Thomas Campbell, an Argyle Scot by lineage, was born in North Ireland in 1763, took a full classical course in the University of Glasgow, and after that the full course in the theological seminary of the Anti-Burgher section of the Seceder branch of the Scottish Presbyterian Church. After preaching and teaching for several years, he became the settled pastor of a church at Ahorey, in County Armaugh, thirty miles south of Belfast, where he remained from 1798 until 1807. Meanwhile he had married the daughter of a French Huguenot family, and his son Alexander had been born in 1788. While ministering to the Ahorey church, he also conducted a private academy at the neighboring town of Rich Hill. Throughout his life, Thomas Campbell devoted more of his time to teaching than to preaching.
The Seceder Presbyterians had split from the established Church of Scotland in 1733 in protest against the arrangement by which the right of appointing ministers had been taken from the parishes and given to lay “patrons,” or landlords, for whom the right to appoint the parson went with their ownership of land. No question of doctrine was involved in this secession. The Seceders were, if anything, stricter Calvinists than the Church of Scotland. Later, the Seceders divided into Burghers and Anti-Burghers, and each of these into New Lights and Old Lights, on fine points concerning the relations of the church to the state. These divisions were carried from Scotland to Ireland, though the issues were irrelevant to conditions there. Thomas Campbell was an Old Light, Anti-Burgher Seceder Presbyterian. But he early outgrew any interest in these divisive issues and sought ways of promoting unity at least among the Seceders.
Aside from the odious examples of disunion before his eyes, two other influences drew Thomas Campbell toward a wider fellowship. One was the Independent (Congregational) church at Rich Hill, a church of the Scotch Independent type, strongly affected by the ideas of Glas and Sandeman and the Haldane brothers. Here he met the celebrated English evangelist, Rowland Hill, who preached an ardent gospel that took little account of sectarian boundaries, and the eccentric John Walker of Dublin, who left the Episcopal Church and resigned a fellowship in Trinity College to lead an independent movement. Campbell was already familiar with the writings of Glas and Sandeman and with the work of the Haldanes. None of these was explicitly an advocate of union; but they all played down the doctrines and creeds which create divisions and the ecclesiastical institutions which perpetuate them; and all played up a warm evangelical faith voluntarily accepted and a return to the simple practices of the New Testament church.
The second influence which moved Mr. Campbell toward a nonsectarian view of religion was the writings of the philosopher, John Locke, especially his Letters Concerning Toleration. In these essays Locke had urged toleration, not only by the state toward dissenting groups, but also by the church toward varieties of theological opinion within itself. Sentences could be quoted from Locke which sound as though they came straight from the Declaration and Address. All this rested on a philosophy carefully worked out in his Essay on the Human Understanding. Thomas Campbell diligently studied these two books by John Locke and made them required reading for his son Alexander, who never ceased to give them his unbounded admiration.
Partly because of ill health in his forties (he lived to the age of ninety-one), and partly to find a place of ampler opportunity for his seven children, Thomas Campbell migrated to America in 1807, as many of his Ulster neighbors had done before him. He landed at Philadelphia on May 13, fortunately found the Associate Synod of North America, which represented all the Seceders in America, in session in that city, presented his credentials and was received into the synod on May 16, and two days later was appointed to the Presbytery of Chartiers in southwestern Pennsylvania. The minutes of the presbytery show that he had preaching appointments at “Buffaloe” (now Bethany, W. Va.), Pittsburgh, and other points beginning July 1. So, in less than three months after preaching his farewell sermon in the Ahorey church in Ireland, Thomas Campbell was ministering to a circuit of communities on the American frontier.
But the connection so promptly made was not long peacefully maintained. At the October meeting of the presbytery, another minister filed charges against him for heretical teaching and disorderly procedure, and others testified unfavorably. After several confused and stormy sessions, the presbytery suspended Mr. Campbell. He appealed to the synod in Philadelphia at its meeting the next year. There were extended and complicated proceedings, culminating in a formal trial in which he was found guilty on several counts, and was sentenced to be “rebuked and admonished.” At the same time the synod censured the presbytery for its irregular and unfair handling of the case. Evidently the synod did not think too badly of Mr. Campbell, for it gave him appointments with the Philadelphia churches for the summer and then sent him back to resume his preaching in the Presbytery of Chartiers. But the presbytery, smarting under the synod’s censure and the reversal of its act of suspension, gave him a chilly reception. Specifically, it failed to give him any preaching appointments, and a rule of the church forbade a preacher to make his own. Tensions and animosities developed until, on September 13, 1808, Thomas Campbell orally—and the next day in writing—renounced the authority of both presbytery and synod. From that act, severing his connection with the Seceder Presbyterians, Thomas Campbell never receded. But the presbytery continued to summon him to appear and answer charges until, a year and a half later, it gave him up as hopeless and voted to depose him “from the holy ministry and from the sealing ordinances.”
