St. Michael’s remains to this day a solid confessional Anglican Church body, still subscribing to the Ecumenical Creeds and Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England. Thus St. Michael’s is representative of the survival of traditional Christian orthodoxy in the American South. South Carolina is home to other notable confessional church bodies in the old mainline denominations, for example First Presbyterian of Columbia, the home church of the great theologian, Rev. Dr. James Henley Thornwell (1812-1862), which stands as a paragon of confessional and evangelical conservatism in the Reformed ecclesial tradition.
In contrast to St. Michael’s, let us momentarily look at another colonial era church with some connection with my ancestors. The First (Congregational) Church in Boston was founded by Governor John Winthrop’s original Boston settlement in 1630. The Puritan Anglican’s in England who felt strongly enough to become “separatists” Puritan’s and form the British Colony of Massachusetts, were at first staunchly dedicated to the doctrines of the Protestant Reformation and would have obviously defended the authority of Holy Scripture, sometimes referred to in Reformation parlance as
Sola Scriptura. My 7
th Great-Grandfather, Richard Holden, was from Groton, Suffolk, England, which was the village of John Winthrop’s family Manor. Richard was acquainted with Winthrop, and probably Rev. John Wilson who was an Anglican minister at Sudbury about eight miles away. Rev. Wilson would become the original Pastor of First Church in Boston after sailing with the Winthrop Fleet to New England in 1630. Richard Holden would follow Winthrop in 1634 and ultimately settle in the namesake of his village in England, Groton, Mass. (later generations of my Holden forebears would move south and west). No doubt Richard, and other of my ancestors, sat at The First Church in Boston listening to fiery Calvinistic sermons by his old neighbor John Wilson, or perhaps the associate Pastor, Rev. John Cotton, the onetime Vicar of St. Botolph’s in Boston, Lincolnshire, who had spent years as a conformist Anglican Puritan before finally relenting to separate and join Winthrop and other friends of his in New England in 1634. Cotton was a sort of absentee delegate at the Westminster Assembly 1643, during the time of the Commonwealth, and sent letters advocating the newly formed teaching of “Congregational Church government” as a replacement of Episcopal or Presbyterian Church polity (which suggestion was rejected by the Convention). Besides ecclesiastical polity, what we might call essential doctrinal disputations were not at stake. As a matter of fact, if Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, had not been particularly cracking down on Puritan clerics within the Church in the days of Charles I, Rev. John Cotton would probably have never joined Massachusetts Colony
Within two generations of this time the ultra Calvinism of the New England Puritans was waning, and doomed to be entirely extinguished. While officially the Congregationalist Puritans in New England subscribed to the doctrinal portions of the Westminster Standards (formally adopting them at the Cambridge Synod of 164
, congregational church governance effectively led them to the ominous final verse of the Book of Judges. There was no ecclesial authority holding the churches accountable. As David J. Engelsma describes this fundamental theological problem in his review article The Cambridge Platform: A Reformed Option?, “[congregational government] denies the kingship of Christ over the church in its two basic respects: rule over the congregation by a body of elders and authority over the united congregations in prescribed areas by an authoritative synod” (Protestant Reformed Theological Journal XXIX, 1995)
Scriptural authority was no longer central to Congregational teaching or preaching by the mid-eighteenth century, and it was not only the so-called five points of Calvinism, or even the
FiveSolas of the Reformation, that were at stake but the doctrines of: the atonement, the virgin birth of Messiah, and the Holy Trinity. The ancient Creeds of the Church Universal linking Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Protestant alike were being questioned or denied. In short, the noble protestant savage of New England, with his Bible alone in hand, was becoming a Unitarian.
