Eighteenth Century Restorationists

In the eighteenth century there arose, in Great Britain, some movements which applied the restoration formula in a way that contributed more directly to the Campbells’ use of it than those already mentioned. None of these gained a large following, and even their names have been forgotten by all except special students of the period. Their leaders were bold and independent spirits who saw that the church needed reforming and were not afraid to attempt it. They laid hold of a great idea, but they were never able to build a substantial enterprise upon it. Yet they handed it down to those who could.

John Glas, a minister of the Church of Scotland, about 1727 came to the conviction that, since the New Testament church had no connection with the state, the whole scheme of establishment as embodied in the “National Covenant” was without authority. Further, he found no warrant for synods or other law-making bodies with power to fix standards of doctrine for the whole church and exercise discipline over it. He therefore left the state church and organized an independent congregation. He next inquired how this autonomous local church should order its affairs, conduct its worship, and establish its ministry. Finding that the New Testament churches “came together on the first day of the week to break 21 bread,” whereas the Presbyterian Church of Scotland observed the Lord’s Supper no oftener than once a month, Glas and his associates adopted the practice of weekly communion. “They agreed that in this, as in everything else,” says his biographer, “they ought to be followers of the first Christians, being guided and directed by the Scriptures alone.”

Further, Glas found that in the early churches there was a “plurality of elders” and that “mutual edification” was practiced—that is, that public services of worship were not conducted solely by one ordained minister. This opened the way for a large degree of lay leadership and less emphasis on the special functions of the clergy. After it was observed that the Epistles of Paul made no mention of a university education or a knowledge of the ancient languages among the qualifications for the eldership, the line between clergy and laity grew still more dim.

Robert Sandeman, who married one of Glas’s daughters, adopted his principles and gave them a somewhat more vigorous advocacy, so that the resulting churches were more often called “Sandemanian” than “Glasite.” Through their combined efforts, there came into existence a few small churches, probably never more than a dozen or two, in various parts of Scotland and England. Michael Faraday, the famous chemist, was a member of a Sandemanian church in London. Apparently not more than six or eight such churches were organized in America, and not all these were known by that name or acknowledged any special connection with Glas or Sandeman. Their basic theory led them to “call no man master” and to exercise their liberty in deciding, from their own study of Scripture, what should be their faith and practice. Robert Sandeman spent his last years in 22 Danbury, Connecticut, where he died in 1771, after organizing a church there. There were Sandemanian churches in Boston. All of them in this country, so far as known, were in New England.

Glas and Sandeman did not find that the New Testament churches practiced only the immersion of believers as baptism. But some of their associates in Scotland did. Archibald McLean was the leader of these. They came to be called “Old Scotch Baptists.” In coming to this position they seem not to have been influenced by the English Baptists but were moved by their own independent study of the New Testament. Similarly, some of the members of Sandeman’s church in Danbury later reached the same conviction, withdrew, and formed an immersionist “Church of Christ.”

Although the Sandemanians remained few and inconspicuous, Robert Sandeman himself was a theological thinker of great ability and clarity. His writings were widely read and highly regarded by many who had no affiliation with his movement and who did not share his views about the importance of reproducing exactly the model of the primitive church. This was especially true of his treatises dealing with the nature of faith and with the priority of faith to repentance. If this now seems a dry and technical matter, it did not seem so then and it had very practical implications. The gist of his thought on this point was that it is within the power of every man to believe the gospel and obey its commands to his own salvation. The more popular theory among eighteenth-century evangelicals was that sinful and “fallen” man has no power to believe. He can repent and “mourn” for the sinful state which he inherited from Adam, but then he must wait for a special and miraculous 23 act of enabling grace to give him faith. This gift of faith and regeneration will be certified to him by an exalted state of feeling which constitutes his religious experience and is the evidence of his “acceptance with God.”

Against this, Sandeman put the doctrine that God had not only revealed his truth in terms intelligible to man and provided the means of salvation through Christ, but had also furnished in Scripture adequate evidence of the truth of his revelation, so that the natural man, just as he is, with all his sins, can weigh the evidence and accept the truth. That acceptance is faith. Saving faith, said Sandeman, is an act of man’s reason, and it differs from any other act of belief only in being belief of a saving fact.

This view of faith came to have immense importance in the history of the Disciples. They developed from it, as Sandeman did not, the method of a very successful evangelism. There were other influences besides that of Sandeman which led Alexander Campbell to this view, especially the philosophy of John Locke and, above all, his own study of the New Testament. But it is known that he had read Sandeman’s writings carefully in his youth and regarded them highly, and the similarity of his view to Sandeman’s on this point cannot be regarded as purely coincidental. A Baptist writer later tried to prove that the Disciples were “an offshoot of Sandemanianism.” (Whitsitt: The Origin of the Disciples of Christ, 1888.) “Offshoot” is the wrong word; a mighty river is not an offshoot from a tiny trickle. But there was undoubtedly an influence: first, in the emphasis upon restoring the procedure of the primitive church; second, in the conception of faith as intelligent belief based on evidence.