What were the reasons for this break? Richardson, in his Memoirs of Alexander Campbell, says that Thomas Campbell gave offense first by inviting Presbyterians other than Seceders to participate in the communion service. This does not appear among the written charges in the minutes of either the presbytery or the synod, but it may well be true. He is quoted as saying that the test of fitness to commune should be only a “general,” not a “particular,” acceptance of the Westminster Confession, and that he himself would gladly commune with other Christians, Lutherans, for example, if a church of his own order were not available. Moreover, he admitted advising Seceders to attend the preaching services of other churches if none of their own was at hand.
The heart of the difficulty was that he said that “the church has no divine warrant for holding Confessions of Faith as terms of communion”; creeds may be useful for teaching, but they should not be used as tests of fellowship, because they contain some things that cannot be proved by the Bible and many things that ordinary people cannot understand. The only strictly theological point related to the nature of “saving faith,” which, in Mr. Campbell’s view, did not necessarily include a sense of “assurance that we in particular shall be saved.” He had already moved far toward the conception of faith as the rational belief of testimony about Christ and trust in him, rather than a mystical experience evidencing a special act of divine grace in favor of the individual to assure him that he had been accepted by God. Two other complaints show that Mr. Campbell had been restless under the restraints of the Presbyterian system. He had preached, on invitation from the people, within the parish or circuit of another minister without getting his consent. And he had said that, in the absence of a minister, “ruling elders” (who would be laymen) might properly pray and exhort in public worship.
At this stage, then, it appears from the record that Thomas Campbell did not radically reject either the Calvinistic theology as a system of doctrine or the Presbyterian polity as a system of church government, though he was far on the way toward rejecting both. His divergence from the Seceder Presbyterians can be summed up under these points: (1) He wanted closer relations with Christians of other denominations. (2) He did not regard the creed as the standard of truth or as an authoritative compendium of the truths revealed in Scripture, but claimed for himself and for every Christian the right to be judged and to test the creed by reference to the plain teachings of the Bible. (3) He held that acceptance of the creed in detail should not be a condition of communion or fellowship. (4) He was suspicious of clerical monopoly. (5) He said that a feeling of assurance of salvation was not of the essence of saving faith, though it might accompany a high degree of such faith. (6) He held that Christ died for all men, and that any man could believe on him and be saved. This last point was his most definite departure from Calvinism.
If the presbytery gave Campbell no preaching appointments after the synod had sent him back “rebuked and admonished,” naturally it gave him none after he had renounced its authority. But he continued to preach in private houses as opportunity offered. None of the churches for which he had preached followed him, and no Presbyterian ministers joined him in withdrawing from the Presbytery of Chartiers. In those respects his movement differed in its beginning from that of O’Kelly and from that of McNemar and Stone. But in both of the earlier secessions the separatists had been preaching in their districts for years, and the ground had been plowed by revivals, and in Kentucky the way had been prepared by the immigration of many “Christian” ministers and laymen from the East. Thomas Campbell, on the other hand, was a newcomer from Ireland and made the break in a community where there had been no such preparation and where he had no wide acquaintance.
Before the final action expelling Mr. Campbell from the Seceder Presbyterian ministry, a group of his sympathizers and habitual hearers, meeting at the home of Abraham Altars, between Mount Pleasant and Washington, Pennsylvania, resolved to form a society “to give more definiteness to the movement in which they had thus far been cooperating without any formal organization or definite arrangement.” The result was the “Christian Association of Washington,” organized August 17, 1809. It was agreed that a proper motto would be, “Where the Scriptures speak, we speak; where the Scriptures are silent, we are silent.” One member protested that this would lead to giving up infant baptism. The others thought not, but considered it a sound principle wherever it might lead. To express more fully the motives and purposes of the association, Thomas Campbell drew up a Declaration and Address, which was presented at a subsequent meeting as the report of a committee of twenty-one. (The total membership was not much more.) On September 7, 1809, the association approved it and ordered it printed.
It was exactly at this point that Alexander Campbell arrived from Ireland by way of Scotland.
When Thomas Campbell came to America, he left his family in Ireland. Alexander, then nineteen years old, was to conduct his father’s school at Rich Hill until the end of the term and to bring his mother and the six younger children to America when his father gave the word. The word came when Thomas Campbell had been in America about fifteen months. On October 1, 1808, the family embarked at Londonderry. Their ship ran aground on one of the rocky islands of the Hebrides. During that experience, Alexander’s previous thought about devoting himself to the ministry reached the point of a firm decision. The interruption of the voyage so late in the sailing season made it necessary to wait until spring for its continuance. The shipwrecked travelers made their way to Glasgow, where they remained almost an entire year.
This year in Glasgow proved to be very important. It gave Alexander opportunity to supplement the excellent instruction he had received from his father by a year of study in the University of Glasgow. In addition, it brought him into contact with the men from whom, as his biographer, Richardson, says, he derived “his first impulse as a religious reformer.” These were representatives of the movement led and financed by the brothers Robert and James Alexander Haldane.
