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Can Two Walk Together Unless They Be Agreed?" the Origins of the Primitive Baptists, 1800-1840

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Can Two Walk Together Unless They Be Agreed? "CAN TWO WALK TOGETHER UNLESS THEY BE AGREED'' THE ORIGINS OF THE PRIMITIVE BAPTISTS, 1800-1840 By JAMES R MATHIS A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 1997 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation, by any human standard, should never have been completed. It has survived personal difficulties which necessitated my getting a job, cutting severely into the amount of time I was able to spend in research and writing. It has survived a fire which led to a hard drive crash and necessitated a slow process of reconstructing notes and drafts which added about six to nine months of work to the project. It survived bouts of despair, depression, and disillusionment, a pervasive sense that it was never going to be finished. But here it is—late, but finished. I have accumulated innumerable debts I will never be able to repay. I would like to thank, first, my father, James D. Mathis, who did not live to see his son earn first a master's and then a doctorate degree. He introduced me to libraries and the wonders contained in their shelves at an early age. He passed onto me a thirst for knowledge and love of writing which sustained me through many hours trying to piece one fi-agment after another together into something resembling coherence. My mother, Oleta O. Mathis, carefiilly avoided the topic of the dissertation during the time when I had not been near the computer in months. She waited very patiently, hopefijl that her son would eventually finish. u I would like to thank my supervisory chairman, Bertram Wyatt-Brown, for not abandoning me even when it seemed hopeless to all concerned. I would also like to thank the other members of my committee for their patience. Special thanks go to Samuel S. Hill, who mentored me and shepherded me through the undergraduate years through to this point. If at times this work rises to the level of genuine scholarship, it is due to the insights I gained through many long conversations with Dr. Hill in person and by telephone. He taught me that a man of scholarship could also be a man of faith, without sacrificing one for the other. I would like to thank my in-laws, Fred and Sarah Sowell, for their assistance in completing this dissertation. My children, Christopher James, Joshua Rhett, and Margaret Elaine, provided Daddy with as much as five or ten minutes of uninterrupted time to work and hours of indescribable joy and love. Finally, and most importantly, I would like to thank my wife, Susan, to whom I also dedicate this dissertation. She, more than anyone, is responsible for the completion of this project. Without her love, encouragement, prodding, and yes, nagging, I would have given up years ago. Sola Deo Gloria! iii TABLE OF CONTENTS sage ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ii ABSTRACT v CHAPTERS 1 INTRODUCTION 1 2 THE PRIMITIVIST DIMENSION IN WESTERN CHRISTIANITY 14 3 THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF THE PRIMITIVE BAPTISTS 29 4 "THE EMPIRE OF JESUS IS RISING": THE MISSIONARY SPIRIT OF AMERICAN BAPTISTS 53 5 SCRIPTURAL ARGUMENT OF THE PRIMITIVE BAPTISTS AGAINST MISSIONS 74 6 "THESE MEN GRASP ALL THEY CAN!" THE ANTI-SECULAR ARGUMENT OF THE PRIMITIVE BAPTISTS 114 7 THE REMNANT CHURCH IN PRIMITIVE BAPTIST ECCLESIOLOGY .... 144 8 THE SPIRITUAL NARRATIVES OF THE PRIMITIVE BAPTISTS 168 9 CONCLUSION 206 REFERENCES 210 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 216 iv Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy "CAN TWO WALK TOGETHER UNLESS THEY BE AGREED?" THE ORIGINS OF THE PRIMITIVE BAPTISTS, 1800-1840 By James R. Mathis December 1997 Chairman: Bertram Wyatt-Brown Major Department: History This study offers a new interpretation of a major split in the Baptist denomination during a time of religious reorganization and revival in America. Historians of the antimission or Primitive Baptists have tried to explain the divisions on sectional, political, economic and social grounds. Unfortunately, their efforts remove the Primitive Baptists from the context of religious and doctrinal changes sweeping through American denominations during these decades. In fact, this study argues, theological and doctrinal issues were central to the conflict which produced the Primitive Baptist sect. The Primitive Baptist sect arose out of a conflict between supporters and opponents of home and foreign missions among American Baptists in the period 1810- 1840. The controversy split churches across the South and West, with a large minority of ministers and church members forming churches which opposed participation in missionary organizations, the establishment of theological schools, and other benevolent organizations which had been organized by evangelicals in the early 1800s. Coming out of a primitivist tradition in Reformed Christianity, the Primitive Baptists formulated a comprehensive argument against various new measures for evangelism and social reform in the early 1800s. They held that missions and other religious organizations except for the local church were