Mandate For Renewal: The Declaration and Address . . .

ALEXANDER CAMPBELL AND THE DECLARATION AND ADDRESS
LOUIS COCHRAN

In any discussion of Alexander Campbell we must include his father Thomas, whose life work formed the basis and supplemented the great accomplishments of his famous son. It is Thomas Campbell’s distinction that he made two great fundamental contributions toward the restoration of Christian unity. In the Declaration and Address, he gave to the world a clear statement of the principles upon which unity might be restored; and in his gifted son he furnished the leadership; in other words, the means of implementing those principles. For of all the leaders of the Restoration Movement, only Alexander Campbell possessed the lifelong creative capacity of sustained dynamic devotion; only to him was given the dedicated genius to bring such a movement into being as a valid, growing, healing power is the Church which is the body of our Lord.

Fundamental to any consideration of thesis is the factor of his complete and utter commitment to the task. For Alexander Campbell was a truly dedicated man. In season and out, like the Apostle Paul, he was a “fool of God” for Christ’s sake. In complete candor I must say that it seems to me the loss of that sense of dedication on the part of those of us who follow in his train today, that dedication which counts the world well lost for Christ’s sake, is the great loss of our age and of our Brotherhood. If we have not succeeded in materially advancing the cause of Christian unity, it may be well for us to stop tinkering with the machinery and examine our own hearts to find the reason why.

I am convinced it was not by happy accident as much as through the mysterious ways of a Divine Providence that when Alexander Campbell first became acquainted with the Declaration and Address, that immortal Declaration of Independence from spiritual bondage, he found himself well prepared for its favorable reception.

Since childhood he had been aware of his father’s distress at the divisions in the Church of Christ; and of his futile personal attempts to heal the breach in his own denomination between the Burghers and the AntiBurghers of the Seceder Branch of the National Church of Scotland. Due to the wise guidance of Father Thomas he had read while yet in his ‘teens’ the searching inquisitions into the human mind of the great independent English philosopher, John Locke. No doubt, too, he had been unconsciously influenced by the Huguenot background of his mother, Jane Corneigle, whose ancestors had fled from France to escape this success in implementing his father’s religious bigotry and persecution. Equally as important in shaping his thinking had been his year at the University of Glasgow, the Alma Mater of his father. There he had come under the influence of some of the greatest liberal thinkers and preachers in all Scotland, the famous Greville Ewing, who personally befriended him; and the equally famous James and Robert Haldane, who gave of both their wealth and their lives to preach a creedless gospel; and the great Irish preacher, Alexander Carson of Tubbermore, who preached that immersion only was the Scriptural baptism. And it was there, at the last annual communion of the Seceders, that he had rejected the Leaden Token, the symbol of his eligibility to partake of the Lord’s Supper, renouncing it, not as a token of communion but as a symbol of separation from other Christians.

Unbeknownst perhaps even to himself, Alexander Campbell had thus already rejected the principal barriers which would separate him from other believers who followed the Savior according to the full measure of their understanding, and was prepared when he landed in New York in September, 1809, and again met his scholarly father, to sympathetically receive the sews that his beloved mentor had also been led of God, through trial and persecution, to the same momentous decision, and in a little attic room supplied by Farmer Nathan Welch had written the Declaration and Address.

We have every reason to believe that during the first strenuous weeks and months of his life in America, Alexander Campbell pondered and prayed over every segment of this 30,000 word document and we can well imagine his delight in finding in it the solution to the problem of the divided church; a solution toward which he had himself been groping, here plainly stated for all the world to read. The thirteen propositions of the Address, the heart of the document, beginning with the words which have since rung round the world, that “the Church of Christ upon earth is essentially, intentionally and constitutionally one,” must have sounded in his ears almost as the words of St. Paul to the Ephesians, written as they were with all “lowliness and meekness, with suffering, forbearing one another in love, endeavoring to keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace.”

Dr. Robert Richardson, in his “Memoirs of Alexander Campbell,” tells us in classical language that Alexander was “so captivated by its clear, decisive presentations of duty, and the noble Christian enterprise to which it invited, he at once, though unprovided with worldly property and aware that the proposed reformation would, in all probability, provoke the hostility of the religious parties, resolved to consecrate his life to the advocacy of the principles it presented.” Soon afterward, when Alexander informed his father that he would not only thereafter devote his life to the cause of Christian unity but had resolved “never to receive any compensation for his labors,” Father Thomas warned him that “upon these principles, my dear son, you will wear many a ragged coat.” It is interesting to note, as Dr. Richardson pointed out, that “with all his parental partiality, Father Thomas had as yet a very imperfect conception of the indomitable energy and the remarkable ability in the management of affairs” of his son. Which statement, I respectfully submit, may in the light of after events be justly considered as one of the graphic understatements of the century.

Printed copies of the Declaration and Address, posted by Thomas Campbell to every clergyman of every faith in Washington County, Pennsylvania, met with no response whatever. Neither the National nor the Seceder branches of the Presbyterian Church would give serious consideration to such an heritical scheme. And even some of the stalwarts who helped build with their own hands the little log meeting house at Brush Run, eleven miles from Washington, began soon to fade away, among them General Thomas Acheson, a lifelong friend of the Campbell both in Ireland and in America.

In looking back through the avenues of the intervening one hundred and fifty years, who can question the sincerity, or the Christian motives, of the doubters? In discarding creeds and ecclesiastical authority, the Campbells were actually proposing nothing less than a religious revolution, as profound and complete, as devastating in its wreckage of ancient idols as the Reformation of Marrin Luther. Truly, in the afterglow, it may be said that the Reformation begun by the great Luther was completed by the Restoration Movement of the Campbells.

Could such a movement result in anything less than anarchy, questioned the established churches? Could the Bible, with the right of private interpretation, actually be made the sole authority in religion? Was it practical? Such a movement had never been at tempted before. The creeds were the living witnesses against the right of private interpretation. Would it work? To the early fathers of our movement, the issue was more than would these principles work in the lives of men. They were asking: “Can Christianity itself stand with only Christ and the Scriptures?”

Alexander Campbell and Thomas Campbell and James Foster and the James Hanans, and the great ones who came later to join them, the Walter Scotts, the Robert Richardsons, the William Pendletons, the Barton W. Stones, the “Raccoon” John Smiths, and all the rest, studied their Bibles as men have seldom studied before, or since. And they answered with a mighty affirmative, “Yes,” which will resound in all parts of the world forever.

It required dedicated men to take this stand and, truly, these were dedicated men.

That unity for which Christ prayed in John 17, that all followers of Jesus might be one even as the Saviour and the Father are one, the union of all Christians, which is the cornerstone and the foundation of the Declaration and Address, was, at the beginning, the first order of the new Movement; the supreme and only justification of its existence. But as time went on little by little the mighty forces, the influences, of the established churches, powerfully arrayed against them, made inroads, and for a period it appeared that the emphasis of the Movement might shift from its original plea of Christian Union to that of the restoration of merely the outward trappings of primitive Christianity; and imitation of the pattern of what was conceived to be the New Testament Church. But never at any time did Alexander and Thomas Campbell lose sight of their tremendous vision that Christian unity must be based upon an acceptance of a common faith and not upon a mere physical conformity with what was designated as “the Ancient Order of Things”; and in due course this vision came again into clear focus as the goal of the new Movement.

In the pursuit of this goal, Alexander Campbell kept steadily in the forefront of his thinking the principles enunciated by Father Thomas in the Declaration and Address. Early in his ministry the principle proclaimed in Proposition Three—that nothing ought to be an article of faith, a term of communion, except what is expressly taught by Christ and his Apostles—fastened his attention on a fundamental truth that dramatically altered the course of his religious thinking.

It is May, 1812, and Alexander is talking with his wife, sitting with their first child before the open hearth of the family kitchen in Buffalo, Virginia. We haven’t discussed the baby’s baptism,” she is saying. “What if we should lose her?” Alexander’s answer is our first recorded instance of his personal implementation of his father’s tremendous thesis.

“I’ve been searching the Scriptures, Margaret, for the authority for infant baptism,” he speaks the words slowly and with deep emphasis, “and it just isn’t there. There isn’t any. Infant baptism is without divine authority, and we cannot practice it.”

From this position it is but a short step to the further clarification of the method and design of baptism. Devout study of such passages as the Savior’s statement recorded in Mark 16 that “He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved,” and in Paul’s letter to the Romans: ‘Therefore we are buried with Him by baptism into death; that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life,” — relieved Alexander’s mind of any lingering doubt that baptism was not only a Divine command, but was by immersion and for believers only.

And so it was that the little congregation at Brush Run was led into the waters for baptism by immersion; which act in turn led to a tenuous, half-way membership with the Redstone Baptist Association of Cross Creek, Virginia, an uneasy mesalliance which continued for seventeen years. With this momentous decision on baptism, Alexander Campbell not only took a long forward step in implementing his father’s dream by incorporation in the plea for Christian Unity the one universally accepted mode of baptism, but he demonstrated another virtue necessary for any real union, that of a free mind; the ability to renounce error in the light of revealed knowledge, which was with him a life-long characteristic.

In Proposition Four in the Declaration and Address, Thomas Campbell stared: “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.”

This passage must have been uppermost in Alexander’s mind when he arose to deliver his renowned sermon on “The Law” before the Baptist Redstone Association as Cross Creek, Virginia, in August, 1816. Taking for his text Romans 8:3: “For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God, sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh,” Alexander Campbell in this sermon first proclaimed to the world the now generally recognized truth, then bitterly opposed by many of the established churches, that Christ came to fulfill, and to supplant, the Jewish law of the Old Testament.

Alexander was only twenty-eight years old when he thus undertook to do for the modern age what the Apostle Paul had done for the churches of the first century in his letters to the Galatians and the Romans: To prove that the Christian Gospel ushered in a new dispensation and was not merely an extension or modification of the old Hebraic law. In so doing he swept aside the theological rubbish of many ages and set firmly in place a great pillar in the platform for Christian Unity. And it was with this sermon, may I add, that the mantle of leadership of the New Movement passed from the aging shoulders of Thomas Campbell to those of his son, to be worn with valor and brilliance and increasing effectiveness for half a century.

It was with this sermon, also, that a significant development was precipitated in the Movement. As its thesis struck a telling blow at the beliefs of many in the Baptist fold, conditions developed which became so uncomfortable that a few years later, in August, 1823, Alexander and his family, with others from the Brush Run Church to the number of thirty-two, withdrew Jesus. It is to our credit that we stand as a great body of Christians; it is to our shame that we present 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!

The heart of the Declaration and Address, the basic premise from which all else evolves, is the first of the thirteen Propositions: “The Church of Christ upon earth is essentially, intentionally and constitutionally one; consisting of all those in every place that profess their faith in Christ and obedience to Him in all things according to the Scriptures….”

In seeking to implement this grand thesis, Alexander wisely and effectively emphasized, not the things that divide us but the things upon which we can agree. Listen to him speaking from the Redstone Association and, organizing a separate congregation at Wellsburg, joined the Mahoning Association of Ohio. With this new affiliation, the efforts of the Campbells to effect the unity of the Church of Christ within the framework of the established church parties came to an end.

Of this move, Alexander Campbell 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 Christiandom. If this be our weakness, we ought not to be despised; if this be our wisdom, we ought not to be condemned.”

Seeking the approbation of our Lord, we continue unwillingly, as a separate communion today, championing the cause of unity among all disciples of through the pages of the Christian Baptist as early as July, 1825.

“Disunion among Christians is their disgrace and a perpetual reproach and dishonor to the Lord Jesus Christ. But it is asked: Are all Christians to agree in this union? I answer: In all these fundamental things they must and do agree. Every Christian has a divine right to admission into the Church of Christ, and to enjoy all the rights and privileges therein, wherever he may be, if he presents himself according to the gospel, unencumbered by sectarian names and creeds.”

Listen to him again in that tremendous statement of belief, “The Christian System,” when he declares in the preface:

“The principle which was inscribed upon our banner when we withdraw from the ranks of the sects was Faith in Jesus as the true Messiah and Obedience to Him as our lawgiver and King the only test of Christian character, and the only bond of Christian union, communion and cooperation, irrespective of all creeds, opinions, commandments and traditions of men.”

And again in that great chapter “in the same book on “Foundations of Christian Union”:

“But the grandeur, sublimity and beauty of the foundation of hope and of ecclesiastical or social union, established by the author and founder of Christianity, consisted in this: The belief of one fact . . . and the submission to one institution expressive of it . . . The one fact is expressed in a single proposition, that Jesus the Nazarene is the Messiah; the one institution is baptism into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”

It was to further implement the plea for Christian Unity that this greatly gifted leader established his two religious periodicals, The Christian Baptist, published from 1823 to 1830, and the MilIennial Harbinger, which survived him, both of which achieved worldwide circulation and are yet read and pondered by many thousands of earnest Christians.

It was for the same purpose that, for seven years during his early manhood, he conducted a school for boys, Buffalo Seminary, which he hoped would develop young Timothys of the Faith, and later, at the age of fifty-two, established on his own farm the still unique and justly famous Bethany College, the only institution of higher learning in the world where the Bible was a required textbook, and guided its destinies as President and instructor in the Scriptures until his death.

It was for the purpose of eliminating obsolete words and phrases in the Holy Scriptures which were stumblingblocks to the proper understanding of the great cause which he espoused, that Alexander Campbell published on his own presses at Bethany a new translation of the New Testament, known as “The Living Oracles,” the George Campbell MacKnight-Doddridge version. It was this version that caused the celebrated John Randolph, during the heat of debate in the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1829, to charge that: “Alexander Campbell can never be satisfied. Even the sacred Scriptures cannot satisfy him, and he has given us a new Bible of his own!”

Alexander Campbell entered secular politics as a delegate to the Virginia Constitutional Convention for the primary purpose, as he wrote to his colleague, Colonal Charles S. Morgan, of introducing certain badly needed reforms, such as an Amendment for the abolition of slavery; the extension of suffrage; and the popular election of judges. In that assembly he served with such eminent statesmen as ExPresident James Monroe, James Madison, Chief Justice John Marshall, future President Tyler, and John Randolph of Roanoke.