Alexander Campbell came to Glasgow with a letter of introduction to Mr. Greville Ewing, who was in charge of the seminary, or training school for lay preachers, which the Haldanes had established in that city. Mr. Ewing became his closest and most helpful friend during that year in Glasgow. Ewing had introduced into his seminary the books of Glas and Sandeman, whose teachings gave the strongest possible emphasis to the restoration of primitive Christianity in all details. In Ewing’s conversation and Glas’s and Sandeman’s books, Alexander Campbell found not only the general concept of a needed restoration of primitive Christianity but such specific ideas as these: the independence of the local congregation; weekly observance of the Lord’s Supper; a plurality of elders; the denial of clerical privileges and dignities; the right and duty of laymen to have a part in the edification and discipline of the church; and a conception of faith as such a belief of testimony as any man is capable of by the application of his natural intelligence to the facts supplied by Scripture. The Haldanes themselves, and some of the followers of Sandeman, had adopted immersion, but Ewing adhered to infant baptism and sprinkling.
The action of all these influences upon Alexander Campbell’s mind, and of his mind upon what he saw and learned of Presbyterianism in Scotland, brought him to a profound dissatisfaction with it. He had no quarrel with its theology. Near the end of his year in Glasgow, when he was examined by the Seceder church to determine his fitness to partake of the communion—because he brought no credentials, and the Seceders were very careful to permit no unqualified person to commune—no fault was found with his profession of faith, and he received the “token” which would admit him to the table. But at the communion service, after postponing his decision to the last possible moment, he laid down his token and walked out. This was, in effect, his break with the Seceder Presbyterian Church. He never went back.
Alexander Campbell and the family sailed for America early in August, 1809, landed at New York on September 29, and proceeded to Philadelphia by stage-coach and thence westward by wagon. Word had been sent ahead to Thomas Campbell, and he met them on the road in western Pennsylvania, October 19, with a copy of the freshly printed Declaration and Address in his pocket. Father and son, with an ocean between them, had independently broken with their religious past and moved by converging paths toward the same goal. Alexander read the Declaration and Address and was enthusiastic about it. It marshaled him the way that he was going.
The Declaration and Address is one of the most important documents in the history of the Disciples. It deserves not only reading in full but careful study. As published in a later edition, it is a pamphlet of fifty-six pages containing four parts: first, a Declaration (3 pages) stating briefly the plans and purposes of the Christian Association of Washington; second, an Address (18 pages), signed by Thomas Campbell and Thomas Acheson, giving an extended argument for the unity of all Christians and amplifying the principles on which the church can regain its original unity and purity; third, an Appendix (31 pages) explaining several points in the Address; fourth, a Postscript (3 pages), written three months later, suggesting steps to be taken for the promotion of the movement.
The Declaration states the aim and the means of attaining it. The aim: “unity, peace, and purity.” The means: “rejecting human opinions, ... returning to, and holding fast by, the original standard.” The method of procedure is outlined under nine heads:
1. The formation of a religious association “for the sole purpose of promoting simple evangelical Christianity, free from all mixture of human opinions and inventions of men.”
2. Contributions “to support a pure Gospel Ministry, that shall reduce to practice that whole form of doctrine, worship, discipline, and government, expressly revealed and enjoined in the word of God.”
3. The formation of similar societies.
4. The Christian Association of Washington is not a church, but an organization of “voluntary advocates for church reformation.”
5. The association will support only such ministers as conform to “the original standard.”
6. A committee of twenty-one, chosen annually, shall transact the business of the association.
7. Meetings shall be held twice a year.
8. An order of business for the meetings.
9. The association agrees to support those ministers whom it shall invite to assist “in promoting a pure evangelical reformation, by the simple preaching of the everlasting gospel, and the administration of its ordinances in an exact conformity to the Divine Standard.”
The Address opens, and for many pages continues, with a picture of the “awful and distressing effects” of division among Christians, an impassioned plea for unity, an argument that conditions in America are uniquely favorable for a union effort, and a restatement of the causes of division and the basis of union. Mr. Campbell revealed the central principle of his endeavor, the ground of his hope for its success, and the breadth of his tolerance, when he wrote:
It is, to us, a pleasing consideration that all the churches of Christ, which mutually acknowledge each other as such, are not only agreed in the great doctrines of faith and holiness; but are also materially agreed, as to the positive ordinances of Gospel institution; so that our differences, at most, are about the things in which the kingdom of God does not consist, that is, about matters of private opinion, or human invention.
The Address then lays down thirteen numbered propositions, which, in condensed form, are as follows:
1. “The church of Christ upon earth is essentially, intentionally, and constitutionally one.”
2. Congregations locally separate ought to be in fellowship with one another.
3. Nothing ought to be an article of faith, a term of communion, or a rule for the constitution and management of the church except what is expressly taught by Christ and his apostles.
4. “The New Testament is as perfect a constitution for the worship, discipline and government of the New Testament church, and as perfect a rule for the particular duties of its members; as the Old Testament was ... for ... the Old Testament Church.”
