Introduction
It is no secret that A. B. Simpson and A. W. Tozer were drawn to an older, medieval theme of divine immediacy while rejecting Roman Catholicism as a system. Two contemporary Alliance theologians—Gordon T. Smith and David E. Fitch—continue this conversation in different keys. The Fourfold Gospel centers on Christ in the believer and through the believer as witness, empowered by the Holy Spirit, in view of the coming King. Simpson’s memorable slogans from an earlier era gesture toward purpose and mission, yet they can also be received as a simplified eschatology that unintentionally reinforces individualism at the expense of ecclesiology.
Simpson’s eschatological work The Coming One and his theologically acute The Old Faith and the New Gospels: Special Addresses on Christianity and Modern Thought exhibit striking discernment about a papal “power shift.” He recognized the Roman Catholic Church’s transition from hard political power to soft ecclesial power, a transition he interpreted through a historicist premillennial lens. For Simpson, the “new gospels” were not merely intellectual errors; they were modern syntheses—absorbed and redistributed through Rome—capable of reshaping Western theology under the guise of spiritual renewal.
In The Old Faith, Simpson implies that evangelicals and Roman Catholics can share certain philosophical instincts—especially where Western theology tends toward metaphysical synthesis (often framed as dualism vs. monism, or transcendence vs. immanence). Yet he refuses the metaphysical project when it becomes a rival construction to biblical revelation. He anticipates how immanentist tendencies—now common across postmodern Christianity—can hollow out the gospel while retaining Christian vocabulary. Along the same lines, Simpson exposes the theological implications of atheistic evolution, pragmatism, and socialism, treating them not as isolated movements but as converging forces that can dull expectation of Christ’s return and displace the “sacred gospel” with substitute gospels. Ultimately, these “new gospels” miss the fullness of Christ alone.
This raises the central question: Are practical appropriations from Catholic spiritual practice legitimate aids in pursuing the sacred? David Fitch foregrounds a distinctive form of realized eschatology shaped by incarnational “presence”—drawing on a wide range of ecumenical and philosophical sources while retaining an apocalyptic horizon. Gordon Smith, by contrast, pursues contemplative formation, deepening an evangelical understanding of conversion and growth, and he engages Roman Catholic leadership (including Pope Francis) with notable openness.
But before evaluating any practical borrowing, a prior question presses: Should Alliance theologians guide spiritual appropriation without sustained critique of “nature and grace” and the medieval metaphysical structures that continue to generate a secular/sacred bifurcation? In other words, can one reliably “glean” from spiritual practices whose underlying theological system is not merely different, but prescriptive—a full account of reality that stands behind and governs those practices? Simpson and Tozer, correctly and perhaps for our correction, anchored the “old faith” not in ecclesial mediation but in Christ and the Holy Spirit, as known through biblical revelation.
This study develops three sections that defend the Alliance patriarchs’ “old faith”:
Historicism and the secular/sacred dichotomy
A brief sketch of C&MA work among RCC populations
“His Presence”: Simpson, Tozer, and medieval appropriation—especially through Meister Eckhart
The third section uses Eckhart as a test case. Often labeled a “mystic,” Eckhart simultaneously (a) brought scholastic metaphysics to a radical conclusion and (b) stands as a formative ancestor of German philosophical trajectories that now infiltrate theological imagination. I close by returning to Simpson’s pneumatology and the Fourfold Gospel, and by comparing Eckhart’s vita activa to the founders’ understanding of union and witness.
Historicisms
As a philosophy of history, historicism treats events—once fully “played out”—as intelligible progress, often judged from the vantage point of reason. This posture easily becomes hubristic toward the past. Simpson’s opposition to postmillennialism rejects precisely this optimism of progress. Yet a secular historicism can also run parallel to, and even support, certain forms of premillennial historicism by providing a narrative of decline and correction—though the two are not identical and cannot be cleanly integrated.
Still, as a method, historicism can be invaluable. It traces a genealogy and asks how a narrative acquired its present shape. One example is the standard historiographical template that casts the medieval period as the “Dark Ages” and then celebrates the “Renaissance” as liberation. This framing was amplified by the nineteenth-century Swiss historian Jakob Burckhardt, who interpreted Renaissance art as evidence of a cultural evolution: more scientific, realistic, individualistic, and humane. The resulting narrative flatters modern sensibilities—leaving the medieval world as superstition and repression—but it can also obscure the intellectual strength of that era and the movements of reform and biblical return that Simpson himself saw as historically significant within his eschatological horizon.
In our own moment, few evangelicals feel nostalgia for scholastic rationalism as propositional certainty. Instead, many are drawn to contemplative spirituality and “mystery,” especially in a secular age. Yet this very sensitivity can make evangelicals vulnerable to sacramentality as an ecclesial solution—one that relocates the sacred from Christ’s living presence in the believer into an ecclesiological structure that claims to mediate that presence. Rome’s longstanding synthesis of faith (tradition + Scripture) and reason functions as a comprehensive syncretism, shifting the sacred from conversion and union with Christ into ecclesial continuity as an extension of incarnation. Thus, competing narratives of “how modernity arrived” proliferate—often by re-describing medieval categories and by reimagining the sacred as embodied in “church” in a way that subtly eclipses the simplicity of the gospel.
