R. A. Torrey

Life

Torrey was born in 1856 into a banking family in Hoboken, New Jersey. He graduated from Yale University and from Yale Divinity School. As a divinity student he is said to have been deeply influenced by the meetings of Dwight L. Moody, an experience that led him to pursue the work of an evangelist. In 1878 he was ordained a Congregational minister and served as a pastor in Garrettsville, Ohio. Around 1882 he studied in Germany at the Universities of Leipzig and Erlangen under scholars such as Franz Delitzsch and Theodor Zahn. After returning to the United States, he planted a church in Minneapolis and also directed the Congregational city mission society there.

In 1889, at Moody's invitation, he moved to Chicago and became the first superintendent of the Bible institute of the Chicago Evangelization Society (now the Moody Bible Institute). In 1894 he became pastor of the Chicago Avenue Church (now the Moody Church), which Moody had founded. From 1912 to 1924 he served as dean of the Bible Institute of Los Angeles (now Biola University), and from 1915 he was also the first pastor of the newly founded Church of the Open Door in the same city. After stepping down from both positions in 1924, he devoted himself to evangelistic meetings and lecturing across the United States until his death in Asheville in 1928.

Ministry and Accomplishments

• Worldwide evangelistic campaigns: From 1902 to 1906, together with song leader Charles Alexander, he traveled to Australia, New Zealand, India, Japan, China, Britain, and elsewhere, holding large-scale revival meetings. He later continued holding meetings in the United States and Canada. In 1908 he began the Montrose Bible Conference, a gathering for Bible study, in Pennsylvania.
• Bible institute education: He led both the Moody Bible Institute and the Bible Institute of Los Angeles during their formative years.
• Fundamentalist movement: He was one of the three editors of The Fundamentals, a series of volumes defending conservative Christian faith against liberal theology. The term fundamentalism derives from the title of this series.
• Writings: He wrote numerous books on prayer, the Holy Spirit, and evangelism, including How to Pray (published in Korean under titles such as "How Should We Pray?" and "How to Receive the Spirit of Prayer"). He emphasized that believers should not rest content with having been saved but should receive the baptism with the Holy Spirit in order to serve with power. Theologically, he is classified as part of the Keswick tradition.

Influence on the Korean Church

His books on prayer and the Holy Spirit have been translated into Korean by several publishers and remain in print. Author biographies from some Korean publishers state that his teaching on the Holy Spirit, transmitted through Robert Hardie and missionaries trained at the Moody Bible Institute, directly influenced the 1903 Wonsan Revival and the 1907 Great Pyongyang Revival. Because these claims come from publishers, however, the specific nature of any such influence requires independent verification in scholarly sources.

Assessment

Torrey is regarded as having carried on the schools, church, and worldwide evangelistic work that Moody established, and in evangelical circles he is remembered as a revivalist devoted to prayer and personal evangelism. His teaching that the baptism with the Holy Spirit is an experience distinct from and subsequent to conversion, however, has been received differently by various traditions. The Holiness movement and Pentecostal traditions stand close to his view in their emphasis on a post-conversion experience of the Spirit. By contrast, many in the Reformed tradition hold that the baptism with the Holy Spirit occurs together with regeneration (the new birth), and so differ with him on this point.