VIII. New American Arminian Denominations
1. THE HEART OF THE UNITARIAN CONTROVERSY
During the period of comparative indifference between the Great Awakening and the Great Revival at the end of the eighteenth century, American Unitarianism developed slowly as the liberal wing of Congregationalism, drawing its leadership from native and anti revivalist intellectualism, its theology from the literature of English liberalism and of Arian-Arminianism, and its easy-going optimism from Boston culture, prosperity, and world trade. The closer contact of eastern New England with the Old World allowed Arminianism and “liberal theology” to take greater root in that region. PFF4 29.1
Unitarian leaders such as William Ellery Channing emphasized “the loving kindness of God, the nobility of man, and the joy of a religious life.” They avoided Joseph Priestley, the radical Unitarian exile from England; they disclaimed English Unitarianism, and acknowledged the name merely as denoting their disbelief in the traditional doctrine of the Trinity, not the more radical belief, as commonly understood by the term in England, that Christ was merely human. Nevertheless, the New England Unitarians and orthodox Congregationalists finally separated after legal battles over church property. The Unitarians won more than one hundred churches in eastern New England, and the most prosperous and cultured part of the population.PFF4 29.2
At first the Unitarians moved only to Arianism, which “did not lessen for them their implicit faith in his [Christ’s] revelation or their recognition of the beauty and glory of his divine character.” But a later period of radicalism brought in the new theory that the spiritual message is “inward,” and not outward, “directly to the soul of a man,” and not through the mediation of a person or a book. Although tolerating all shades of opinion, the Unitarian Church moved far beyond the liberalism of Channing’s day. The human emphasis in place of a supernatural message soon channeled Unitarian zeal and idealism into humanitarian enterprises. The ideals of Transcendentalism, expressed by some of the most noted literary lights of New England, were of Unitarian origin.PFF4 30.1
2. THREE NEW ENGLAND MOVEMENTS ARISE
Following the American Revolution, while the, Unitarian controversy still remained a matter of theory rather than of action, three humbler Arminian movements rose to attack Calvinism. Separating from New England orthodoxy, they soon formed sects—the Universalists, the Freewill Baptists, and the “Christians.” And the Great Revival produced frontier schisms that formed new denominations, like the Cumberland Presbyterians and the western branch of the “Christians”—and later the Disciples. The Universalists, repudiating the Calvinist “limited atonement” (for the elect only) carried their “universal atonement” to the extreme of universal salvation; they later became closely identified with the Unitarians. The Freewill Baptists, drawing off from the Calvinist Baptists because of irreconcilable doctrinal differences, multiplied rapidly in the beginning of the nineteenth century.PFF4 30.2
3. THE POSITIONS OF THE “CHRISTIANS
The third group, the “Christians,” or Christian Connection, who attempted to end all denominational and creedal differences, need a little explanation, because they are often confused with the later and more numerous Disciples of Christ. They were a fusion of three schismatic groups. PFF4 31.1
Originating as part of the revolt against the restraints of Calvinistic creeds, they insisted on Christian character as the only test of fellowship, and their only creed the “plain language, and understanding of the Bible according to average judgment, as to meaning and interpretation.” A member might likely have declared himself “neither Unitarian, Trinitarian, an Arian or Socinian, but simply a Christian.” Thus, although holding various views, the anti-Calvinist Christians fell easily into the classification of anti-Trinitarians as a result of their reluctance to be bound by a “metaphysical” theological term not found in Scripture “The Bible only” was their watchword. Morrill puts it thus:PFF4 31.2
“Never for a moment have they surrendered the Bible, nor its simple direct use. People who have dubbed the Christians ‘Unitarian1 and other harder names, failed to appreciate their standpoint, and misapprehended their intention. True religious freedom avoids all theological dogmatism. Freedom and revivalism have always characterized the Christians. Their fold has included men of all opinions, and men of deep convictions, but by mutual consent they laid aside their speculative opinions and divisive tenets in favor of practical Christianity, plain Scriptural teaching and winning men to Christ.” PFF4 32.1
4. CALVINISM’S PROBLEMS IN THE NEW WEST