To understand contemporary Catholicism—especially the theological atmosphere within which projects like Fitch’s and Smith’s can be received—one must return to the nineteenth-century intellectual streams Simpson confronted in The Old Faith and The Coming One. There Simpson identifies Roman Catholicism as “Babylon” in Revelation’s imagery. His tone was shaped by Rome’s posture toward modernity, the crisis of Italian nationalism, and his own European travel. Vatican I (1869–70) responded defensively to modernity by affirming a neo-Thomistic synthesis; Leo XIII’s Aeterni Patris (1879) reinforced Thomistic theology as a counter-vision to modern philosophy. Vatican II (1962–65) then “updated” the posture—most notably through Lumen Gentium—by embracing modern humanity and personhood while deepening, not abandoning, its participatory Thomist core through renewed philosophical mediation.
In this light, Vatican I reaffirmed explicit metaphysical prescription against modernity, while Vatican II advanced a more tacit and flexible prescription, weaving a renewed “sacred” fabric in which the human subject is gently subordinated to the ecclesial whole—less by overt coercion than by theological atmosphere. This subtle shift requires a historical vista and a sober examination of ecumenism—not merely as practice, but as philosophical-theological drift. The question, then, is not whether Simpson “predicted documents,” but whether he correctly discerned the trajectory Vatican II would eventually embody. So: in what sense was Simpson prescient of Vatican II?
Theological Ecumenicism and the Secular/Sacred Reassembly
Contemporary theological ecumenicism—across several influential streams—has increasingly pursued “the culprits of modernity,” often by constructing genealogies that mirror Burckhardt’s retro-template: a decisive “fall,” an explanatory villain, and a proposed recovery. This posture frequently allows thinkers such as Protestant John Milbank (Radical Orthodoxy) and Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor to operate as interpretive authorities beyond Rome’s formal magisterium, even as their work functions in practice as a theological atmosphere consistent with Vatican II’s impulses.
Much of this discourse turns on two ambiguous terms: the secular and the sacred. Yet unless these are critically related back to Rome’s traditional architecture of nature and grace, the conversation risks laundering old categories into new language. I therefore propose that much of today’s theology implicitly updates “nature and grace (supernatural)” into a contemporary bifurcation between “the secular and the sacred.” The reassembly project then asks: How can we reintegrate what modernity has separated? Milbank’s answer is to reject the secular’s autonomy; Taylor’s analysis is more descriptive, granting the immanent frame as a social condition in which belief is still possible.
Milbank reads Thomas Aquinas through the nouvelle théologie and patristic ressourcement, aiming to move beyond Vatican I’s hard neo-scholastic posture while still retrieving a participatory metaphysic. Taylor, though not offering a churchly prescription in the same way, can be read as affirming an Aristotelian pattern of institutional flourishing within immanence—available, in principle, to whomever. Both projects locate the “rupture” somewhere in late medieval or early modern developments: Milbank frequently targets Duns Scotus; others locate the decisive break in the Reformation itself—explicitly in Taylor, implicitly in Milbank’s narrative grammar.
Milbank and colleagues interpret medieval thought as a coherent “great tradition” linking the ancients and the fathers. With immense erudition, Milbank correctly exposes how philosophical language and metaphysical scaffolding can control and constrain biblical reading—precisely the kind of external system Simpson opposed. Yet here lies the blind spot: in criticizing abstraction imposed upon Scripture, Radical Orthodoxy often replaces one controlling system with another, prescriptive and comprehensive, only now baptized as “sacramental” and “participatory.”
At bottom, the issue is not whether unconverted persons worship something “secular” while converted persons worship something “sacred.” In practice, both the unconverted and the converted can worship what is not God: self, morality, nation, science, material prosperity, political ideology, even the enchantment of a romanticized sacred past. Here the “sacred” can become an idol no less than the secular. This is the very danger Simpson saw: a religious system that appears transcendent while displacing the gospel’s simplicity and the Holy Spirit’s immediacy.
Smith and Fitch rightly recognize the challenge of our non-religious era for gospel witness. Yet both, in different ways, risk allowing the secular/sacred frame to dictate theological reaction—often through a renewed attraction to “real presence” language and sacramental patterns—without sufficient attention to Rome’s systemic nature-and-grace logic as it continues to operate under Vatican II’s updated vocabulary.
This is visible, for example, in Gordon Smith’s tendency toward a univocal assumption that “church” essentially means the same thing across traditions, and that sacramental language can be borrowed “as needed” so long as one rejects transubstantiation atomistically. But theological terms frequently function as systemic terms, not merely isolated tokens. The same words—church, sacrament, presence, grace, participation—can carry radically different ontological weight in Catholic and Protestant frameworks.