unscriptural human innovations. They believed that the advocates of missions were engaged in commercializing religion through their constant appeals for money and their basing membership on level of contribution rather than on religious experience. The Primitive Baptists saw themselves as the latest defenders of the pure gospel order. They argued that other churches, because of their origins in the Reformation out of the Roman Catholic Church, were not in fact true churches. They taught a form of apostolic succession, pointing to what they argued were churches in every era of church history which preserved and defended the primitive church order from human traditions developed in the early post-apostolic period. The leaders and members who followed them out of missionary Baptist churches across the South and West were protesting developments within churches and denominations they saw at variance with Scripture. In doing so they articulated a critique of institutionalization in American Christianity, the move of the evangelical church from protesting to adopting society's opinions concerning money and social status, and the correct means of saving the lost. In each of these areas they expressed on a popular level the fears of many conservative theologians such as the Old- School vi Presbyterians and John Nevin in the German Reformed Church. While they differed on many particulars, the Primitive Baptists shared with other conservatives almost identical concerns about the effect the new measures of evangelicalism would have on the church and its members. The Primitive Baptists, in the end, expressed the fears of many believers in and out of the Baptist denomination over the direction that American Christianity was taking in the early years of the new republic. vii ' CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: THE PRIMITIVE BAPTISTS AND AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY, 1800-1840. This study offers a new interpretation of a major split in the Baptist church during a time of religious reorganization and rewial in America. Historians of the antimission or Primitive Baptists have tried to explain the divisions on sectional, political, economic and social grounds. Unfortunately, their efforts remove the Primitive Baptists from the context of religious and doctrinal changes sweeping through American denominations during these decades. The interpretation of the Primitive Baptist movement in the early nineteenth century has two major elements. Historians have traditionally classified the entire antimission movement as an expression of Jeffersonian and Jacksonian protests against the designs of social and economic elites. The rapid process of institutionalization of American Christianity, the argument goes, bred hostility towards Northern and Eastern ministers and elite lay leaders in the various denominations. Older ministers in the West and South saw a threat to their livelihoods from younger, more educated ministers coming into their communities at the behest of societies and boards based in ' A note on terms. Baptist groups which opposed missions went by a number of names, some given to them by their opponents: Hard-shells, Black Rockers, Kehukeites, antimission Baptists, Old School Baptists, and Primitive Baptists. I have followed modem convention of using the term Primitive Baptist, even when referring 1 New York City to "christianize the heathen." Lay people resented the constant appeals for money from the boards. In reaction, the antimission movement led hundreds of local churches out of the major Baptist denomination in the late 1820s and 1830s. More recent historians have examined the Primitive Baptists and the larger antimission movement within the context of a broader primitivist or restorationist dimension in American religious life. While both approaches help us understand the rise of the Primitive Baptists, they give sUght attention to the specific historical and doctrinal background of the movement.'^ Of the works on the antimission movement, only Nathan Hatch, Bertram Wyatt-Brown and Richard T. Hughes take seriously theological or doctrinal factors. Most historians of the movement see these as secondary to social or economic causes and are in fact dismissive of the intellectual foundations of the Primitive Baptists. William Warren Sweet asserts that "opposition to missions and education developed to Baptist writers against missions who made their arguments before the rise of the Primitive Baptist sect. ^ For the social, economic, political and sectional interpretation of the Primitive Baptist or antimission movement see Bertram Wyatt-Brown, "The Antimission Movement in the Jacksonian South: A Study in Regional Folk Culture," Journal of Southern History 36:4(Nov. 1970): 501-509; William W. Sweet, Religion in the Development ofAmerican Culture, 1765-1840 (New York: 1952), 273-275; Sweet, Religion on the American Frontier, 1783-1830 (New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1964), 58-76; Walter B. Posey, Religious Strife on the Southern Frontier (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1965), 12-22; Posey, The Baptist Church in the Lower Mississippi Valley, 1776-1845 (Lexington: 1957), 68-79; T.
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