5. The church can give no new commandments where the Scriptures are silent.
6. Inferences and deductions from Scripture may be true doctrine, but they are not binding on the consciences of Christians further than they perceive them to be so.
7. Creeds may be useful for instruction but must not be used as tests of fitness for membership in the church.
8. Full knowledge of all revealed truth is not necessary to entitle persons to membership, “neither should they, for this purpose, be required to make a profession more extensive than their knowledge.” Realization of their need of salvation, faith in Christ as Savior, and obedience to him are all that is necessary.
9. All who are thus qualified should love each other as brothers and be united.
10. “Division among christians is a horrid evil.”
11. Divisions have been caused, in some cases, by neglect of the expressly revealed will of God; in others, by assuming authority to make human opinions the test of fellowship or to introduce human inventions into the faith and practice of the church.
12. All that is needed for the purity and perfection of the church is that it receive those, and only those, who profess faith in Christ and obey him according to the Scriptures, that it retain them only so long as their conduct is in accord with their profession, that ministers teach only what is expressly revealed, and that all divine ordinances be observed as the New Testament church observed them.
13. When the church adopts necessary “expedients,” they should be recognized for what they are and should not be confused with divine commands, so that they will give no occasion for division.
The Appendix explains and clarifies several points in the foregoing and answers possible objections.
The Postscript, written after the committee of twenty-one had held its first monthly meeting, December 14, 1809, makes two suggestions. The first is that there be prepared “a catechetical exhibition of the fulness and precision of the holy scriptures upon the entire subject of christianity—an exhibition of that complete system of faith and duty expressly contained in the sacred oracles; respecting the doctrine, worship, discipline, and government of the christian church.” Fortunately, this was never done. The second suggestion is that a monthly magazine be published, to be called the Christian Monitor, to be started when 500 subscribers were secured, and to be devoted to “detecting and exposing the various anti-christian enormities, innovations and corruptions, which infect the christian church.” This project also was dropped, and it was not until thirteen years later, and in the hands of Alexander Campbell, that the Christian Baptist took the assignment of “detecting and exposing.”
At this distance in time it is not easy to see how the author and signers of the Declaration and Address could suppose that they would be able to “reduce to practice that whole form of doctrine, worship, discipline, and government, expressly revealed” without employing any opinions of their own in interpreting the revelation, when they clearly saw that those who had attempted this before them had produced discordant and divisive systems. They were sounding their prophetic and unifying note when they declared, in the same document, that the basis of fellowship is not agreement on any complete system of doctrine and church practice, but is the simple and saving essentials of the gospel upon which Christians generally are already agreed.
Alexander Campbell, newly arrived on the scene of this nascent reformation, immediately settled down to a strenuous course of private study—Bible, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and church history. He preached his first sermon on July 15, 1810, in a private house. He had no license to preach and he was a member of no church, for he had left his Presbyterianism in Scotland, and the Christian Association of Washington was not yet a church. He preached a hundred times during the next twelve months.
After Thomas Campbell had applied for admission to the regular (not Seceder) Presbyterian Synod of Pittsburgh, and had been rejected, the Christian Association of Washington constituted itself a church, on May 4, 1811. This became the first church among Disciples of Christ in the Campbell strain of their lineage. The new church chose Thomas Campbell as elder, elected four deacons, and licensed Alexander Campbell to preach. It observed the Lord’s Supper the next day, and thereafter every Lord’s day. A simple building was erected—the Brush Run Church—and the first service was held in it on June 16, 1811. Alexander Campbell was ordained on the first day of the next January.
The subject of baptism had not yet been seriously considered. Some members of the group, and some of its critics, doubted whether the principles of the Declaration and Address were consistent with infant baptism and sprinkling. Thomas Campbell was not disturbed about it. Stating his views to the Synod of Pittsburgh, he had said that infant baptism is not a command of Christ, hence not a condition of membership in the church, but that it is a matter of forbearance. Three members of the Brush Run Church, soon after its organization, refused to commune because they had not been baptized. These had not even been sprinkled, yet they had been admitted to membership. “Forbearance” had extended so far. At their urgent request, Thomas Campbell immersed them—somewhat reluctantly, it may be surmised, for he did it without going into the water himself. At that time Alexander Campbell said: “As I am sure it is unscriptural to make this matter [baptism] a term of communion, I let it slip. I wish to think and let think on these matters.”
Almost a year later, the birth of his first child forced the question of infant baptism upon his attention and drove him to a study of the whole subject. The result was the conviction that the sprinkling of infants was not baptism within the meaning of the New Testament. On June 12, 1812, Thomas and Alexander Campbell, their wives, and three other members of the church were immersed in Buffalo Creek by a Baptist preacher, on a simple confession of faith in Christ. Most of the members of the Brush Run Church soon followed this example. Those who did not, withdrew.
