More Resources on Soteriology: The Biblical Doctrine of Salvation
III. Andrew Murray
The South African minister Andrew Murray (1828-1917), whose “influence has been, probably, greater than that of any other contemporary devotional writer,”[1] is a very notable advocate of the continuationistic Keswick theology and a charismatic precursor. His works, translated into many foreign languages, have received a wide recognition in Europe and America,” so that “[t]o estimate the spiritual influence which Andrew Murray exercised upon his day and generation is not only a difficult but an impossible task.”[2] He wrote approximately 240 books and tracts[3] in English and Dutch, translated into a large number of languages, including, among a number of others, French, German, Spanish, Danish, Swedish, Chinese,[4] Japanese, Russian, Arabic, Yiddish, and Urdu.[5] He could write quickly, as his writings,[6] while containing a variety of warm devotional thoughts, were generally “unpremeditated,” rather than being the product of careful and painstaking exegesis of Scripture. He could, for example, write eighteen chapters of a book in a single day.[7] As Keswick exercised a profound influence upon Murray, in turn, “‘[p]henomenal’ is not too strong a word to describe the influence of Dr. Andrew Murray upon Keswick . . . as powerful as that of any man upon the movement,” for “he became renowned as an exceptionally gifted exponent of the same teaching as at Keswick . . . through his books,”[8] which spread the Keswick theology around the globe. He was both associated with “Keswick” and with “Mr. Moody,”[9] and, his Faith Cure theology being well known,[10] he spoke at the Keswick Convention in 1895[11] at the invitation of its Quaker co-founder Robert Wilson,[12] where he was “one of the principal speakers,” indeed, “[t]he main feature of . . . [the] Convention” that year, telling the assembled crowds at Keswick: “Do not be afraid if people say, Do you want to make Quakers of us?”[13] Murray also preached at a variety of other Higher Life venues,[14] where, he testified, many “have heard how I have pressed upon [them] the two stages of the Christian life,” justification and sanctification, “and the step from the one to the other,” the special act of faith for sanctification.[15] The two-faith position of Murray and Boardman passed directly from the Higher Life theology into Pentecostalism.[16] Murray also adopted from William Boardman, in connection with other Higher Life and Faith Cure influences,[17] the theories of sanctification and healing by faith alone.[18] He adopted the doctrine of Boardman and Hannah W. Smith that the Holy Spirit does not indwell the believer at the moment of regeneration, but only indwells those who have received the second blessing and entered into the Higher Life, affirming, in a manner that prepared the way for Pentecostalism,[19] that adoption of this false pneumatological doctrine was key for entry into the Higher Life, revival, and a restoration of the sign gifts.[20] Indeed, whenever the Spirit is truly working with power, according to Murray, miracles of healing will always be found—anyone who claimed that the Spirit is working powerfully, but does not see miraculous physical healings take place, is deceiving himself:
Let us seek then to obtain divine healing. Wherever the Spirit acts with power, there He works divine healings. . . . [I]t is precisely because the Spirit acted powerfully [in the book of Acts] that His working must needs be visible in the body. If divine healing is seen but rarely in our day, we can attribute it to no other cause than that the Spirit does not act with power. . . . Let us pray earnestly for the Holy Spirit . . . for the work of healing.[21]
Murray also wrote an entire book to “help some to see that the second blessing is just what they need.”[22] After all, “the impotence of the regenerate man . . . proves the need of something new, a second blessing. . . . the second blessing and the higher life, or the spiritual life.”[23] Murray’s adoption of a distinction between the Spirit being “with” all believers but only “in” those who knew of the Higher Life in the dispensation of grace was clear evidence of his dependence on Boardman, for such a distinction can with much more ease be discovered in Boardman’s The Higher Christian Life than it can be found in the Bible. Murray taught that in “regeneration . . . [t]he believer [becomes] a . . . temple ready for the Spirit to dwell in,” but only “where faith claims it” and the Higher Life is entered into does “the second blessing” come, namely, “the Spirit of the Father and the Son [coming] to dwell within [the Christian],” even as, misinterpreting Acts 2:38,[24] the “three thousand” were regenerated at the moment of their “repentance and faith” but then subsequently, “when they had been baptized,” received “the Indwelling Spirit . . . as God’s seal.”[25] Baptism is very important for the Higher Life, since “baptism is . . . the sacrament of the beginning of the Christian life . . . [and] in Romans 6 baptism is represented as the secret of the whole of sanctification, the entrance into a life in union with Jesus.”[26] Murray connected his error on the indwelling of the Spirit with the idea that in regeneration the believer gains only a “renewed regenerate spirit,”[27] rather than a renewal that affects the whole man; his restriction of regeneration to the human spirit was developed by Jessie Penn-Lewis and Watchman Nee in accordance with the initiator impetus from the spiritualist Lord Mount Temple’s doctrine of deification as propagated at the Broadlands Conferences.[28] Murray’s belief that only the spirit was regenerated was important in his rejection of Biblical activity in Christian sanctification for Keswick Quietism.[29] Since only the spirit is regenerated, “[t]he greatest danger the religion of the Church or the individual has to dread is the inordinate activity of the soul, with its power of mind and will,”[30] for the Christian conflict is not, as Scripture represents it, between the flesh and the spirit, but between the soul and the Spirit[31]—it is not the evil of indwelling sin versus the renewed person strengthened by the Holy Spirit, but the evil of the person himself and his activity against the Divine seed of the indwelling Spirit in the human spirit. Adopting many of the doctrinal aberrations of the Keswick continuationist leaders “Boardman, Smith, [and] Stockmayer,” who “decisively influenced . . . his doctrine of holiness and . . . his practical Christianity” as “[h]e remained in constant contact with the Holiness movement,” Murray testified: “I constantly followed what was happening in Oxford and Brighton, and [it] all helped me.”[32] He contributed greatly to the spread of Higher Life conferences throughout South Africa “under the stimulus of the Oxford Holiness Movement which is connected with the name of Pearsall Smith,”[33] despite dissent from the Higher Life theology by other Christian leaders.[34] Having adopted the Higher Life for both the soul and the body in the Faith Cure, he promulgated the companion teachings as the founder of “the South African Keswick” and lifelong leader in the “South Africa General Mission” through many other “Holiness Conventions” that were organized in South Africa to promote the Higher Life for soul and body.[35]
Murray was influenced by a large variety of men, from rationalists to mystical quietists and perfectionists to other Keswick leaders. He “acknowledged his indebtedness for valuable pedagogic principles . . . [to] Herbert Spencer,” studying Spencer “with a view to . . . writing . . . on the education of our children.”[36] Murray’s The Children for Christ was written strongly under Spencer’s influence, although the “High Priest of materialism”[37] and evolutionist “Spencer was the chief exponent of agnosticism in 19th-century England.”[38] Murray “delighted also in the writings of” men such as the theological liberals and idolaters P. T. Forsyth[39] and Adolf Harnack.[40] He also found much value in the writings of Stockmaier and other Keswick writers, and found the Quietist mystic “Tersteegen . . . beautiful and profitable,” so that he could “read Tersteegen over and over again.”[41] Murray averred, concerning the Oberlin Perfectionist leader and Keswick speaker Asa Mahan’s Baptism of the Spirit, with its second blessing perfectionist doctrine of the baptism of the Holy Ghost: “I have read [Mahan] with profit . . . the book does one good.”[42] The biography of George Fox was a favorite.[43] Murray also stated: “I approve of [the] books [of] . . . [Thomas] Upham and . . . and recommend them.”[44]
Shortly before preaching at Keswick, Murray “had fallen under the potent spell of William Law . . . the chief of the English mystics . . . [and] a quietist, who daily ‘prostrated himself body and soul, in abysmal silence, before the interior central throne of divine revelation’ . . . and it is the mystical element in his teaching which . . . proved to be such an irresistible influence to . . . Murray.”[45] Murray recognized that “[i]n Law . . . the deep truth . . . on which so much stress is laid in what is called Keswick teaching, stand[s] prominently out.”[46] Law’s teaching of the spiritual life, in Murray’s view, was that of Keswick. Law’s writings “occup[ied] a place of pre-eminence” for Murray after reading them. Murray wrote: “The more I read [Law’s] writings . . . the more I am impressed by his insight, range, and power . . . For fine observation of the human heart there is surely no one like him among English writers. . . . [Law] is one of the most powerful and suggesting writers on the Christian life[.]”[47] Works such as Law’s A Serious Call and Christian Perfection “were read, re-read, and underscored, in token of his appreciation of the inestimable worth of their teachings. This deep appreciation was even more strikingly proved by the fact that he edited no less than six volumes of selections from Law’s writings,”[48] despite the fact that Law was an opponent of the imputation of the righteousness of Christ to the believer, received for justification by faith alone, and other essential doctrines,[49]and therefore was an enemy of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Through Law, Murray was also influenced by the German mystic, heretic, pantheist, and dualist Jacob Böhme.[50] The “mysticism [of] Böhme and Law . . . depreciates the value of Scripture, denies the imputation theory of the atonement, minimizes the worth of the Church as a visible divine institution . . . and reveals a marked pantheistic tendency,” among other abominable errors.[51] The influence of such authors shows up in Murray’s writings in a variety of ways, and contributed to his “books [being a] source of consolation and comfort to many . . . of many creeds.”[52]
Medieval Roman Catholic mysticism and quietism had a very influential and lifelong influence on Murray. The devout Mary worshipper, receiver of inspired oracles,[53] and Roman Catholic monk “Bernard of Clairvaux,” who taught that “it is necessary for the seeker to lose himself in God and merge his own individuality in that of the Eternal One,” and who also gave “a mighty stimulus to asceticism,” was “a favourite historical character with Andrew Murray, who called his home at Wellington after the famous abbey which Bernard founded.”[54] Throughout his life Murray was also greatly influenced by Madame Guyon. Murray stated: “I approve of [the] books [of] . . . Madame Guyon . . . and recommend them,” so that it was a great compliment for one in his family to recognize a fellow minister as “an exemplification of the doctrines of Quietism in action[.] . . . All those expressions of being dead to self and lost in God which one finds in Madame Guyon seem to be exemplified in his experience and life.”[55] Murray rated “Madame Guyon” and the Catholic monk “Rysbroeck” as “among his chief friends,” while also admiring the Roman Catholics “Catherine of Siena and Santa Teresa,” with their false gospel, idolatrous worship, whether of images, allegedly transubstantiated bread, or Mary, and demonic visions, mysticism, and continuationism.[56] It is perhaps not surprising that Murray’s “books of devotion . . . met with the highest commendation at the hands of the most High Church Anglican Bishops[.]”[57]
Murray was amenable to the Keswick continuationist theology because of “his inadequate theological training . . . [he was] a minister by the time he was twenty”[58] (cf. 1 Timothy 3:6), and the limited training he did receive was within a hotbed of rationalism and theological liberalism,[59] under professors with strong antipathy to evangelical piety and among unconverted denominational fellow-students with “scandalous morals.” Even the “orthodox and respectable” ones “profaned . . . the name of God,” and many were “intoxicated” on various occasions.[60] “Conversion was an antiquated word.”[61] It is perhaps not surprising that Murray’s view of conversion and advice to the unconverted contain serious confusion. Denying total depravity for the doctrine that the lost can truly love Jesus Christ, Murray wrote to the unconverted: “I write to you as those of whom I hope that it is in truth their earnest desire to find the Saviour, and of whom I really trust that they have truly declared before the Lord: Lord, Thou knowest all things, Thou knowest that I love Thee.”[62] Those unconverted persons who truly love Christ are not to consciously and instantly repent, and believe the gospel, and be justified by repentant faith alone, but are to confess that they accept Christian doctrine, worship Christ, and so insensibly and gradually become believers.[63] It is most unfortunate that Murray’s theologically liberal seminary education left him with such a confused view of evangelical conversion.
