THE UNIQUE CONTRIBUTION OF THE
CAMPBELLS TO CHRISTIAN UNITY
by Louis Cochran

In reading the injunctions of the Apostle Paul to the early church, I am often impressed by the hints they give us that even in that day there were differences of opinion and practice in matters of church life among the brethren. “I beseech you, brethren,” he said in writing to the church at Corinth, “that ye all speak the same thing and that there be no divisions among you; but that ye be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment.”

“For it hath been declared of you, my brethren, that there are contentions among you.”

As deep as the mystery of sin itself is this mystery of the sin of the divided Church of Christ. Yet its coming seems as inevitable as the Fall of Man, rooted as it is in the blindness, the arrogance, the egotism, and in the pitiful self-righteousness of human beings, then and now.

As long as the Apostles lived, as long as their voices were dominant, there was no real disunity. Inspired voices do not contradict. But after their passing, and that of others who had been with Jesus, human error entered into the teachings, and dissension, unstilled by any commanding voice; and apostasy was on its way. In each church were those who argued and differed with their brethren on the interpretation of the Scriptures, and inevitably there came a departure from Apostolic simplicity and practice; the gradual incorporation of pagan customs and rites; a growth of worldliness in the church which brought about conditions that within 300 years after the Death and Resurrection, had destroyed the early unity of the Church of Christ, and scattered it into a thousand fragments.

This is not the time or place to recount the story of the great schisms, or the rise of the warring sects, or the ascendency of the Princes and the Popes who, for over fifteen hundred years ruled the spiritual, and oftentimes the temporal, Western world as the self-anointed viceroys of God. There was unity in the church then, but it was the unity of force, of the rack and the faggot and the stake and the inquisition. But the world of the spirit is one of love, and can be ruled only by persuasion; never by force. Mighty champions of truth arose to defend this principle; John Huss, and John Wycliffe, and the Lollards and the Waldensians, and the great Martin Luther, and Zwingli and John Knox and John Calvin. But they were Reformers only, and in attempting to reform (as is inevitable with reformers) they became as unbending and as rigid in their particular beliefs as their persecutors. Their followers broke away from Roman Catholicism and established themselves as separate religious parties, each wrapped smugly within its particular germ of truth, denying to all others the name of Christ, and each thus further abusing and mutilating the body of our Lord.

And then came the Campbells —Father Thomas and his great son, Alexander, preaching not only the restoration of the New Testament Church in its primal simplicity, but the equal fellowship of all believers under Christ; a plea not only to the clergy but to all the brethren, as Paul wrote to the Church at Ephesus, to “walk with lowliness and meekness, with long suffering, forbearing one another in love, endeavoring to keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace.” (Ephesians 4:1)

And in that advocacy of Christian Unity, in recognizing the responsibility as well as the true state, as fellow-Christians, of all followers of Jesus, the Campbells were distinctive and unique among the reformers and religious leaders of all ages since the Apostles.

“The Church of Christ upon earth is essentially, intentionally and constitutionally one,” Thomas Campbell declared in his immortal “Declaration and Address,” “It consists of all those in every place that profess their faith in Christ and obedience to Him in all things according to the Scriptures.” The resurrection of this basic fact from the rubble of many creeds is the outstanding contribution of our Brotherhood to the Christian world, and the supreme justification of our existence. “A full knowledge of all revealed truth,” Thomas Campbell explained (Prop. 8), “is not necessary to entitle persons to membership in the church. Neither should they, for this purpose, be required to make a profession more extensive than their knowledge.” But all, he emphasized, “should love each other as brothers and be united as children of one family.” (Prop. 9)

This passion for full Christian fellowship according to the measure of our understanding is at the very marrow of our being as a’ Brotherhood, and if we have been false to that passion, because of our bickering over matters non-essential to Christian faith and practice-then it is our sin and our shame, and one for which we shall stand in the publican’s seat before the Lord.