To be clear: a renewed reflection on Christ’s presence at the Table can be profoundly important. Yet such reflection demands a larger systemic awareness. Otherwise, “retrieving mystery” becomes a portal into prescriptive metaphysics—especially when mediated through ressourcement projects aligned with Vatican II’s theological imagination. In this respect, Fitch’s work shows more nuance than Smith’s; he can name and critique Constantinianism and spectator religion with remarkable clarity. Still, the deeper conceptual inheritance remains.
Here Hans Boersma is emblematic. A former Reformed scholar, and once a colleague within the same wider evangelical orbit as Smith, Boersma has arguably provided one of the most compelling evangelical articulations of sacramental ontology—shaped by thinkers such as Milbank, de Lubac, and other ressourcement voices—while presenting it as a “recovery of mystery.” But the question is not whether mystery is real. The question is: What kind of ontology is being smuggled in under the term “mystery”? Becoming conversant with metaphysics—not merely with ontology—matters here, because the “tapestry” becomes prescriptive. It is not accidental that Roman Catholic clergy still commonly undergo years of Thomistic formation before theology proper. This is not merely spiritual temperament; it is a systemic architecture.
The Reformers rejected medieval sacramental synthesis not simply because of “nominalism,” but because they saw a prescriptive theologia gloriae displacing the centrality of the Cross. Their rejection was not anti-mystery; it was a defense of the gospel against a rival sacred construction.
So how should one navigate the modern discourse of “secular” and “sacred”? First, as the Reformers insisted, one must clarify creation: general revelation provides a locus for common grace, and the created order is good—yet it is not therefore “sacramental” in Rome’s sense, nor does “nature” function as an autonomous metaphysical category that demands a supernatural supplement. In Roman Catholic synthesis, “nature” becomes canonized through metaphysics: being (ens) and its transcendentals (one, good, true, beautiful) are treated as convertible, and creation becomes readable as participatory within a metaphysical economy.
Second, one must clarify incarnation. The Reformers did not use “nature” as the primary framework for this reason. They emphasized creation and Fall: creation is not fallen, but humanity is; creation groans, but it does not become sacred by ecclesial mediation. Roman eucharistic theology, by contrast, tends to sacralize created elements within a fluid understanding of incarnation as ongoing ecclesial extension. This shifts Christology into ecclesiology. It also blurs the biblical time-markers of finality and permanence—what De Chirico identifies as the breach between ἅπαξ (“once for all”) and μᾶλλον (“forevermore”)—in favor of a sacrificial continuity enacted in the Mass. Rome continues to act on its own terms for a reason.
David Fitch offers a meaningful critique of spectator religion and retrieves practices around the table and the neighborhood. His “presence” language is often pastorally effective and missionally urgent. Yet his account may still drift toward an incarnational conflation: the metaphorical body of Christ becomes ecclesiology in a way that can absorb, rather than clarify, the gospel’s apocalyptic trajectory. Fitch leans heavily on a kaleidoscope of sources—de Lubac, Milbank, and others—whose underlying system is not merely descriptive but prescriptive, even if presented as a critique of modern ideology. The result can be an epistemological extravaganza: a method excellent for teaching contextualization, yet vulnerable to displacing Scripture’s primacy as the controlling norm.
The term incarnational ministry illustrates the issue. It often tries to hold together individual and collective dimensions, but it can easily be pulled toward Rome’s model of Christ–church interdependence or toward an ecumenical atmosphere that assumes “church” as a mediating deposit. Alliance theology already possesses a clearer logic: Jesus is the gospel; the church are His witnesses; the Holy Spirit empowers the mission. “All of Jesus to all of the world” is not a slogan for ecclesial self-extension; it is a confession of Christ’s sufficiency and the Spirit’s agency.
This is why “cherry-picked” appropriations remain dangerous when terms are not defined systemically. Evangelicals can borrow liturgical practices, sacramental language, or contemplative disciplines while unintentionally absorbing the metaphysical logic that supports them. The risk is that the church becomes the end—“the ends of ecclesiology”—rather than the witness to Christ alone.
Gordon Smith encourages evangelicals to learn from Roman Catholicism and often does so with pastoral sobriety. Yet he tends to assume the univocity of vocabulary across traditions. He even praises the Roman capacity to absorb contradictions for the sake of unity, citing Rahner’s comments on anathemas and bulls as “genius.” That assessment rightly recognizes Rome’s institutional continuity, but it can understate the systemic consequences: Rome’s unity is not neutral; it is unity on Rome’s terms.
Simpson, however, interpreted this trajectory with eschatological clarity. His historicism applied not only to Rome’s former political power, but to its lamb-like ecclesial transformation. In The Old Faith, Simpson’s remark about modernists such as George Tyrrell is therefore not incidental: it reveals that Simpson understood how Rome could absorb modernist impulses once the institutional time was ripe. He discerned that philosophical theology could rebrand itself as spiritual renewal while functionally blotting out the line between church and world—precisely through an ecclesial sacralization of culture and experience.
