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University Microfilms, a XEROX Company, Ann Arbor, Michigan f 71-27,448 CLOSSMAN, Richard Hunter, 1928- A HISTORY OF THE ORGANIZATION AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE BAPTIST CHURCHES IN OHIO FROM 1789 TO 1907, WITH PARTICULAR REFERENCE TO THE OHIO BAPTIST CONVENTION. The Ohio State University, Ph.D., 1971 History, modern University Microfilms, A XEROX Company, Ann Arbor, Michigan ('cT) Copyright by Richard Hunter Clossman 1971 THIS DISSERTATION HAS BEEN MICROFILMED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED A HISTORY OR THE ORGANIZATION AND DEVELOPMENT OP THE BAPTIST CHURCHES IN OHIO PROM 1789 TO 1907, WITH PARTICULAR REPERENCE TO THE OHIO BAPTIST CONVENTION DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Richard Hunter Clossman, B.A., M.A. ***** The Ohio State University 1971 Approved by Adviserer Department of History VITA Sept. 1 9 , 1928 . Born - Kokomo, Indiana 1950 .............. B.A., Bob Jones University, Greenville, South Carolina 1953 .............. B.D., Northern Baptist Theological Seminary, Chicago, Illinois 1 9 5 5.............. M.A. , The Ohio State University Columbus, Ohio FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: History Ancient History. Professor William F. McDonald Renaissance and Reformation. Professor Harold J. Grimm Colonial American. Professor Paul C. Bowers The United States. Professors Robert H. Bremner and Francis P. Weisenburger 11 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page VITA ............................................... ii ABBREVIATIONS .................................... iv Chapter I. BAPTIST BEGINNINGS IN EUROPE AND AMERICA . 1 II. BAPTIST BEGINNINGS IN OHIO, PROM 1788 TO 1830 24- The Earliest Arrivals Associations, 1789-1818 Associations, 1819-1830 III. THE MISSIONARY CAUSE IN O H I O ............ 70 IV. THE CAMPBELLITE R E F O R M ................... 103 The Mahoning Revolt Reactions in Miami and Other Associations Causes for the Schism V. THE ANTIMISSION C O N T R O V E R S Y ............. 129 The Causes The Division VI. THE BAPTIST CONVENTION, 1830-1860, SEARCH FOR SUPPORT.......................164- VII. HIGHER EDUCATION AMONG OHIO BAPTISTS .... 210 VIII. THE CONVENTION, 1860-1881, STRUGGLE FOR COHERENCE ............................... 24-7 IX. THE CONVENTION, 1882-1907, THE BUILDING YEARS ................................... 285 BIBLIOGRAPHY......................................... 329 111 ABBREVIATIONS In the interests of brevity in typing the foot­ notes, the lengthy and sometimes misleading titles of the printed annual minutes of various Baptist associations have been abbreviated to form a consistent pattern. The citations will read Minutes followed by the particular year of the imprint. The full titles of the annual pub­ lications of the Ohio Baptist Convention proceedings have been retained within the footnotes because of their sin­ gular importance in the study of Ohio Baptists. IV CHAPTER I BAPTIST BEGimiNGS IN EUROPE AND AMERICA Baptists have steadfastly denied all necessity for apostolic succession and ecclesiastical tradition. They have disclaimed any need for an uninterrupted episcopacy transmitted from the days of the apostles.^ Baptist historiography, however, until more recent years, disclosed a sizeable amount of literature forging a lineal relation­ ship to primitive Christianity. "The Baptists claim their origin from the ministry of Christ and his Apostles," asserted one religious encyclopedia dated 1875, claiming "to be able to trace their history in a succession of pure churches, under various names, down to the Reformation of 2 the sixteenth century." To build this chronological chain, a long list of spiritual ancestors was employed. William Gerald McLoughlin, Isaac Backus on Church, State, and Calvinism, Pamphlets, 1754-1789 (Cambridge. Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1968), pp. 274-76. 2 Vincent L. Milner, Religious Denominations of the World (Philadelphia: Bradley, Garretson and Co., 1875), p. 40. 2 all of whom possessed evangelical sentiments and anti- pedobaptist feelings.^ Any lineal connection is without substantive proof. Nevertheless the importance of such a succession theory to the Baptist mind suggests in part the underlying reason for the emergence of the modern Baptist movement in the early years of the seventeenth century. All of the pre- Reformation non-conformists, together with the Baptist movement, possessed what Ernst Troeltsch termed a "Sect- type" character. They aspired after a "personal inward perfection" which sought to identify with primitive Christianity. Renouncing the "Church-type" institution which ascribed to itself a supernatural character quite apart from the holiness of its members, the Sect churches emphasized the direct rule of Christ as the basis for "direct personal fellowship" within the relatively small A. circle of members. Two main Sect-type streams flowed into the early Baptist churches, the one, Anabaptist, the other, English Separatism. Besides these there was the general movement created throughout Europe by the Jansenists and by Blaise ^Albert Henry Newman, A History of the Baptist Churches in the United States (New York: The Christian Literature Co., 1895)» pp. 15-16. ^Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Church (2 vols.; London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1956), I, 531. 