CHAPTER VI: WITH THE BAPTISTS, 1813-30

WITH THE BAPTISTS, 1813-30

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. __________________________________________________________________

Debates on Baptism

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. __________________________________________________________________

"Reforming Baptists"

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. __________________________________________________________________

Walter Scott, the "Gospel Restored"

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. __________________________________________________________________

Separation from the Baptists

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. __________________________________________________________________