In short: evangelicals can resist being “flat” without surrendering to prescriptive sacramental ontology. The answer is not a new sacred system. The answer is the old faith: Calvary, conversion, the Holy Spirit, and the coming King—held together as union with Christ that produces embodied witness.
Mysterion, Sacramentum, and the Inflation of “Deep Church”
A further pressure point appears in the language of mystery. The New Testament’s mysterion—especially in Ephesians—names the revealed gospel reality now made known in Messiah for the nations. Yet when mysterion is routinely rendered sacramentum in the Latin tradition, the semantic gravity subtly shifts: “mystery” becomes more easily tethered to ecclesial mediation and sacramental economy. The result is not merely a translation issue; it is a conceptual drift that can thicken “church” into a deposit of sacred power rather than the Spirit-formed people who bear witness to Christ. In that atmosphere, “doing theology in community” can become shorthand for a mediated sacred, and “depth” can be confused with ecclesial extension.
This matters for Fitch’s project. Fitch often critiques ideology and resists the modern voluntarist reduction of church to individuals rallying around a cause. His instincts are right. Yet the vocabulary of “presence,” “table,” and “kingdom space”—especially when braided with ressourcement sources—can slide toward an incarnational density in which the church’s communal practices are asked to carry a weight Scripture assigns first to Christ Himself and to the Spirit’s agency in the believer. The danger is not that Fitch loves embodied practice; it is that embodied practice can be framed as the locus of “real presence” in a way that parallels Rome’s logic more than the Alliance’s “Jesus Only” logic.
Here the deeper problem is methodological: a highly eclectic epistemology can become a substitute for a governed theological method. Fitch’s best conclusions arrive, but the route can be so elaborate—so “kaleidoscopic”—that it risks teaching the reader to locate authority in curated networks of sources rather than in Scripture as the norming norm, with theological history serving as illumination rather than construction.
Simpson, Tyrrell, and the Vatican II Trajectory
This is precisely where Simpson’s discernment remains bracing. Simpson understood that Rome could no longer rely on the older posture of Vatican I hardening—especially after the loss of political power—yet he also perceived that Rome’s ecclesial system could continue and even intensify by shifting from coercive power to persuasive, spiritual power. That is why his comments on George Tyrrell are so revealing. Tyrrell was excommunicated under Vatican I’s anti-modernist posture; yet the impulse Tyrrell represented—especially subjectivist emphases and the reconfiguration of the natural/supernatural relationship—would later find hospitable expression in Vatican II’s theological atmosphere, even when not named as such.
Simpson’s point is not that every Catholic thinker is a villain, nor that every ecumenical gesture is betrayal. His point is structural: when Rome absorbs “new gospels,” it absorbs them on Rome’s terms, within a framework where ecclesiology is not merely the church’s life but the continuing form of incarnation. That is why Rome can simultaneously affirm orthodox-sounding doctrines and still obscure the gospel through a sacrificial and mediatory system. Marian dogmas are a case in point: they do not simply add a devotional flourish; they reshape the atmosphere in which Christ, mediation, grace, and authority are understood.
And Rome’s posture toward evangelicals confirms the asymmetry. Evangelicals are not “church” in Rome’s formal grammar; they are “communities.” Ecumenism becomes a set of concentric circles radiating from Rome’s center. This is ecclesiological supersessionism of a refined and expansive kind. In that setting, “cherry picking” is never neutral. Borrowed practices and shared vocabulary can inadvertently concede the very framework that the Reformation rejected for gospel reasons.
Alliance Clarity: Union, Witness, and the Holy Spirit
Against this, the Alliance tradition remains distinctive in its simplicity. “Jesus Only” is not a slogan for theological minimalism; it is a confession about direct mediation: Christ by the Spirit, received by faith, forming a people who bear witness. It is not anti-church; it is anti-church-as-sacred-system. The church is not a sacramental machine that produces grace; it is the Spirit-constituted community of those united to Christ.
This is why Simpson and Tozer can draw from older devotional sources—including Catholic writers—without surrendering to the system behind them. Their appropriation is governed by a prior allegiance: Scripture, Christ alone, and the Holy Spirit’s immediacy in conversion and sanctification. In this sense, their borrowing is not naïve cherry-picking; it is bounded appropriation anchored in the gospel.
Tozer’s The Pursuit of God exemplifies this. The secular/sacred divide is not healed by sacralizing creation through ecclesial mediation, but by recovering the believer’s union with God in Christ. The “sacrament” is the believer’s communion with Christ—real, living, direct—without external necessity as a means of grace. This does not erase embodied practices; it refuses to load those practices with the metaphysical weight of Rome’s incarnation-extension.
A Brief Return to Historicism
Before moving into Alliance history and then Eckhart, it is worth sharpening the historicism point. Long before Burckhardt’s retro-template, thinkers like Vico and Herder challenged progress narratives that universalize reason and flatten particularity. Their critique opened space for recognizing how cultures and epochs differ—sometimes unpredictably—and how “progress” can become a mask for spiritual decline. In an eschatological frame, the incarnation remains the fulcrum of history: the decisive event that interprets all others. Historicism, therefore, must not become rational arrogance. It must become discernment: reading events in light of Christ and the Spirit’s work, expecting both predictable patterns of sin and surprising movements of grace.
