Separated and Doomed to Die

“[Scripture] nowhere contains a sketch of the doctrine of faith; this is something that has to be drawn from the entire organism of scripture…. So much study and reflection on the subject is bound up with it that no person can possibly do it alone.  That takes centuries.  To that end the church has been appointed and given the promise of the Spirit’s guidance into all truth.  Whoever isolates himself from the church, i.e. from Christianity as a whole, from the history of dogma in its entirety, loses the truth of the Christian faith. That person becomes a branch that is torn from the tree and shrivels, an organ that is separated from the body and therefore doomed to die.”  – Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics (emphasis mine)[1]

It’s worth remembering that the Reformation was trying to reform, not reinvent the church.  Luther didn’t want to leave the priesthood, he just wanted some questions adequately answered.   Reformers were largely pushed out of the Roman church for holding to truth that had been obscured or persecuted unto death by the church they loved and wanted to serve (e.g. Tyndale).  But at the same time, the United States of America is unique in many respects, and the 18^th and 19^th centuries were a new and exciting time, with some strange side effects.  One of those is how our American Revolution and rugged individualism seems to have impacted the church.  Just as we decided politically here (and in France, for example) we’d do it better ourselves, the same sentiment seems to have reverberated into the church in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Charles Finney is a name that has remained famous over the years.  He was a Presbyterian when he started, but left the Presbyterians (rather than almost certainly being forced out). On the bright side, he was an ardent abolitionist in the 1830s prior to the American Civil War.   Unfortunately,  Finney preached a sort of religious humanism where man was responsible to seek his own salvation and even included in his “important sermons” one entitled “Sinners Bound to Change Their Own Hearts.”  The sermon starts with one verse in Ezekiel 18, where God is speaking to the Israelites through the prophet Ezekiel – but Finney immediately rips it from context and says that it applies today to “every impenitent sinner.”[2]  He promoted the idea of “New Methods” which were really ways focused at men to get them to make a decision – flipping the salvation plan on its head and leaving it up to men (and people like Finney as their guides) to “accept” their own salvation.  In Finney, we can easily see what happens when someone casts aside all their training, the sum of 1800 years of Christian study and makes himself a branch torn from the tree, as Bavinck says.   This is just one example in a sea of his issues.   Suffice it to say here that Finney was popular, but he was not orthodox in his theology.  BB Warfield describes Finney’s theology,” It is quite clear that what Finney gives us is less a theology than a system of morals. God might be eliminated from it entirely without essentially changing its character.”[3]    How did this happen? Unfortunately, Mr. Finney was certainly popular in many ways, no doubt a result of his man-focused novel methods.  But he’d taken it upon himself to reject all his training (and all the history and tradition it was predicated on) and simply chart his own course through theology.   He was the branch Bavinck describes as ripped of the tree.

At around the same time, the Stone-Campbell movement (aka the Restoration Movement) that was intent on establishing the pure democratization of Christianity and the Restoration of all people in one church under Christ.  While this may have been their goal, Barton Stone leveraged the distrust of authority generally and ecclesiology specifically to dismantle his own presbytery in 1804 and essentially become a self-appointed pastor of his own denomination (a title he would reject, but these churches work together like a denomination) because he didn’t want to face censure over his behavior at the Cane Ridge Revival.  Ultimately, Barton Stone rejected large portions of the Westminster Standards and the theology underpinning it.  So too, Alexander Campbell left the Presbyterian church for the Baptists, who also forced him out for his views that were heretical to them.  The “Restoration Movement” is ostensibly based on pure biblicism (and the views of Campbell and Stone) – that the Bible be the only reference for faith and practice – and the complete rejection of any inter-church hierarchy or creed.  These folks rejected all denominations, traditions, creeds, catechisms and titles outside of those specified in the New Testament as divisive and developed the creed “No creed but Christ” – again ripping themselves away from the tree.   To do so, they promoted populism – that anyone can (on their own and without help) sort through the Bible, ironically ignoring one of the benefits of their time: books and access to information that would have been far more difficult 100 years earlier.  In their fervor they derided all pastors/ministers as “money-grubbing tyrants”[4]  though not unexpectedly the decedents of this movement get paid for church work today! They believed that all this democratization would result in church unity – a true ecumenical utopia where Christ’s church would be restored to purity.    Unfortunately, they could not have been more wrong, and to date their “non-denomination” has splintered into multiple denominations and factions, many of these splitting over type and style of music and/or baptism and re-baptism.  The beliefs of people within these churches are also as varied as you might expect when one is encouraged to simply rely on individual interpretation, regardless of personal effort invested, which is also often their undoing.  There were many such episodes in the 19^th century (including more spin-offs like the Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Pentecostals and although it is beyond the scope of this document, Nathan Hatch’s “Democratization of American Christianity” is a great historical resource which lays the foundation for the massive fracturing of denominations and non-denominationalism based on one or a few individuals’ personal beliefs unhitched from all tradition.

[1] Herman Bavinck, “Reformed Dogmatics. 1: Prolegoma,” ed. John Bolt, trans. John Friend, vol. 1, 4 vols. (Grand Rapids, Mich: Baker Academic, 2003).

[2] Charles Finney, Sermons on Important Subjects (New York, 1836), https://www.loc.gov/item/unk83003350/.

[3] BB Warfield, Studies In Perfectionism, accessed April 1, 2025, https://www.monergism.com/thethreshold/sdg/warfield/Studies_in_Perfectionism_-_B_B_Warfield.pdf.

[4] Hatch, Nathan, “The Democratization of American Christianity” p75