Highlights in Restoration History …

A CANADIAN HISTORIAN LOOKS AT OUR DIVISIONS

Most of us in this country who are heirs of the Restoration Movement are hardly aware that our counterparts in the country to the north of us have their own origins and traditions, quite independent of us. We presume that any nation that has heard our plea must have heard it from our pioneers, and if they do not look back to Alexander Campbell and Barton Stone like we do, there is something wrong. But our Canadian brethren have had a Restoration Movement all their own, and it is just as old as ours, if not older. They have their own pioneers who migrated from the Old World just as ours did. They had journals by 1836 and cooperative agencies by 1843.

Their first church, organized by John R. Stewart, a Scot, on Prince Edward Island, dates back to 1810, which makes it a year older than Thomas Campbell’s Brush Run Church of Christ. Like the Camp hell group. they were not immersionists at the outset. but became so in 1815 when another Scot of Haldanean influence. Alexander Crawford, began to work with them.

They also have had their own historian, just as we have had Dr. Robert Richardson. Reuben Butchart is his name. and one cannot make his way through his 700-page chronicle of The Disciples of Christ in Canada Since 1830 without appreciating its author as much as the history. Butchart must have been at least a third generation Disciple. though the Canadians have traditionally called themselves Churches of Christ almost exclusively, especially in the earlier generations. When Alexander Campbell visited Ontario in 1855, with Selina at his side, he tells of traveling with a “Bro. Butchart.” I am guessing that this was Reuben’s grandfather. Some of our Canadian readers might help me on this point.

In his preface to the history Reuben tells how his interest in the Movement goes back to his boyhood when he would rummage through old disciple literature in his father’s attic. He was a member of the Church of Christ in Canada for seventy years, and it was in those latter years that he wrote his history. But he would not presume to be a historian, only a compiler. Some compiler he was, for he wrote the story of every congregation that ever existed in all of Canada’s nine provinces. I was especially interested in those of what he calls “the pioneer period,” which was up to 1869, at which time Canada had 71 churches of the Restoration persuasion.

And Restoration is the word, for Butchart notes that Canada stressed restoration much more than unity, a point of difference with the Stone-Campbell work in the States. He says that in all those years he heard very little about unity. While our pioneers were well-educated Presbyterians, broad and ecumenical in their outlook, Canada’s were less-educated Scotch Baptists, who were rigid and legalistic, and who had already divided several times over “restoring the ancient order” before coming to Canada. Butchart thinks it remarkable not only that all the Scotch Baptist churches in Canada became Churches of Christ, but that in Canada they managed to stay united despite lots of differences—at least for the first two generations.

It is both sad and interesting to follow the story of the ruptures in the few, small, scattered churches of Canada. Once they had a missionary society, there were those who opposed it, insisting that it was not in “the pattern.” Then came instrumental music. Same story, same reason. Both sides were often unloving and overbearing. Soon the non-instrument Churches of Christ were a separate church. Reuben, in his kindly manner, devotes a chapter to them, in which he lists the congregations, and, in behalf of the people he represents. expresses “cordial and Christian greetings to our sister Churches in Canada.”

In recent years there has been a healthful reexamination of the nature and causes of the divisions within the Movement in the States. Our older historians have attributed the divisions, especially the “Church of Christ” split which was the first, to “differences in interpreting Biblical authority and the scope and details of ‘restoration’,” to quote W.E. Garrison in his now famous “Fork of the Road” address before the Pension Fund of Christian Churches in 1964. His colleague in historiography, A. T. DeGroot, says “the principle of restoration of a fixed pattern is divisive and not unitive.” He refers to “this spectacle of divided unionists,” observing that there is something obviously wrong when a unity movement divides again and again and again. Howard Short, in a Ph. D. thesis on the causes of our divisions, points to “exclusivism, sectism, and legalism.”