The frontier conditions necessitated, as many thought, a more unified organization than Congregationalism. Therefore, between 1801 and 1837, Presbyterianism and Trinitarian Congregationalism tried out a “Plan of Union.” The Presbyterians profited more from this. But they would not consent to subordination of the doctrines of predestination, original sin, and election, to revivalism, or to the employment of ministers without full formal education. And rather than yield on these points, they allowed the Cumberland Presbyterian Church to develop and take over their most promising western section in Kentucky. Ecclesiastical trials—for example the celebrated cases of Albert Barnes, Asa Marian, and Lyman Beecher in the 1830’s—were followed by the split between the “Old School” conservatives and the “New School” progressives, with strength wasted in dogmatic controversy that might have gone into growth. So the Methodists* Baptists, and then the Disciples took the definite lead in the new West. PFF4 32.2
5. THREE GREAT FRONTIER SECTS FORGE AHEAD
On the Western frontier—the mountains and the Ohio-Mississippi valley—three left-wing groups took the lead. The most successful of these were the Arminian Methodists, who had been organized in 1784, with Francis Ashury as the first American bishop. They stressed “original virtue,” says Bates, rather than “original sin,” and held that man had the power, with God’s enabling grace, to escape the consequences of the Fall and to avoid eternal punishment. They threw open the gates of heaven not only to the “elect” but also to all who truly willed to enter. And they held that in this life one might have the “certitude of salvation,” the two steps, of stages, to this being “justification” and “sanctification.” Meanwhile, the Baptists, Congregationalists, and Unitarians fought over control in New England, and the Presbyterians held Pennsylvania. But the itinerant-preacher system, successfully used by the Waldenses and the Wyclifites, and revived by the Methodists, was best suited to the needs of the frontier. For thirty years stalwart circuit riders, like Peter Cartwright, resolutely “carried salvation” to the Western wilderness. And the camp meeting was taken over as a Methodist institution.PFF4 32.3
Likewise, into the West and South went the Baptists—“soft-shell” and “hard-shell,” “general” and “particular.” The Freewill Baptist movement spread from New Hampshire to the Northwestern frontier. A line of liberal Baptist colleges extended from Maine to Minnesota. Disputes with other groups over immersion versus sprinkling were common, and among themselves over Calvinism and foreign missions. The Calvinistic Baptists made the greatest gains—including large Negro accessions—in the South; however, there was little to distinguish the Southern Baptists from the Methodists except the name. PFF4 33.1
6. DISCIPLES ORGANIZE AS SEPARATE BODY
The third of the great frontier sects was an indigenous American product, the Disciples of Christ, also called Christians, founded by the Scotch-Irish Presbyterian preacher, Thomas Campbell (who came to America in 1807), and his son Alexander, who was associated with his father’s work from 1810 onward. The elder Campbell’s revolutionary proposal for reuniting all Protestants, by exchanging simple Bible teachings for creeds, brought down upon him a vote of censure from the Presbyterian synod in Pennsylvania. He then began to preach in the homes of his friends, holding “the Bible only” as his rule of faith. “Where it speaks,” he said, “we speak; where it is silent, we are silent.” PFF4 33.2
The Campbells did not desire to establish a separate sect. A Christian Association (not a church) was therefore established in 1809, without a paid ministry. They welcomed all Protestants who wished to join. Alexander Campbell took his stand for adult baptism only, and so, between 1813 and 1832, they were affiliated with the Baptist Church as its most radical group. PFF4 34.1
But in 1816 Alexander Campbell virtually discarded the Old Testament, or “the Law”—as the letter, the ministration of condemnation and death—in contrast with the New Testament gospel of the Spirit, the ministration of righteousness, the law of liberty and Christ. Nor did he require a public expression of Christian experience before baptism, as the Baptists did. As doors were now closed against them, in self-defense the “Campbellites” soon felt forced to abandon the dream of a unified Protestant church and to form themselves into a separate denomination—the Disciples of Christ. These were joined by Barton W. Stone and a group of the ex-Presbyterian “Christians,” and by other groups, increasing their membership from 10,000 in 1830 to 250,000 in 1850. PFF4 34.2
Walter Scott, one of their fiery evangelists, converted in 1819, cherished a belief in the imminent second coming of Christ. And Alexander Campbell, whose debates with deist Robert Owen and the Catholic Bishop Purcell were among the high lights of the times, significantly changed the name of his journal, The Christian Baptist, to the Millennial Harbinger and began to stress the prophecies.PFF4 34.3
But the development of the distinctly American system of varied, voluntary, and completely autonomous denominations cannot be understood except in its setting of another distinctive phase of American religious life-the Great Revival the early nineteenth century. Both old and new denominations still show marks of the influence of that fervent revivalism. This we shall survey in the next chapter.PFF4 35.1