Bur he also took advantage of the occasion to preach Christian unity according to the Gospel. Almost every night he was in some pulpit, or upon some platform, the quality of his messages being such as to cause James Madison, one of his frequent listeners, to characterize him as “One of the ablest and most original expounders of the Scriptures I have ever heard.”

Likewise, in each of his famous debates, Alexander Campbell was prompted principally by the desire to promote the cause of Christian Unity as set forth in the Declaration and Address. In his debate with John Walker and with W. L. McCalla, he emphasized the divisive nature of human creeds as well as the divine nature and universality of Scriptural baptism; and through the printed accounts of the debates, spread widely the plea of the new Movement. His debate with the celebrated British atheist-socialist, Robert Owen, in Cincinnati in 1829, was the result of his acceptance of a challenge by Owen to any clergyman, anywhere, to debate the “Evidence of Christianity.” In this encounter, Campbell so effectively appeared as the champion of all Christendom that the Restoration Movement came to the attention of many thousands who otherwise might never have heard of it. And his debate with the Catholic Bishop John B. Purcell in 1837 in the same city, in response to the Bishop’s declaration that ‘The Protestant Reformation has been the cause of all the contention and infidelity in the world,” established him as the greatest and most original apologist of Protestant religious thought since the days of Martin Luther. His last debate, and perhaps the most farreaching in its influence on succeeding generations, was his sixteen-day battle with the celebrated Presbyterian scholar, Dr. Nathan L. Rice, at Lexington, Kentucky, in November, 1843. This debate has been characterized as the most thorough exposure of the fallacy and folly of human creeds ever made, and should be required reading for our brethren today. As Campbell stated on the sixteenth day of this encounter:

“Our doctrine is catholic, very catholic not Roman Catholic, nor Greek Catholic, but simply catholic. In religion we have one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one body, one spirit, one hope, and one God and Father. But we have many opinions. The church, then, may have opinions by thousands, while her faith is limited to the inspired testimony of the Apostles and the prophets. Where that testimony begins and ends, faith begions and ends. In faith, then, all Christians may be one, though of diverse knowledge and of numerous opinions. In faith we must be one, for there is but one Christian faith; while in opinions we may differ. Hence, we are commanded to receive one another, without regard to differences of opinion.

“It is not the object of our efforts to make men think alike on a thousand themes. Let men think as they please on any matters of human opinion, and upon ‘doctrines of religion,’ provided only that they hold THE head to be Christ and keep His commandments.”

In Proposition Eight of the Declaration and Address, Thomas Campbell emphasized that full knowledge of all revealed truth 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.” And, again, in Proposition Twelve, he stated that 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.

It was with these profound truths in mind, I think, that Alexander most effectively implemented his father’s thesis. For despite the fact that he is generally regarded as an unemotional and intellectually aloof man, nothing he ever did or said or wrote contributed as much to the healing of wounds caused by the strife of divisions as his attitude of understanding and respect for those who did not see with him eye to eye. At no time during his lifelong plea for Christian unity did Alexander Campbell hold that an eventual return to New Testament Christianity be identical in all details with what he thought constituted that return. At no time did he allocate all knowledge and wisdom in spiritual matters to himself, and those like him. In nothing he ever said or wrote is this better exemplified than in his noble reply to the lady of Lunenburg, who wrote him asking: “How can anyone become a Christian? Does the name of Christ belong to any but those who believe the Gospel, repent and are buried by baptism into the death of Christ?”

“Who is a Christian?” answered Alexander Campbell. “Everyone who believes in his heart that Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah, the son of God; repents of his sins and obeys Him in all things according to his measure of knowledge of His will. I cannot, therefore, make anyone duty the standard of Christian state or character, not even immersion . . . Should I find a Pedobaptist more intelligent in the Christian scriptures, more spiritually-minded and more devoted to the Lord than one immersed on a profession of the ancient faith, I would not hesitate a moment in giving the preference of my heart to him that loveth most. Did I act otherwise I would be a pure sectarian, a Pharisee among Christians. It is the image of Christ the Christian looks for and loves, and this does not consist in being exact in a few items but in general devotion to the whole truth as far as known.”

Thus, by precept and example Alexander Campbell throughout his long life faithfully implemented his father’s thesis and pointed the way for those of us who follow after him in our quest of the unity of God’s people.

Paraphrasing the words of Abraham Lincoln, whose time Campbell shared and whose family was intimately influenced by the Movement he headed: It is for us the living to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which this man has so nobly advanced; that from his dedication we take renewed inspiration to the cause for which he gave the full measure of devotion.

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Louis Cochran, a Disciple of Christ, lives in Nashville, where he is writing a history of our Movement. He is also the author of several novels, including The Fool of God, which tells the story of Alexander Campbell.