From Revival Ridge to Bible Deism Valley

TheOdd History of the Holy Spirit among Churches of Christ

Part2, Alexander Campbell and the Spirit’s Word

Leonard Allen・05/04/19

Alexander Campbelland the Spirit’s Word

IfBarton Stone supported revivals, Alexander Campbell abhorred them. If Stone wasa “new light” Presbyterian, Alexander was an “old light.” Hewas disgusted by the emotionalism he witnessed and read about in revivals. Campbell’sMillennial Harbinger contains over 1600pages on the Holy Spirit, much of it opposing what he termed “spiritualinfluences” in conversion. He believed that the dominant Protestant view ofconversion ran roughshod over biblical teaching, opened the door to spiritualdelusions, and discredited the gospel to people of reason. So he sought tominimize conversion and sanctification as “experiences” and to emphasize theirintellectual, volitional character.

Facts,testimony, faith, feeling, and moral action, he insisted, constitute the strictorder of the “ancient gospel,” and there could be “no exception, [any]more thanagainst the universality of the laws of gravity.”[i]People caught up in the distress and uncertainty of the revivalist pattern ofconversion could bypass all the emotional paraphernalia of revivalism and usetheir own common sense to examine the factual testimony of Scripture, believeit, promptly “obey the gospel” (be baptized), and immediately receive the fullassurance of salvation. The “ancient gospel” did not require a person to become“a desponding, trembling infidel before he can become a believer.” No“insensible operation of the Holy Spirit” is needed; all that is needed is Scripture’sfactual testimony to Jesus the Messiah.[ii]

Thisfocus was effective with many people bypassed by the revival fires. Many thousandsfound relief in this simple, rational path to salvation.

In arguing this case, Alexanderplaced tight strictures on divine agency in the world. God’s power to affectpeople, he said many times, is “all contained in [revealed] words.” The Biblealready “contains all the arguments which can be offered to reconcile man toGod, and to purify them who are reconciled,” and therefore “all the power ofthe Holy Spirit which can operate on the human mind is spent.” To be filled withthe Spirit thus meant little more than having the words and arguments of theBible in one’s mind. Thus the basic difference between the “natural man” andthe “spiritual man” was that the first possessed only the five senses as anavenue to knowledge, while the second possessed the Bible in addition. And inregard to prayer’s petitions, one must not expect that “the laws of nature areto be changed, suspended, or new-modified, or that we are to become thesubjects of any supernatural aid in obtaining these things.”[iii]

Campbell’stheology quickly eclipsed Stone’s beginning in the 1820s and especially afterthe two movements united in 1832. Campbell didn’t mean to remove the Spiritentirely from the post-conversion life of Christians. But in the longtrajectory he created that was a strong effect.

Crossroads: Robert Richardson and Tolbert Fanning

Beginning in the 1840s Campbell’syounger colleague and friend, Robert Richardson, expressed this very concern.Limiting the Spirit’s influence to the Bible alone, he said, “degrades theBible by placing it in a false position, and ascribing to it exclusive powerand attributes which it never claims for itself.” In 1843 he urged Mr. Campbellnot to defend (in his upcoming debate with N. L. Rice) the proposition that “inconversion and sanctification the Spirit works only through the word of truth.”But Campbell did defend it.

Fourteenyears later, after many years of mounting concern, Richardson took on TolbertFanning, editor of the Gospel Advocate,over the matter of the Spirit and the Christian life. Since Richardson couldnot or would not take on Campbell directly, he chose Fanning as a kind ofstand-in since Fanning had embraced Campbell’s “Word only” stance with avengeance. They went back and forth in a long series of articles. Such a viewof the Spirit, Richardson stated, strikes at the heart of Christian faith,distorting its nature, sapping it power, and diminishing its enjoyment. Becauseit “constantly seeks to resolve everything into . . . mere words,” the effectof this doctrine is “to unfit men’s minds to receive anything that is notmerely outward and formal,” and thus it is “naturally and directly antagonisticto everything spiritual in religion.”[iv]The practical effect is spiritual debilitation.

Theissue at stake between Richardson and Fanning (and Campbell) was preciselythis: Does the Spirit guide, comfort, empower, and sustain Christians throughmeans other than biblical words? Fanning said no. Campbell said no most of thetime. Richardson said yes and amen.

Ihave argued that this 1857 exchange represents a kind of crossroads in thehistory of Churches of Christ.[v]Fanning’s way became overwhelmingly dominant, especially in the early twentiethcentury. Richardson’s way became a minor path, soon mostly forgotten.

