CHAPTER IX: RENAISSANCE, 1874-1909

RENAISSANCE, 1874-1909

After the dark ages of controversy and organizational stagnation--which were by no means so dark in other respects--came a renaissance in which the Disciples gained a clearer view of their central purpose and a better command of the resources for realizing it. They began to make more intimate contacts with the social and intellectual currents of the time and to escape from the cultural isolation into which they had fallen. Those who thought of this as apostasy from the true faith tended to withdraw, and ultimately did withdraw, into a separate and noncooperating group. The main body no longer took interest in what now seemed trivial disputes about organs, pastors, and the legitimacy of missionary organizations. The new issues which arose were such as were shared by the whole Christian world, so that even their dissensions related them to the main currents of religious thought.

This period saw the continuance of westward expansion, the winning of a second and almost a third half-million members, the creation of new missionary and benevolent organizations, more than a hundredfold increase in giving for missions, new journalistic enterprises, an educational awakening, a new type of evangelism, new outreaches in Christian union and interdenominational cooperation, and some slight beginning of a discovery of social ethics as a field of Christian responsibility.

The "dark ages" had not been stagnant in numerical and geographical growth. That process needed only to be continued. As the completion of the transcontinental railroads brought new land within reach for settlement, and as homesteaders invaded what had been the open range, towns sprang up throughout the West. In town and country, Disciples were there among the first, and churches were planted. After the American Christian Missionary Society was relieved of its foreign responsibilities, it could do more in promoting new work in the West. Soon the Board of Church Extension came to give first aid to the new church needing a house. It was never a log-cabin frontier west of the Mississippi (except Missouri and Arkansas), and building was a different problem from what it had been on the old timbered frontier. Even though the Disciples could draw less support from the East than some denominations, they became relatively strong in most of the Western states and very strong in some, such as Kansas and Oklahoma.

Total estimated membership in 1875 was 400,000. The official figure was 641,000 for 1890; 1,120,000 for 1900; 1,363,533 for 1910. __________________________________________________________________

Journalism and Missions

A new center of journalistic influence began when J. H. Garrison moved his paper, the Christian, from Quincy, Illinois, to St. Louis, on January 1, 1874, and organized the Christian Publishing Company. He had been on the point of moving it to Chicago, when the Great Fire of 1871 intervened. B. W. Johnson's Evangelist, which had lately moved from Iowa to Chicago, merged with the Christian in 1882 to produce the Christian-Evangelist. By its conservatively progressive policy, it became at once a powerful force in leading the Disciples out of the age of sterile controversy and into a wider conception of religion and more active work in its promotion. The Christian Standard, at Cincinnati, under Isaac Errett, was already exercising a similar influence. As long as Mr. Errett lived, the two papers worked together for the same ends. The relations between these two great editors were always intimate and affectionate. Writing from his deathbed (1888) to his brother editor,
J. H. Garrison, who was his junior by twenty-two years, Mr. Errett said:

We have been together from the beginning of this missionary work. We have stood shoulder to shoulder ... and the two most effective instrumentalities in educating our people and bringing them into active cooperation in spreading the gospel in all lands have been the Christian-Evangelist and the Christian Standard; and indeed, upon all points of doctrine and practice and expediency you and I have always worked on the same lines in perfect harmony.

A third paper, destined to hold a very prominent place in American journalism at a later date, was plodding its useful way through most of this period with a rather local constituency. This was the Christian Oracle, which began at Des Moines in 1884 and later moved to Chicago. In 1900 it became the Christian Century. For several years thereafter it reflected the liberal spirit of Herbert L. Willett, who was its editor for a time. Coming under the control and editorship of Charles Clayton Morrison in 1908, it soon began to evolve into an undenominational journal of religion.

The real awakening of the Disciples came with the rise of their interest in missions. Legalistic controversy over missionary methods had previously absorbed so much energy that little was left for missionary work. The old society had barely kept itself alive. The Louisville Plan had been a total failure. Into this vacuum came a band of devoted women, led by Mrs. C. N. Pearre, of Iowa City, who formed the Christian Woman's Board of Missions in 1874. The organizing ability and untiring energy that went into it would have made almost any enterprise a success. The regular meetings of the local auxiliaries and of Junior and Intermediate groups and the publication of the monthly Missionary Tidings and other literature constituted a vast program of missionary education. A system of regular dues produced a trickle of dimes which aggregated a torrent of dollars. By 1909 there were 60,000 adult members. Offerings up to that time had totaled nearly $2,500,000. Missions were conducted in Jamaica, India, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Argentina, and Liberia. There were schools in the backward Appalachian Mountain area, institutes and missions for Orientals on the West Coast, evangelists in thirty-three states, a missionary training school at Indianapolis, and "Bible chairs" at the Universities of Michigan, Virginia, Kansas, and Texas.