By the time of the Great Awakening many New England Congregational Churches had lapsed into Unitarianism and Universalism. Indeed, that fact was the reason an “awakening” was even warranted. It is also worth noting that, other than the Congregationalist preacher Jonathan Edwards and Presbyterian Samuel Davies (a minister virtually unknown to Yankees), most of the influential awakening ministers were not home grown colonials but Anglican’s from England. So what of First Church Boston – where the Westminster Standards had once been heralded and confessed? Universalist preacher, Charles Chauncy, became Pastor of First Church Boston in 1727 and ministered there until his death in 1787. Joseph Jay writes in chapter One of
Sacred Conviction (pg. 5)
Educators like Joseph Stevens Buckminster infiltrated Northern Universities, ushering in an era of German Higher Criticism. Harvard University itself went Unitarian with the election of Reverend Henry Ware as Hollis Professor of Divinity in 1805, an event that “not only [made it] the seat of liberalism but also, by necessity, the seat of anti-Calvinism.” Even the First Church in Boston, founded by John Winthrop, became Unitarian under the guidance of Jonathan Edwards’s opponent, Charles Chauncy.
The descendants of the Puritans retained their pharisaical self-righteous bent, but began to transfer their religious fervor toward secular issues. The conviction that once led to sermons against donning vestments at chapel, and their zeal for burning witches was now filtered through the materialism of Hobbes and the empiricism of Hume and Lock. Social causes, closely linked with the radical egalitarian views of the French Revolution, often became the new dogma of the apostate Yankee; while even the traditionally non conformist/dissenter churches of the South (e.g. Baptists) were more or less traditionally orthodox in their Christian expressions
This division widened as political debates driven by regional and economic concerns in the United States began to take on themselves a religious character through the writings and preachers of Northern Abolitionists. And as Jay states that there “is no doubt the gospel preached by the evangelical abolitionists was not the traditional gospel of orthodox Christianity” (pg. 66). At the risk of generalization, the Northern abolitionist condemned the institution of slavery as an inherently sinful and wicked institution, while giving the slave trade a pass, as it was a staple of New England commerce. Southerners tended to have the opposite view. Southern clerics did not find any wholesale prohibition on the institution of bond labour in Holy Scripture, although they confessed that every social and political enterprise was tainted by sin and in a fallen condition; while they did find biblical mandates opposing the slave trade (Exodus 21:16; 1 Timothy 1:9-10) much to the chagrin on Yankee venture-capitalists more than willing to profit by slavery as long as they did not have to live in the environment themselves.
While abolitionists used the image of redemption in Christ as a political and material redemption, Southrons objected to this as an aberration from the orthodox understanding of the fallen nature of sinful man being justified before a Holy God. These factors contributed to a turbulent theological division that ultimately split many denominations.
Another issue addressed in the book is done so under the heading “The Slave as Human” (pg. 31) and deals with the impact of Darwinism on Yankee ideology. While Hollywood has attempted to reverse the rolls on this subject, historical evidence is clear. Pop culture would brand Southerners as the racists who questioned the full humanity of their sometime subservient, but Jay reveals that it was rather in the North where a growing belief in human evolution from lower forms was impacting social understanding of their newly developing race theory. He cites several Northern scientists who claimed that they had “proved” that blacks were a separate species than whites (pg. 32). It was often scientific and eugenic concerns that drove abolitionist activism in the mission to eliminate the slave-system and deport the former slaves, as they saw both free and bond Negroes as a threat to racial purity. It was from Southern pulpits and publishers that opposition to the growing Darwinian consensus was most loudly voiced. Clergyman such as the Rev. J. H. Thornwell were outspoken against these liberal theologians and scientists insisting upon the full humanity of Africans on a Scriptural understanding: “The Negro is of one blood [Acts 17:26} with ourselves – that he has sinned as we have, and that he has an equal interest with us in the great redemption …We are not ashamed to call him our brother” (Pg.33). One can almost feel the Yankee ridicule for a deplorable, such as Thornwell, clinging to his Bible and guns.
Joseph Jay summarizes the Northern humanistic utopianism at odds with Southern traditionalism stating: “The war came down to a fight over two visions of reality – the world in which man creates an earthly paradise on the one hand, or the world in which men await a heavenly reward on the other” (pg. 79).
A Tale of Two Churches.
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Originally Posted by Bezukhov
