CONGREGATIONALISM AND CREEDS.

CONGREGATIONALISM AND CREEDS.

The effect of the Congregational polity upon creeds is to weaken the authority of general creeds and to strengthen the authority of particular creeds. The principle of fellowship requires a general creed, but it is reduced to a mere declaration of the common faith prevailing among Congregationalists at a given time, instead of a binding formula of subscription. The principle of independency calls for as many particular creeds as there are congregations. Each congregation, being a complete self-governing body, has the right to frame its own creed, to change it ad libitum, and to require assent to it not only from the minister, but from every applicant for membership. Hence there are a great many creeds among American Congregationalists which have purely local authority; but they must be in essential harmony with the prevailing faith of the body, or the congregations professing them forfeit the privileges of fellowship. They must flow from the same system of doctrine, as many little streams flow from the same fountain.

In this multiplication of local creeds Congregationalism far outstrips the practice of the ante-Nicene age, where we find varying yet essentially concordant rules of faith in Jerusalem, Cæsarea, Antioch, Aquileja, Carthage, Rome.

With these local creeds are connected 'covenants' or pledges of members to live conformably to the law of God and the faith and discipline of the Church. A covenant is the ethical application of the dogmatic creed.

In the theory of creeds and covenants, as on the whole subject of Church polity, the Regular or Calvinistic Baptists entirely agree with the Congregationalists.

[1586] This term is preferable to Independency. In England both terms are used synonymously. The American Congregationalists rather disclaim the designation Independents, except for a small portion of their ancestors, namely, the 'Pilgrim Fathers' of Plymouth. See below.

[1587] ekklesia, from ekkaleo, to call out, means (like qhl) any public assembly, but especially a religious assembly.

[1588] Matt. xvi. 18; Acts xx. 28; Gal. i. 13; Eph. i. 22, etc.

[1589] Matt. xviii. 17; Acts v. 11; viii. 3; xv. 41 (in the plural, hai ekklesiai); Gal. i. 22; Rom. xvi. 4, 5, etc.

[1590] Comp. Acts xi. 26; xxvi. 28; 1 Pet. iv. 16. There were parties or sects among the Christians at Corinth which assumed apostolic designations, but Paul rebuked them (1 Cor. i, 10-13; iii. 3, 4). The tribes of Israel may be quoted as a Jewish precedent of the divisions in Christendom, but they formed one nation.

[1591] ekklesiai ton hagion, 1 Cor. xiv. 33.

[1592] Comp. the modern American distinction between church proper and congregation.

[1593] The Jews--like the 'untaxed Indians' in the United States--were excluded from the rights of citizenship, and as unmercifully persecuted during the Middle Ages as the Christians were persecuted by the Jews in the apostolic age.

[1594] Robert Browne, a clergyman of the Established Church and a restless agitator, urged a reformation 'without tarrying for any,' a complete separation from the national Church as an anti-Christian institution, and the formation of independent Christian societies. After suffering persecution and exile (he was imprisoned about thirty times), he returned to the Ministry of the national Church, where he led an idle and dissolute life till his death, in 1630, at the age of eighty years.

[1595] See on these early witnesses and martyrs of Independency, Hanbury (Vol. I. chaps. ii.-xxvi.), Brook (Vol. III.), and Punchard (Vol. III.).

[1596] Vol. VI. p. 280.

[1597] I beg leave to quote from an essay which I wrote and published in the midst of our civil war (1863), when New England was most unpopular, the following tribute to its influence upon American history: 'It seems superfluous, even in these days of sectional prejudice, party animosity, and slander, to say one word in praise of New England. Facts and institutions always speak best for themselves. We might say with Daniel Webster, giving his famous eulogy on Massachusetts a more general application to her five sister States: "There they stand: look at them, and judge for yourselves. There is their history--the world knows it by heart: the past at least is secure." The rapid rise and progress of that rocky and barren country called New England is one of the marvels of modern history. In the short period of two centuries and a half it has attained the height of modern civilization which it required other countries more than a thousand years to reach. Naturally the poorest part of the United States, it has become the intellectual garden, the busy workshop, and the thinking brain of this vast republic. In general wealth and prosperity, in energy and enterprise, in love of freedom and respect for law, in the diffusion of intelligence and education, in letters and arts, in virtue and religion, in every essential feature of national power and greatness, the people of the six New England States, and more particularly of Massachusetts, need not fear a comparison with the most favored nation on the globe. But the power and influence of New England, owing to the enterprising and restless character of its population, extends far beyond its own limits, and is almost omnipresent in the United States. The twenty thousand Puritans who emigrated from England within the course of twenty years, from 1620 to 1640, and received but few accessions until the modern flood of mixed European immigration set in, have grown into a race of several millions, diffused themselves more or less into every State of the Union, and take a leading part in the organization and development of every new State of the great West to the shores of the Pacific. Their principles have acted like leaven upon American society; their influence reaches into all the ramifications of our commerce, manufactures, politics, literature, and religion; there is hardly a Protestant Church or Sabbath-school in the land, from Boston to San Francisco, which does not feel, directly or indirectly, positively or negatively, the intellectual and moral power that constantly emanates from the classical soil of Puritan Christianity.'

[1598] Dr. Emmons, one of the leaders of New England Congregationalism, is credited with this memorable dictum: 'Associationism leads to Consociationism; Consociationism leads to Presbyterianism; Presbyterianism leads to Episcopacy; Episcopacy leads to Roman Catholicism; and Roman Catholicism is an ultimate fact' (Prof. Park, in Memoir of Emmons, p. 163). But there would be equal force in the opposite reasoning from Independency to anarchy, and from anarchy to dissolution. Independents have a right to protest against tyranny, whether exercised by bishops or presbyters ('priests writ large'); but there are Lord Brethren as well as Lord Bishops, and the tyranny of a congregation over a minister, or of a majority over a minority, is as bad as any other kind of tyranny.

[1599] 'The Form of Presbyterial Church Government agreed upon by the Assembly of Divines at Westminster,' and adopted by the General Assembly of Scotland in 1645, thus defines a local Church: 'Particular churches in the primitive times were made up of visible saints, viz., such as, being of age, professed faith in Christ and obedience unto Christ, according to the rules of faith and life taught by Christ and his apostles, and of their children.' The Form of Government ratified by the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States in May, 1821, gives this definition (Ch. II. 4): 'A particular church consists of a number of professing Christians, with their offspring, voluntarily associated together for divine worship and godly living, agreeably to the Holy Scriptures, and submitting to a certain form of government.'

[1600] The most serious conflict between the principles of Independency and Fellowship in recent times has grown out of the unhappy Beecher trial, which has shaken American Congregationalism to the very base. See Proceedings of the two Councils held in Brooklyn in 1874 and 1876, which represent both sides of the question (Dr. Storrs's and Mr. Beecher's), though presided over by the same Nestor of American Congregationalism (Dr. Leonard Bacon).

[1601] Masson (Life of Milton, Vol. II. p. 563) says that of seventeen noted ministers who emigrated to New England, fourteen were bred in Cambridge, and only three (Davenport, Mather, and Williams) at Oxford. R. Williams was probably likewise a Cambridge graduate. It was therefore natural that the first college in New England should be called after Cambridge.