In 1875, almost with the founding of the women's work, came the organization of the Foreign Christian Missionary Society. Its early development was slow, and it was ten years before it had an office of its own or a full-time secretary. By 1881 its annual income had risen to $13,178. It was still sending the gospel only to Christians. It had missions in Denmark, England, France, and among the Armenians in Turkey, and was planning to send (but did not send) missionaries to Italy and Germany. An address by J. H. Garrison, at the convention at Louisville in 1881, appealing for missions to the heathen, led immediately to the establishment of Children's Day for that purpose. The foreign missionary deadlock was at last broken. Receipts of the foreign society doubled the next year, and G. L. Wharton and seven others were sent to India. Japan was entered in 1883, China in 1886, the Belgian Congo in 1897, Cuba in 1899. A. McLean was an invaluable missionary leader for many years, and an unforgettable personality.

When the American Society was permitted to devote itself wholly to American missions, its energies revived and it had an important part in the expansion that has been mentioned, as well as on the new frontier of foreign populations in the cities. In addition, it sponsored the Board of Church Extension, which at first made only small building loans to new and weak churches but later, as its resources increased, was able also to help some important city churches with their housing problems. George W. Muckley, as representative of Church Extension for nearly forty years, from 1888, linked his name inseparably with this cause.

The National Benevolent Association, 1887, grew out of a purely local impulse in St. Louis, but its work expanded from a single orphans' home in that city to a long list of institutions for children and old people in all parts of the country. This and the Board of Ministerial Relief showed that the Disciples were awakening to social responsibilities of which they had not previously taken account on a national scale. Ministerial "relief" was found to be inadequate, but it prepared the way for the more businesslike Pension Fund. __________________________________________________________________

Renaissance in Education

At the beginning of this period a new birth in education was as badly needed as in organization and missions. It came, but not as promptly. The colleges had been founded largely as training schools for ministers, and they performed that function better than any other. From the Civil War to the end of the century they were poorly equipped, meagerly supported, and inadequately staffed. Since there were few high schools outside the cities, and the Disciples were 93 per cent rural in 1890, entrance requirements and academic standards were necessarily low. The young preacher who had finished the ministerial course in one of these colleges was supposed to have completed his professional education.

The educational awakening included three things: First, a few men in the 1890's, then scores and hundreds, went to the divinity schools and graduate departments of the great universities for further training after they had been graduated from the colleges of the Disciples. Second, these colleges themselves gained greater resources, raised their standards, and many of them became excellent institutions. Third, with well-trained men now available for faculties, there arose some graduate schools of sound quality in connection with a few of the Disciples' colleges. This advance proceeded slowly and on an uneven front. Some colleges became better than others, and some became better sooner. Some died because they could not meet the more rigorous demands of the modern age, including those of the standardizing and accrediting agencies; and some with small resources and low academic standards continued to render valuable service in educationally retarded areas. Most of the improvement in the colleges came after the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1897 there were forty-five educational institutions, including five "universities" and twenty-five colleges; and the total of their endowments was $1,177,000. Six years later this amount had been doubled. Thirty years after that, these doubled endowments had been multiplied by ten--and seventeen of the forty-five schools had disappeared.

The establishment of the first "Bible chair" at the University of Michigan by the Christian Woman's Board of Missions was a piece of educational pioneering which led to great developments and became the Disciples' most original contribution to American education. There was a touch of genius in the discovery of the obvious fact, hitherto apparently unnoticed, that the students in state universities, which were growing enormously, offered a constituency for religious education, and the further fact that there were more young Disciples in state schools than in their own colleges. Bible chairs were established at many other state universities, some under the auspices of state missionary societies, others under independent boards. Some developed into schools of religion in which several denominations cooperated. The one at the University of Virginia became an integral part of the university. The whole development showed that the education of the future lay leaders did not rest wholly with the Disciples' colleges, indispensable as these were, but could be promoted by using also state or other endowed institutions.