Indeed, Murray confessed that his seminary education was essentially useless,[64] although his interaction with religious apostasy likely contributed to Murray’s ecumenicalism, his “broad . . . charity” and “generous welcome” to men such as the Keswick leader, international Keswick spokesman, and annihilationist George Grubb, and the Higher Life and ecumenical leader John R. Mott, who became “one of the principal architects of the World Council of Churches,” was that body’s “honorary president,” and who received “the Nobel Peace Prize for his contributions to the ecumenical movement.”[65] Murray was “among the first to bid them welcome, and to lend the weight of his influence and authority to their undertaking[s] . . . there can be no doubt that the sympathy [and] constant interest . . . of Mr. Murray formed . . . a large element in any success which may have attended their mission.”[66]
Despite his lack of a genuinely Christian theological education, Murray went on to influence many other important Keswick continuationist leaders, such as Jessie Penn-Lewis and Watchman Nee. He corresponded with Mrs. Penn-Lewis, contributed to her Overcomer magazine, and commended her writings. He even wrote an introduction to one of her works, which he was glad to have translated into Dutch and arranged to have distributed to all the ministers and elders of his denomination in South Africa for free.[67] “For twenty years he was president of the Holiness movement in South Africa,”[68] the country where he ministered. Among other theological errors,[69] Murray taught the classic Keswick form of Quietism, affirming that the Christian “soul becomes utterly passive, looking and resting on what Christ is to do,”[70] yielding to be “a passive instrument possessed by God,”[71] for “Scripture . . . speaks of our being still and doing nothing . . . [the Christian] yields himself a truly passive instrument in the hand of God . . . [to] perfect passivity.”[72] The believer is to be passive, rather than actively use his mind or will, since these are functions of his allegedly unregenerate soul, rather than his regenerate spirit, and “[t]he greatest danger the religion of the Church or the individual has to dread is the inordinate activity of the soul, with its power of mind and will.”[73] The “intellect . . . is . . . impotent and even dangerous” without a quietistic extra-Biblical and extra-mental revelation from God, a “wait[ing] for His teaching” within, “deeper than the soul, with all its life of feeling, and thought, and will.”[74] Murray also altered the previous practice of his church to permit women to lead the congregation, including the men, in prayer.[75] He further averred: “Perfection . . . is a Bible truth . . . and Perfectionism . . . may . . . be . . . truth.”[76] He “frequently deplored the fact that . . . Christians in general were ‘terribly afraid of perfectionism.’”[77]
In 1882—the year Murray’s first book, Abide in Christ,[78] appeared in English[79]—through the influence of Boardman and Stockmeyer,[80] and while “visiting England in search of health” and visiting “Keswick,”[81] Murray added the doctrine of the Higher Life for the body to his doctrine of the Higher Life for the soul, recognizing, as Boardman had before him, the one as the natural concomitant of the other.[82] The initial impetus to his adoption of the Faith Cure was reading Boardman’s The Lord thy Healer,[83] and study, not of the Bible, but of “the work of Dorothea Trüdel and Dr. Cullis . . . removed from [his] mind all doubts,”[84] while personal interaction with Stockmeyer and Boardman led him to open avowal and bold advocacy of the Faith Cure aspect of the Higher Life. Writing to his congregation in South Africa about his trip to Europe and his new public advocacy of the Faith Cure, Murray explained his recognition of healing by faith alone as an adjunct to sanctification by faith alone:
Let me now relate to you a few of my experiences in Europe. . . . I desired particularly to see Pastor Stockmaier . . . a truly spiritual man, of strong faith, and who now stood at the head of an institute for faith healing. . . . At . . . the Mildmay Conference[85] . . . Mr. Stockmaier was also present. I called on him . . . Mr. Stockmaier [taught me that the] body has been redeemed . . . and, for the believer who can accept it, the Lord is ready to reveal even in the case of the body His mighty power to deliver from the dominion of sin.
Mr. Stockmaier invited me to attend, in the course of the following week, the meetings of Dr. Boardman, writer of The Higher Christian Life, on the subject of faith healing. Shortly before my departure from [South Africa] I had perused Dr. Boardman’s other work The Lord thy Healer . . . I now learnt that only a few months before an institute for faith healing had been opened in London under his supervision. This institute I visited in the following week, when everything became clearer to me and I decided to ask if I could not be received as an inmate. The reply was that . . . I would be welcome.
I entered the institute . . . and remained in it for . . . three weeks. It would be difficult to describe how much instruction and blessing I obtained during those weeks. . . . But why was it necessary to enter a Home, and to remain there for so long a time? Is not the prayer of faith the matter of a moment, just like the imposition of hands or the anointing with oil of which James speaks? Quite true. . . . Yet in most cases time is needful . . . [t]he stay in such a Home . . . helps to . . . strengthen faith.[86] . . . Disease is a chastisement . . . [w]e ask the Lord truly to impart to the body the eternal youth of His heavenly life,[87] and . . . [acknowledge] our readiness to receive the Holy Spirit in order to infuse health into the body which He inhabits, and our readiness to live every day in complete dependence upon the Lord for our bodily welfare. We learn to understand . . . giving and preserving health by faith . . . a more complete union of the body with Him[.][88] . . .
One of the first things that struck me as being in conflict with my expectations was that in most cases slow progress is made with the healing process. I thought, and others have expressed the same opinion, that if healing is an act of God’s almighty power, there can be no reason why it should not be perfected at once.[89] This point I discussed with Dr. Boardman and others, whose reply was somewhat as follows—
“First of all, experience has taught that at the present time most cases of healing are subject to this rule; so that, even though we cannot understand why it should be so, we have merely to observe what God actually does.[”][90] . . . I subsequently discussed the subject with Mr. Stockmaier, who stands at the head of a faith healing establishment at Hauptwal in Switzerland. He told me how at one time he was wholly incapacitated . . . and that even after he had accepted the truth of healing by the exercise of faith, the trouble in no wise disappeared immediately. For more than two years the [problem] continued . . . [h]e counted it a great privilege that God . . . preserve[d] him . . . [in] the body [by] the daily bestowal upon it of supernatural power . . . [instead of] immediate cure[.] . . .
At first I could not entirely assent to this view of the matter. I asked Dr. Boardman if it would not be a much more powerful proof . . . if the cure of disease were instantaneous and complete. . . . Would it not also be for the greater glory of God if I desired of Him this instantaneous restoration? His answer was, . . . “Your duty is to hold fast to Him as your Healer, in whom you already have the healing of your malady [even if your body still has all the symptoms of sickness.”][91] . . . In this point of view I was able, ultimately, wholly to acquiesce.
So we see that in faith healing there is the same contrast as in the spiritual life[.] . . . In the well-known fifty-third of Isaiah sins and sicknesses are placed alongside of each other in a very remarkable way, and are borne together by Him in the suffering of which the chapter speaks. . . . We have severed the one from the other, and have accepted the redemption of the soul from sin as the fruit of Christ’s sufferings, but without regarding the deliverance of the body from disease as in like manner the fruit of His sufferings.[92] The faith which says, “He has borne my sins to free me from them,” must also learn to say, “He has carried my sicknesses in order to deliver me from them also.” . . . [F]rom the disease of the body there can be deliverance through the Spirit who dwells in the body as His temple. . . . Only yesterday I heard from a brother who has just arrived from Switzerland of a . . . girl who was . . . weak with consumption[.] . . . She heard from Mr. Stockmaier of the possibility of being cured by faith. One night she seemed to see very clearly how the Lord had given His body for her body, just as for her soul He had poured out His soul unto death. It seemed to her that she actually beheld the Lord[93] giving His body for her health and cure. Next morning . . . she got up out of bed[.] . . .
