Winthrop Hudson agrees: While revivals and voluntary societies embodied “a spirit of unity,” at the same time “there were discordant notes[,] . . . controversy[,] and division.”50 As Philip Schaff observed, “America is the classic land of sects, where in perfect freedom from civil disqualification, they can develop themselves without restraint.”51
Religious pluralism prompted an ecumenical movement among those who viewed it as inconsistent with the prayer of Jesus for the unity of the church (John 17:20–23). Generally speaking, ecumenists took one of three approaches to the spirit of sectarianism in America. Some rejected their current context by pushing the restart button. This “No Creed but the Bible group”—which included groups like the Campbellites and Winebrenner’s “Church of God”—blamed creeds and traditions for the divisions in the church. They affirmed the imperative of unity, sought to restore the original unity of the church, and called “upon the Christian world to come with them to the pure fountain of God’s word, as having no doubt that it is to be secured in this way.”52 As Nichols notes, “this type of movement was so widespread . . . as to provide a significant key to the prevailing American religious mentality.”53 Others sought to repair the American Protestant church by accepting the divisions as healthy and then minimizing their distinctive tenets in order to form alliances. With reference to this approach, Nevin wrote,
A very favorite way of representing the subject, at one time, was to compare the different denominations to the several different kinds of soldiers that go to make up a regular army. More beautiful is the illustration (the last we have seen of the sort) brought forward in connection with the late “Christian Alliance” movement by a distinguished orator from the Established Church of Scotland, making the several denominations to be so many chords, whose combined music constitutes the harmony of the one, holy, universal Church!”54
Both Schaff and Nevin criticized this ecumenical strategy. Schaff objected: “[T]o make room for union, peculiarities of doctrine are to be surrendered for which our fathers contended and made the greatest sacrifices.”55 Nevin agreed: “It is a catholicity which stands wholly in negations; by which all that is affirmed as a distinguishing interest by the different denominations is either denied, or at least treated as something of no worth.”56 A third strategy involved efforts to reform that which has been broken by developing theological systems for the American context. Presbyterians in this group opted for the invisible-visible church distinction, which allowed them to affirm the unity of the church and, at the same time, affirm denominationalism. John Nevin took a different approach by condemning sectarianism, calling the church to repentance for the sin of sectarianism, and prescribing an incarnational ecclesiology which required faith in the Church itself.57
Inculturation by Immigrants
“Between the American Revolution and 1845,” writes Nathan Hatch, “the population of the United States grew at a staggering rate: two and a half million became twenty million in seventy years.”58 This unprecedented growth was due to a high birth rate, the availability of land, and immigration. The Annual Report of the Department of Justice, Immigration and Naturalization Service reports total immigration to the United States as 143,439 from 1821–1830, 599,425 from 1831–1840, and 1,713,251 from 1841–1850. Another 2,598,214 immigrated from 1851–1860.
This factor especially impacted the German Reformed Church. After 1830 “a new wave of German immigrants flooded into the expanding frontier, stretching the resources and ecclesiology of German Reformed communities.”59 According to one albeit slightly exaggerated estimate, over four million Germans immigrated to the New World from 1841–1860. Many if not most of these immigrants left Germany after the failure of the revolutions of 1848 to establish democracy. This massive German immigration led to “increasing German-American self-consciousness,” encouraging immigrants to “cheris[h] the heritage from the fatherland” while accepting “responsibility for their newly adopted nation.”60 “This growing self-consciousness had negative and positive aspects. On the negative side were the tensions of cultural and language differences. On the positive side was the maintenance of identity so essential to societal development.”61 All this took place as a new generation of American-born Germans from Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey moved to Ohio and Illinois, and a newer group of German-speaking immigrants settled farther west in Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, and the Dakotas where they formed distinct communities of German Reformed people. The tensions between these two German Reformed groups continued up to the post-World War I period.62
All nineteenth-century German Reformed immigrants faced, at least, two challenges. The first was adjusting to the economic, social and political conditions in America. In the process, they wrestled with how much of the Old World to hold on to while living in the New World, and with how quickly to let go of the Old while living in the New. John Nevin, though not a German by birth or lineage, was but one member of the German Reformed Church with a conservative opinion: “I do not hesitate to say that the German Reformed Church ought not to lay aside her distinctive national character and merge herself in a foreign interest. . . . In Eastern Pennsylvania especially, the predominant form of mind will continue to be German;. . . . ”63 The second challenge was religious. To what extent would Old World theological and ecclesiastical formulations function in the New World? Will they be preserved, the hope of the more conservative, or significantly modified, the hope of the more progressive? More specifically, how will the Old World norm of the union of the magisterium with the church, and that union’s subsequent influence on the doctrines of the church and her ministry, play out in the New World where such a union does not exist? The responses of the German Reformed Church to these challenges “exhibit both the essence of the faith tradition it represented and the way in which the sociocultural ethos of the growing nation defined limits as well as opportunities for that tradition.”64
The Church Question Answered
In America, opposing answers to the Church Question prompted the rise of two parties: the Revivalists, characterized by a willingness to adapt to the demands of the New World, and the Conservatives who warned of compromising basic precepts of their theological traditions. Contemporary scholars often refer to the Revivalists as evangelicals and the Conservatives as confessionalists. Evangelicals embraced both the need for revival, as well as the “new measures” of revivalism.65 While answering the Church Question, they tended to reduce God’s normative strategy to Romans 10:13–17:
For “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are they to preach unless they are sent? As it is written, “How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news!” But they have not all obeyed the gospel. For Isaiah says, “Lord, who has believed what he has heard from us?” So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.66