Similarly, the education of the ministry gained vastly by utilizing universities and theological seminaries maintained by others. Before 1909 there was already a beaten trail from some of the colleges to Yale Divinity School, and the numbers who traveled it later ran into the hundreds. Many went to Union Theological Seminary in New York, and others to Harvard, Princeton, Hartford, or Vanderbilt. The University of Chicago, which opened its doors in 1892, furnished a seat of learning in the Middle West and therefore nearer to the geographical center of the Disciples. Though its divinity school was at first nominally Baptist, it appealed definitely to students of all denominations and successfully sought ways of evading the restriction of its faculty to Baptists. The Disciples Divinity House was established, 1894, in affiliation with the university and its divinity school, and at once a large number of students came, many of whom were mature men already in the ministry but eager for graduate study. Through all these means, by the end of the period here under consideration, the educational average of ministers among the Disciples had been greatly raised and their intellectual horizons vastly widened. The improvement of the colleges was one of the causes and also one of the consequences of this. __________________________________________________________________

Higher Criticism

The old differences of opinion about the organ and the missionary society continued, but there was no longer any interest in controversy about them. The opposing element ceased to cooperate with the "progressives" and was moving toward separation, which had become an accomplished fact, for all practical purposes, years before it was registered by the separate listing of the statistics of the "Churches of Christ" in the religious census of 1906.

New issues arose which afforded topics for lively debate in the papers, at preachers' meetings, and at the Congresses which met annually after
1899. Chief among these were higher criticism, the reception of the unimmersed, and federation. Since federation was the only one of these that called for collective action, and since it had very strong support as soon as it was proposed, it had full and frank discussion in the conventions also, as the other two questions did not.

"Higher criticism," or the study of the Bible by critical methods of historical and literary analysis, began in Europe early in the nineteenth century. By the middle of the century, controversy had grown hot, especially because the new method did not assume the inerrancy of the Bible, as the older orthodoxy did, and because some of the results of research cast doubt upon the historicity of some parts of the Bible. American scholars reacted, positively or negatively, to the higher criticism during the two decades after the Civil War. It became fairly well known by name, though not well understood, and there were some famous heresy trials. But Disciples did not become generally aware of it until the 1890's. Professor J. W. McGarvey, stalwart opponent of the new methods, began in 1893 his Biblical Criticism Department in the Christian Standard. With acumen and acrimony he denounced every new conclusion or theory about such things as the authorship of Deuteronomy and the latter part of Isaiah or the date of Daniel as an attack upon the faith and the work of "enemies of the Bible." This weekly page was widely read and much discussed. It gave great publicity to the subject and, by its caustic tone, its pungent personalities, and its identification of higher criticism with infidelity, added bitterness to what would in any case have been a very real divergence of opinion. "Few scholars and few students were permanently influenced by the department," says McGarvey's biographer and long-time associate, W. C. Morro.

Disciples were vitally interested in this battle of the Book, for they had always claimed to be, in a peculiar sense, a Bible people. Many of them remembered the first of Alexander Campbell's "rules of interpretation": in studying any book of the Bible, "consider first the historical circumstances of the book--the order, the title, the author, the date, the place, and the occasion of it." The young men who had been going to the Eastern universities and seminaries had become acquainted with the new methods of Bible study, which were directed to these very questions. The opening of the University of Chicago, just three months before the beginning of Professor McGarvey's antibiblical-criticism page, gave an immense impetus to this trend, for its president, Dr. W. R. Harper, was the most conspicuous exponent of these new methods in the United States, with extraordinary gifts for teaching and for publicity as well as for research. It might almost be said that it was Dr. Harper who put higher criticism on the map in the Middle West. Dr. Herbert L. Willett, who had been a student under Harper at Yale, became a colleague in his Semitic Department at Chicago and dean of the Disciples Divinity House. During several years he devoted much of his time to extension lecturing and the holding of institutes on the Bible. His popularity and success in this field were sensational. For most Disciples, Willett became the personal embodiment and symbol of the new biblical learning. He carried the flag with complete boldness, and his brilliant and winsome figure became a shining mark for the counterattack.

