THE EROSION OF FUNDAMENTAL CREEDS
At the risk of stimulating anti-confessional winds and impoverishing further anti-confessional soils, a more comprehensive overview of this religious malignity, or tyranny of human willfulness, exemplifies the powers of overweening religiosity.
Over centuries now, ecclesiastical symbols met name-calling opposition inspired by evangelical impatience and liberal conceit, each mean-spirited movement eager to misinterpret Scriptures as well as misunderstand the purpose and significance of confessions of faith. “Sectarian distinctives.” “Quibbling over the finer points of doctrine.” “Traditional faith.” “Dead orthodoxy.” “Major assumptions.” “Inherited formation of the faith.” “Inherited theological formulations.” “Denominational peculiarities.” “Rigid theological straitjackets.” “Ecclesiastical heirlooms.” “Sectarianism.” “Antiquated knowledge.” “Theological hairsplitting.” These and other skewed epithets convey darkness of heart: Negativity, deep and abiding, emanating as smear campaigns against the controverted symbols. Smug with heterodoxy, church people believing contrary to the Word what they themselves want feed into blinding influences of selfishness manifested as anti-confessionalism.
Shallow soil and Rocky Ground
Anglicans/Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Lutherans, and Reformed immigrants in successive waves carried onto North American shores incisive confessional strengths born in the century of the Reformation. Each church body hoped to speed on the reforming of the Church here, at least hold onto gains made. Even early Baptists drew largely from the Westminster Standards, confessing God’s sovereign will radiating outwards from respective fellowships; they too brought initial waves of reformative high hopes.60 To all intents and purposes, each of the confessional traditions counted on an unlimited future of ecclesiastical aspirations in North America, unifying symbols held high. However, symbolic expectations after each immigrant generation dropped from high to low; second and third generations generally failed, succumbing to prevailing anti-confessionalism.
At consecutive confessional plantings in shallow soil and on rocky ground, however, winds of revolution gathered momentum, first the Arminian, a troubling variant of the Reformation,61 with its subtle temptations for human sovereignty in salvation. This Arminianism, Protestant sister to Roman Catholic Semi-Pelagianism, in tandem with the continent’s pagan soul started opposition to the symbols’ predestinarian doctrine, desiring works righteousness. Therefore, one reason for this heretical wind, first formally identified and opposed at the Synod of Dort, 1618–19, consisted of its fear of divine sovereignty relative to salvation. Arminians, even as Semi-Pelagians, demanded final control in predestination. Hence, its opposition to the regnant symbols attempted to prove these wrong, at variance with the Scriptures. Arminianism had to disparage its principled opponents in order to gain undisputed dominion in Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Lutheran, and Reformed traditions.
Decline of the Euro-centric confessions surfaced already prior to the American Civil War, 1860–65. Before that bloody, internecine conflict, Arminianism split into Methodist, Evangelical, revivalist, and Free-Will Baptist patterns, searing winds scorching the creedal plants, “. . . that Calvinism of the other denominations was becoming so diluted as to be unrecognizable. Taking their lead from Nathanial W. Taylor, the revivalists had placed such stress upon the ability of the sinner to acquire conversion as in effect to transform Calvinism into an operational Arminianism.”62 Revivalism, free-flowing Arminian winds at the time, hammered reformative hopes to dust, sucking away precious saps of life. By 1842, “. . . revivals had become ‘a constituent part of the religious system’ to such an extent that ‘he who should oppose himself to revivals, as such, would be regarded by most of our evangelical Christians as, ipso facto, an enemy of spiritual religion itself.’”63 In running-up to the American Civil War, revivalists/Methodists/Evangelicals/Free-Will Baptists swept North American populations up along the Atlantic Seaboard, deep into Canada too, to absorb by popular agitation many in its religiosity. As fast as settlers, adventurers, pioneers, and itinerant preachers moved inland, so fast anti-confessionalism took hold, fearfully reducing confessional hopes.
Astonishing, high hopes for the symbols succumbed to egregious anti-creedalism storming hither and yon across the continent.
Searing Winds and Hostile Storms
At the lowest levels of anti-confessionalism, the conglomeration of revivalist Evangelicals/Methodists/Free-Will Baptists held out high hopes for their religiosity. Within this broadening movement, pietistic winds added to the anti-confessional attacks. Pietists, in reaction to stiff, dry Lutheran and Reformed orthodoxies in Europe, crossed the Atlantic, hungering for more religious experience, devotional living, and practical effects of Christianity. On the whole, these Pietists were probably nice people. “The Pietists were not hostile to the churches and they were far from heterodox, but they found theological discussion distasteful and regarded it as a source of division and strife among Christians. Christianity was a life, they insisted, not a creed. Thus the Pietists tended to sit rather loosely to their confessional traditions, to emphasize the common experience of Christ which bound all Christians together, and to be characterized by a strong missionary fervor.”64 This sort of ecumenism of the heart, a source of division in itself, made them prey for all sorts of deceitful philosophies and human traditions. The point, however, is: Increasingly they shunned the symbols of the Church as inconsistent with and opposed to what they considered the fire of religion. Therefore, Pietists minimized, consciously cast aside the monumental standards, Anglican, Presbyterian, Lutheran, and Reformed.
Another revolutionary wind bolstered these storming desperations of revivalism: Wesleyan perfectionism. Comparative wealth, mechanical inventions, and westwards expansion generated expectancy, enthusiasm, social ferment—nothing seemed impossible, not even perfection of human nature. Strangely, amidst material buoyancy, perfectionists hoped for a heavenly existence on earth. Hence: “Perfectionist tendencies, of course, always threatened to get out of hand. The revivals had multiplied conversions so rapidly that it became increasingly easy to overlook the great obstacles which man’s sinful nature placed in the path to perfection and to believe that it was only an individual’s willful perversity which caused him to temporize with sin. Thus many were moving into a perfectionist phase, which emphasized the abolition of sin almost to the exclusion of any preoccupations with creed . . .”65 Perfectionist enthusiasm impatient with the Church sought the perfectibility of believers, if not the race. The Social Gospel movement of the late nineteenth century with plans for the Kingdom of Heaven on earth typified the intense excitement and total envelopment of perfectionism at a later stage.
Perfectionism, too, ridiculed creedal integrity, until the bloody horrors of World War One. Thereafter, only the biblically illiterate and historically unaware pursued perfectionist hopes.
At the same time as anti-creedal Pietism and perfectionism stormed westwards and northwards, other winds picked up and mixed in—socialization, acculturation, and indigenization, further damaging and disintegrating confessional growth. “Religion became increasingly a social activity rather than a spiritual experience. William Dean Howells . . . noted the ravages of secularization, even in Puritan New England. ‘Religion there . . . has largely ceased to be a fact of spiritual experience, and the visible church flourished on condition of providing for the social needs of the community. It was practically held that salvation of one’s soul must not be made too depressing, or the young people would have nothing to do with it. Professors of the sternest creeds temporized with the sinners, and did what might be done to win them to heaven by helping them to have a good time here. The church embraced and included the world.”66 Even strict Calvinists, whether Anglican, Presbyterian, or Reformed, conceded little by little to the socialization and secularization of the Church in order, allegedly, to maintain a united front with which and from which to counteract hostile movements, for instance, in the eighteenth century Unitarianism and Universalism. In this socialization, “. . . churches in a democratic society must stand for something definite and specific if they are to avoid surrendering to the dominant cultural tendencies of the time.”67 And this “standing for something” became the difficulty.
Along with socialization and acculturation once revivalism had done its