The adoption of immersion in this way, as the unvarying practice of the church and therefore as an item in the proposed platform for the union of all churches, radically changed the program of the movement. It had begun with the idea that the churches were divided by human opinions that had been added to a perfectly adequate common core of revealed truth and duty which all accepted. But now the Reformers could no longer say, as Thomas Campbell had said, that all the churches “are agreed in the great doctrines of faith and holiness and as to the positive ordinances of the Gospel institution.” To achieve union no longer required only persuading the churches to unite upon something that they already held. Now, it became necessary to persuade them also to accept one “positive ordinance” which only the Baptists believed to be commanded in the New Testament.
But if the adoption of immersion erected a barrier between the Reformers and the other churches, it brought them closer to the Baptists. In the autumn of 1813 the Brush Run Church applied for admission to the Redstone Baptist Association, at the same time submitting a full written statement of its position, including its protest against creeds. The application was accepted, over the protest of some of the Baptist ministers. For the next seventeen years, the Reformers were, as Walter Scott said, “in the bosom of the Regular Baptist churches.” But they did not lose their sense of mission or merge indistinguishably in the Baptist denomination.
After the Brush Run Church had joined the Redstone Baptist Association, Alexander Campbell began to preach more widely among the Baptist churches of the region. Thomas Campbell, who was more occupied with teaching than with preaching, rather rapidly dropped out of his position of leadership, which was taken over by his son. Alexander had married the daughter of a well-to-do farmer, and his father-in-law had deeded to him the farm which was to be the nucleus of his large Bethany estate, part of which became the campus of Bethany College thirty years later. Even at the age of twenty-five he enjoyed economic security and was well on the way toward becoming a substantial citizen.
At a meeting of the Redstone Baptist Association in August, 1816, Alexander Campbell preached his famous “Sermon on the Law.” There seems to have been some scheming to keep him off the program, and he was called in only at the last moment to fill a vacancy. But the content of the sermon, if not its form, had evidently been the subject of long and careful study. The central point of it was that the Christian system is not a continuation of the Jewish regime but is based on a new covenant which, though prepared for and prophesied in the religion of the Old Testament, is a radically new thing. Therefore, he said, no arguments can be drawn from the Old Testament about the nature or form of Christian institutions. The law of the Sabbath has nothing to do with the observance of the first day of the week; baptism cannot be understood by considering it as taking the place of circumcision; paying tithes and keeping fasts are no part of a Christian’s duty; and any alliance between church and state, as in the old covenant of God with the Hebrews, is alien to the spirit and nature of Christianity.
Some of these conclusions—especially separation of church and state and the denial of any analogy between baptism and circumcision—were pleasing to the Baptist audience. But the basis of the argument, the complete abrogation of the Old Testament law, seemed to many a dangerous doctrine. The preachers who heard the sermon went out to spread among the churches their fears that this bold and brilliant young man might be a disturber of Baptist usage. Thereafter he “itinerated less” among the Baptist churches and confined his labors to “three or four little communities constituted on the Bible, one in Ohio, one in Virginia and two in Pennsylvania.” But he also made one or two preaching trips a year among the regular Baptists. He opened in 1818, and conducted for four years, a boarding school for boys, especially with a view to finding and training candidates for the ministry.
Mr. Campbell’s Baptist colleagues may have considered him heretical about the covenants, but they could not fail to value him as a champion of immersion. So when a Seceder Presbyterian minister, John Walker of Mt. Pleasant, Ohio, issued a challenge for a debate on that topic, they urged him to accept it. Mr. Walker, as challenger, affirmed that the infant children of believers are proper subjects for baptism and that sprinkling is a proper mode. As to the baptism of infants, he rested his case almost wholly on the proposition “that baptism came in the room of circumcision, that the covenant on which the Jewish church was built and to which circumcision is the seal, is the same with the covenant on which the Christian church is built and to which Baptism is the seal.” This is precisely the proposition that Mr. Campbell had denied in his “Sermon on the Law,” and it gave him opportunity to elaborate and reinforce his argument as to the radical newness of Christianity and its freedom from Old Testament law. In addition, he made use of his careful studies of the Greek word baptizein and the prepositions used with it in the passages describing baptism. He quoted pedobaptist lexicographers and commentators to prove that the Greek verb means “to immerse”; and he stressed the distinction between “positive” and “moral” precepts to show that the former, including baptism, demand implicit obedience with no reasoning on our part as to the expediency or value of the thing commanded.
The debate with Walker was held at Mt. Pleasant, Ohio, in June, 1820. It greatly enhanced Campbell’s reputation, especially among the Baptists of the Mahoning Association in eastern Ohio, and brought him many invitations to preach in the churches of this association. The publication of the debate as a book gave much wider publicity to his ideas and brought on another debate, in October, 1823, with W. L. Maccalla, a Presbyterian minister of Augusta, Kentucky. This debate was held at Washington, Mason County, Kentucky. On the horseback trip from his home to that place, Mr. Campbell was accompanied by Sidney Rigdon, then a young Baptist minister in Pittsburgh, later one of the three who constituted the “first presidency” of the Mormon Church and still later a rival of Brigham Young for its leadership after the death of the “prophet” Joseph Smith. The text of Campbell’s side of the discussion, as subsequently published, is based on Rigdon’s report.