The papers were inevitably involved in the higher criticism controversy. The Christian Standard's position was never in doubt. It was against it, not only on Professor McGarvey's page, but on every other page as well. The Christian-Evangelist was cautiously liberal editorially. Its editor was not a technical scholar in this field, but his mind was always alert to discover new truth. He was hospitable to the critical methods and was not alarmed by their results, even though he did not personally accept all of them. For several years he had Dr. Willett write for the paper the weekly article on the Sunday school lesson. This showed editorial courage, rather than caution, but it was part of a consistent editorial policy that did as much as a university could have done for the education of the Disciples. __________________________________________________________________

Rethinking Baptism

"Open membership" had few advocates during the period under consideration, but there had already begun to be lively discussion of baptism in relation to the problem of union. When Thomas Campbell wrote the Declaration and Address--the event marked by the 1909 centennial as the beginning of the Disciples--he had not yet adopted the immersion of believers as part of the basis of union and communion. But after that practice was adopted by the Brush Run Church, it became an integral part of the program of the Campbells and it was a pivotal point in Scott's technique of evangelism. The "Christians" in Kentucky generally practiced immersion but considered it a matter of opinion and did not insist upon it. Those who merged with the Disciples yielded on this point and became strict immersionists. Campbell's reply to the "Lunenburg letter" showed that he regarded the pious unimmersed as Christians. Later developments showed that he would also commune with them as Christians. But he would not have favored admitting them as members, even if such a proposal had been made.

The first Disciple to argue for the admission of the unimmersed was Dr.
L. L. Pinkerton, in 1868. Pinkerton, a medical doctor as well as a preacher, was a remarkably free spirit and may be called the first thorough "liberal" among the Disciples. He also challenged the theory of the inerrancy of the Bible, though he probably never heard of the higher criticism. Apparently no other Disciple of his time shared his views about either baptism or the Bible, except John Shackleford, co-editor with him of the Independent Monthly, a breezy magazine which lived less than two years.

W. T. Moore, a missionary in England for the Foreign Christian Missionary Society, about 1885 became minister of West London Tabernacle, an independent church having many unimmersed members. Defending himself against criticism in a convention to which he was reporting during a visit back home, he suggested that baptism might cease to be a barrier to union if it were agreed to recognize as baptized persons those who had already been sprinkled, whether as infants or as adults, but to practice only immersion thenceforth. In spite of the high regard in which he was held, this opportunistic proposal found little favor. At the Congress of Disciples in 1901, Dr. Moore renewed and elaborated this proposal, that a united church be formed at once with all Christians as members and that only immersion should be practiced thereafter.

Robert L. Cave, an eloquent Virginian, who was pastor of Central Christian Church, St. Louis, in 1889 issued a pronunciamento widely at variance with the generally accepted views of Disciples, and of other evangelical Christians, on many points and demanded a vote of confidence on that basis. Failing to get it, he withdrew, followed by nearly half of the members, and established the Non-Sectarian Church. This was the outstanding heresy case of the period. But Dr. Cave's rather casual treatment of baptism was such a small item in the sum of his heresies that it was scarcely noticed, and the whole episode produced a conservative reaction even in the minds of moderately progressive leaders. The editor of the Christian-Evangelist at once launched a doctrinal revival, the permanent record of which is the volume entitled, The Old Faith Restated. Dr. Cave's advocacy did more to retard than to advance the acceptance of liberal ideas, including ideas about baptism.

In the 1890's the religious papers began to print contributions discussing the function of baptism and questioning whether it is indispensable. R. T. Matthews, a professor at Drake, said that some of the unimmersed "are in essential union with Christ." John Shackleford denied McGarvey's statement, in the first edition of his Commentary on Acts, that "faith without immersion is dead." J. J. Haley, when pressed to declare categorically whether he thought baptism necessary, gave the Delphic answer that baptism is "as necessary as an ordinance can be, considering what an ordinance is." Thomas Munnell, former missionary secretary and one of the most honored veterans, wrote a long article, in the New Christian Quarterly, April, 1894, arguing that the requirement of baptism be waived in the interest of union. In the correspondence columns of the weeklies, there were expressions of the opinion that a Christian union movement which excludes from its churches a large proportion of those whom it regards as Christians is both illogical and futile. These were the opinions of a small minority, and there were vigorous replies. In 1901 Dr. H. L. Willett published a little book, Our Plea for Union and the Present Crisis, which was a bold argument for open membership.

