The Aggressive Christianity of Catherine Mumford Booth -- By: Mary Agnes Maddox

Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 22:3 (Summer 2008)
Article: The Aggressive Christianity of Catherine Mumford Booth
Author: Mary Agnes Maddox


The Aggressive Christianity of Catherine Mumford Booth

Mary Agnes Maddox

MARY AGNES MADDOX is a Professor of Christian Ministry at Williamson Christian College in Franklin, Tennessee. She is a graduate of Liberty University with an M.Div. and Ph.D. from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

The American holiness movement of the mid-nineteenth century provided a fertile seedbed for women preachers responding to the Spirit’s prompting. One such woman became the mother of a whole army of daughters, following their heroine into battle for the Lord. It was Catherine Mumford Booth (1829-1890), cofounder with her husband of The Salvation Army, who argued the innate equality of women and promoted them to clerical parity with men.1

Assurance of salvation was a central concern in the Methodism of Catherine’s youth. This should come as one listened to sermons, searched the heart and soul in class meetings, and read the Bible and prayed. “By assurance,” she said, “I mean the personal realization of my acceptance in Christ . . . I mean the inward assurance which men and women find for themselves, or have revealed in themselves, which they know as a matter of consciousness.”2 Catherine struggled with this until she was sixteen; it seemed unreasonable to her that she could be saved and not know it. But, one morning, her eyes fell upon the lines of Charles Wesley, “My God, I am Thine, What a comfort Divine, What a blessing to know that my Jesus is mine!” She had read and sung these verses dozens of times, but now they came home to her soul with a force and illumination as never before. She wrote, “Previously not all the promises in the Bible could induce me to believe [I was saved]; now not all the devils in hell could persuade me to doubt.”:3

When we have the witness of the Spirit in our souls of our acceptance with God, that he does now for Christ’s sake pardon and receive us, what power it brings. This is what the old divines called assurance of faith, a conviction wrought in the soul by the Holy Ghost that Jesus Christ has given Himself for me, that God has accepted that offering in view of my sin and transgression, and . . . has justified me freely from all things by which I could not be justified by the Law of Moses, and that in Him God becomes my Father, and now accepts me and looks upon me well pleased—a conviction wrought in my soul by the Holy Spirit.4

Catherine’s thinking on women in ministry

Although an avowed supporter of women, Cather...

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