The Uneasy Center

Reformed Christianity in Antebellum America

Paul K. Conkin

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2000
• Print ISBN: 9780807844922, 9780807821800
• eBook ISBN: 9780807860861
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Distinguished intellectual historian Paul Conkin offers the first comprehensive examination of mainline Protestantism in America, from its emergence in the colonial era to its rise to predominance in the early nineteenth century and the beginnings of its gradual decline in the years preceding the Civil War. He clarifies theological traditions and doctrinal arguments and includes substantive discussions of institutional development and of the order and content of worship. Conkin defines Reformed Christianity broadly, to encompass Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Congregationalists, Methodists, Calvinist Baptists, and all other denominations originating in the work of reformers other than Luther. He portrays growing unease and conflict within this center of American Protestantism before the Civil War as a result of doctrinal disputes (especially regarding salvation), scholarly and scientific challenges to evangelical Christianity, differences in institutional practices, and sectional disagreements related to the issue of slavery. Conkin grounds his study in a broad history of Western Christianity, and he integrates the South into his discussion, thereby offering a truly national perspective on the history of the Reformed tradition in America.

Chapter 1: Reformed Christianity in Britain and Colonial America

Because of the patterns of migration to early America, the largest number of colonists came from the state churches of Britain (Anglican and Presbyterian). Whether orthodox Calvinists or not, they traced their origins back to John Calvin, to his close associates, or to the church order he helped establish in Geneva. Such a tradition informed the four largest colonial denominations, all of British origin (Anglican, Congregational, Presbyterian, and Separate Baptist), and two much smaller continental transplants (Dutch Reformed and German Reformed). The backdrop to the transplantation of Reformed Christianity to America was the complex reformation of the English and Scottish churches.

Reform of the English Church

Protestant reforms within the English church came gradually, often in the midst of bloody conflict. The first break with Rome, under Henry VIII, involved legal issues of authority, not doctrines or rituals. From 1530 to 1534, Henry sought the support of the church for either an annulment of his marriage to Katherine of Aragon or a divorce from a wife who had not borne him a son. Frustrated in his attempts to gain what he wanted from the church, Henry in 1533 married Anne Boleyn and in 1534 declared himself sole head of the English church, thus breaking all ties to the pope. He forced most English churchmen to go along with this shift in polity and cruelly executed the few leaders who refused to support his divorce (the most famous martyr would be Sir Thomas More). At first, this break with Rome did not change the doctrines or forms of worship in the English church. Still a subject of debate among historians is the strength of the Roman church in 1534 and the degree that earlier English reformers, such as John Wycliffe, had gained covert followers and thus prepared the way for internal changes. It seems that the degree of dissatisfaction with the existing church, and the openness to the types of well-publicized reforms begun by Luther, varied from region to region in England.¹

Henry seemed to relish his new religious role and was in sentiment a committed Christian. Influenced by several advisers tied politically to Anne Boleyn, he explored an alliance with Lutheran princes in Germany and in 1536 approved a Lutheran-influenced but moderate set of ten articles, which marked the first official move toward a more Protestant church in Britain. The articles affirmed justification by faith and referred only to the three sacraments accepted in the Augsburg Confession (baptism, Eucharist, and penance) but left in place most of the existing Roman liturgy. It is not clear how much, if any, effect the new articles, or a subsequent reduction in the number of holy days, had on local forms of worship and devotion. For those local congregations already committed to a broader reform agenda, the shift in 1536 at least gave them some leeway to revise beliefs and worship forms. In the wake of this first quasi-Protestant reform, Henry began dispossessing the monasteries, largely for financial gain and in retaliation for churchmen’s increasing opposition to his policies.