Along with much discussion, there was some action, but only a little within this period. J. M. Philputt was minister of a church on 119th St., New York, which from about 1890 to 1900 received the unimmersed as "members of the congregation," not of the church. "We receive them," he explained, "not as Disciples of Christ but simply as Christians." This distinction proved embarrassing. The practice drew too much criticism and it was abandoned. Similar "associate membership" arrangements were practiced for some time at South Broadway, Denver (B. B. Tyler); at Central, Denver (W. B. Craig); at Shelbyville, Kentucky; and elsewhere. At Hyde Park, Chicago (now University Church of Disciples of Christ), Dr. E. S. Ames in 1903 led the church into receiving unimmersed persons as "members of the congregation." Though the distinction between the two classes of members seldom came to attention it was not formally abolished until 1919 when the church became, de jure as well as de facto, an open-membership church. Long before that, in 1906, the Monroe Street Church, Chicago, of which Charles C. Morrison was pastor, had become the first church among the Disciples to receive into full membership the unimmersed members of other evangelical churches. When Morrison took over the Christian Century in 1908, he promptly made it an outspoken champion of liberal views, including open membership.

As the last item in the record of changing views on baptism within this period, it may be noted that at the Centennial Convention at Pittsburgh, 1909, Dr. S. H. Church, a grandson of Walter Scott, delivered an address in which he held that baptism is a matter of opinion in regard to which there should be individual liberty. __________________________________________________________________

Federation

The movement for federation among the Protestant denominations quickly won the favor of all Disciples except the most rigidly noncooperative, but these were many, and their voices were loud. The impulse to federation came from the new sense of the social responsibilities of the churches which became acute in the latter part of the nineteenth century. It was first proposed by the Presbyterian General Assembly as a means of getting some united action by Protestants without compromising their denominational differences and independence. After a decade of desultory discussion and some local organizations, a national Federation of Churches and Christian Workers was formed in 1901. The next year this body proposed a conference of official representatives of denominations to consider the feasibility of a federation of the denominations as such. It was at this point that the matter came before the Disciples through a brief speech by the secretary, Dr. E. B. Sanford, at the Omaha convention in 1902, following an eloquent address on Christian union by E. L. Powell. A resolution of approval was introduced by J. H. Garrison, who supposed--naïvely, as he afterward said--that it would be adopted unanimously. J. A. Lord, editor of the Christian Standard, objected that joining such an association would be "recognizing the denominations." The resolution was adopted, with only a small opposing vote. But the war was on, with the two papers already ranged on opposite sides. For the next four or five years, federation was the hot spot of controversy in conventions, ministers' meetings, and the press. The Disciples were represented, however, at the Interchurch Conference on Federation, at Carnegie Hall, New York City, in November, 1905, where a constitution was drafted. A mass meeting called during the Norfolk convention in 1907 approved the constitution, with only one dissenting voice, and elected representatives in the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America. The first meeting of the Federal Council was held at Philadelphia, February 2, 1908.

Thus the Disciples were in the Federal Council from its beginning. They also cooperated from the start with the Foreign Missions Conference of North America (1907) and the Home Missions Council (1908). Union as an objective had not been forgotten; but, while there were barriers to immediate union, cooperation with other Christians in the promotion of practical Christian ends had come to seem, to the great body of Disciples, both safe and wise.

The completion of the first hundred years was celebrated by a Centennial Convention, at Pittsburgh, October, 1909. This was a gathering of unprecedented and still unequaled size. It quickened the interest of Disciples in their own history and heritage. Coming so soon after they had embarked upon these large ventures in cooperation, it directed their minds not only to the numerical and institutional success of their own movement but also to the path of common service and the hope of unity that lay ahead. It was a true instinct that directed the choice of the centennial of the Declaration and Address for this observance rather than, for example, the promulgation of Walter Scott's "uniform, authoritative method of proclaiming the gospel," or the dissolution of the Mahoning Association. This choice expressed the feeling that the essence of the movement is not in its separateness or in its "particular ecclesiastical order," but in its call for union upon the will to do the will of Christ. __________________________________________________________________