J. FRANK NORRIS: CAMPBELLITE

Flamboyant and controversial, J. Frank Norris, an independent Baptist of yesteryear with big churches in Fort Worth and Detroit, was cut from a large mold. While I was but a lad when he was in his heyday, I remember some of the stories about his colorful and stormy career. They told it on him that he would sometimes have the ushers to lock the doors and allow no one to leave the church until they had given the amount of money he asked for. And he once shot a man to death in his church, apparently in self defense. He was at war with the Southern Baptists as much as with the devil, so he had his own brand of Baptist church. He must have been powerful in the pulpit, for he was known to bring 4,000 people to their feet as one man, praising God, and he often moved audiences to tears.

He touched the history of Churches of Christ in Texas in what may well have been the most famous debate in this state, with Foy E. Wallace, Jr., who was as colorful a figure among Churches of Christ as Norris was among the Baptists. The Norris-Wallace debate, which was held at the First Baptist Church in Fort Worth in 1934, attracted 7,000 to 8,000 people for each of the three days it was held, with almost as many attending the day sessions as the evening ones.

It had its amusing moments, such as Norris accusing Wallace of sprinkling folk when he accidentally turned a glass of water on a man sitting near him. But it was more often visceral, with feelings running deep and Baptist and Church of Christ folk, who usually make good neighbors even in Texas, more polarized than ever. Wallace resembled a prosecuting attorney, sometimes shaking his finger in Norris’ face as he made his points.

Norris had the debate stenographically recorded and was going to publish it in its entirety, but Wallace went to court and got an injunction prohibiting Norris from publishing Wallace’s part of the debate. Norris went ahead and published the Norris-Wallace Debate, which was only his speeches, but since there are copious quotes from what Wallace had said, one gets some idea of the line of argument. Norris took full advantage of Wallace’s refusal: Read the debate that so thoroughly annihilated the opponent that he refused to have his side published, was part of Norris’ advertisement of the debate.

One is left to wonder why Wallace refused, for he was given the right to check his speeches and make corrections, and he was offered half the profits from the sale of the book. Limited as we are to what Norris published, we can make no judgment on this matter. But it is clear that Norris believed that it was to his advantage to publish the debate, including Wallace’s side, and one must conclude that he handled his part quite well on all four propositions, two of which were on premillennialism, the others on eternal security and the essentiality of baptism.

What especially intrigued me, being the Campbellite that I am, is the way Norris used Alexander Campbell to his advantage, even to putting the audience in gales of laughter. He showed quite convincingly that Campbell believed in a millennium, in the future conversion of the Jews, and a thousand year reign. As for baptism being essential, he really laid it on Wallace again and again: “I challenge him to show one line, statement, syllable, address, sermon, where Alexander Campbell ever wrote or spoke, or preached that baptism is essential to salvation.” Campbell in fact went on record to the effect that he could not say baptism is absolutely essential. Norris insisted that Wallace and his folk should not be called Campbellites. I am a Campbellite, proclaimed J. Frank Norris, clearly in charge of the situation. The audience roared!

Norris was devastating on what has long been the Achilles’ heel of Churches of Christ, exclusivism or supposing only themselves to be saved and all others lost, which was particularly manifest during the first half of this century. “Is it not a fact that you teach, preach, and practice that all who are not baptized into your particular ‘Church of Christ’ have no chance of heaven?,” Norris asked. He then gave a roll call of some of the great saints who have gone on to their reward—Wesley, Moody, Spurgeon. They are all in hell, along with millions of other evangelical Christians who were not baptized according to Wallace’s understanding, he charged. And that includes Alexander Campbell, he added, who was never immersed in or by the ‘Church of Christ.’

As interesting as this old debate is, staged by remarkably colorful preachers, it is just as well that those days are behind us. I would that all remnants of the “skin the sects” days were discarded, but we are not yet completely liberated from our narrow sectarian exclusivism. Shades of the Foy Wallace era are still with us, so long as we presume to be so “right” that we cannot have fellowship with other believers.

The truth is that we should never have debated the Baptists, nor any other Christian group for that matter. Add up all the debates and what do we have in terms of brotherhood among believers. Absolutely nothing! We were born as a movement with a passion for unity, our pioneers assured us, but debates not only cultivate no unity, they are Satan’s tool to divide us further.

And the propositions debated have often been unnecessary if not silly. When Wallace affirmed that “baptism is essential to salvation” he took a very vulnerable position, one that the best minds throughout our history have refused to take—mainly because the Bible nowhere teaches that baptism is essential to salvation! And why gather 8,000 people together and argue about the millennium, a doctrine on which the church has always differed, usually without difficulty. As for the issue of whether a believer can fall from grace, an “outsider” might have concluded from watching the spectacle that both parties fairly demonstrated that even 8,000 believers might fall from grace together, for the Baptists and Church of Christ folk spent the better part of three days laughing at each other as each urged his champion to get with it, not unlike a rooster fight.

Fancy with me for a moment. We go back in our minds to the First Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas in 1934. There is a great gathering of 8,000 Christians, mostly Baptist and Church of Christ folk, and they are having a festival of preaching and fellowship. Great singing! Great praise! Their love for each other is evident. Two of their great preachers, J. Frank Norris and Foy E. Wallace, are sharing the pulpit together. Together they are preaching Jesus Christ and him crucified. They are aware that they have some differences, but on this occasion they are emphasizing their commonality in Jesus Christ, and the two churches are bearing witness to the people of Fort Worth of how Christians can differ and still love each other and do something constructive together.

Down deep inside your heart do not you want that kind of Church of Christ, one that reaches out to embrace with loving fellowship rather than one that shakes a finger in a fratricidal spectacle? The choice is really ours to make. Don’t you think there has been enough hating and debating?

As for Alexander Campbell, he received word while on his death bed that his folk and the Baptists were trying to unite. The old man wept for joy, saying, “This is the happiest day of my life,” and went on to say that the Disciples and Baptists should never have separated.

That is one more reason why 1 am a Campbellite—along with J. Frank Norris!—the Editor