The Nashville BibleSchool Tradition

Before the Campbell-Fanning doctrineof the Spirit triumphed, however, there was the “Nashville Bible Schooltradition” led principally by James A. Harding and David Lipscomb. This schoolof thought in the latter nineteenth and early twentieth century was centeredaround the Nashville Bible School and the Potter Bible School in Kentucky ledby Lipscomb and Harding. Younger leaders included J. N. Armstrong, R. H. Boll,and J. W. Shepard. It was focused on a dynamic vision of God’s inbreakingkingdom which one day would fill the earth. It called for a counterculturallifestyle, for dependence upon God’s “miraculous” providence and indwellingSpirit, for the spiritual disciplines of prayer, Bible reading, and caring forthe poor, and for disciples to back away from patriotism which was oftenidolatrous.[vi]

            JamesHarding believed that the Holy Spirit was a vital and active presence in thelife of Christians. We hunger for intimacy with God and for deeptransformation, and it is through the Spirit within us that we experienceadoption as God’s beloved children and the new and transformed life. The Spirithelps our infirmities. “A book cannot pray or groan” on our behalf; only theSpirit can do that. ”I am as far as the East is from the West,” said Harding,“from believing that neither God, Christ, nor the Holy Spirit can help usexcept by talking to us.”[vii]

Aman named J. C. Holloway, a physician, evangelist, and editor in Indiana,declared war on Harding’s view that the Spirit was a vital and active presencein the life of Christians. Holloway stood in the lineage of Campbell andFanning. Holloway’s central proposition was that “no man today is led orinfluenced by the Holy Spirit” or “indwelled by the Holy Spirit as an entity.”“Since revelation was completed, the Spirit works through, in and by the Wordas the only medium”; so to “quench the Spirit today is to sneer at the HolyScriptures” by claiming that some other power beyond the written Word isneeded.[viii]

Harding,in response, charged that Holloway was advocating a form of deism. He wrote: “Ifeel sorry for those who are afflicted by these dreadful, blighting, and semi-infidelmaterialistic notions, that leave God, Christ, the Holy Spirit . . . wholly outof the Christian’s life—for those who think all spiritual beings left us whenthe Bible was finished, and who think that we now have to fight the battlealone.” Harding thought Holloway’s was a deadly doctrine: “I do not know anydoctrine taught by any of the Protestant sectarian bodies that is more flatlycontradictory of the general tenor of Scripture, that is a more blighting,withering, deadly curse to those who believe it.”[ix]

Harding’scharisma combined with his passionate advocacy of a robust doctrine of God’sprovidence and God’s active Spirit exerted considerable influence, especiallybetween 1890 and 1917. His health began failing in 1912 and he died in 1922.The NBS tradition was quickly eclipsed—and increasingly judged heretical by leadersin Churches of Christ. By 1930 or so Holloway’s (and Fanning’s and Campbell’s)view of the Spirit had triumphed—though Harding’s position remained an “underground”minority view.Next month I will focus on the triumph of the “Wordonly” view of the Spirit.

[i] AlexanderCampbell, “The Confirmation of the Testimony,” Millennial Harbinger 1 (January 1830), 9.

[ii]Barton Stone, for whom Cane Ridge remained a high point ofhis life, believed that something was missing from Campbell’s pattern ofconversion. After he had witnessed this rational, quick, and orderly pattern ofconversion at work for fifteen or twenty years, Stone expressed concerns. Hehad no doubt that, for believers who languished under conviction of sin, thecall simply to “obey the gospel” upon a profession of faith was a great balm.It had opened the door to gospel assurance and peace for them. But he believedthat it also had short-circuited the process of repentance and swept peopleinto the church who had not experienced deep sorrow for sin and true heartchange. The result, he thought, was a widespread spirit of coldness andnominalism in the churches.

[iii] Alexander Campbell, “Dialogue onthe Holy Spirit—Part 1,” MillennialHarbinger 2 (July 4, 1831): 295, 296; “Dialogue on the Holy Spirit—Part 2,”Millennial Harbinger 2 (August 1831):369; “Incidents on a Tour to Nashville, TN. No. 1,” Millennial Harbinger 1 (December 6, 1830): 560; “Prayer—No. 1,” Millennial Harbinger 2 (October 1831):471.

[iv] Richardson, “Faithvs Philosophy—No 5,” MH (1857), 329. For a full treatment of this episode, seeLeonard Allen, “Unearthing the ‘Dirt Philosophy’: Baconianism, Faith, and theSpirit,” in Things Unseen: Churches of Christin (and after) the Modern Age(Abilene, TX: Leafwood, 2004), 71-98.

[v] See Leonard Allen (with DannySwick), Participating in God’s Life: TwoCrossroads for Churches of Christ (Abilene, TX: Leafwood, 2003).

[vi] See John Mark Hicks and BobbyValentine, Kingdom Come: Embracing theSpiritual Legacy of David Lipscomb and James Harding (Abilene, TX: Leafwood,2006). Hicks should be credited with identifying and naming the Nashville BibleSchool tradition.

[vii] James Harding, “How Does God HelpHis People,” Christian Leader and the Way(February 6, 1906), 9.

[viii] J. C. Holloway, Christian Leader and the Way (May 1905), 1; Holloway, The Spirit and the Word (1905), 23. Cited by Hicks and Valentine, Kingdom Come,

[ix] Christian Leader and the Way (June 19, 1906), 9; CLW (January 1905), 8.

You can read Part 1 here