This is where Simpson’s historicist premillennialism functioned pastorally: not to gratify speculation, but to keep the church alert to counterfeit sacred systems, and anchored in the old faith’s irreducible center—Christ crucified, risen, ascended, sending the Spirit, and coming again.
History
In just over a century, the C&MA has taken root across numerous Roman Catholic contexts—Latin America, the Middle East, Francophone Southeast Asia and Africa, the Philippines, and also North America. One of Simpson’s early disciples, the Italian-American evangelist Michele Nardi, preached and eventually died in Italy; Simpson later compiled Nardi’s story, reflecting the founder’s early attention to immigrant realities and transnational mission. The Alliance was never merely a denominational project; it was a missionary movement born in the cracks of modernity.
Gloria Torres participated firsthand in the remarkable growth of the Lince Alliance Church in Lima, Peru. As a young believer she belonged to a small congregation before the Spirit’s movement expanded it dramatically. Though the work began with North American missionary presence, local leadership emerged—most notably Alfredo Smith—as a catalytic figure in the movement associated with Lima al Encuentro con Dios (LED). Yet even that story warns against technique: the LED approach could not be mechanically replicated elsewhere. Holy Spirit movements are often particular—tied to a place, a people, a set of providences. Mission cannot be reduced to a transferable formula.
Out of that Peruvian movement, Gloria sensed her call and received further training at the Alliance Bible Institute in Guayaquil, Ecuador (1976). Marty, from Cleveland, Ohio, later witnessed analogous realities in North American Alliance life: congregations in which substantial portions of members came from nominal Catholic backgrounds—not through polemical argumentation, but through conversion, Scripture, and Spirit-formed discipleship.
Gloria and Marty married in 1988 after meeting aboard an Operation Mobilization ship—an organization founded by George Verwer, whose missionary imagination consciously resonated with Simpson’s missional impulse and Tozer’s call to the deeper life. In 2010, Gloria and Marty were invited by the Peruvian Alliance to assume a church-planting project in Rome and Milan. Working among Latin Americans, Italians, and refugees, they served and then passed the work on in 2018.
During those years Marty studied philosophy in two Pontifical universities, with the privilege of working closely with Dominican historian Walter Senner, a leading Eckhart scholar. From 2016 onward, Marty also participated in the Reformanda Initiative, which offered a rare vantage: deep immersion in Rome’s institutional world, relationships with clergy from across the globe, encounters with former evangelicals who had “crossed the Tiber,” and an ongoing set of conversations ranging from irenic dialogue to direct polemics.
Yet the most significant “argument” did not occur in seminar rooms. It occurred in the lives of Alliance believers who had come out of Roman Catholicism—immigrants and workers struggling toward stability, yet marked by the simplicity of Scripture, prayer, conversion, and lived obedience. They did not perform systemic analysis. They did not “cherry-pick” practices. They learned Christ. They discovered, often with painful clarity, the difference between ecclesial religiosity and the living Jesus who meets a person by the Spirit.
This is not an argument against learning. It is an argument for remembering where the gospel’s power is located: not in borrowed atmospheres, but in Christ Himself.
His Presence: Eckhart, Immediacy, and the Exaltation of Martha
The medieval preacher-theologian Meister Eckhart sits behind much of the devotional tradition that later fed Protestant “deeper life” currents—including streams Simpson and Tozer read. Eckhart’s signature claim is divine immediacy: God is encountered in the “now,” and the path to God involves a radical detachment from the self. In popular reception, this has made Eckhart appear as a timeless contemplative guide—portable, evocative, and easily adapted.
But Eckhart is not merely a contemplative writer. He is a highly trained scholastic, twice appointed at the University of Paris, moving with full competence in the metaphysical vocabulary of his age. The contrast with Thomas Aquinas is instructive. Thomas’s theology is canonized; Eckhart’s thought is condemned (1329). Both judgments came from the same papal office (John XXII), which already signals that ecclesial politics and theological method cannot be separated.
Eckhart is often treated as an apophatic “mystic,” as though his central contribution were simply silence before mystery. Yet his Latin works—many recovered and edited over the last century and a half—reveal a more precise and philosophically ambitious project. Eckhart drives scholastic theses toward their extreme. He does not merely borrow metaphysics; he weaponizes it in the service of immediacy. His “mysticism,” therefore, is not an escape from reason; it is reason pressed to a spiritual conclusion.
This becomes most vivid in his famous preaching on Mary and Martha. In the standard reading (and in Thomas Aquinas’s interpretation), Mary represents contemplation and “the better part,” while Martha represents active service—good, but secondary. The contemplative life precedes the active life; action flows from adoration.