In recent years some of our folk have played down the doctrinal or hermeneutical causes and have pointed to socioeconomic factors, especially as they were created by the Civil War. This began with Henry K. Shaw in his Hoosier Disciples in 1966. “Disciples of Christ like to claim that American slavery and the Civil War did not divide them,” he writes as he questions the long-accepted Garrison-DeGroot-Short explanations. He goes on to argue that the War did divide them. Carl Ketcherside and Ed Harrell have also thoughtfully suggested in their writings that the War had much more to do with the division than has been acknowledged, Harrell in particular arguing that the division was actually sectional, between North and South, as a statistical breakdown of the churches indicate.

Reuben Butchart also had to explain division in a unity movement—in Canada and not the United States. Since they’ve had no Civil War he does not have that factor to consider. Perhaps the division came through American influence? He does not suggest this. Rather he tells of congregations that separated over these issues that had no contact with us, who were native Canadians whose roots go back to the Scotch Baptists. He blames the “needless divisions” on the “narrow thinking of long ago,” and he quotes A. T. DeGroot, as we have above, to the effect that our people have divided because of their illusion that there is a fixed pattern to restore, and they fracture when they cannot agree on what that pattern is.

Butchart observes that the Scotch Baptists, who had a proclivity for dividing, looked for “a systematically devised church,” one that operates “according to a fixed schedule of ordinances for all time,” and that they brought this along with them when they became Churches of Christ.

The same thing happened to our people in Great Britain. Whether it is England, Scotland, or Ireland—or Australia or New Zealand—or Canada or the United States, the story is the same: we have divided and divided and divided. So have other churches, of course. If there are twenty different kinds of Presbyterians, there must be a hundred different kinds of Baptists. There is one embarrassing difference: we are the one people, the only people, who are supposed to represent a movement to unite all the Christians.

I have no interest in belaboring the question of why we divided. I had rather contribute to the healing of the divisions, whatever be their cause. But there may well be a relationship between why we originally divided and our continuing to divide, along with preserving the old divisions. Right now we have Churches of Christ in Texas, not to mention Canada or Great Britain, that will not even fellowship each other. As for others in discipledom, it is as if the Disciples and the Christian Churches were completely separate churches, even though we are all baptized believers with the same historic roots. Why?

I agree with the humble Canadian historian that our divisions have not only been needless but that they are to be blamed upon a devastating fallacy that has been inherent in the restoration plea from the outset. We have all been duped by a fatal error, restorationism. In “restoring the church” (and that itself is an error in that the church has always been and does not need to be restored) we have presumed that the New Testament constitutes a fixed pattern, that all the details are legislated, not unlike the minute instructions that God gave to Moses for building the tabernacle. We have made much of Heb. 8:5, “See that thou make all things according to the pattern,” supposing that this makes the New Testament a fixed code for the church.

And so of course each leader presumes that his interpretation is the correct one, and he teaches his people that to be “faithful” they must adhere to the way he sees it, even if it means creating a faction. Nearly always the point at issue relates to what the Scriptures say nothing about.

But such legalism is not merely differing on the details of the pattern, for the church could abide this if the unity of the Spirit were preserved in the bond of peace. We allow love to fail, and we come to cherish our parties more than each other. We neglect the love that builds up and seek the “knowledge” that puffs up.

To put it another way, our folk divided in Canada, Great Britain, and the United States when some among them imposed their opinions upon others, making them a “Thus saith the Lord” that all others must accept to remain in the fellowship. This is sectism, which is carnality and a sin, just like idolatry or fornication. We divide because we are carnal. True, socioeconomic factors may tempt us to be carnal, whether dividing the body or cheating in a business deal. But we don’t have to be factious or be a cheat. Faith is our victory, and love is that which binds us together. One should be just as resolved not to make a sect as not to be a fornicator. Lest we forget, the apostle makes factions and parties a sin. So there is no way to blame our sinful, divisive ways on three continents on forces within our cultures beyond our control. We could have helped it and we sinned when we didn’t. And we can do something about our present divided condition, and we sin so long as we don’t.

Old Prof. W. E. Garrison observed well when he said: It makes a world of difference whether a group of restorationists is looking for grounds on which to separate or for grounds on which to unite. —the Editor