[F]aith healing . . . points the road of holiness and full consecration[.] . . . The question has arisen in my mind whether I may not perhaps possess the gift, and have the vocation, to devote myself, for a time at least, to this work. I notice in those who are engaged in this labour that they must give almost all their time and strength to it.[94] . . . I spent last Sunday week at Männedorf, where Dorothea Trüdel labored with so much blessing. . . . I found the opportunity of discussing [these matters with] . . . Samuel Zeller . . . [h]er successor[.] . . . [H]e expressed the opinion that, if the Church were to flourish as in the earliest ages, and the leaders in the congregation were again to be characterized by true spirituality, the gift of healing would be found very much more frequently[.] . . . May the Lord in His own good time grant this![95]
“The subject of faith healing continued to engross Mr. Murray’s attention for several years after his return to South Africa”[96] from Boardman’s Bethshan Institute of Healing.[97] By 1884 he had published a book “in which he developed his teachings concerning healing by faith . . . he described [it] as ‘a personal testimony of my faith[.]’”[98] He published his book despite the fact that he “acknowledges in his preface that many objections can be leveled at the doctrine of faith healing to which no satisfactory answer can at present be found.”[99] Nevertheless, Murray argued:
Are not these glad tidings that reach us from different quarters, that the Lord is again making Himself known to His people, as of old, by the name The Lord thy Healer? The number of witnesses daily increases who can affirm [so] from their own experience[.][100] . . . The Church has grown so unaccustomed to this action of the Spirit in curing the body, she has for so long ascribed the loss of this gift to the counsel of God[101] rather than to her own unfaith . . . that the truth has remained hidden even from the eyes of many pious expositors and theologians. . . . The Grounds for [the] Faith [Cure include] . . . Mark xvi. 18 . . . [that] the Lord Jesus, our Surety, has borne our sicknesses as well as our sins in His body . . . [that] Jesus commanded and empowered His disciples[102] both to preach the Gospel and to heal the sick. . . . [that] this is part of the work for which the Holy Spirit was given and has come down from heaven . . . 1 Cor xii. 4, 9[103] . . . [that] the healing of the body and the hallowing of the soul are very closely connected, and because in union with each other they enable us fully to know and glorify Jesus . . . Exod. xv. 26 . . . [that] the Church must expect great outpourings of the Spirit in these days, and may reckon upon this gift likewise . . . Isa xliv. 3 . . . Pentecost was but a commencement . . . [n]ow that the Lord is beginning to bestow His Spirit, we may certainly expect a new manifestation of His wondrous power.[104] The rules for faith healing [include] . . . understand that sickness is a chastisement on account of sin . . . be assured . . . that it is the will of God to heal you . . . [since] the new life of the Holy Spirit . . . affect[s] the body not less than the soul . . . the healing power of Jesus will restore health to your body . . . claim healing for yourself . . . as . . . [a] sinner . . . claims by faith the forgiveness of sins . . . the sick one says . . . I have the healing . . . [although I] fee[l] no change and fin[d] no light . . . [and] feel no better[.] . . . Do not be astonished if the disease does not immediately take a turn for the better. And if after some improvement the disease grows worse, do not imagine that it is all a mistake . . . act as one who realizes that health is beginning to return . . . [t]hese trials are . . . a proof that God is willing to strengthen you to be healed wholly and solely by faith in Jesus . . . testify, as a witness to the faith who knows what he says.[105] . . .
This new life is none other than the Holy Spirit in the body. . . . Healing and sanctification are closely united. . . . These are the main outlines of the doctrine of faith healing[.][106]
Murray with “fervency . . . [and] intensity of conviction . . . both preached and practiced the doctrines of healing by faith,”[107] so that many learned from Murray to “take no medicines for any disease.”[108] He “never receded from the position which he took up towards faith healing in . . . [his] book[,] [which] was circulated in America . . . in French . . . [and] Dutch,” although there were “cases in which all the conditions of healing seemed to be completely fulfilled, where yet the disease refused to yield to prayer, and the death of the sick one ensued.”[109] Nevertheless, “Murray continued for many years to follow the principles of faith healing,” teaching that “suffering, even in the believer, is due to some special sin,” avoiding doctors for decades, and suffering from various maladies, none of which was healed in the way that Christ healed in the Gospel records. Murray suffered, for example, from:
[T]hroat trouble . . . severe injuries to his arm and his back [so that] at first he had to be assisted into the pulpit . . . [and which left him] suffering from a weak back . . . [for] years [and] . . . permanen[t] injur[y] [to] his spine . . . later years [in which he became] exceedingly deaf . . . lameness and deafness [for] years . . . decreased . . . strength . . such feeble[ness] . . . increasing bodily infirmity . . . severe illness . . . serious [infirmity such that he] had to be conveyed to a hospital . . . positive ill-health [that left him unable to] fulfil preaching engagements . . . serious influenza and bronchitis [severe enough that] [h]e never really regained strength again[.][110]
He finally suffered from a “heavy cold with concomitant bronchitis, from which he never recovered[,] [but lingered in sickness for] . . .months,” until he finally died in delirium.[111] Despite believing in and promulgating widely the Higher Life of the body, he suffered sickness like other men. However, his doctrine did not, at least, lead to his own personal early death, as Murray lived a long life, although fellow ministers who believed in it saw it fail and died,[112] and even a minister in Murray’s own family died because of the Faith Cure:
Pieter F. Hugo, who was married to a niece of Mr. Murray, and was therefore the object of especial sympathy and prayer . . . developed symptoms of consumption, which compelled him to suspend his pastoral labours and threatened to terminate fatally. Leaving his congregation in the Eastern Province he proceeded to Paarl, where he could enjoy the rest and comfort of his mother’s home and also be within easy reach of Mr. Murray’s influence. . . . Mr. Murray’s bulletins on the state of the patient’s health show how carefully he was watching the case. . . . Mr. Hugo, who was a truly pious and devoted man, was firm in the faith that he would recover. Acting in accordance with the principle of considering himself as already healed, he undertook a long journey to Middleburg in the Central Karroo, in order to attend a ministerial conference, at which Mr. Murray was also to be present. . . . Mr. Hugo accomplished the return journey . . . and then began rapidly to weaken. One evening he complained of a feeling of utter weariness, retired to his room, and shortly afterwards breathed his last. His death occurred within a month of his visit to Middleburg . . . [h]is decease was a great blow to Mr. Murray, who had cherished the most confident expectation of his nephew’s recovery.[113]
Thus, a minister and member of Murray’s own family, foolishly pretending that he was already well when he was actually sick because of his adoption of the Faith Cure, died young in an unnecessary and tragic waste and a violation of the principles involved in the sixth commandment. Such were the closest relatives among the unnecessary and continual production of youthful corpses, widows, widowers, and orphans among the people of God that resulted from Mr. Murray’s espousal and fervent promulgation of the Higher Life for the body. Mr. Murray was also unable to heal his wife or prevent her from enduring great and continual suffering from disease for years, much less from dying,[114] although she “was like himself strongly convinced of the truth of faith healing.”[115] Nor could he prevent his eldest son from being so sickly that he had to abandon his further education, nor from dying at only twenty-three.[116] Believing that a believer’s suffering is a product of special sin is a very hard message to hold to through such suffering, grief and loss—thankfully, it is not one taught in Scripture.
Nevertheless, despite the failures of the Faith Cure, Murray believed that the gift of healing was not limited to the first century but was for the entire church age, influenced in his doctrine of healing by what he had himself “witnessed . . . [in] a Sunday evening service for the sick . . . [led by] the late Mr. W. E. Boardman.”[117] Murray wrote: “The Bible does not authorize us, either by the words of the Lord or of His apostles, to believe that the gifts of healing were granted only to the early times of the Church[.] . . . [I]t is the Church’s unbelief which has lost the gift of healing . . . salvation offers to us even now, healing and holiness[.] . . . The more we give ourselves to experience personally sanctification by faith, the more we shall also experience healing by faith. These two doctrines walk abreast. . . . [D]ivine healing is part of the life of faith. . . . Wherever the Spirit acts with power, there He works divine healings.”[118] Murray taught, as did John MacMillan,[119] A. B. Simpson,[120] and the Pentecostal movement, that physical healing in this life was part of Christ’s atonement: “Jesus Christ has obtained for us the healing of our diseases, because He has borne our sicknesses. According to this promise, we have right to healing, because it is part of the salvation which we have in Christ.”[121] Job was sick, Murray affirmed, following Boardman, because the patriarch had not properly employed the Higher Life technique of surrender and faith to deal with “his hidden sins.”[122] It was best for believers to cease using medicine[123] and simply to employ Higher Life techniques when they were sick, for “setting aside all remedies [is better than] using remedies as believers do for the most part[.] . . . Renouncing remedies, [sic] strengthens faith in an extraordinary manner; healing becomes then, far more than sickness, a source of numberless spiritual blessings; . . . we commit ourselves to Him as our sovereign healer, counting solely on His invisible presence.”[124] Unfortunately, as with the spurious “healings” of modern charismatics, the generality of the “healings” Murray spoke of were radically different from those of the Lord Jesus and the Apostles. Biblical healings were all perfect and without any relapses, while such was not the case with the alleged healings Murray spoke of: “Sometimes also the first symptoms of healing are immediately manifest; but afterwards the progress is slow, and interrupted at times . . . [or entirely] arrested or . . . the evil returns.”[125] The tremendous difference between Murray’s Higher Life theology of healing and the healings of the Lord and His Apostles was connected to his Higher Life doctrine of sanctification. As the Keswick theology teaches that sanctification is only maintained by a moment-by-moment faith decision without any change or actual renewal of the inward nature, so physical healing is only maintained by a moment-by-moment faith decision, and any relapse in the faith decision leads to a loss of the healing: “[T]he return to health . . . is the fruit of giving up sin, of consecration to God. . . . [I]t is by healing that God confirms the reality of . . . sanctification[.] . . . When Jesus . . . cures . . . our body . . . miraculously . . . it follows that the health received must be maintained from day to day by an uninterrupted communion with Him.”[126] As the Higher Life theology generally takes elements of the perfection of spiritual sanctification that the historic Baptist and traditional Protestant theories of sanctification affirm belong to the future state of glory and affirms that they can be obtained here on earth at the present time, so Boardman and Murray, consistent with their Higher Life principles, took the perfect healing of the body that properly pertains to the future state of glory and affirmed it was to be obtained on earth now, in the same fashion as sanctification was to be obtained, namely, by a moment-by-moment faith decision. Certainly God is able to heal people today, and it is right for believers to pray for physical healing, but the Higher Life theology of healing espoused by Boardman and Murray is unscriptural, and the Biblical gift of healing—which involved no relapses and did not require any faith on the part of the recipient—was temporary and for the first century alone.