As the Apostles maintained a unity of fellowship among the widely scattered churches of the New Testament days, so, likewise, did the founding fathers of our Restoration Movement. And just as it was not until after the living witnesses to the life of the Master passed away that apostasy and dissension entered the body of His church, so it was not until after the giant figures of the Restoration Movement had passed from the earthly scene that real divisions occurred among us. There were rumblings and mutterings from the beginning of our Movement; of this we have an inkling from many sources. But as long as Thomas and Alexander Campbell, Barton W. Stone, Walter Scott, “Raccoon” John Smith, Isaac Erett, Moses E. Lard and others like them remained among us, we stood basically united in our call for a return to the simple teachings, and to the brotherly love and forbearance of the New Testament Church. And hungry souls by the hundreds of thousands answered that call —as long as we stood together, voicing together our common plea.

The Campbells, in pursuit of their vision of “the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace,” had no wish to leave the orthodox church. But the established church parties would have none of them. Why? Because they believed that men could hold fast to liberty in non-essentials and yet dwell together in unity, forbearing in love. This was heresy! They were censured and rejected by the Presbyterians; and when their little congregation at Brush Run was invited to affiliate with the Redstone Baptist Association, they gladly entered that fold rather than constitute what they feared would be just another splinter-sect in the body of our Lord. But they were equally as uncomfortable in that affiliation, unable to accept the teachings of the Baptists that they alone held the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven, and after seventeen years of tenuous membership they began, reluctantly, but with no other choice, to worship at last as a separate body of “Christians only.”

As Alexander wrote in the Millennial Harbinger in 1834, “All the world must see that we have been forced into a separate communion. We were driven out of doors, because we preferred the approbation of our Lord to the approbation of any sect in Christendom. If this be our weakness, we ought not to be despised; if this be our wisdom, we ought not to be condemned.”

And so, seeking the approbation of our Lord, we continue unwillingly as a separate body today, championing the cause of unity among all disciples of Jesus. It is to our credit that we stand as a great body of Christians; it is our shame that we present considerably less than a united front to the world. And because of that, I think Alexander Campbell would say to all factions of our great Brotherhood today: “Physician, heal thyself!”

Campbell foresaw that differences would occur among us. In the Millennial Harbinger in 1834 he wrote: “Where we cannot agree in opinion, we will agree to differ; and a free intercourse will do more to enlighten us and to reform all abuses than years of controversy and volumes of defamation.” In his great debate with Dr. Nathan L. Rice at Lexington, Kentucky, in 1843 he said:

It is not the object of my efforts to make men think alike on a thousand themes. Let men think as they please on any matter of human opinion, and even upon the doctrines of religion, provided only that they hold the head Christ and keep His commandments. I have learned not only the theory but the fact that if you wish opinions to cease or to subside, you must not call up and debate everything that men think or say. You may debate anything into consequence or you may, by a dignified silence, waste it into oblivion.

This admonition was echoed during our lifetime by our own P. H. Welshimer, a preacher in the true tradition of Alexander Campbell. In his splendid little booklet, “Concerning The Disciples,” this great minister of Christ reminded us that:

There was no unity in the apostolic church in non-essentials (matters of mere expediency), but there was unity in the essentials … In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, love. We have the right to our opinions about things of which the Lord has not spoken —the type of architecture; the kind of music, the number of instruments to be used, if any; the method of doing missionary work; the number of services to be held in a day; the length of a sermon, the style of clothing to be worn, and a hundred other things that are matters of mere expediency. They are not essential to salvation. In these we have the right to opinion, and the majority should rule. But in such matters as the divinity of Christ, the inspiration of the Scriptures, the Christian ordinances, the names to be worn, the new birth, tests of faith, and all other matters actually essential to the Christian life —we have no opinion for we need none. Here the Scriptures speak; and where the Scriptures speak we speak; where they are silent, we are silent.

While Thomas Campbell continued to preach, and to teach, the rest of his life, his principal contribution, in addition to his great “Declaration and Address,” lay in the counsel and assistance he gave his famous son. This change in leadership came easily, naturally, and in the fullness of time following the great sermon on “The Law,” preached by Alexander before the Redstone Baptist Association at Cross Creek, Va., in August, 1816. Delivered almost by chance, this sermon first proclaimed the now generally recognized truth, then bitterly opposed by the established churches, that Christ came to fulfill and to supplant the Jewish law. In this sermon, young Alexander Campbell undertook to do for the modern age what the great Apostle Paul had done for his time; to prove that the Christian gospel is a new institution, and not a mere extension or modification of the Hebrew legal system. In so doing, he swept aside the confusion of many ages and burnished brightly the plea for the union of all believers under Christ.