Eckhart subverts the expected hierarchy. He does not deny Mary’s “better part,” but he relocates the center of gravity: Martha becomes the mature figure. She embodies a life in which contemplation and action are unified within the eternal now. Martha is not merely busy; she is formed. She is not distracted by service; she is stable within service. She is, in Eckhart’s terms, already at home in God while moving within time. The exaltation of Martha functions as a theological argument: the goal is not retreat from the world, but a sanctified activity that remains inwardly free—detached, clear, and unshaken.
Here, Eckhart’s immediacy can feel like Simpson and Tozer’s “His Presence.” The resonance is real. Yet the question remains: what system carries the resonance? For Eckhart, immediacy is not only pastoral; it is metaphysical. The “just person” is nothing in himself, and becomes righteous only by participation in a transcendent righteousness—language that can sound like sanctification, but is operating within a different metaphysical grammar. The Cross is not central in Eckhart’s preaching in the way it is for evangelical proclamation; the Eucharistic economy in his world provides an always-available sacred continuity that can displace the once-for-all logic of the gospel.
This is why Eckhart is both fascinating and dangerous: he offers a powerful description of the integrated life (contemplation and action unified), and he exalts Martha as the figure of mature stability; yet he does so by means of a metaphysical scheme that can quietly relocate gospel finality into a perennial sacred process.
Simpson and Tozer, by contrast, aim at the same integration—union that yields witness—but they anchor it in a different center: Christ crucified and risen, known by Scripture, made present by the Spirit, producing holiness that does not require a sacramental ontology to be “deep.”
Conclusion
The Fourfold Gospel functions as the Alliance’s missionary engine not because it is clever, but because it is Christ-centered and pneumatologically governed. It is not a complete systematic theology; it is a missional confession. It gathers the church around Christ as Savior, Sanctifier, Healer, and Coming King, and it places the life of the believer and the community under the Spirit’s active agency.
Here the Apostles’ Creed fits naturally—not as ecclesial control, but as communal memory:
“He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and His Kingdom will have no end.”
The Ascension ratifies the Fourfold Gospel’s horizon; Pentecost sets its course. “I believe in the Holy Spirit” is not a secondary clause. It is the living nerve of the Alliance tradition: the Spirit reveals Christ, unites the believer to Him, empowers witness, forms holiness, and sustains hope until the King returns.
The older category of the munus triplex—Christ as Prophet, Priest, and King—can serve as a helpful companion framework, but it is still not the gospel. Like Simpson’s merism, it points beyond itself to the person of Christ as the fulfillment of Israel’s offices and promises. What matters is not the elegance of the scheme, but whether the scheme safeguards the biblical time-markers of finality and permanence—what Rome routinely blurs when it frames itself as the church as a prolongation of incarnation and the Mass as an ongoing sacrificial mediation.
Roman Catholicism’s genius is its capacity for synthesis: faith and reason, nature and grace, the secular and the sacred. Yet this very genius can become a gospel-obscuring machine. It does not merely borrow language; it integrates language into a prescriptive metaphysical framework and then reissues it with ecclesial authority. Vatican II did not abandon the system; it refined its atmosphere. The sacred becomes thicker, more humanistic, more participatory—yet also more ecclesiologically absorbing.
The Alliance patriarchs model a different path. Simpson and Tozer could read widely and appropriate devotionally, yet they anchored the “old faith” in Christ alone and the Spirit’s immediacy through Scripture. Their discernment was not an anti-intellectual reaction; it was a gospel instinct: beware any sacred construction—however beautiful—that displaces Calvary, conversion, the Spirit, and the coming King.
The global advance of the gospel—especially among peoples emerging from nominal religion—continues to testify to the old faith’s power. Where the gospel is proclaimed plainly, the Spirit converts. Where Christ is presented as living Lord, believers are formed into witnesses. Where the church remembers that it is not the mediator of sacred power but the Spirit-formed people of the Word, mission regains clarity.
Endnotes
David P. Jones, A.B.: The Unlikely Founder of a Global Movement, 60; A. B. Simpson, The Alliance Weekly, Vol. XLVI, No. 25 (September 16, 1916), 395. See also David J. Smith, “Albert Benjamin Simpson: An Integrated Spirituality with Christ as the Centre,” AWF Resources, http://awf.world/consult/david-j-smith-albert-benjamin-simpson-an-integrated-spirituality-with-christ-as-the-centre/.
Leonardo De Chirico, Evangelical Theological Perspectives on Post-Vatican II Roman Catholicism, 45 (citing Gerrit C. Berkhouwer on systemic vs. atomistic analysis).
Bernie A. Van De Walle, Jesus IS the Gospel, Part 1 lecture (AWF Symposiums, 2018–19), 2–3.
Context note on Smith and Fitch as Alliance theologians (as you drafted).
A. B. Simpson, The Old Faith and the New Gospels, 62, 104–5, 133; The Coming One, 91.
Simpson, The Coming One, 93.
Simpson, The Old Faith, 123.
Simpson, The Old Faith, 23–24, 144–45.
Ibid.
Ibid.
David E. Fitch, Faithful Presence, 65.
