Ecumenism & Christian Liberty In 18^th Century America

Walter Sundberg

 

We all appreciate the religious liberty we enjoy as citizens in the United States.  We know that they were not won without the struggle of the American Revolution and the events that led to it.  It behooves us to recall from time to time the particulars of that struggle, for these particulars can serve to illuminate our situation today.  

The freedom of Christian denominations to practice their faith, while widely accepted in colonial America, was not without opposition.  During the eighteenth century, the Anglican Church pursued an aggressive policy to control American religious life. Under the principle “No Bishop, no King,” Anglican authorities denigrated Puritan divines, implying disloyalty to the crown.  Doctrinally, Anglican claimed that dissenting clergy were not truly ordained to “the administration of God’s Word and Sacraments” and thus lacked the principles of “true religion.”  They attempted by law to close schools run by dissenters.  They also sought to establish an Anglican episcopate directly in the colonies, in part to take legal control of the income provided by the taxes meant for religious purposes.  Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, etc. were seriously threatened.

 One of the most effective voices who rose to defend religious liberty was Ezra Stiles (1727-1795).  In April, 1760, the then thirty-three year old Congregational minister serving Second Congregational Church in Newport, Rhode Island, presented to a gathering of his fellow clergy, A Discourse on the Christian Union.  A year later it would be expanded and published and become a best-seller, establishing Stiles, a future president of Yale College, as a leading Christian intellectual.  Stiles’ subject was the intersection of church and society.  It is the fundamental identity of the cause of Protestantism, grounded in Scripture, that no civil or ecclesiastical authority should be allowed to interfere with private judgment on religious matters.  The members of Christ’s Body belong by persuasion, never coercion.  To coerce faith is to destroy faith.  It is an affront to the Holy Spirit:  “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (II Cor. 3.17).  This is why Protestants naturally gravitate to congregationalism as the accepted form of polity.  In the local community, Christians naturally unite.  It is as congregations that Christians choose their leaders:  “Churches can... alone be said to be perfectly free, when each congregation has an unlimited, absolute, and self-determining power in the choice of their officers.”  This right, given by God, has political implications, for it parallels the right “british freemen enjoy and exercise uncontroulably in the choice of a representative or member of assembly.”  Congregationalism, then, is a witness to the “fundamental principle of universal liberty.”

There is more.  The Protestant love of liberty, rooted in the Bible and ratified by experience, is the firm basis upon which all Christian sects can live “in the friendly cohabitation of all.”  Stiles saw this particular blessing of congregational ordering in startlingly ecumenical terms.  There may be those who wish to build the unity of Christ upon the edifice of a single institutional organization so there would be a “universal dominion to the destruction of the rest.”  This is wrong; it is not the will of God.  Rather Christians live together properly when “all the present sects...  subsist and increase into distinct respectable bodies, continuing their distinctions for a long time to come in full life and vigor.”  Christians are not afraid of differences among themselves in the way they gather and order.  On the contrary to embrace these differences is part of what it means to be Christian.  Ecumenism and Christian liberty are not opposed.