Eva Jean Wrather, Alexander Campbell: Adventurer in Freedom (TCU Press, 2005); Edited by D. Duane Cummins

Writing about Eva Jean Wrather’s recently published book on Alexander Campbell brings to mind some of my contacts with her through the years, both at her home in Nashville and while serving with her on the board of the Disciples of Christ Historical Society, which she had a hand in founding. She was always gracious, engaging, and interested in the subject at hand.

At lunch on one occasion she told me that Walter Scott should be the founding hero of Churches of Christ, not Alexander Campbell. This was her way of telling me she thought our people in Churches of Christ were still caught up in legalism, and that Scott might serve our cause better than Campbell. I begged to differ with her, not that we might not yet have a problem with legalism, but that I did not believe that Scott was any more a legalist than Campbell.

On another occasion I asked her what she made of the “two Campbells” theory, posited by some historians among us -- that Campbell was a belligerent sectarian in his Christian Baptist days, but a conciliatory ecumenist in his latter years. She said it was a myth. I agreed with her that time.

As for her lifetime study of Campbell,-- totaling 70 years! -- it is arguable that she became the authority on Alexander Campbell. She eventually produced an 800,000 word manuscript on Campbell’s life. If one measured that by the present volume under review with its 264 pages, the series would have to run eight or nine volumes to include her entire manuscript. Through the years there were overtures to publish her manuscript if she would substantially reduce its size, which she could never bring herself to do.

Back in the 1960s no less a publisher than Harper and Brothers offered to publish her work if she could limit it to a single volume of some 700 pages. While this was a generous offer, it still would have required more than a 75% reduction of the manuscript! And she had been advised along the way that the best portrait of a man might come through judicious selection rather than massive detail.

She agonized over the Harper proposal for a time, and at last rejected it. When I asked one of her friends, Perry Gresham, president of Bethany College, about her reluctance -- we all wanted to see it published -- he ventured, “She can’t turn him loose.”

There was the benign suggestion around the historical society and Nashville friends that she was vicariously ‘the third Mrs. Campbell.” That Eva Jean was by now a seasoned spinster provided some basis for the idea that she was at least incurably enamored of the man she spent a lifetime studying, whom she respectfully referred to as “the reformer.”

But any infatuation she may have had for Campbell did not keep her from an occasional caustic criticism. An example of this was the occasion of his “Sermon on the Law” in 1816 when Campbell was but 27, which was a turning point in his ministry. He had at first been rejected as preacher for the occasion by Elder Pritchard, pastor of the Cross Creek Baptist Church where the annual meeting was held. But when the scheduled speaker became ill, logic required that Campbell should speak, to which Pritchard acquiesced. When friends brought word to Campbell, he told them he would accept, but that the invitation would have to come from Pritchard himself.

Oddly, Eva Jean saw this as vindictive on Campbell’s part. “For all his desire to follow the teachings of Christ,” she said, “he did not find it easy to turn the other cheek.” The facts of the case hardly allow one to conclude that Campbell wanted to embarrass Pritchard or to force him to eat crow, but simply that he was in charge of the proceedings and the only appropriate one to invite him.

Even more surprising is the way Eva Jean interpreted the story of Campbell being invited by the chaplain to the U. S. Congress, one Spencer H. Cone, to take his place on an occasion, again in 1816 when Campbell was in the nation’s capital to raise money for a church building back home. But he declined the invitation. Eva Jean supposed Campbell, then only 27 and a U.S. citizen for only seven years, must have been awed at a chance to “speak” before the U. S. House of Representatives in the presence of such notables as Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, and John Randolph. But he turned it down!

She saw this as his “not having quite recovered from his siege of Pharisaic separatism.” It was his sectarian exclusivism from which he had not yet fully recovered that led him to reject the opportunity! This is a gross misreading of the facts, and patently unfair to Campbell.

In the years that followed Mr. Cone, the chaplain involved, became a prominent Baptist minister, and in 1855 Campbell published his obituary in his Millennial Harbinger. When the writer mentioned that Cone as a young minister had served as chaplain to Congress, Campbell inserted an asterisk and supplied a footnote. In the footnote he told the story of how the two of them were together in Washington back in 1816, and that Cone had invited him to take his place on an occasion as the chaplain to Congress, and that he did not accept.

He told why he excused himself. He did not consider it appropriate to enter into “the solemnities of social worship” with men who daily blaspheme God. He would preach the gospel to sinners at any time, but he would not commune with them in Christian worship. He made it clear that -- forty years later -- he had the same “scrupulosity,” that he had not changed his mind.

If the chaplain had invited him to preach to Congress he would have accepted, but it was an invitation to do what such chaplains do -- open the proceedings with a prayer. His rejection had nothing to do with Pharisaic exclusivism, but with the conviction that he would preach the gospel to sinners anytime and anywhere, but he would engage in Christian worship only with fellow believers.

He may have been overly arduous about this. He once suggested that meeting houses might well have a gate in the aisles, so as to separate believers from unbelievers. The saints would sit together and commune together. Unbelieving visitors, while graciously welcomed, would be seated separately and would not be served Communion. Campbell would see them there to hear the gospel, not to worship.

While this may be seen as a high view of Christian worship, I do not know of a single congregation that followed his “gate in the aisle” idea. Not even the church at Bethany!

As for preaching in the House chamber, Campbell did just that in 1850, his text being John 3:16. It was an informal gathering of congressmen and their families. It was a Lord’s day. Afterwards he met with an assembly of saints to break bread. He made a clear distinction between such gatherings.

But, overall, Eva Jean’s first volume on Campbell -- which extends from his family background and birth in 1788 to the beginning of his first journal, The Christian Baptist, in 1823 --- deserves high marks. It is brilliantly written, painstakingly researched, and impressively resourceful. The reader gets the impression that once the author has told her stories about “the warrior of Bethany” -- whether his break with his mother church, his wrenching decision to be immersed, his uneasy ministry among the Baptists, his initial adventures as a reformer, his marriage and early family life, his first “reformed” church, his assumption of the leadership of “the reformation” from his father -- there is nothing more to be told.

But what is a strength may also be a weakness. The reader is inundated with massive detail, and may conclude that he is being told more than he needs -- or wants -- to know. If there had been more “judicious selection,” as Eva Jean had been advised, and a leaner telling of the story the average reader would be more likely to remain attentive.

While this book is described as “A Literary Biography,” it is also most certainly a scholarly biography, as is evident on virtually every page. The resources are vast and the quotations are abundant, and yet the author or editor chose not to provide footnotes. There is a useful index and an array of rare pictures, but no references to sources quoted. This will substantially compromise the book’s usefulness for the impressive number of young Campbell scholars now emerging among us.

But Eva Jean Wrather has nonetheless splendidly shared with us her understanding of a remarkable young man -- an “Adventurer in Freedom,” as she describes him. Whatever else may be said of Alexander Campbell, he was first and last “the reformer” who chose freedom for himself and for the church catholic -- in season and out, mostly out.

Notes

This was prepared at the request of another web site, but I thought my readers would also be interested in it.

All previous essays, along with other writings, are available at www.leroygarrett.org Names will be added upon request.