In very similar words, and only a few years later, the English philosopher John Locke argued that, since men differ in their interpretations of the Bible and always will, none should seek to impose his opinions on another, and that their differences should not divide them. In his first Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), Locke wrote:
Since men are so solicitous about the true church, I would only ask them here by the way, if it be not more agreeable to the Church of Christ to make the conditions of her communion consist in such things, and such things only, as the Holy Spirit has in the Holy Scriptures declared, in express words, to be necessary to salvation?
And Rupertius Meldenius made the classic statement of this principle when he said: “In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity.”
But the churches did not respond to this appeal for liberty of opinion within the church that there might be union of Christians in one church. Slowly, however, the governments of most European countries in which the Roman Catholic Church did not exercise control yielded to the demand for liberty of religious opinion within the state. With this grant of toleration to churches which were mutually intolerant, the states preserved their unity, while the church sank into a condition of complacent sectarianism. During the seventeenth century there had been many pleas for church unity through liberty. The eighteenth century thought much about liberty and little about unity. But it is to be remembered that, when a new call to unity was sounded in America at the beginning of the nineteenth century, it was the renewal of a campaign that already had a long history. It came at a time when the churches in America, happy in the complete liberty they enjoyed and in their freedom from state control and equality before the law, had ceased to be much concerned about unity and had settled into the conviction that division and denominationalism represented the normal condition of the church.
The Idea of Restoration
The other principle stressed by “the reformation of the nineteenth century” was the restoration of primitive Christianity. That also had a long history, which can be only sketched. Thomas and Alexander Campbell made a new use of this idea, and it will have a large place in the story of their work, but in order to understand their contribution it is necessary to note that the idea itself was not new. The oldest Christian bodies claim to have preserved primitive Christianity uncorrupted, and every reforming movement in the history of the church has claimed in some sense to offer a restoration of its pristine purity. A few citations, among many that might be offered, will make this clear.
The Roman Catholic Church professes to present original Christianity unchanged. “What Christ made it in the beginning, that must it ever remain,” says Rev. B. J. Otten, S.J., in The Catholic Church and Modern Christianity. A representative of the Eastern Orthodox Church more recently wrote: “The Russian Church, having alone preserved the picture of Christ, must restore that picture to Europe.” A Chinese Nestorian who visited Europe in the thirteenth century said to the College of Cardinals: “As for us Orientals, the Holy Apostles taught us, and up to the present we hold fast to what they have committed to us.”
The great reformers of the sixteenth century conceived of their work as clearing away the human additions and getting back to primitive Christianity as found in the Bible. Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin all made their appeal directly to Scripture. Bucer exhorted believers to “reject all false speculations and all human opinions.” The Anabaptists cited the example of the first Christians as their authority for refusing to have a creed or to bear arms or to take oaths or to hold civil office, and Melchior Hofmann announced a “resurrection of primitive Christianity.” When Queen Elizabeth was masquerading as a Lutheran, for diplomatic reasons, she said she would hold to the Augsburg Confession because it “conformed most closely to the faith of the early church.” Chillingworth stated the principle of the Reformation in the words, “The Bible and the Bible alone is the religion of Protestants,” excluding ecclesiastical tradition because it furnished neither legitimate additions to the primitive faith and practice nor trustworthy evidence as to what these had been. Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists, in seventeenth-century England, all claimed the authority and example of the New Testament church in support of their respective forms of church organization and their conceptions of the ministry.
One modern Lutheran writer declares that “the Lutheran Church is the old original church,” and another that “Lutheranism is Bible Christianity.” A book issued by the Presbyterian Board of Publication says that “of all the churches now existing in the world, the Presbyterian Church comes nearest to the apostolic model.” John Wesley wrote to the Methodists in America after the Revolution that, being free from the English state and hierarchy, they “are now at full liberty to follow the Scriptures and the primitive church.”
More secular thinkers have made similar appeal to the ancient standards as the cure for the modern church’s ills. Rousseau “only wanted to simplify Christianity and bring it back to its origins,” says A. Aulard in his work on Christianity and the French Revolution. John Adams wrote in 1770: “Where do we find a precept in the Gospel requiring ecclesiastical synods, councils, creeds, oaths, subscriptions, and whole cart-loads of other trumpery that we find religion encumbered with in these days?”