Indeed, according to Murray, none of the spiritual gifts were temporary, and they will appear to those who have discovered “the higher life”[127]: “Wherever the life more abundant of the Spirit is to be found, we may expect Him to manifest all His gifts . . . Divine healing accompanies the sanctification by the Spirit . . . the body . . . ought to be healed as soon as the sick believer receives by faith the working of the Holy Spirit, the very life of Jesus in him.”[128] Murray believed that not healing only, but “all [the Spirit’s] gifts,” including tongues, prophecy, and the rest of the phenomena claimed by the modern charismatic movement, should be expected for the entirety of the church age for those who have entered into the Higher Life[129]—indeed, Murray taught believers to “live in a holy expectation” for a restoration of the other gifts that accompanied the pouring out of the Spirit in Acts.[130] Keswick theology was the key to having all the sign gifts restored: “[M]en and women who live the life of faith and of the Holy Spirit, entirely consecrated to their God . . . would see again the manifestation of the same gifts as in former times.”[131] He affirmed that God may lead believers today through “heavenly voices.”[132] Tongues, in particular, will be restored as Keswick theology spreads:
On the day of Pentecost the speaking “with other tongues” and the prophesying was the result of being filled with the Spirit. . . . We may reckon upon it that where the reception of the Holy Spirit and the possibility of being filled with Him are proclaimed and appropriated, the blessed life of the Pentecostal community will be restored in all its pristine power.[133]
Murray’s strong continuationism, associated with his teaching that “the intellect must follow,” not lead, “the heart and the life . . . [i]n all the experience of the blessings of the Gospel,”[134] were important in theological trajectory from Keswick to Pentecostalism.[135]
In light of Murray’s Higher Life continuationism, it is not surprising that he was a central figure in the rise of South African Pentecostalism. Certain of Murray’s books are “sold nowadays only by the Pentecostals.”[136] Murray requested that his own biography be written by J. DuPlessis, whose continuationism led him to became the General Secretary of the charismatic Apostolic Faith Mission of South Africa.[137] Furthermore, Murray “acted as mentor for Pieter Le Roux, who was to be a key figure in the establishment of Pentecostalism in South Africa,”[138] as LeRoux was “one of the first propagandists” of the Keswick continuationist and essentially Pentecostal “Christian Catholic Church” of John Dowie. LeRoux went on to become, “for 29 years, President” of the “Pentecostal Apostolic Faith Mission”[139] which largely developed out of the Christian Catholic denomination.[140] The Christian Catholic Church and the Pentecostal Apostolic Faith Mission “provided the example that has been followed by the South African Pentecostal movement”[141] to this day, including the South African Pentecostal doctrine that “[m]edicine is rejected and . . . absolute reliance on the healing of the sick through prayer” is practiced instead.[142] In addition to the major Pentecostal denominations, numberless South African “independent Pentecostal churches . . . go back to men like Le Roux” as “offshoots of the Apostolic Faith Mission.”[143] Andrew Murray’s Keswick continuationism was key to the explosion of the apostasy, which is South African Pentecostalism.
Unlike many other central figures in the Keswick theology, Andrew Murray had a reasonable testimony of personal conversion and a confession that was consistent with the fundamentals of the Christian gospel. He was a sincere and pious man, and various Christian truths found in his writings have been a spiritual blessing to many. A sincere Pentecostal pastor may similarly make statements that could be of benefit to separatist Baptists. Nevertheless, the errors of Keswick continuationism and the influence of many unconverted religious figures in Christendom are bound inextricably into the fabric of Murray’s works. The spiritual truths that have blessed the people of God in his writings are also found in the works of many authors free from Murray’s errors, writers of unquestionable orthodoxy and fervent spirituality who pay far more attention to the careful and accurate exegesis of that instrument of the Spirit for the sanctification of the saint, the holy Scripture (John 17:17), than Murray does.
Applications from the Life and Teachings of Andrew Murray
Many of Andrew Murray’s writings should be avoided altogether by all Christians. Compositions such as his writings on the Faith Cure are certainly worthless settings forth of dangerous error. The remainder of his works, at the most, should only be read by those who, within the protection of a strong Bible-practicing Baptist church, have a comprehensive knowledge of his Keswick and continuationist errors and the spiritual wisdom to reject them, as well a firm grounding in the truth of Scripture on the doctrines and practices concerning which Murray has been led astray. Since such knowledge is absent in the vast majority of those who read Mr. Murray, the great majority of his readers should abstain from reading him. Countless Christians have been hindered in their sanctification and been spiritually confused by the Keswick errors in Murray’s writings, and many have been influenced toward charismatic apostasy by him. Even for the small minority that possesses the comprehensive knowledge and equipment to diagnose and handle his errors, one would expect greater spiritual refreshing from spending time in the Word itself, instead of Murray’s works, and from the reading of better devotional writers who handle the Scripture with more study and carefulness. A spirituality developed from the study of Andrew Murray will be withered and weak compared to a spirituality sustained by a deep study of God’s Word.
Learn from Andrew Murray’s life the dangers of corrupt religious denominations. While Christian charity has a reasonable ground for hope that Murray himself was truly regenerate, the fact that he could already have determined to enter the ministry before his conversion illustrates the fact that vast numbers of spiritual leaders in the South African Dutch Reformed denomination of Murray’s day were unconverted—while God in His mercy appears to have saved Murray in seminary, many others who were studying for the ministry had never come to Christ, and never did come to Christ, but became spiritual wolves destroying the flock of God. It was imperative for any true believers among the Dutch Reformed in South Africa in Murray’s day to come out from among that corrupt denomination and unite themselves with truly Biblical and separatist assemblies. Unconverted members are an awful curse to any church—what disaster, then, is an unconverted minister?
Learn also from Andrew Murray’s life the danger of a corrupt seminary education. A Christian should be as likely to attend an apostate seminary as the Apostle Paul would have been to send one of his converts to the Judaizers for an education, or as Elijah would have been to send one in the school of the prophets to learn in the school of Baal. By the great mercy of God, a young and impressionable Murray was himself preserved from utter spiritual shipwreck while funding and attending an educational institution of the Antichrist to prepare for Christian ministry. Many others were not so preserved. Furthermore, Murray’s seminary education was both a waste of years of his life and a seed-bed for filling his mind and heart with errors that were never entirely extirpated—had he instead attended a school run by a true church, one that was whole-heartedly consecrated to God and whole-heartedly opposed to every form of error, the likelihood that Murray would have adopted an ecumenicalism that contributed to the destruction of whatever true Christianity remained in his denomination is small. Furthermore, God blessed Murray’s sincere desire to walk with Him despite all his errors—but how much the more could he have flourished spiritually had he not been pumped full of error for years in his youth? Who knows what blessings were available to Murray had he followed the preceptive will of God, and were lost because of a failure to practice separation (cf. 2 Chronicles 16:7; Psalm 81:16)? Such terrible evils as apostate institutions for the training of Christians should not be attended, but be abolished from the face of the earth, thrust down into that hell which belched them forth.
Learn also from Murray’s life the great spiritual danger in hearing and reading of corrupt false teachers. Although he had already been hopefully converted, and even in the ministry, for years, Murray fell under the spell of William Law, that enemy of the gospel of Christ, and allowed that false teacher to profoundly influence him. What is more, not only did Law influence Murray personally, but countless believers have been drawn towards error by the teachings of Law that they received mediated through Murray. It would have been better for Murray to have feared error more, and mistrusted his ability to discern error more, and avoided William Law altogether. “Be not deceived”—whether considering your denominational affiliation, or your educational choices, or your reading material—“evil communications corrupt good manners” (1 Corinthians 15:33). The Scripture gives no exceptions. Whether you are in seminary, or in the ministry already, unscriptural associations will corrupt you.
Murray’s ecumenicalism and continuationism illustrate the experience-centered spiritual confusion engendered by the Keswick theology. His Faith Cure delusion, which was nothing but the physical concomitant of his Higher Life doctrine of sanctification, has led both to many an unnecessary physical death and to the rise of Pentecostalism, which has overwhelmed South Africa and brought many not only to physical death by a rejection of medicine, but to spiritual death also, as the saving gospel is confused with mystical experience. Reject experience-based hermeneutics, and cleave with all your heart and soul to the literal interpretation of Scripture, recognizing the Bible as your sole authority. In so doing, you will be preserved from much spiritual danger.
Rejoice that God promises you perfect physical healing in the future glory. Ponder His blessed promise: “Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God. And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away” (Revelation 21:3-4). Yes, healing is in the atonement—perfect bodily healing, freedom from all pain and suffering, crying, and the last enemy, death, is certain to come for you. Since God is your own God, and He has given you His Son, with Him you will certainly also be given all things. You will not need to worry that you will “lose your healing.” You will not need to pretend that you are healed when you are not. Your body will be perfectly whole in truth, and so forever and ever, for you will have a body like Christ’s glorious body. How wonderful is God’s real work of healing—how it infinitely exceeds the meager dregs promised by the Faith and Mind Cure! Fix your eye of faith on your God and His glorious promises to you, and, knowing that even in this life He works all things together for your good, you can traverse your earthly pilgrimage, with its trials and sorrows, with a joyful confidence in the ineffably blessed eternity that is your certain future, to the everlasting glory of your blessed Savior, Jesus Christ.