In the Maccalla debate, Campbell began to develop his theory of the design of baptism. Baptism is appropriate for penitent believers, not for innocent infants, because it is the “washing of regeneration,” designed to cleanse, not from inherited original sin, but from the guilt of actual personal sins. Yet it is not a magical “water salvation,” though he was often accused of teaching that. “The blood of Christ really cleanses us who believe.... The water of baptism formally washes away our sins.” This distinction was never again so clearly stated, and it may be argued that it represents a stage through which Mr. Campbell’s thought passed, rather than a conclusion on which it rested. However, it brought into prominence the conception of “baptism for the remission of sins.” When the distinction between “real” and “formal” remission was dropped, other ways were found for avoiding the morally repugnant conclusion that, if remission comes by baptism and only immersion is baptism, then the unimmersed must necessarily be damned. Neither Campbell nor the Disciples after him ever believed that.
The journey to Kentucky to meet Maccalla was the first of Alexander Campbell’s many visits to Kentucky. It put him in touch with men and churches that were going his way—the “Christians,” and a strain among the Baptists that was to furnish powerful reinforcement to his cause. And on that long journey by horseback he carried in his saddlebags copies of the first issue of his new magazine, the Christian Baptist.
The Christian Baptist began in 1823 and continued for seven years. Mr. Campbell was his own publisher. He set up a printing office on his farm, secured the location of the post office of Buffaloe (later Bethany), and was appointed postmaster. The magazine took up at once the delayed task of “detecting and exposing the various anti-christian enormities, innovations and corruptions which infect the christian church.” It was small, as a hornet is small, and its sting was as keen. It attacked especially three characteristics of the existing churches: the authority and status assumed by the clergy; unscriptural organizations, such as synods and church courts, missionary societies, Bible societies, Sunday schools, and all kinds of “innovations” and “popular schemes”; and the use of creeds. There was loud outcry that it sowed the seeds of discord among the churches. It certainly did. Mr. Campbell would have said that there must always be discord when truth is boldly proclaimed and error is stubbornly held.
On the constructive side, the magazine used much space in developing—as the Postscript had suggested doing in a catechism—“that complete system of faith and duty expressly contained in the Sacred Oracles respecting the doctrine, worship and government of the church.” A few years later it was said that Mr. Campbell now became the advocate of “a particular ecclesiastical order.” To him it was the order of the apostolic church. For a time, little attention was paid to Christian unity. This objective was not forgotten, but it was held that emphasis should be first upon the pattern and procedure of the primitive church as the only ground upon which Christians could unite.
All this produced an upheaval among the Baptist churches within the area of Mr. Campbell’s personal and journalistic influence—and it was a considerable area. Since the Redstone Association, to which the Brush Run Church belonged, for the most part resisted his ideas in their earlier statement, he had formed a new Baptist church in the town which is now Wellsburg, on the Ohio River, seven miles from Bethany, and secured its admission into the Mahoning Association of eastern Ohio. But in 1826, ten Redstone churches that stood firm for the Philadelphia Confession and Baptist usages cut off thirteen that leaned toward the Reformers, and the thirteen joined the Washington (Pa.) Association, thereby overbalancing it in the same direction. The Mahoning Association became thoroughly permeated by the idea of restoring primitive practice. The church at Hiram, for example, abandoned its church covenant, constitution, and Confession of Faith to adopt “the Bible alone” as its standard; and all the others were following fast in the same way. Many Baptist churches in western Pennsylvania and Virginia contained large minorities, if not actual majorities, favorable to the “restoration” program. One can understand the distress of Rev. Robert Semple, who, speaking as one quite satisfied with the Baptist position, said that the Christian Baptist was “more mischievous than any publication I have ever known.”
The ferment in Kentucky was even more acute. For more than twenty years the Baptists in that state, while gaining rapidly in numbers, had been troubled by dissension concerning some of their Calvinistic doctrines and questions growing out of them—election, whether Christ died for all; the nature of faith, whether saving faith requires a special enabling act by the Holy Spirit for each individual; and the kind of “experience” a converted man ought to have. Some associations had divided on one or more of these issues. Camp-meeting methods, developed in and after the “great revival,” offended some by their disorderly enthusiasm, gratified others by their offer of salvation to all. The “Christian” churches, which provided a continuing series of revivals with Methodistic coloration, attracted those who wanted freedom both from the rigid theology of the old creeds and from the Methodist and Presbyterian systems of centralized control over ministers and local churches.
Stirred by these influences, many Kentucky Baptists were ready for a call to follow a “reformer.” The Christian Baptist, the Maccalla debate in 1823, and Mr. Campbell’s extensive tour through Kentucky the next year furnished the call.