After 1538, a period of reform virtually ended, with reaction the order of the day. Henry had been pushed further than he wanted by his most persistent evangelical advisers, Thomas Cromwell and Thomas Cranmer, while conservative churchmen had tried to salvage as much of the old doctrines as possible. Alliances with Catholic states also mandated moderation. The conservatives won most arguments after 1538. Thus Henry achieved a church only slightly reformed, and this more at a doctrinal than at a liturgical level. The English church retained communion in one kind (bread), transubstantiation, clerical celibacy, private Masses, and individual confessions before priests. In 1540 Cromwell, who had resisted enforcement of such conservative policies, was executed for treason. An intimidated Archbishop Cranmer salvaged as much of the early, and essentially Lutheran, reforms as possible. In 1543, a new formulation of doctrine, one enthusiastically approved by Henry, dropped any commitment to faith as the sole basis of justification (Henry wanted equal emphasis on works) and limited the reading of the English Bible to the upper ranks of society. In 1546, an ill Henry approved heresy trials against even moderate evangelicals, but in the final four months of his life he once again aligned himself with more evangelically oriented advisers, or those who would control the regency set up to govern for the new boy king, Edward. Also, throughout the period of reaction, Cranmer had retained his position as archbishop.

A new wave of reform came during the brief reign of Edward VI. It eliminated most remnants of Catholicism and produced a new, moderately Calvinist confession and a vernacular Book of Common Prayer. These changes reflected Reformed more than Lutheran sources, since they now paralleled the influential reforms under way by Calvin in Geneva. Cranmer corresponded with Calvin, and Calvin’s earlier Reformed mentor, Martin Bucer, moved from Strasbourg to England in 1549 to teach at Cambridge and help guide Edwardian reform until his death in 1551. John Knox, in exile from his native Scotland, took refuge in England and contributed to the new reforms before moving on to Geneva to serve under Calvin as assistant minister, all in preparation for his return to Scotland in 1560 to assist the reformation in his home country. Thus, the more evangelical English bishops joined an international network of Reformed intellectuals.

What happened in the seven years of Edward’s rule seemed, in retrospect, revolutionary. But the changes came by degree and were not without intense opposition; such were the radical shifts required at the parish level that it is impossible to gauge how deeply the ordinary people assimilated the new Protestantism. Edward approved a strongly Calvinist confession (Forty-Two Articles). A rapid turnover in bishops all but eliminated the conservatives and led to a young and able group of preachers and bishops. The leaders of the new order suppressed endowed prayers for the dead, ended Masses for the dead and condemned the purgatory doctrine, introduced a completely new communion service (both elements, plain bread, tables to replace altars, no elevation of the Host, and no corporeal presence), and ordered the use of an English Bible. The clergy could marry, images were no longer accepted in churches, and priests were now called ministers. Many papist ceremonies became illegal, such as ringing of holy bells, kissing altars, and clerical processions. At the very end of Edward’s reign, the Crown ordered the confiscation of all vestments (except surplices) and plate. Of all the changes, the second prayer book, that of 1552, proved most important. It introduced a formal and prescribed and soon beloved liturgy, which, with limited later changes, remains the basis of Anglican worship today.

At Edward’s premature death in 1553, Henry’s eldest and Roman Catholic daughter, Mary Tudor became queen. She quickly moved the English church back to Rome, with the enthusiastic support of at least a large minority, and possibly a majority, in England who remained loyal to the old church. She married Phillip II of Spain and reestablished a Roman Catholic liturgy. Her religious policies drove the ablest Reformed ministers and nonconforming lay-people into prison, exile, or martyrdom (280 burned at the stake). Many escaped to European Protestant centers – Strasbourg, Frankfurt, Geneva – there becoming part of a network of Calvinist activists.