Andrew Murray sought for genuine spirituality—such a desire was highly commendable, and one that you must share—indeed, your very desire for a closer walk with God must undergird your rejection of the errors of Murray’s Keswick continuationism. Rejoice that a genuinely vibrant and Christ-centered spiritual life can truly be lived by the power of the Spirit through the Word in the context of a historic Baptist church. You are not left to a dichotomy of following Andrew Murray, adopting his errors, and having a heart-felt spiritual life, or rejecting Keswick’s errors for a cold and lifeless orthodoxy. No, you can have a glorious and living orthodoxy that undergirds and greatly contributes to a sweet and growing spiritual life in Christ. In fact, this is what you must have—nothing else can suffice but the passionate spiritual embrace of the orthodox Christ revealed fully and truly today only in the pages of the Holy Scripture. Reader, how is it with you?
[1] Pg. 441, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis. Murray wanted DuPlessis to write his biography (pg. v, ibid), and DuPlessis has obliged by composing an extremely favorable presentation of Murray’s life.
[2] Pgs. 411, 435, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis.
[3] It is noteworthy that “[a]ll the teachings of his later lifetime are present . . . [in] his earliest volumes” (pg. 469, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis).
[4] The influence of his writings in China is described on pgs. 472-473, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis. Their influence on Watchman Nee is notable.
[5] Pgs. 472-474, 526-535, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis.
[6] It is noteworthy that he also regularly preached “without the use of manuscript or notes” ( pg. 446, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis).
[7] Pgs. 464-468, 499, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis. His book De Blijdschap (Joy) was the particular work that DuPlessis recorded he wrote eighteen chapters of in a day. Murray would regularly write a number chapters of his books in a day. Such work was made more easy since, for example, “[o]ut of the contemplation of [a] . . . shapeless brown stump grew The Mystery of the True Vine,” rather than, say, a deep and careful exegesis of the vine pericopes in Scripture. DuPlessis also noted: “A word or two is necessary on Andrew Murray’s style, which, it must be confessed, is a poor one, both in English and in Dutch. . . . Mr. Murray was perfectly aware of his linguistic shortcomings. One of his earliest letters . . . contains a lament over ‘my miserable deficiency in composition’ . . . and to his daughter and amanuensis he would say, in later years: ‘My child, I have no style, or only a very bad style.’”
[8] Pg. 249, Keswick’s Authentic Voice, ed. Stevenson.
[9] Pg. 185, Divine Healing, Andrew Murray. Murray was invited to and influenced many at Moody’s Northfield Conference after preaching at Keswick in 1895 (pgs. 444-445, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis).
[10] E. g., Murray’s The Lord thy Healer was freshly printed and promulgated in London only the year before (pg. 528, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis).
[11] The text of his addresses, “The Pathway To The Higher Life” and “That God May Be All In All,” appears on pgs. 292-300, 425-435 of Keswick’s Authentic Voice, ed. Stevenson. Murray’s “address . . . on ‘The Way to the Higher Life’ . . . stands out beyond all others,” Evan Hopkins testified in The Keswick Week of that year, while Figgis and Sloan consider only his other address competitive in its Higher Life power—his two messages stood above those of all other speakers that year (pg. 250, ibid). See also pg. 109-110, The Keswick Story: The Authorized History of the Keswick Convention, Polluck.
[12] Pg. 47, Mrs. Penn-Lewis: A Memoir, Mary N. Garrard. Murray was already under the spell of the quietist and mystic William Law at the time, publishing a book of extracts from Law in that very year and another volume of extracts the next year (pgs. 528-529, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis).
[13] Pg. 435, Keswick’s Authentic Voice, ed. Stevenson, printing the text of Murray’s message “That God May Be All In All” (pgs. 425-435). Murray explains that one should not be afraid of people asking if Keswick wants to turn men into Quakers because “every portion of Christ’s body”—the universal, invisible church, in which the Quakers were included, despite denying justification by the imputation of Christ’s righteousness alone and other core doctrines of the gospel—“has a lesson for us” (pg. 435, ibid). Murray was in particular commending the Quaker practice of “keeping silence before God” (pg. 435, ibid) and expecting Him to give one a special revelation; indeed, this Quaker practice is the “chief thing,” more important than commands to “give yourselves up to the will of God, prove the power of God, and seek the glory of God throughout the earth” (pg. 434, ibid).
[14] Pgs. 442-444, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis; pg. 113, The Pentecostals, Hollenweger.
[15] Pg. 447, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis.
[16] Pgs. 104ff. of A Theology of the Holy Spirit: The Pentecostal Experience and the New Testament Witness, F. D. Bruner, explores the two-faith Pentecostal error and its antecedents in the writings of Murray, F. B. Meyer, A. J. Gordon, A. B. Simpson, and others.
[17] While secondary to Boardman, Johannes Blumardtwas another influence on Murray in favor of the Higher Life and healing theology; Murray even traveled on foot from Holland to visit Blumhardt (cf. pg. 111, The Pentecostals, Hollenweger).
[18] Happily, Murray had a reasonable testimony of personal conversion, unlike so many other early Keswick leaders, although the fact that he was already in seminary studying for the ministry at the time of his professed conversion is evidence of the character of Murray’s Dutch Reformed church as a mixed multitude at best (cf. pgs. 32, 64-66, 74, 78, The Life of Andrew Murray, J. DuPlessis. London: Marshall Brothers, 1919). His counseling people who were seeking salvation that “we have but to accept, to believe ‘He is mine,’ and we are saved” (pg. 137, ibid) also certainly lacks important clarity, as the lost sinner is not to believe that Christ is already his, but that Christ will save him if he comes to the Redeemer in repentant faith.
Despite being a conservative Dutch Reformed minister, Murray did not hold to classical Reformed doctrine in all its aspects; for example, he believed in an unlimited atonement, and his eldest daughter served for many years in the strongly Arminian Salvation Army (pgs. 249, 487, ibid).
[19] Note the similarity to Murray’s position on, e. g., pgs. 42-46 of Systematic Theology, Earnest S. Williams, vol. 3, an Assemblies of God and Pentecostal classic. Williams employs Acts 19:1-7 as Murray does, and also affirmed, as Boardman and Murray would, that “[i]n the new birth the temple [of the Christian’s body] is fitted for the infilling of the Holy Spirit,” which does not take place, Williams teaches, at regeneration, but only at the time of the Second Blessing. The second blessing doctrine of post-conversion Spirit-baptism taught by “Gordon, Meyer, Simpson, and Murray, and all those influenced by them, [brought] Pentecostalism . . . a large and influential body of . . . opinion which taught and supported the later distinctively Pentecostal experience of a subsequent baptism in the Holy Spirit” (pg. 46, A Theology of the Holy Spirit: The Pentecostal Experience and the New Testament Witness, Frederick Dale Bruner. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1970). Compare also pgs. 313-325 of Murray’s The Spirit of Christ with the Pentecostal writers cited by Bruner on pg. 63, A Theology of the Holy Spirit: The Pentecostal Experience and the New Testament Witness, F. D. Bruner, and pgs. 95-96 for parallelism between A. J. Gordon and Pentecostalism’s doctrine.
[20] Murray argued that the Holy Spirit does not indwell all believers, and that recognition of this alleged fact is essential for a restoration of the miraculous sign gifts, by misinterpreting Acts 19:1-7, overlooking both the fact that the people who did not have the Spirit were unconverted individuals who did not believe in the Trinity and the transitional character of the passage, as well as the many plain texts that indicate that for the course of the dispensation of grace all believers are indwelt, such as Romans 8:9; Galatians 4:6; and 1 John 3:24:
[T]he message [is] that the Christian life is two-fold. The first is that we experience something of the operation of the Holy Spirit but do not yet receive Him as the Spirit of Pentecost, as the personal indwelling Guest who comes to abide permanently in the heart. The second is that there is a more abundant life in which the indwelling is known and the full joy and power of redemption are a fact of personal experience. It is essential that believers come to fully understand the distinction between these two conditions . . . only then can we dare hope that the Christian community will once more be restored to its Pentecostal power. . . . Had it been otherwise, Paul would never have asked the question, “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?” (Some versions render this “Have you received the Spirit since you believed?”) These disciples were recognized as those who believed in Jesus Christ as the Messiah. This belief, however, was not enough. . . . [T]here are two ways in which the Holy Spirit works in us. The first is preparatory, in which He acts on us but is not yet dwelling in us. The second is the higher phase of His working, when we receive Him as an abiding gift, an indwelling Person; we know that He has assumed responsibility for our whole inner being, working in us both to will and to do of His good pleasure. This is the ideal of the full Christian life. . . . It is of utmost importance to comprehend this. . . . [T]o receive the Holy Spirit . . . was quite different from the working of the Spirit that led them [those in Acts 19:1-7] to conversion . . . [i]t was something higher: for now the Holy Spirit was imparted in power with His abiding indwelling to consecrate and fill their hearts. . . . As long as believers think that the only thing lacking in their life is more commitment or zeal or strength, and that if they only attain to these they will become all they ought to be, the preaching of a full salvation will be of little use. It is only when they discover that they are not standing in a full relationship with the Holy Spirit—they may have His initial working but do not yet know Him as an indwelling presence—that the way to something higher will ever be seen as a possibility. For this discovery, it is indispensable that the question be put to every believer as clearly as possible: “Have you received the Holy Spirit since you believed?” When the answer is a straightforward no, the time of revival is not far off. . . .