Gordon T. Smith, “Conversion and Sanctification in the Christian and Missionary Alliance,” http://awf.world/consult/gordon-t-smith-conversion-and-sanctification-in-the-christian-and-missionary-alliance/.
Martin L. Banzhaf, “Before Bliss: St. Thomas’ Imperfect Happiness,”
Leonardo De Chirico, Post-Vatican II Roman Catholicism, 219; https://www.reformandainitiative.org/resources/nature-and-grace-in-roman-catholicism-part-1; plus your Wells excerpt as drafted.
Franklin Pyles, “The Missionary Eschatology of A. B. Simpson,” http://awf.world/consult/franklin-pyles-the-missionary-eschatology-of-a-b-simpson/; Paul L. King, Alliance Foundations (forthcoming), 57 (as you drafted).
Reiner Schürmann, Broken Hegemonies.
Jakob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy; Guardian review link as you drafted.
Simpson, The Coming One, 32–33 (Mustard Seed/Leaven discussion), as quoted.
Trevin Wax, “Three Definitions of the Secular,” https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/trevin-wax/3-definitions-of-secular-and-why-they-matter-for-our-mission/; plus Ortlund/Armstrong review material as you drafted.
Schaeffer/Hankey
Michael A. Gillespie
Simpson, The Coming One, 54; 198–200; plus the 1871 Rome letter excerpt as you drafted.
De Chirico interview link as drafted: http://vaticanfiles.org/en/2016/10/129-roman-catholic-theology-after-vatican-ii-an-interview/.
De Chirico, “Not Away From Thomism but Deeper into It,” http://vaticanfiles.org/en/2019/05/vf162/.
Banzhaf, “Charles Taylor and Language,” http://globalsouthadvance.blogspot.com/p/introduction-charles-taylor-is-canadian.html.
Fergus Kerr, “A Different World: Neo-Scholasticism and its Discontents.”
Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation; Milbank “Reformation 500” link as drafted.
Milbank discussion + Otten review excerpt as drafted.
Augustine, The City of God, XIV.28.
Gordon T. Smith, “Formation for Ministry in a Secular Age,” Catalyst Resources, https://www.catalystresources.org/formation-for-ministry-in-a-secular-age-1-the-situation-we-find-ourselves-in/a.
Gordon T. Smith, Transforming Conversion, 115–125 (as you summarized).
Gregg R. Allison, Roman Catholic Theology and Practice: An Evangelical Assessment, Kindle loc. 835–1400 (as you noted).
Ibid., Kindle loc. 5058–5684 (as you noted).
Hans Boersma, Heavenly Participation (2011) and Nouvelle Théologie & Sacramental Ontology (2010), plus De Chirico review link as drafted.
Boersma, Nouvelle Théologie & Sacramental Ontology, quoted passage (as drafted).
Raul Corazzon, Theory and History of Ontology (Kindle locations as drafted); plus your Aertsen/Gilson remark.
Note on Pontifical universities’ philosophy/theology faculties (as drafted).
Jack Kilcrease, “Lutheran Theology and the Metaphysical Question,” Theologiae Crucis blog (as drafted).
John Calvin, Institutes, Kindle loc. 756–760 (as drafted).
Creation/common grace sources (Conradie; Bavinck; Reformed Dogmatics), as listed.
James R. Payton, Getting the Reformation Wrong, 190.
Cornelio Fabro, “The Transcendentality of Ens-Esse…” p. 426 (as drafted).
Romans 8:18–27.
Reference back to Boersma note (systemic).
John 1:1–18; 1 Cor 8:6; Col 1:15–20; Heb 1:1–4.
Leonardo De Chirico, “The Blurring of Time Distinctions in Roman Catholicism,” http://vaticanfiles.org/en/2016/04/123-the-blurring-of-time-distinctions-in-roman-catholicism/.
Fitch, Faithful Presence.
Fitch, The End of Evangelicalism?, 155–56 (quoted section as drafted).
Joseph Martos, Deconstructing Sacramental Theology and Reconstructing Catholic Ritual, 54 (as drafted).
Boersma, Heavenly Participation, 105–6; plus Fitch “Flat Epistemology” link as drafted.
De Chirico mariology tag link as drafted.
De Chirico search link on evangelicals as drafted.
De Chirico younger evangelicals fascinated link as drafted.
Smith YouTube timestamp as drafted.
Smith, Transforming Conversion, ch. 8; plus Allison (as drafted).
Smith YouTube timestamp as drafted.
De Chirico unity sphere/polyhedron link; plus Pritchard/De Chirico link; plus Smith timestamp (as drafted).
Simpson, The Coming One, 77–105; and Old Faith, 93 (as drafted).
Simpson, Old Faith, 123–126; plus Maher/Wells references as drafted.
Wells, pp. 32–42 (as drafted).
Boersma, Nouvelle Théologie, 18–21, esp. 20 (as drafted).
De Chirico personhood piece link; plus Simpson Coming One 189–90 excerpt (as drafted).
Banzhaf Murdoch post link as drafted.