One of its most eager and receptive hearers was “Raccoon” John Smith. He was a frontiersman with little formal education but with a keen mind, a free spirit, and a passion for preaching the gospel. In 1824, when he met Campbell, he was forty years old (four years older than Campbell) and had been an ordained Baptist minister for sixteen years. Within the next year he began to preach in the way of the Reformers—the gospel for all, a simple faith in Christ such as is common to all sects, no creed, every man able to believe and repent, no miraculous “experience” needed. Charges of un-Baptistic teaching were brought against him at an annual meeting of the North District Association and were to be acted upon the next year. Meanwhile he went forth to evangelize and before the next meeting of the association he had won so many converts and organized so many new churches “on the Bible alone” that the charges had to be dropped. In April, 1830, this association formally adopted the principles of the Reformers, but did not at that time dissolve. Within the year, three or four other Baptist associations had taken similar action. At the same time, through the work of other Baptist preachers who cast in their lot with the new movement, many new independent churches had been formed, and some old churches had dropped the Baptist name. As early as 1825 the Baptist church in Louisville, of which P. S. Fall was pastor, voted to give up the Philadelphia Confession and take the Bible alone. Jacob Creath, Sr., and Jacob Creath, Jr., and John Smith evangelized so widely and so successfully that the new movement gathered a considerable following from the previously unconverted as well as from the Baptist churches. By the end of 1830, the Reformers—“Campbellites” to their opponents—were a clearly recognizable element in Kentucky, though most of them were still nominally Baptists.
But the events which were most decisive in changing the Reformers from “Reforming Baptists” to an independent group to be known as Disciples occurred in the Mahoning Association in eastern Ohio. The man who had most to do with these events was Walter Scott. Born in Edinburgh in 1796 and educated in the university of that city, Scott was still a member of the Church of Scotland when he came to New York immediately after his graduation and to Pittsburgh the next year. Here he taught in a school conducted by a Mr. Forrester, who was also the leader of a church of immersed Haldaneans—locally known as “kissing Baptists.” Scott joined this church. To gain a better understanding of the restoration of primitive practices, he visited similar churches in New York, Paterson, New Jersey, Baltimore, and Washington. He found that they did not entirely agree as to just what the practice of the primitive church was. He returned to Pittsburgh much depressed, but resumed his teaching and studied the writings of Locke, Glas, Sandeman, and Haldane to clarify his religious ideas. The sudden death of Mr. Forrester threw upon him the care of the little church. His first meeting with Mr. Campbell, his senior by eight years, was at Pittsburgh in the winter of 1821-22. They met occasionally during the next year, and the contact brought Scott out of his fog. When Campbell was planning his magazine, it was Scott who suggested the name, “Christian Baptist,” as an indication that the aim was to work with and through the Baptists, not to promote a defection from them.
Scott’s chief interest was in defining the process by which one becomes a Christian. That had really been the central point in Thomas Campbell’s original concern, for this, in his view, would define the terms of fellowship and become the basis of union. But attention had been diverted to developing a complete pattern for the restoration of the church on the primitive model. To the first four issues of the Christian Baptist, Scott contributed a series of articles on “A Divinely Authorized Plan of Preaching the Christian Religion.” The plan of preaching it and the plan of accepting it must naturally be the same. There must be the right elements in the right order. He found that the exact steps, authoritatively given as constituting the way to salvation, were these: (1) Faith, the persuasion of the mind by rational evidence. “The messiahship rests on demonstration,” and everything else follows from that on authority. (2) Repentance of sins, under the motive of the promises. (3) Baptism, in obedience to divine command. (4) Remission of sins, and (5) the gift of the Holy Spirit, both in fulfillment of God’s promise, which is conditioned on man’s completion of the first three steps.
These became the five points of Scott’s standard sermon and the outline of a tremendously effective evangelistic appeal. These points were all implicit in what Campbell was teaching, but so long as they remained implicit they could not win converts; they could only change some regular Baptists into Reforming Baptists, and divide Baptist churches and associations. The Mahoning Association was more thoroughly imbued with Campbell’s views than any other; yet at its annual meeting in 1827 all its churches together (excepting Campbell’s own church at Wellsburg, which did a little better) reported only twenty-one additions for the year—and there had been twelve excommunications. It was agreed to appoint an evangelist to “travel and teach among the churches.” Scott, who had moved to Steubenville, Ohio, within the boundaries of the association, and who had visited its meetings twice at Campbell’s invitation and preached before it once, was asked to accept this appointment. He was not a member of the association, not a Baptist, not an ordained minister. With the Mahoning Association in 1827, evidently being a Reformer counted for more than being a Baptist.