In the Acts of the Apostles we often read of the laying on of hands and prayer. Even a man like Paul—whose conversion was the result of a direct revelation of Christ—had to receive the Spirit through the laying on of hands and prayer. This implies that there is to be among ministers of the Gospel and believers in general a power of the Spirit that makes them a channel of faith and courage to others. . . . On the Day of Pentecost, speaking with other tongues and prophesying were the result of being filled with the Spirit. Here at Ephesus, twenty years later, the very same miracle is again witnessed as the visible token and pledge of the glorious gift of the Spirit. We should expect that, where the reception of the Holy Spirit and the possibility of being filled with Him are proclaimed and received, the life of the believing community will be restored to Pentecostal power. . . . Have you received the Holy Spirit since you believed? Let every believer submit himself to this heart-searching question. . . . Do not hold back, even if you do not yet fully understand what the blessing is or how it comes. . . . [Y]ou may rest assured that the marvel of Jerusalem and of Samaria, of Caesarea and Ephesus, will once again be repeated. (pgs. 13-21, Andrew Murray, The Fullness of the Spirit. Minneapolis, MN: Bethany House Publishers, 2004 ed. Originally titled The Believer’s Full Blessing of Pentecost.)
[21] Pgs. 29-30, Divine Healing: A Series of Addresses, Andrew Murray. Nyack, NY: Christian Alliance Publishing Co., 1900.
[22] Pg. 173, The Two Covenants and the Second Blessing, Andrew Murray. New York, NY: Chicago; Toronto: Fleming H. Revell, 1899.
[23] Pgs. 181, 189, The Spiritual Life, Andrew Murray. Chicago, IL: Tupper & Robertson, 1896.
[24] See the discussion of the verse in Heaven Only for the Baptized? The Gospel of Christ vs. Baptismal Regeneration, Thomas Ross.
[25] Pgs. 14-16, The Spirit of Christ, Andrew Murray.
[26] Pg. 202, The New Life: Words of God for Young Disciples of Christ, Andrew Murray. New York, NY: Hurst & Company, 1891.
[27] Pgs. 14-16, The Spirit of Christ, Andrew Murray. Murray wrote: “In regeneration it is this spirit of man which is quickened again and renewed. . . . In that inner shrine of our wondrous nature, the spirit, deeper than the soul, with all its life of feeling, and thought, and will, which God made for Himself, in the spirit quickened by His power, there dwells the Holy Spirit” (pgs. 334, 338, The Spirit of Christ: Thoughts on the Indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the Believer and the Church, Andrew Murray. New York: Anson D. F. Randolph & Company, 1888).
[28] Mr. Mount-Temple prayed: “My Lord Jesus, as Thou didst take my humanity, I pray Thee impart to me Thy Divinity,” and he stated that, as with the confession of Christ as one Person with a true Divine and a true human nature at Chalcedon: “I have to record my thanks . . . for deep Churchism at our Conferences . . . [and] for the knowledge that we are all two in one—two natures in one person . . . the Divine and the human” (pg. 183, Memorials [of William Francis Cowper-Temple, Baron Mount-Temple], Georgina Cowper-Temple. London: Printed for private circulation, 1890).
[29] Bruner points out the connection between the Pentecostal imperative that one “must become as passive as possible” to receive the baptism of the Spirit and the teaching of Andrew Murray and the mystical writers on the subject (pg. 99, 339, A Theology of the Holy Spirit: The Pentecostal Experience and the New Testament Witness, F. D. Bruner; cf. the need for “deep passivity,” according to Murray, on, e. g., pg. 200, The Spirit of Christ).
[30] Pg. 335, The Spirit of Christ: Thoughts on the Indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the Believer and the Church, Andrew Murray. New York, NY: Anson D. F. Randolph & Company, 1888.
[31] “In the believer there is ever going on a secret struggle between the soul and the Spirit” (pg. 337, The Spirit of Christ: Thoughts on the Indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the Believer and the Church, Andrew Murray).
[32] Pg. 113, The Pentecostals, Hollenweger; cf. pg. 448, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis; pgs. 52-53, Transforming Keswick: The Keswick Convention, Past, Present, and Future, Price & Randall.
[33] Pg. 313, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis.
[34] Pgs. 315, 517, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis.
[35] “No estimate of Mr. Murray’s influence as a leader . . . would be complete that did not take account of his intimate and lifelong connexion with the South Africa General Mission” (pg. 381, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis; cf. pgs. 381-386. Murray worked closely with Spencer Walton). Through Murray, not just Keswick continuationism, but also Keswick ecumenicalism was brought to South Africa, as men “of every denomination” (pg. 382) came together to imbibe and spread the Higher Life within the allegedly universal and invisible “Church Catholic” (cf. pg. 418, ibid).
[36] Pg. 410, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis. Of course, Spencer was not the sole influence on Murray’s view of the education of youth; cf. pg. 479, ibid, for others.
[37] Calvary Contender, 07/15/1999, cited in the Fundamental Baptist Digital Library, ed. David Cloud.
[38] Pg. 1538, The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, F. L. Cross.
[39] Despite a rejection of some of his earlier influence from Ritschl, Forsyth “retained the tools of liberal higher criticism” (pg. 260, New dictionary of theology, Ferguson & Packer). Many compare his views to those of Karl Barth, but, rejecting part of the orthodoxy that even the neo-orthodox heretic Barth had retained, Forsyth rejected classical Christology: “[M]any . . . think of . . . Forsyth . . . as a ‘Barthian before Barth’. Forsyth, like Barth, understands divine revelation in terms of the gracious and reconciling activity of God in Jesus Christ. But for Barth, the Chalcedonian definition is essential to the task of understanding and speaking faithfully of the full divine and human identity of the person Jesus. Forsyth, however, adjudges this ancient Christology to be far too Hellenic (i.e. ontological) and therefore of no contemporary significance or authority. In its place, he proposes a ‘metaphysic’ of conscience. . . . Forsyth’s ready dismissal of the Chalcedonian motif of a ‘unit-in-difference’ sharply distinguishes his Christology and doctrine of the triune God from those of Barth; many would regard them as less adequate” (pg. 235, Biographical Dictionary of Evangelicals, ed. Larsen). Indeed, rejecting classical Christology is not just “less adequate.” It is idolatry.
“At the breakfast-table [Murray also] discoursed on German theology, and on the attitude of the school of Ritschl[.] . . . Dogma or doctrine is of no account” (pg. 482, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis).
[40] Pg. 481, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis.
[41] Pgs. 332, 437, cf. 439, 482, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis. On Tersteegen’s Quietism see pg. 466, The Encyclopedia of Christianity, vol. 4, Fahlsbusch & Bromiley. Although a Protestant, Tersteegen “adopted some of the ideas of Catholic quietist mysticism” (pg. 680, Encyclopedia of Christianity, vol. 3) and fell under the “influence of ascetic and Quietist ideas,” so that he, unsurprisingly, translated many of the works of medieval Roman Catholic Quietism, such as the writings of Guyon (pg. 1062, The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, F. L. Cross).
[42] Pg. 337, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis. Murray also expressed dissent from Mahan’s exegesis of Ephesians 1:13.
[43] Pg. 479, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis. Murray also enjoyed biographies of non-Quakers with far more orthodox theology, such as David Brainerd.
[44] Pg. 238, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis. Happily, Murray also said: “I cannot say that I agree in everything with Upham[,]” since Mr. Murray was a Christian and Protestant minister, not a an exponent of a god that is a Father-Mother duality, like Upham.
[45] Pgs. 449-450, 456, 470, 518, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis.
[46] Pgs. 173-174, The Two Covenants and the Second Blessing, Andrew Murray. New York, NY: Fleming H. Revell, 1899.
[47] Pgs. 470, 480, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis.
[48] The books in question were Wholly for God, The Power of the Spirit, The Divine Indwelling, Dying to Self, The Secret of Inspiration, and God in ons (Dutch). See pgs. 455, 498, 480, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis. Murray did at least warn about some of the errors espoused by Law—which was commendable—in a preface to his republication of Law’s works, although not republishing them at all would have been far better.
[49] Law was not just the author of A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1728) but also the author of such undevout and unholy affirmations as: “What becomes now of the Philosophy of Debtor and Creditor, of a Satisfaction made by Christ to a Wrath in God? Is it not the grossest of all Fictions, and in full Contrariety to the plain written Word of God?” (Spirit of Love, Part 2; The Second Dialogue Between Theogenes, Eusebius, and Theophilus, William Law). Nonetheless, Andrew Murray affirmed: “The points on which so much stress is laid in what is called Keswick teaching, stand prominently out in . . . William Law[’s] . . . whole argument” (Note A, Chapter II, “The Second Blessing,” in The Two Covenants and the Second Blessing, Andrew Murray, elec. acc. Blue Letter Bible). John Wesley, after his professed evangelical breakthrough, wrote to Law, his contemporary and correspondent, “a severe letter . . . reproaching him for never having set before him the way of salvation in all its simplicity. ‘Under the heavy yoke of the law,’ he says, “I might have groaned till death, had not a holy man, to whom God lately directed me, upon my complaining thereof, answered at once, Believe, and thou shalt be saved. Now, sir, suffer me to ask, How will you answer it to our common Lord that you never gave me this advice? Why did I scarce ever hear you name the Name of Christ? Never so as to ground anything in faith in His blood? Who is this who is laying another foundation?’” (pg. 457, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis. DuPlessis, nevertheless, commented: “Had Andrew Murray lived in the first half of the eighteenth century instead of the second half of the nineteenth, he might have reconciled Wesley and Law.”)
Contrary to Murray, however, to try to learn how to be holy by reading the works of unregenerate heretics like William Law is amazing folly.
[50] Pgs. 449ff., The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis. Böhme also “imbibed . . . astrological and theosophical speculations” (pg. 453, ibid).
[51] Pgs. 453-5, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis.
[52] Pg. 511, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis.
[53] E. g., his false prophecy of the success of the Second Crusade; cf. pg. 315, Cyclopedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature, McClintock & Strong.
