Perfect holiness attained at conversion

Before founding the Oneida Community, John Humphrey Noyes developed a theological position known as Perfectionism, holding that a genuinely converted believer could, in this life and not only after death, achieve complete freedom from sin through a decisive act of faith rather than through the gradual lifelong process of sanctification most American Protestant churches of his era taught. Noyes reached this conclusion while a divinity student in the 1830s and announced it publicly in 1834, a declaration that cost him his license to preach from the New Haven Congregational Association, whose ministers regarded a claim of present sinlessness as both doctrinally reckless and spiritually presumptuous, effectively ending Noyes's prospects within mainstream Congregationalism. Bible Communism presents perfect holiness as the theological foundation the entire Oneida experiment was built on: because members were understood to have already achieved a converted, sinless standing rather than being engaged in an ongoing struggle against sin, the community felt free to reconsider social arrangements, ordinary marriage and private property among them, that Noyes argued had been shaped by a fallen state believers were no longer living in.

Noyes did not treat perfect holiness as a private spiritual claim with no social consequence; he argued that once believers had left sin behind, the ordinary rules by which a sinful society regulated marriage and property no longer bound a community actually living in the perfected state, and complex marriage, developed several years after his 1834 Perfectionist declaration, is presented in the community's own writing as one direct application of that earlier doctrine rather than a separate innovation. Spencer Klaw's history notes that this move set Oneida apart from other nineteenth century Perfectionist and Holiness currents, several of which taught a similar doctrine of entire sanctification, the Wesleyan Holiness movement among them, without drawing anything resembling Noyes's conclusions about marriage, since most Perfectionist teachers held that a sinless life would express itself in stricter conventional morality rather than in its revision. The distinction mattered enough to Noyes's contemporaries that Oneida was frequently treated as a cautionary example within wider Perfectionist and Holiness circles, cited by more conventional revivalist preachers as proof that a doctrine of present sinlessness needed firm guardrails, precisely because one prominent exponent of it had used the same doctrine to justify an arrangement most American Christians of the period considered scandalous.