Tozer, The Pursuit of God, 106.
Van De Walle, Jesus IS the Gospel, 10.
Andrew Reynolds, “What is Historicism?” p. 275; plus your Nash/Herder comment (as drafted).
Jones, A.B., 251 (Nardi reference) as drafted.
Israel Mandujuano, “Timeless: The C&MA Church of Peru,” with link as drafted.
Simpson, Missionary Messages, 5 (as drafted).
Pastor Gregg Carrick staff link as drafted.
Reformanda Initiative link as drafted.
Note on clergy vs. lay polemics (as drafted).
Clyde Glass dissertation quotation and discussion (as drafted).
Jan Aertsen, Medieval Philosophy as Transcendental Thought, 681 (as drafted).
Walter Senner in Companion to Meister Eckhart, 33–36; plus Harrington, Dangerous Mystic, 299 (as drafted).
James L. Snyder, p. 231–32; Eckhart’s Talks of Instruction and Augustine’s Confessions (as drafted).
John D. Caputo, Heidegger and Aquinas, 274–75; plus papal remarks links as drafted.
Heiko Oberman, The Harvest of Medieval Theology, 335–40.
Kurt Flasch, Meister Eckhart, Philosopher of Christianity, plus your Senner/De Libera commentary (as drafted).
Banzhaf, “Meister Eckhart’s Parisian Quaestio IX,” p. 71, link as drafted.
Boersma, pp. 121–131 (as drafted).
Banzhaf, “Before Bliss,” link as drafted.
Eckhart, LW I citations as drafted.
Flasch, 245–46 (as drafted).
Van De Walle, “How High of a Christian Life?” (as drafted).
Banzhaf, “Could God Create A Better World?”, 11–14, link as drafted.
Augustine quotation (restless heart), as drafted.
Loris Sturlese, Opus Tripartitum, 129–131 (as drafted).
John M. Connolly, Living Without Why; plus your YouTube lecture link as drafted.
Eckhart, LW I references as drafted.
Tozer, The Pursuit of God, 34.
Snyder, p. 159.
Eckhart, Parisian Questions and Prologues, trans. Armand Maurer, intro p. 13; plus LW V citations as drafted.
Chiara Paladini article (as drafted).
Hackett and Hart Weed, p. 228 (as drafted).
Banzhaf, Quaestio IX p. 71 again (as drafted).
Tozer, Faith Beyond Reason, 129–135 (as drafted).
Christopher Knauf blog link and note as drafted.
Eckhart German sermons references (DW I; DW III) and Vinzent pp. 204–205 as drafted.
Your long “Simpson and Tozer’s Augustinian Epistemology” note (Nash, Glass, Simpson quote), as drafted.
Eckhart societies links as drafted.
Banzhaf Charles Taylor page link as drafted.
Frank B. Farrell, How Theology Shaped 20th Century Philosophy (as drafted).
David Bentley Hart Kindle locs as drafted.
Smith, “Conversion and Sanctification in the C&MA,” 1992 (quoted as drafted).
Van De Walle, Saving the Gospel, 6.
Van De Walle, Fourfold Gospel, A. T. Pierson’s threefold office, 170 (as drafted).
Your Israel note (church replaces Israel) as drafted.
De Chirico ecumenism link as drafted.
Pritchard bird’s-eye gospel link; and Banzhaf globalization link (as drafted).
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Eckhart (Meister): Die lateinischen Werke, eds. Ernst Benz et al., vols I–V, Stuttgart, 1936–2012 (=LW).
— Die deutschen Werke, eds. Josef Quint and Georg Steer, vols I–V, Stuttgart, 1936–2007 (=DW).
— Parisian questions and prologues, trans. Armand Maurer, Toronto, 1974.
— The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, trans. Maurice O’C. Walshe, New York, 2009.
— Meister Eckhart Essential Sermons, Treatises, and Defense, trans. Edmund Colledge, ed. Bernard McGinn, Mahwah, 1981.
— Meister Eckhart: Teacher and Preacher, trans. Edmund Colledge, ed. Bernard McGinn, Mahwah, 1986.
Fitch, David E.:
— The Great Giveaway, Grand Rapids, 2005.
— The End of Evangelicalism?, Eugene, 2011.
— Faithful Presence, Downers Grove, 2016.
— The Church of Us vs. Them, Grand Rapids, 2019.
Simpson, Albert B.:
— The Old Faith and the New Gospels, New York, 1911.
— The Coming One, New York, 1912.
Smith, Gordon T.:
— Beginning Well, Downers Grove, 2001.
— Transforming Conversion, Grand Rapids, 2010.
— A Holy Meal, Grand Rapids, 2005.
— Evangelical, Sacramental and Pentecostal, Downers Grove, 2017.
— Called to Be Saints, Downers Grove, 2014.
— “Conversion and Sanctification in the C&MA,” paper, 1992.
— Video archive and ecumenism links as listed.
Tozer, A.W.:
— The Pursuit of God, (1948) republished 2019.
— Faith Beyond Reason, 1997.