It was a good appointment. Scott began his work at New Lisbon, Ohio. The first convert under his new presentation of the “ancient gospel” was William Amend, who, according to Scott’s biographer, Baxter, “was beyond all question the first person in modern times who received the ordinance of baptism in perfect accordance with apostolic teaching and usage.” That was on November 18, 1827. The force and freshness of Scott’s appeal, the exciting sense of discovery, the thought that an ancient treasure of divine truth was just now being brought to light after being lost for centuries, the sense of witnessing the dawn of a new epoch in the history of Christianity—these things gave to the campaign an extraordinary quality. It was different from other revivals. Here was no debauch of emotion, but an attractive blending of rationality and authority. It appealed to common sense as well as to Scripture. It assumed man’s rational ability to understand what he ought to do and why, and his moral ability to do it. The first three steps were man’s; the other two were God’s. When the convert had believed, repented, and obeyed (i.e., been baptized), he could be perfectly sure that he would be saved by the remission of his sins and the gift of the Holy Spirit and eternal life. He had the promise of God for it.
Scott’s work extended throughout eastern Ohio. Besides completing the conquest of the Mahoning Association for the Reform, it gained great numbers of converts—many from other denominations but many also, probably more, who had been members of no church. New churches were organized. Some of the Baptist preachers entered vigorously into the new movement, and some of the new converts—such as William Hayden, A. S. Hayden, and John Henry—became preachers of great power. The first year of this new evangelism brought more than 1,000 additions to the churches of the Mahoning Association, more than doubling their total membership. Scott was assisted at times by Joseph Gaston, a “Christian” preacher who was, Scott says, the first of that church who “received the gospel after its restoration.” At the 1828 meeting of the association, William Hayden was added to the staff, and the next year Bentley and Bosworth.
In three years, the Mahoning Association had lost every distinctive Baptist characteristic except its form and name as a Baptist association. Scott’s rigid devotion to the idea of reproducing the practice of the primitive church led him to the conviction that there was no warrant for associations. He suggested that the association be dissolved and persuaded Mr. Campbell not to oppose this action, as he was inclined to do. A resolution to that effect was passed.
The actual separation of the Reformers—hereafter to be called Disciples—from the Baptists was a process which had begun two or three years earlier and which continued for at least three years after this event. But if a single date must be set for the beginning of the Disciples of Christ as a separate and independent religious body, it is in August, 1830, with the dissolution of the Mahoning Association at Austintown, Ohio.
The doctrines and practices of the Disciples which distinguished them from the Baptists at the time of the separation may be summarized:
As to doctrine: (1) The distinction between the old and new covenants, with consequent reliance solely upon the New Testament as a source for instruction concerning Christian faith and institutions. (2) The design of baptism, for remission of sins; faith, repentance, and baptism constitute regeneration. (3) The nature of faith as the belief of testimony, a rational act of which any man is capable in the exercise of his natural powers and free will. (4) The operation of the Holy Spirit through the Word alone in conversion. (5) Rejection of the Calvinistic idea (which not all Baptists held) that Christ died for only the “elect,” a limited number of predetermined individuals.
As to practice: (1) Rejection of creeds and church covenants. (2) Reception of members on confession of faith in Christ, repentance, and baptism, without examination, the relation of an “experience,” or a vote by the congregation. (3) Baptism and the Lord’s Supper may be administered by any believer. (4) Weekly observance of the Lord’s Supper. (5) No special “call” to the ministry expected or required and, in general, no sharp distinction between clergy and laity. (6) Denial of the authority of associations to exercise any power over local congregations (Baptists also denied this in theory), or to pass any judgment upon them, or to lay down conditions of fellowship and communion, as Baptist associations did when they excluded delegates who did not bring assurance that their churches adhered to the Philadelphia Confession.
While the movement toward separation from the Baptists was approaching its crisis, two events occurred, both in 1829, which added greatly to the fame and prestige of Alexander Campbell and thus helped indirectly to get the Disciples off to a good start.
Mr. Campbell was elected and served as a member of the Virginia Constitutional Convention. He answered those who criticized this entry into politics by saying that he wanted to urge the abolition of slavery or at least some steps in that direction. But he found that it would be impossible to do anything about slavery until the system of representation was so altered as to take away the concentration of power that was in the hands of the slave-owning aristocracy in the eastern part of the state. He fought a magnificent but losing fight on the floor of the convention for the abolition of the property qualification for voting and for representation in proportion to population. In advocating these democratic measures he faced, almost alone, such champions as John Marshall, John Randolph, and ex-presidents Madison and Monroe, all of whom were members of the convention. Anyone who doubts the intellectual and moral stature of Alexander Campbell will find a convincing demonstration of both by reading, in the published proceedings of the convention, his speeches in debate with these giants.
A few months earlier, Mr. Campbell had engaged in a debate with the noted British social reformer, philanthropist, and skeptic, Robert Owen, on the general subject of the validity of the claims of Christianity and a religious versus a secular and materialistic view of the world. In his two earlier debates he had represented the Baptists against the Presbyterians. In his two later ones, he defended Protestantism against Roman Catholicism and certain aspects of the Disciples’ position against its critics. But in the debate with Owen he had his most eminent opponent and his most exalted theme—the “Evidences of Christianity.” For this occasion he was not the advocate of a party or a particular system of religious ideas, but was the champion of all Christianity. His own movement entered upon its independent existence with some of the glory of this splendid performance upon it.