"You Had Better Get Nearer Rome in Some Things"
John Alexander Dowie on the Virgin Mary and the intercession of the saints
Preparing for last night’s service, I came on a stunning statement in one of John Alexander Dowie’s sermons, yet more evidence that Pentecostal spirituality and theology are not nearly as dull and narrow as we’ve been led to believe.
The sermon was published on October 1st, 1904 in Leaves of Healing, Dowie’s magazine, although he had delivered it a month earlier at a service in Shiloh Tabernacle.
It is vintage Dowie: equal parts provocative and insightful, banal and bewildering. And it concludes with what must have seemed even to his audience a bizarre rant about criminality and lust. But the meandering at last leads Dowie to marvel at Mary:
If there is to be a godly seed, there must be a godly spirit—purity, self-restraint, wisdom, love. There is no real happiness in sin; none at all. Man was created first and he was greatest. Woman fell, and bore the awful burden, until God gave a pure woman. She got ahead of man and gave us the only pure Man that has ever lived. It is glorious to think that we had one pure Man in the whole world, ant1 that he came from the womb of a pure and holy virgin. It is glorious to think that that virgin still lives.
That last thought—“that virgin still lives”—then spins out into the passage that knocked me down:
