Apologetic Works 5

Nathan A. Finn

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9783110418521
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Kirchengeschichte

Andrew Fuller (1754-1815) was the leading Baptist theologian of his era, though his works are just now being made available in a critical edition. Strictures on Sandemanianism is the fourth volume in The Works of Andrew Fuller. In this treatise, Fuller critiqued Sandemanianism, a form of Restorationism that first emerged in Scotland in the eighteenth century and was influencing the Scotch Baptists of Fuller's day. Fuller's biggest concern was the Sandemanian belief that saving faith is merely intellectual assent to the gospel. Fuller believed this "intellectualist" view of faith undermined evangelical spirituality. Strictures on Sandemanianism became a leading evangelical critique of Sandemanian views. This critical edition will introduce scholars to this important work and shed light on evangelical debates about the faith, justification, and sanctification during the latter half of the "long" eighteenth century (ca. 1750 to 1815).

1Overview of Sandemanianism

1.1John Glas and the origins of Scottish Independency

John Glas was a fifth-generation Presbyterian clergyman who began his career in 1719 as minister of a parish church in Tealing, Scotland, near the town of Dundee.7 He had previously studied at the universities in St. Andrews and Edinburgh, two schools that along with Glasgow University would soon become centers of the Scottish Enlightenment in the 1720s. By mid-century, these schools were associated with Scottish Common Sense Realism, a philosophical movement that championed empirical knowledge universally accessible through honest inquiry. Scottish Common Sense Realism influenced evangelicals across the British transatlantic world.8 Among Scottish evangelicals, empiricism led to a strong biblicism that emphasized the alleged plain meaning of Scripture. Enlightenment empiricism ostensibly influenced Glas, Sandeman, and later restorationist leaders.9 From the start, Glas’s biblicism was the defining feature of his ministry. As John Howard Smith suggests, “Glas began his ministry with a determination to make the Word of God his sole rule of conduct, and it never occurred to him that adherence to such a rule could ever bring him into collision with the laws and standards of the church.”10

At the outset of his career, there was no indication Glas was anything other than an orthodox Presbyterian pastor. He affirmed the National Covenant (1638), the Solemn League and Covenant (1643), and the Westminster Confession of Faith (1646). He was convinced of Presbyterian polity as a biblical balance between Independency (Congregationalism) and Episcopacy. However, early eighteenth-century Scottish Presbyterianism was rife with controversy. In 1680, the followers of Richard Cameron, who comprised a radical wing of the Scottish Covenanters, split from the Church of Scotland amid concerns of Episcopal intrusions via the Stuart Monarchy.11 Cameronian views were also held by many Presbyterians who remained in the National Church, including the Tealing parish. In 1718, the Marrow Controversy began, eventually resulting in the evangelical “Marrow Men” separating from the Church of Scotland in 1733 amid charges of Antinomianism.12 Most Scottish Presbyterians were moderates who wished to avoid the two extremes of pro-Stuart Episcopalianism and the strict Presbyterianism of the Covenanters. In this context of ecclesiastical turmoil, Glas became the centre of yet another dispute that led to schism among Scottish Presbyterians.

By the early 1720s, Glas was growing increasingly concerned with the spiritual state of his parishioners. Many had been influenced by Cameronianism and were indifferent to Glas’s preaching ministry because of the perception his Presbyterian convictions were too tepid. Faced with a parish that to him seemed more concerned with the covenants and matters of polity than the Bible itself, Glas began to revise his ecclesiological convictions. He became convinced the kingdom of God is wholly spiritual and thus independent of any state church. He also believed a local church’s membership should be comprised only of those who show evidence of having been regenerated. Glas’s biblicism inspired him to move increasingly toward a position more akin to the English Independents, a fact not lost among his family and close friends. In 1725, Glas formed a separate society of almost one hundred members who were sympathetic to his new views. Though Glas did not intend to form a new church, but rather a devotional society within the church, his group formed the nucleus of a new congregation and marked the beginning of the Glasite movement.13

Glas made his views public among his fellow Presbyterian clergy at a fast-day meeting in Strathmartine in 1726. Glas preached on the spiritual nature of Christ’s kingdom, much to the chagrin of John Willison (1680 –1750), a fellow pastor from Dundee who shared preaching responsibilities with Glas. Willison, who was a leading evangelical in the Church of Scotland, became an early opponent of Glas and his new views. Over the next year, Glas was criticized in presbytery and synod meetings, where he agreed his ecclesiology signaled a departure from the Westminster Confession. In April 1728, the presbytery suspended Glas from his pulpit, a decision confirmed by the General Assembly later that year. However, Glas had supporters, as well as others who, though they rejected his sentiments, nevertheless did not wish to see him suspended. Glas appealed his suspension, but the decision was confirmed in 1730. By that time, Glas had founded a second Glasite society in Dundee, which signaled the spread of the fledgling movement beyond Tealing. He had also put his views into print with his treatise The Testimony of the King of Martyrs Concerning His Kingdom (1729). Glas was reinstated as a minister in 1739, but forbidden to serve a parish in the state church without repenting of his anti-Presbyterian views. Derek Murray observes, “Glas was the first man to be deposed from the ministry by the Reformed Church of Scotland.”14

Glas was at the fountainhead of a new trend toward restorationist Independency in Scotland. According to Murray, Glas was the “true Founding Father of Scottish Independency.”15 He directly influenced at least three new groups in addition to the Glasites: the Old Scots Independents, the Bereans, and the Scotch Baptists. Though Glas was not directly responsible for the birth of the movement, his primitivist vision also possibly influenced the evangelical restorationist movement led by the Haldane brothers later in the century, though this is impossible to demonstrate conclusively because of how commonly restorationist views were held among Scottish evangelicals. From Scotland, restorationist principles, including Glasite-Sandemanian views, spread to the United States through Thomas Campbell (1763–1854) and his more famous son, Alexander (1788–1866), who co-founded the Stone-Campbell movement in the early nineteenth-century.16 However, while Glas may have been the father of transatlantic restorationism, the most influential theologian of the movement was his son-in-law, Robert Sandeman. The latter became so identified with restorationism that the Glasites outside of Scotland—as well as many other restorationists with no ties to Glas and his movement—were called Sandemanians.

1.2Glasite distinctives

As it developed between the 1720s and the 1750s, the Glasite-Sandemanian movement became characterized by several beliefs and practices that stood outside the evangelical norm. J. Ford Stanley summarizes the movement’s distinctives under four headings: economic communalism, apostolicity, ritualistic emphasis, and intellectualist faith. In terms of its economic communalism, the Glasites first emerged primarily among the semi-skilled laborers of the Scottish urban middle class, though some leading manufacturing families were also attracted to the movement (including the Sandemans). Perhaps because of this economic milieu, and like many sixteenth-century Anabaptists such as the Hutterites, Glas and his followers interpreted Acts 2:44–45 as a prescriptive command: “And all that believed were together, and had all things common; And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need.” Within the Glasite-Sandemanian movement, the entire congregation pooled its resources to alleviate material burdens among members.17 This sort of literal biblicism was common among restorationists.

Glasite-Sandemanian apostolicity and ritualistic emphasis are more germane to this study. Glas and his followers wanted to follow apostolic practices as closely as possible; this desire is the great burden of restorationism in all its forms.18 In their quest for the simple apostolic faith, the Glasites rejected all creedal statements and adopted practices such as foot-washing, the love feast, and the kiss of charity. Their members did not eat strangled meat or meat where the blood was not cooked out, following the injunction in Acts 15:20: “But that we write unto them, that they abstain from pollutions of idols, and from fornication, and from things strangled, and from blood.” Elders in Glasite churches were bi-vocational, unpaid, and rejected all clerical titles. They also placed considerable emphasis on weekly communion observance. Stanley suggests “the weekly celebration of the Lord’s Supper served as a cohesive element in Glasite-Sandemanian social worship” and the “frequent celebration of such a significant religious ritual helped bind the membership closer together.”19

Glasite ecclesiology originated as a Free Church critique of the Church of Scotland’s polity. Glas and his followers rejected Presbyterianism in favour of Congregationalism, though in decision-making they sought congregational unanimity rather than a majority vote. The Glasites retained a plurality of elders in each church, though there was parity between the elders and no distinction between “teaching” and “ruling” elders. Unlike Presbyterianism, there was no system of ecclesiastical courts that exercised authority over local churches. The whole congregation took responsibility for church discipline. The Glasites rejected the concept of state churches, arguing for local church autonomy and the spiritual nature of the church. They retained infant baptism, but practiced baptism by pouring rather than sprinkling. John Howard Smith suggests that Glasite-Sandemanian ecclesiology had much in common with seventeenth-century European Anabaptist theology, especially the emphasis on egalitarianism and the rejection of any ministry positions apart from local church elders.20 In light of these ecclesiological emphases, it should not be surprising that baptistic evangelicals adopted Glasite views later in the century.

The Sandemanians denied being a new denomination, and their churches opted to use names such as “Christians” or “Disciples of Christ” to identify themselves. Unlike later movements that took those names, the Sandemanians continued to affirm a Calvinistic understanding of election, atonement, and perseverance. Considering their context, their Calvinism likely helped advance the Glasite-Sandemanian cause. As Derek Boyd Murray suggests, any theology “not based upon the Calvinism that was so much a part of Scottish theological thinking could not have any following except among an esoteric group.”21

While each of these practices was controversial in its own right, by far the most provocative Glasite-Sandemanian belief was Stanley’s fourth distinctive: an intellectualist understanding of saving faith. Glas became convinced that both Calvinists and Arminians were undermining justification by faith alone because of undue introspection that resulted from frontloading obedience into faith. As Hornsby argues, “According to Glas saving faith is something simple not complex. It is neither more nor less than belief of the truth or testimony of God concerning Jesus Christ passively received by understanding.”22 Beginning in the 1750s, Sandeman further developed the Glasite concept of saving faith, which became identified as the centre of the Glasite-Sandemanian vision of Christianity. Due to the fact that intellectualism was so controversial, and because Sandeman’s views became the prism through which these views were understood, the Sandemanian label increasingly supplanted the Glasite label among the movement’s literary critics.

1.3Robert Sandeman and saving faith

Robert Sandeman was born in Perth, Scotland, in 1718, the year before John Glas began his ministry at Tealing.23 Sandeman was raised in a nominally Glasite home; his father was a sometime attender of the Glasite churches in Tealing and Dundee, though he would have periodic fallings out with the elders and was excommunicated at least once. Sandeman first met Glas around 1734 before enrolling at University of Edinburgh. In 1737, Sandeman married Glas’s daughter, Katherine, at the same time identifying pe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• General editor’s foreword
• Editor’s introduction
• 1 Overview of Sandemanianism
• 2 Sandemanianism among British Baptists
• 3 Overview of Strictures on Sandemanianism
• 4 Publication history and notes on the text
• Andrew Fuller Strictures on Sandemanianism, in Twelve Letters to a Friend
• Index of names
• Scripture index
• Subject index
• Footnotes