Mary’s reign proved brief, to the despair of Catholics and to the joy of leading Protestants. Succeeding her at her death in 1558 was Henry VIII’s Protestant daughter, Elizabeth, the last of the Tudor monarchs. Guided by ecclesiastical advisers, she slowly and against determined opposition worked out an enduring, although not unchallenged, religious settlement, which rested on a clearly Reformed confession – the Thirty-Nine Articles – and, more important in the long run, a revised Book of Common Prayer. Roman Catholics at first strenuously resisted this settlement, which helped push Elizabeth more fully into the Reformed camp. But she resisted pressures for more extreme reforms, and at least in many of the rituals prescribed in the Book of Common Prayer, and in the episcopacy, she retained several traditional, nonscriptural reminders of Romanism (vestments for ministers, the use of traditional pulpits, and leeway in the communion for a doctrine of real presence), as a part of a deliberate effort to form a moderate English church with the broadest possible appeal.

The Elizabethan settlement brought temporary religious peace to England. The Thirty-Nine Articles were deliberately general or broad, but they were not latitudinarian. They still represent one of the more elegant summaries of Reformed Christian doctrine, including the doctrine of election or predestination. The articles have remained, to this day, a quite acceptable guideline for a now minority of Calvinist Anglicans. In fact, they are alone fully acceptable to such Calvinists, for as a whole the English church outgrew, or came to ignore, but did not repudiate, what most Anglicans now view as a historically significant confession. But the articles could not encompass the religious spectrum in England, particularly former Catholics who, even if willing to sever connections with Rome, still loved the older, sacramental religion or resented the endless preachments, the moral rigor, and the abstentious life of the more zealous Reformed ministers. At the other extreme were those who wanted a more thorough cleansing of the old and corrupt church; who yearned for a presbyterian or even a congregational polity; who wanted a converted, zealous, and well-trained clergy; who despised all non-essential forms in worship; who affirmed with rigor such doctrines as complete depravity, divine election, irresistible grace, and the perseverance of saints; and who aspired to a serious, rigorous personal and social morality. In time, these divisions gained labels, such as Catholic versus Puritan, or High Church versus Low Church, or Arminian versus Calvinist. But the labels would never be very precise.

At the death of Elizabeth in 1603, Calvinist doctrine was not a major issue in England. The broad church itself was Calvinist, at least in profession, in the dominant voices in its universities, and in a majority of its bishops and clergy. Yet tensions remained. Already, a few congregations had rejected the authority of the episcopacy and as nonconformists had faced severe persecution. The Brownists or Separatists were one such small sect, half of whom fled their exile in Holland to found the small Plymouth colony in New England in 1620. Later Quakers would take nonconformity so far as enthusiasm. Within the church, the various factions, all with blurred boundaries, competed for power and preference. Somewhere on the continuum between sacramentally oriented, High Church advocates and overt nonconformists existed a spectrum of churchpeople who, eventually, would gain the elusive label of Puritan. The label first came into prominent use largely as a pejorative term, particularly after the High Church party gained preference under Charles I and his archbishop, William Laud. Laud tried to enforce strict conformity even at the parish level. Laud and his supporters tended to use the label “Puritan” in a very encompassing sense, so as to include most of his clerical enemies – those strictly Calvinist in doctrine, those evangelical or non-liturgical in practice, and those who favored a more decentralized system of church government, whether presbyterian or congregational.²

This spectrum of so-called Puritans included a scattering of ministers and lay-people, most to the northeast of London, who late in the sixteenth century despaired of a fully reformed state church. Thus they began writing and subscribing congregational covenants. They did not mean for such covenants to separate them from the larger English church but used them as the local foundation, or justification, of their church order. Members had to subscribe to such a covenant, and each covenanted congregation claimed a large degree of local autonomy – the right to pass on the qualification of members and even an asserted but never realized right to elect its own minister. This began a special free church tradition in Britain, one distinguished not so much by congregational polity (various Anabaptist groups pioneered in this) but by the special role of the congregational covenant. Such congregations joined to create their own special identity, and by subsequent revisions or rewriting of covenants, they could change that identity. The local covenant was not a creed or confession but an all-important bond of union that soon replaced all creeds or formal confessions. Although forming only one distinguishable segment of Puritans in England, these “covenanting” Puritans dominated the mass exodus to Massachusetts Bay in 1630–31 and gave a distinctive shape to New England. Because of their role, the word Puritan quickly gained a much more precise and self-conscious meaning in the new world than it ever had in the old.

