical Emphasis.

Sangster made a number of contributions of his own, influenced over the next 20 years by his acceptance of a theistic evolutionary position on origins and a Jungian psychology of human personality and, in his later years (he died in 1960), by Roman Catholic mysticism. Cheatle describes him theologically as a ‘mild liberal’, who embraced or at least toyed with positions of ‘tempered universalism’ and belief in spiritual opportunities after death. He developed Wesley’s voluntaristic notion of sin, which is described as ‘substantival’, in a more relational direction and made more of supra-personal / social sin and of sin in the ‘unconscious’. He held firmly to the Arminian idea of the inviolability of the will.

Cheatle makes relatively few references to the Bible and gives the impression (perhaps unfairly) that it was of secondary importance for Sangster too. The problem is that, if you begin with confusion (Wesley’s doctrine of sanctification and perfection) and add chaos (evolutionary theory, Jungian psychology and Catholic mysticism), you are unlikely to achieve clarity.

This book will be of interest to historians of Methodism or of the doctrine of sanctification — for whom, no doubt, it is intended.

Mostyn Roberts,
pastor of Welwyn Evangelical Church and lecturer in Systematic Theology at London Theological Seminary