To implement his plea for the return to New Testament practices as a basis for unity, Alexander Campbell began the publication in 1823 at Buffalo, now Bethany, Virginia, of a monthly paper, The Christian Baptist, dedicated to all those “who, willing to have all religious tenets and practices tried by the Divine Word, and who, feeling themselves in duty bound to search the Scriptures for themselves, are disposed to reject all doctrines and commandments of men, and to obey the truth; holding fast the faith once delivered to the saints.” This monthly journal, which developed into the equally famous Millennial Harbinger in 1830, while often attacked as iconoclastic because of its vigorous assaults on the vested interests of the time, contained some of the most irrefutable arguments in favor of unity and against human creeds, to be found in any writings outside the New Testament itself.

In March, 1824, issue of The Christian Baptist, in an article entitled “The Foundation of Hope and Christian Union,” Alexander Campbell reminds us that this foundation “established by the author and founder of Christianity is this: Belief of one fact and submission to one institution. The one fact,” said Mr. Campbell, “is that Jesus the Nazarene is the Messiah; the one institution is baptism.”

The same view is expressed in his great work on Christian faith and practice, The Christian System, published twelve years later in 1836, and which for two generations was a constant handbook and reference for every devout Restorationist who could afford its cost. It was an exposition of Mr. Campbell’s own beliefs, which other Christians could accept, or reject, without prejudice to their own standing as Christians. The right to opinions different from his own, instead of being a bar to fellowship, was the very essence of Alexander Campbell’s beliefs, and from this position he never wavered, although some of those who came after him, claiming him as their leader, allocated to themselves an exclusiveness to salvation which Mr. Campbell himself not only never claimed but consistently fought all his life.

For Alexander Campbell trod a new pathway to heaven. He was not a reformer of the existing established churches. Instead, he advocated a return “to the ancient order of things”; the apostolic simplicities of the New Testament church. Like all great leaders, he was misunderstood and misrepresented, and much maligned. He suffered vituperation, and even prison. But he endured. Few men climbed to the heights with him. His message was new, sweeping away as it did the theological rubbish of the ages. He avoided the terminology of the Seminaries and spoke in the language of the Scriptures, and his very simplicity in many instances was a hindrance rather than a help. But in nothing was he more misunderstood and misrepresented than in his uncompromising catholicity, against which the narrow sectarianism of his time severely revolted, and revolts today.

Campbell never held that a return to New Testament Christianity, and an acceptance of all that he thought constituted that return, were identical. At no time did he abrogate all knowledge to himself and those like him. To the end of his days he was an unceasing seeker after revealed truth, and he never hesitated to change his position when additional light on the truth was revealed to him through the Word of God. We are all seekers after truth based upon the confession of Peter, the most fundamental and most important declaration in history —that Jesus Christ is the Messiah, the Son of God. Upon that fundamental fact, as Paul said, other foundations can no man lay. From that supreme truth, which is the grand principle of the Restoration Movement, and which gives us our validity in the Christian world today, Alexander Campbell never wavered and never retreated.

But that does not mean he had a rigid, closed mind. He was never static in his thinking, and he never hesitated to renounce error, once convinced of it, and to champion the eternal verities as they were more clearly revealed to him. Alexander Campbell had a free mind, bound only by fundamental truth. His whole life was a continuing search, and exposition of the terms of Christian unity and fellowship. In this respect he was unlike many of the clergy of his day of whom he once wrote in the Millennial Harbinger: “They are very similar to the posts or pillars we find along our state and county roads which are pointing the traveler to the right way, while they, themselves, never move an inch in that direction.”

But such rigid immobility did not exist in Alexander Campbell. Hear his confession in the Christian Baptist in 1826:

I was once so straight that, like the Indian’s tree, I leaned a little the other way. I was once so strict a Separatist that I would neither pray nor sing praises with anyone who was not as perfect as I supposed myself to be. In this most unpopular course I persisted until I discovered the mistake and saw that on the principle embraced in my conduct, there never could be a congregation or a church upon the earth. . . Dear sir, this plan of making our own nest, and fluttering over our own brood; of building our own tent, and confining all goodness and grace to our noble selves and the “elect few” who are like us, is the quintessence of sublimated pharisaism.