Briefly, during the Long Parliament (beginning in 1640), Anglicans of all types, including Puritans and Presbyterians, united in a common confession (the Westminster). They already shared the authorized English translation of the Bible (today often called the King James Version). These two works subsequently became the most influential documents in American Christianity. Even to this day, the Authorized Version (including modern updates) remains the most used Bible, and the Westminster Confession remains a doctrinal bench mark, ever useful in measuring how much Christians, in all the Reformed churches, have moved from their seventeenth-century roots.

Both of the great seventeenth-century Reformed confessions (Dort and Westminster) were born out of internal controversy. They helped establish the enduring and, in many senses, polar references – Calvinist and Arminian. The Arminian label derived from a moderate, avowedly Calvinist churchman in the Netherlands, Jacob Harmensen (Arminius), who remonstrated against the now dogmatic doctrine of double predestination (that God chooses those who are to be saved and those who are to be damned) and most other doctrines implicated by it. Such are the ambiguities of language that it is difficult, today as much as then, to clarify the exact issues at stake. But in a sense not acceptable to orthodox churchmen in England as well as Holland, Arminius gave enough choice to humans in resisting or responding to God’s grace as to jeopardize the doctrines of double predestination and the irresistibility of grace. As his critics realized, the whole, linked, interactive Calvinist scheme of salvation was now at stake. Thus, the counter-remonstrants in Holland, joined by the then ablest theologian of the English church, William Perkins, tried to convince Arminius of his errors and, when this failed, tried to settle the doctrinal issues by consultation at a called conference at Dort (Dordrecht), where orthodox Dutch Calvinists met in 1618–19. This led to the formulation of a new Confession and to the soon oversimplified but much quoted five points of Calvinism, or TULIP (Total depravity, Unconditional election, Limited atonement, Irresistible grace, and the Perseverance of saints). James I, the first joint monarch of England and Scotland, sent to Dort five official English and Scottish consultants, all orthodox Calvinists. At this point international Calvinism seemed to rally around a doctrinal consensus. But it is worth noting that Arminius considered himself a disciple of Calvin, and in this sense the Arminian wing of the movement was also part of the historical Reformed tradition. In time, the winning side at Dort monopolized, or determined, the meaning ascribed to the label “Calvinist.”

Charles I, even more than James, chose sides within the increasingly faction-alized English church. He sympathized with both a High Church (emphasis on episcopal authority and on a liturgical or sacramental approach to salvation) and an Arminian position and made William Laud, who was most clearly identified with a High Church form of Anglicanism, bishop of London in 1628 and archbishop of Canterbury in 1633. Instead of the so-called Puritans destroying the broad settlement (some had tried), it was now the king and Laud who in fact rather quickly sabotaged it. For a brief period – only a decade – the High Church party prevailed in England and even in distant Ulster, where Presbyterians suffered the exile of all their ministers. Laud’s attempt to impose a revised worship guide on the Scottish church led to revolt in Scotland (see below). In England, Laud deposed, or even imprisoned, those ministers who would not strictly conform to a now centralized episcopacy. For those on Laud’s side, this was a period of reform, of sacramental renewal. In fact, Laud’s doctrine of a real presence in the Eucharist, and his desire to elevate sacramental worship as at least a counterweight to Puritan preaching, reflected an often neglected emphasis of both Luther and Calvin, and in that sense righted a balance. But Laud moved too far in the other direction to win over a majority, although so many nonreligious issues became involved in opposition to an imperious Charles as to blur the distinctively religious aspects of a developing civil war.

The beginning of the end of High Church dominance came in 1640 when a financially beleaguered Charles had to convene what became the revolutionary Long Parliament. Very quickly, those on the Presbyterian or Puritan side of the church spectrum gained control and shifted the balance sharply back toward the other extreme. In 1643 the Parliament, in order to gain Scottish military assistance, abolished the episcopal system in both England and Scotland and replaced it with a republican or presbyterian polity. This Presbyterian settlement proved ephemeral in England but remained the basis of a separate and independent Church of Scotland.