3 Pascal and Jacob Bohme, whose appeal to an inward reli­ gious experience was not unlike that associated with the Baptists.5 The Anabaptist movement touched the Baptists directly through the Waterlander Mennonites. The term Anabaptist in the sixteenth century was a broadly applied designation of abuse leveled against a wide, variety of indi­ viduals out of sympathy with the established church. Ranging from the extreme chiliastic to the quietistic mystic, the Anabaptists possessed the unifying feature of practicing a second baptism which spoke of an experiental knowledge of God without priest or pope, and which pointed to "the true church" as distinct from the "fallen.The Munster Rebellion in 1555» which began with a peasant- supported theocratic kingdom at Munster in Westphalia, near the Butch border, and ended in a horrible bloodbath filled with wild excesses of cruelty and terror, brought extreme persecution and repudiation to the many varieties of Anabaptists who espoused democratic tendencies. The Munster legacy stained the Anabaptist name throughout Europe for several centuries. Some Anabaptist doctrines. ^Carl J. Eriedrich, The Age of the Baroque, 1610- 1660 (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1952,), pp. 97- 105. ^Robert A. Macoskey, "The Contemporary Relevance of Balthasar Hub.maier's Concept of the Church," Founda­ tions , 71 (April, 1965), 99. 4 nevertheless, survived to touch the first known Baptist congregation in Amsterdam in 1609.^ After the Munster atrocity, Menno Simons was successful, beginning in 1537, in gathering many of the Anabaptists into a peace-loving "quiet Antipedobaptist" group which in time became known Q as the Mennonites. Settling in Holland, the Mennonite congregations, particularly the Waterlander variety, had a deep influence upon John Smyth as he led his congrega­ tion to become the first antipedobaptist church to assume the Baptist name.^ The church of John Smyth had originally emerged out of English separatism. When James I continued the policies of the Elizabethan Settlement, several noncon­ formist congregations migrated to the more lenient atmos­ phere of Amsterdam.Coming from Gainsborough about 1505, Smyth's congregation made the transition from Sepa­ ratism to Baptist doctrine in 1509. ^Ernest Belfort Bax, Rise and Fall of the Ana­ baptists (New York: American Scholar Publications, Inc., 1965;, pp. 381-85. ^Henry 0. Vedder, A Short History of the Baptists (Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society, 1907), pp. 184-85. *^Henry William Clark, History of English Noncon­ formity from Wiclif to the Close of the Nineteenth Century (2 vols.; London: Chapman and Hall, Limited, 1911), I, 189-90. ^^Harold J. Grimm, The Reformation Era, 1500-1550 (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1954), pp. 478, 545-45. 5 It was in the rather acrimonious disputations among neighboring English Separatist congregations that John Smyth hammered out his Baptist position. Smyth, a Cambridge graduate and an accomplished student in Biblical languages, argued more with Francis Johnson of the London group than with John Robinson of the Scrooby Manor congregation. Examining the New Testament as a model for his church, Smyth became convinced that the Separatist churches were oriented toward the Old Testament ceremony of convenanting, based upon a mutual contract between members, while the primitive apostolic church laid its foundation upon bap­ tism as an act of repentance and as a confession of faith. Smyth's point of contention with the other Separatists was the character of baptism. In his The Character of the Beast, Smyth argued: Therefore, the Separation must either go back to England or go forward to true baptism; and all that shall in time to come separate from England must separate from the baptism of E n g l a n d . 12 Smyth pointedly scolded the Separatists for "the error of baptizing infants" as "a chief point of Antichristianity and the very essence and constitution of the false Church. ^^llfred Clair Underwood, A History of the English Baptists (London: The Baptist Union Publication Dept., 194.7 ;, pp. 33-3 7. 1 p Sydnor L. Stealey, A Baptist Treasury (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1938;, p. 5* ^^Ibid., p. 3. 6 Known later as a General Baptist church, because of its Arminian theology,
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