[54] Pg. 451, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis. For Bernard, “conversion [was] enter[ing] the monastery,” and “uncoerced humility justifies and . . . merits the grace of God[.] . . . Bernard does not represent a purely forensic form of justification” (pgs. 41, 48, 58, Sweet Communion: Trajectories of Spirituality from the Middle Ages through the Further Reformation, Arie de Reuver, trans. James De Jong). “Bernard was not . . . a forerunner of the Reformation. He was a devout child of the twelfth century, completely involved in the contemporary developments of the Roman papal establishment” (pg. 57, ibid).
[55] Pgs. 237-239, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis. Murray did also affirm: “I cannot say that I agree in everything with . . . Madame Guyon,” since Mr. Murray was not a medieval Roman Catholic like Guyon. Murray would nonetheless have done well to warn against Guyon instead of commending her very dangerous writings with a few words of warning.
[56] Pgs. 480-481, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis.
[57] Pg. 511, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis.
[58] Pg. 113, The Pentecostals, Hollenweger.
[59] Nevertheless, Murray did not become a theological modernist, but retained many elements of the conservative Dutch Reformed paedobaptist tradition in which he had been raised. For example, his teaching about what the children of believers possess by virtue of their parentage evidences clear dependence upon the Reformed paedobaptist covenantalism:
The word holy is the promise of a divine life-power. Let us beware of emptying the word holy of its divine truth and power. If God calls our children holy, it is because they are born from a believing parent who is holy in Christ; therefore, they are holy, too. The child of true believers inherits from his parents, not only the sinful nature, but habits and tendencies which the child of the unbeliever does not share. These are the true seeds of holiness, the working of the Holy Spirit from the mother’s womb. Even where it cannot be seen, there is a secret heritage of the seed of holiness implanted in the child of the believer. There is secured to him the Holy Spirit in whom the holiness of God has reached its full manifestation. . . .
In promising the Holy Spirit to His disciples, our Lord said He would be a river of living water flowing from them to others. The believer has power to influence those with whom he comes in contact. The child born of him inherits a blessing in the very life he receives from the parent who is sanctified by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. In the mother’s womb the child can receive the Holy Spirit. Oh, let us be sure of it, when God gives our child the name holy, that is the beginning of the work of His own Holy Spirit. Let nothing less than this be what our heart reads in God’s words: your children are holy. (pgs. 267-268, Raising Your Children for Christ, Andrew Murray. New Kensington, PA: Whitaker House, 1984)
Murray’s affirmations might find support in the Reformed paedobaptist tradition, but they certainly are not found in the Bible; at the church of Ephesus, all who had been regenerated—and the book clearly states that Christian families with children were to be found in the congregation at Ephesus (Ephesians 6:1)—had been spiritually dead and were unholy children of wrath and of the devil without any inherent goodness in them until they came to a point when, after some time living, having a walk, and fulfilling the lusts of the flesh and of the mind, they were consciously converted at the moment of saving faith (Ephesians 2:1-10). The church of Ephesus, including the converted children of Christian parents in the congregation, would not have recognized Murray’s statements as Christian doctrine had Murray’s teaching, or the covenantal paedobaptism it is based upon, existed at the time.
[60] Pgs. 60-63, 68-69, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis.
[61] Pg. 58, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis.
[62] Pg. 10, Why Do You Not Believe?: Words of Instruction and Encouragement for All Who Are Seeking the Lord, Andrew Murray. Chicago, IL: Fleming H. Revell, 1894.
[63] Murray wrote:
This at least you know that, although you cannot yet say, He is my Saviour, your whole soul believes that He was sent by God to be a Saviour, and that He has proved Himself to be a Saviour for others. Well, then, go with this confession to Jesus, utter it before Him in prayer, look to Him and adore Him as the Saviour of the world. Speak out what you do believe, and by this means will faith in your heart be confirmed and increased. Say: “Lord Jesus, how unbelieving I am; this, however, I do believe that Thou art the Saviour, full of love and grace, and mighty to redeem.” Forget yourselves and worship Jesus, although you dare not as yet say, that He is yours. In the midst of those exercises your faith will increase, and by and by you will insensibly come to the confidence that He is also yours. (pgs. 36-37, Why Do You Not Believe? Words of Instruction and Encouragement for All Who Are Seeking the Lord)
[64] Murray stated: “[T]he lectures here [in seminary] are such that it is almost impossible to get any good from them.” A fellow student averred: “One learnt nothing from [the professors’] lectures” (pgs. 62, 67, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis); the sole exception was the lectures of “Opzoomer,” whose lectures bred “an enthusiasm which was wholly lacking in his older colleagues,” but this enthusiasm was for apostasy from Christianity, as he was “a rationalist . . . an empiricist . . . [and] one of the fathers of . . . Liberalism or Modernism . . . in Holland” (pg. 63, ibid). Because the seminary education he had received was useless, Murray wanted to go to Germany to get a real education, but his father told him to return to South Africa and begin his service as a minister instead, and he did so (pgs. 67ff., ibid).
[65] Pgs. 451-453, Biographical Dictionary of Evangelicals, ed. Larsen. The Dictionary notes: “Mott’s appeal seemed to be ‘entirely to the moral nature and there is no theology in it’ (Hopkins, Mott, p. 385). His relative indifference to theology and broad ecumenical sympathies were characteristic of the holiness evangelicalism of the late nineteenth century.”
[66] Pg. 440, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis. Murray also welcomed more orthodox men; he did not confine his welcome to the heterodox.
[67] Pg. 2, The Overcomer, January 1910.
[68] Pg. 113, The Pentecostals, Hollenweger.
[69] For example, in addition to paedobaptism and the confusion on conversion so closely associated with it, Murray believed that alcoholic “[w]ine is a good gift of God, to be received with gratitude and to be used to His glory,” so that he could not agree with those who argued that “the Bible not merely permits but enjoins abstinence from the use of wine,” although he was himself, commendably, a practitioner of total abstinence (cf. pgs. 361-365, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis; for a good presentation of the Biblical requirement, not option, of total abstinence, see The Use of Wine in the Old Testament, Robert Teachout).
[70] Pg. 30, Abide in Christ: Thoughts on the Blessed Life of Fellowship with the Son of God, Andrew Murray. Philadelphia, PA: Henry Altemus, 1895. Out of this utter passivity, Murray goes on to explain, activity flows—in the Keswick theology, quietism is not an end to itself, but leads to a sort of activity.
[71] Pg. 7, Waiting on God! Daily Messages for a Month, Andrew Murray. New York, NY: Fleming H. Revell, 1896. Murray is quoting a poem by Freda Hanbury.
[72] Pgs. 136-137, Abide in Christ: Thoughts on the Blessed Life of Fellowship with the Son of God, Murray. Here again, Murray goes on to explain that by means of “perfect passivity” one becomes the “active instrument” of God.
[73] Pg. 335, The Spirit of Christ: Thoughts on the Indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the Believer and the Church, Andrew Murray. New York, NY: Anson D. F. Randolph & Company, 1888.
[74] Pg. 338, The Spirit of Christ: Thoughts on the Indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the Believer and the Church, Andrew Murray.
[75] Pgs. 194-199, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis.
[76] Pg. 311, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis. Murray also stated that some forms of perfectionism are “a human perversion of that truth” of “Perfection” and of true “Perfectionism.”
[77] Pg. 313, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis.
[78] The first Dutch edition had been published in 1860. Murray, speaking about his Abide in Christ, testified at the 1895 Keswick convention: “I had not then . . . . [when] my book Abide in Christ was written . . . experienced all that I wrote of; I cannot say that I experience it all perfectly even now” (pg. 448, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis).
[79] Pgs. 442, 463, 521, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis. Abide in Christ, which was published after Murray’s stay at Bethshan, sold very rapidly, being recommended by men such as F. B. Meyer (pg. 56, F. B. Meyer: A Biography, W. Y. Fullerton).
[80] Pg. 115, The Pentecostals, Hollenweger.
[81] Pg. 381, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis; pgs. 61-62, The Keswick Story: The Authorized History of the Keswick Convention, Polluck.
[82] As the connection was entirely natural, it is not surprising that many others followed Murray and Boardman in preaching both the Higher Life of the body and the soul, so that “the rise of the healing doctrines was largely a radicalization of the perfectionist push of the Holiness teachings. . . . the connection is present in every major manifestation of the Healing movement in the late nineteenth century” (pgs. 130, 136, Theological Roots of Pentecostalism, Dayton). It is noteworthy that Murray also frequented hydropathic establishments, despite the love that advocates of spiritism and other advocates of the equivalents in that day of modern New Age energy medicine had for the hydropathic system (cf. pg. 162, Andrew Murray at Water Cure, in The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis).
[83] Pg. 338, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis.
[84] Pg. 339, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis.
[85] The “the Mildmay Conference” was a “precursor of the Keswick Convention” (pg. 658, Biographical Dictionary of Evangelicals, Larsen).
[86] However, in the Gospels and Acts, those who had the gift of healing did not require faith in those whom they healed.
[87] Were this prayer actually in accordance with Scripture and actually answered, not merely a gradual healing from some types of non-organic disease, but instantaneous perfect health, and eternal freedom from physical death, would result.
[88] Note the parallel to the Keswick doctrine of sanctification—the Higher Spiritual Life is maintained only moment by moment, and any failure to continue it brings an instantaneous and total relapse to a state of utter domination by sin, and the Higher Physical Life is also only maintained moment by moment, and any failure to live the Higher Spiritual Life brings instantaneous relapse into sickness. Neither Higher Life concept is taught in Scripture.
[89] Indeed, the reason such a thought is so prevalent is that immediate healing is what is found in the truly miraculous healings in the Bible.
[90] Note that “experience” is the answer to, and justification for, the radical discontinuity of the Faith Cure with the miracles of Scripture.