Alexander Campbell changed his mind as a youth of twenty as to the validity of human creeds, and forever renounced them; he changed his mind as to the method and design of baptism and, rejecting his own baptism as imperfect, accepted immersion as the Scriptural symbol for him of the death and resurrection of our Lord. He changed his mind as to the value of Sunday schools, and of special training for ministers, and upon his own farm at Bethany, West Virginia, he established Bethany College, the first institution of higher learning in the world founded upon the Bible as a basic text-book. He changed his mind in regard to cooperative work among the churches. But nothing he ever did was more thoroughgoing in its reversal of himself than in the matter of fellowship at the Lord’s Table. As a very young man, Alexander Campbell was a strict, closed communionist. In middle life he had so completely reversed himself that he wrote for all to read in the Millennial Harbinger in 1850 that such a position “was the very spirit of guile from which every pure and generous and sensitive heart recoils in mortification and disgust.”

This is a strong statement, and a complete reversal of his previous conviction. But due principally to his leadership, the practice of open communion is accepted and followed each Lord’s Day by all branches of our Brotherhood in this country today.

“Truth alone is eternal,” Campbell wrote in 1836 to Elder William Jouse of London. “But still the question recurs, What will we say? That every truth is alike important? No, certainly. For then on earth there could never be union. All Bible truths are therefore nowhere in that book propounded as either necessary to salvation or as prerequisites to union and communion among brethren. A person may understand and believe with all his heart a thousand truths, recorded in the sacred page, such as the martyrdom of Noah, the age of Methuselah, the flood, the building of Babel, etc., and still live without God, without Christ, and without hope of heaven.

“That truth which pacifies the conscience, which purifies the heart and reconciles to God,” he went on to say; “that truth is the bond of union in the family of God. For certainly that which reconciles a sinner to God ought to reconcile him to his fellows; and that which brings the peace of heaven into his soul ought to promote the peace with all men, especially with the household of faith. Hence it is that nothing is proposed as a bond of peace on earth other than the bond of peace in heaven, which is all comprehended in the cardinal and sublime proposition that Jesus the Nazarene is the Messiah, the son of God.”

But Campbell’s insistence upon this tenet as the simple basis for the union of Christ’s followers brought disapproval from many quarters in his time, as it does in ours. Nevertheless, it remains the only basis for Christian union which can bring into being a truly catholic or universal church. Its uniqueness, and its distinction, is that it affords a plea based upon those essentials upon which all Christians can agree. And in that we are truly catholic, a word often upon the lips of our Restoration forefathers. “Our doctrine is catholic, very catholic,” said Mr. Campbell during the Rice debate. “Not Roman catholic, nor Greek catholic, but simply catholic.”

And so it is. We present to the world a catholic creed, the confession that Jesus is the Christ, the only begotten Son of God; a catholic name, Christian; a catholic book of authority, the Bible; a catholic mode of baptism, immersion; a catholic brotherhood, “By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, that ye have love one to another.” (John 13:34-35)

As a Brotherhood we have suffered our wounds, and our heartaches, and our divisions, and our differences of opinion. We have also had our triumphs. In the Providence of God it is our privilege in a crucial age to declare and to witness that the Church of Christ is One, as men are one, and as the Father and the Savior are One. We take note only of the shining hours, and like Alexander Campbell, go forward in our faith as workmen who needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth, seeking always the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace.

May the Almighty and Merciful Father grant that we shall ever remain true to that sacred trust.

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Louis Cochran is author of several important novels, including The Fool of God, an historical novel based on the life of Alexander Campbell. Presently he is working on the life stories of other Disciple pioneers.

Science makes major contributions to minor human needs; philosophy makes minor contributions to major human needs. —Oliver Wendell Holmes

My experience has taught me that to get a victory over the world, over the love of fame, and to hold in perfect contempt human honor, adulation, and popularity, will do more to make the New Testament intelligible, than all the commentators that ever wrote.—Alexander Campbell