To create a much needed confession for this united church, the Parliament sanctioned a great conclave of English churchmen, with Scottish participants, who met at Westminster periodically from 1643 to 1648. The Westminster assembly developed the confession that still bears its name, as well as a Directory of Worship and a short and long catechism, documents that would remain authoritative in Scottish Presbyterianism but not for long in the church that created them. The Westminster Confession was not clearly in conflict with the Thirty-Nine Articles, but it differed in emphasis. Given the perceived threat of Arminianism, it contained the strongest possible language in defense of divine sovereignty and of divine election to both salvation and reprobation. As much or more than even Dort, it reflected a fighting version of Calvinism, one that sharpened rather than muted points of conflict with Arminians. But for Presbyterians, for the strongly Calvinist factions in the English church, and for a smaller number of Baptists, it became the final arbiter of doctrinal issues (though not theological issues, for it left plenty of room for divergence at a more lofty philosophical level).

In the midst of the English revolution, and especially after the establishment of the Republic in 1649, efforts at unity and uniformity quickly gave way to near religious anarchy. Under Oliver Cromwell, a loose polity prevailed, one that allowed wide toleration for formerly dissenting sects. The excesses of some of the reformers prepared the way for the last great shift in religious sentiment – back to the episcopacy and to now overt Arminian doctrines, to the church restored by Charles II when he was invited back to the British throne in 1660. Charles enforced a strict conformity to a slightly revised Book of Common Prayer and banned clergymen who refused conformity to it. Charles, personally, favored Roman Catholicism and was baptized a Catholic just before his death. His unpopular brother and successor, James II, openly embraced Roman Catholicism, which was one reason for his deposition by Parliament in 1688. With this Glorious Revolution, the broad Protestant religious establishment was now secure and would remain in effect up to the present. Nonconforming groups gained at least freedom of worship by the Toleration Act of 1689.

A footnote to this final settlement would have importance in American religious history. In England, five bishops and four hundred clergymen refused to repudiate their former oath of allegiance to James and thus would not declare allegiance to the new monarchs, William and Mary. These nonjurors lost their position in the English church, becoming a special nonconforming sect within England and the only Anglican church within Scotland. It was to these nonjurors that American Anglicans turned after 1783 to gain the consecration of their first American bishop.

Reform in Scotland and Ulster

Church reform came more suddenly, and conquered more completely, in Scotland than in England. In Scotland the linkage to Calvin and Geneva was direct. John Knox, the ablest Reform minister in Scotland, and soon a symbol of its reformation, spent several exile years as associate pastor with Calvin in Geneva. The fullest impact of this experience would not be doctrinal. Knox’s doctrines were consistent with Calvin’s but also with those of a dozen other reformers. What the Scottish church most clearly copied was the polity and modes of discipline developed in Geneva. In the form of Scottish Presbyterianism, Genevan institutions moved to America with Scottish and, more often, Scotch-Irish immigrants.³

Scottish reformers never gained all their goals. The lords in Scotland first broke with the Roman church in 1560, invited Knox back to Scotland, and approved a new Protestant confession. But the general assembly of the new church was not able to work out a new form of church government until 1567. At the time of the break in 1560, the Scottish monarch, Mary Stewart (or Stuart), who had just reached maturity, was in Fr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Uneasy Center
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Pre-Reformation Christianity in the West
• 1: Reformed Christianity in Britain and Colonial America
• 2: Methodist Origins
• 3: Theological Foundations
• 4: The Age of Evangelical Hegemony
• 5: Outside the Evangelical Consensus
• 6: Reformed Worship
• 7: Reformed Theology at Maturity: Taylor, Hodge, and Bushnell
• 8: Storm Clouds on the Evangelical Horizon
• Afterword
• Notes
• Index