[91] The Faith Cure doctrine that people can be healed but still be just as sick as before is here set forth. It has led many to an early grave.
[92] Murray’s parallel only holds if the deliverance from sin God gives in sanctification is that of the instantaneous entrance into the Higher Life by means of the second blessing; this instantaneous deliverance can be paralleled with the Faith Cure which claims to give instantaneous miraculous healing, although in both cases neither the Higher Spiritual nor Physical Life is quite as high as its proponents affirm; but if the historic Baptist doctrine that progressive sanctification is a process of growth in holiness that is completed only in glorification is true, and perfect freedom from sin’s effects on body and soul awaits the eschaton, then the fact that one trusts in Christ for both a glorified and genuinely perfect and sickness-free body and a genuinely perfect and sin-free person at the time of the future resurrection does not involve any kind of unbiblical severance of anything.
[93] Note how the restoration of other miraculous powers, such as visions, goes hand in hand with the Faith Cure. The alleged restoration of the gift of healing will bring with it the alleged restoration of the other miraculous gifts, and both the healings and the visions, tongues, and so on, will bear the same sort of discontinuity with Scripture.
[94] Neither Christ nor the Apostles had to devote almost all their time and strength to healing instead of preaching because they had the real ability to miraculously heal. Only when allegedly miraculous healings are gradual, and take weeks, months, and years to supposedly work, does one need to devote all one’s time to such “healing.” The Lord Jesus would have emptied out all Faith Cure establishments by curing all their occupants in a few minutes.
[95] Murray’s two letters to his Congregation at Wellington, reproduced on pgs. 339-345 of The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis. Note how easily Murray’s wish for the restoration of miraculous healing slides into a desire for a restoration of all the miraculous gifts of the “earliest ages [of] the Church.”
[96] Pg. 345, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis.
[97] Pg. 352, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis.
[98] Pg. 345, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis.
[99] Pg. 345, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis.
[100] Note the appeal to experience and testimonial and the evident influence of William Boardman’s book on the Faith Cure.
[101] That is, for Murray, cessationism is a faithless error that must be overthrown and replaced with continuationism.
[102] That is, according to Murray, if not the New Testament, not the Apostles only and those on whom they laid hands, but every disciple of Christ in all ages is commanded and empowered to miraculously heal people.
[103] Note that 1 Corinthians 12:4-9, if the gifts found in the passage are a proof-text for the Faith Cure in modern times, are equally a proof-text for all the other sign gifts, such as tongues.
[104] Note the assumption, based on the Isaiah text that is actually about Millennial blessing on Israel, that Spirit baptism is a post-conversion event for the dispensation of grace, and the fact that if all that was involved in Pentecost in Acts two is for the current day, not the gift of healing only, but all the sign gifts, should be restored, as affirmed in Pentecostalism.
[105] Of course, the notion that one has been “healed” but is still sick and is getting worse is in radical discontinuity with Biblical miraculous healing, is contrary to all sense, and is very dangerous advice to give sick people, as acting as if one is getting well when one is getting sicker means that one will cling with a death-grip to delusion and view taking medicine as sin, instead of abstaining from so doing as sin.
[106] Pgs. 345-348, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis. Minor changes in capitalization have been introduced, and italics eliminated.
[107] Pg. 352, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis.
[108] Pg. 475, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis. The individual who testified to having learned this lesson from Mr. Murray also testified that Murray taught him “to forsake all commentaries on the Bible and look only to the teaching of the Holy Ghost.”
[109] Pg. 349, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis. DuPlessis speculates, however, that Murray “felt with increasing force the difficulties urged against the doctrine” (see pgs. 349-352, ibid). Whatever he may or may not have felt, no repentance for teaching such error or renunciation of it ever followed.
[110] Pgs. 351-352, 381, 430, 466, 477, 491, 494, 500-501, 506-512, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis. The list is not comprehensive.
[111] Pgs. 506-512, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis.
[112] For example: “An exceedingly earnest and capable young missionary . . . was seized with an internal malady . . . [a] general request was issued for intercession. Mr. Murray himself, accompanied by his colleague . . . J. R. Albertyn, proceeded to . . . where the sick man lay, in order to lay his hands on him and pray for him. A few days later the following message was . . . made public: . . . [‘]We . . . expect a complete recovery. With marvelous calmness, rest and peace, and in childlike faith Brother Stofberg [the sick missionary] rests assured that the Lord is healing him. May God’s great name be at this time more and more glorified by His children!’ Yet notwithstanding . . . Mr. Stofberg died within three weeks, and the faith of many who were awaiting news of his restoration was grievously staggered. Mr. Murray ascribed this failure of faith and prayer to effect the recovery of the sick man to the low state of the Church, which had neither truly apprehended the truth nor exercised the faith that is able to save and to heal” (pg. 350, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis). That is, this minister died, not because the Higher Life Faith Cure was a delusion, but because not enough people were committed enough to its truth to make it work.
[113] Pgs. 349-350, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis.
[114] Pgs. 486-487, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis.
[115] Pg. 351, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis.
[116] Pg. 487, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis.
[117] Pgs. 113-114, Divine Healing, by Andrew Murray. Nyack, NY: Christian Alliance Publishing, 1900. Elec. acc. http://ia341314.us.archive.org/2/items/DivineHealingByAndrewMurrayBroughtByPeter-johnParisisfounderOfThe/DivineHealingByAndrewMurray.pdf.
[118] Pgs. 15, 17-19, 24, 29, Divine Healing, Murray.
[119] “MacMillan believed that healing is a privilege for the Christian as a provision of the atonement, and needs to be affirmed actively and strenuously,” so that the believer can “refuse the sicknesses that seek to fasten upon [his] physical fram[e]” (pg. 227, A Believer with Authority, Paul L. King). See pg. 25, The Adult Full Gospel Sunday School Quarterly, November 22, 1942 & pg. 26, The Adult Full Gospel Sunday School Quarterly, January 23, 1938, MacMillan.
[120] One notes that Murray’s Divine Healing was published in 1900 in Nyack, NY, home of the CMA Training Institute, by the Christian and Missionary Alliance (cf. pg. 529, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis).
[121] Pg. 72 (cf. pg. 12), Divine Healing, Andrew Murray. London: Victory Press, 1934. Cf. http://www.jesus.org.uk/vault/library/murray_divine_healing.pdf.
[122] Pg. 172, cf. 168-173, Divine Healing, Murray. Since Job was the most righteous man on the earth (Job 1:8), it appears that Higher Life principles must not have been practiced much on the earth in Job’s day, since even the best man on earth was made horribly sick for not properly employing them—or, perhaps, Murray’s reading of Job, in which he follows William Boardman, is radically inaccurate.
[123] The Word of Faith movement likewise teaches that “all disease comes from the spiritual realm of Satan. . . . a true believer should never be sick. . . . [Word of] Faith teachers insist that believers can, and should, grow in their faith to the point where they no longer need medical science. Only those in the Faith movement who are immature in their faith guiltily seek medical care” (pgs. 149-150, 186, A Different Gospel, McConnell; pgs. 153-165 demonstrate the almost exact similarity between Murray’s doctrine and that of the Word of Faith theology, and provide a fine critique of the Word of Faith healing doctrine.).
[124] Pgs. 174-179, Divine Healing, Murray.
[125] Pg. 92, Divine Healing, Murray.
[126] Pg. 154, Divine Healing, Murray.
[127] Pgs. 201, 209, Divine Healing, Murray.
[128] Pgs. 85-86, 124, Divine Healing, Murray.
[129] Nor is it surprising that charismatic writers can refer to “Andrew Murray” as a “prominent Pentecostal figur[e]” alongside of charismatics like “Aimee Semple McPherson” (cf. pg. 67, A Different Gospel, McConnell), although such a designation for Murray is somewhat proleptic.
[130] Pgs. 87-88, Divine Healing, Murray.
[131] Pg. 15, Divine Healing: A Series of Addresses, Murray. See also pg. 100.
[132] Pg. 161, The Spirit of Christ, Andrew Murray. Springdale, PA: Whitaker House, 1984. While Murray writes, “There are souls to whom such leading . . . [by] heavenly voices . . . undoubtedly is given,” at least he also affirms that such voices are not the “ordinary” means of leading—an affirmation, however, that a Quaker or practically any modern Pentecostal could also make.
[133] Pg. 17, The Full Blessing of Pentecost: The One Thing Needful, trans. J. P. Lilley. London: J. Nisbet & Co., 1908.
[134] Pg. 204, The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis.
[135] Antecedents of the Word of Faith theology have also been seen in Murray. For example, the doctrine of the authority of the believer, as developed by the Word of Faith movement out of the writings of John MacMillan, appears to have been anticipated by Murray: “The Head truly calls the members of His Body to share His power with Him. Our Father places His power at the disposal of the child who completely trusts Him” (pg. 83, With Christ in the School of Prayer, Andrew Murray. Springdale, PA: Whitaker House, 1981).
[136] Pg. 114, The Pentecostals, Hollenweger.
[137] Pg. v. The Life of Andrew Murray, DuPlessis & pg. 172, The Pentecostal Movement, Donald Gee. DuPlessis was a continuationist like Murray but not yet the General Secretary of the Pentecostal Mission at the time Murray asked him to write the biography.
[138] pg. 462, “Murray, Andrew,” Biographical Dictionary of Evangelicals, ed. Larsen; pgs. 72-73, The Pentecostal Movement, Donald Gee.
[139] Pg. 115, 120, The Pentecostals, Hollenweger.
[140] Pg. 120, The Pentecostals, Hollenweger.
[141] Pg. 120-121, The Pentecostals, Hollenweger.
[142] Pg. 121, The Pentecostals, Hollenweger.
[143] Pgs. 171-172, The Pentecostals, Hollenweger.
More Resources on Soteriology: The Biblical Doctrine of Salvation
