Near the end of his biography of the nineteenth-century preacher Alexander Campbell, Douglas A. Foster notes an irony: one indicator of Campbell's success as a religious reformer is the willingness of his successors to forget him. Campbell preached that Christians should dispense with the creeds, doctrines, and traditions that had accumulated during eighteen hundred years of church history and restore, instead, the pristine gospel and practice of the early church. His followers imbibed this “ahistorical attitude” (325), Foster says, and applied it to their own movement. As one Church of Christ minister declared at the beginning of the twenty-first century, “I stand fully committed to the view that we can have a New Testament church today without ever having heard of the Stone-Campbell movement. I appreciate what those men did, but my roots are not in that movement. My roots are in the New Testament itself” (325). Foster, a longtime professor of church history and director of the Center for Restoration Studies at Abilene Christian University, aims to remedy this inattention to history by providing an intellectual biography of the reformer who did so much to shape the restoration movement.
Foster begins his account with a description of the transatlantic religious world that shaped the Campbell family. In late-eighteenth-century Ireland and Scotland, Thomas Campbell and his son, Alexander, witnessed conflicts pitting Protestants against Catholics and one Protestant denomination against another. In response, they joined cross-denominational missionary endeavors seeking to unite Protestants in evangelism. When the Campbells emigrated to the United States in 1807–1808, they carried grand hopes for how this cooperative spirit might thrive in the context of American religious liberty. Yet there, too, they found that religious diversity begat religious discord. The fractiousness that beset Protestantism on both sides of the Atlantic provided the impetus for the reform Thomas soon announced and Alexander later nurtured: Christians must unite around simple, New Testament religion—what Alexander called “the ancient gospel and order of things.” Only then could believers evangelize the world and herald the millennial reign of Jesus Christ.
Following his ordination in 1812, Alexander Campbell devoted five decades of unrelenting work to promoting his reform. Fosters spends much of his book tracing Campbell's labors as preacher, writer, Bible translator, periodical editor, and college founder. The tireless preacher proved most energetic as a religious polemicist. More than a third of A Life of Alexander Campbell recounts his many skirmishes with friends and foes. Through debates performed publicly or in print, Campbell emerged as a champion Protestant apologist, sparring with freethinker Robert Owen and Catholic bishop John Baptist Purcell. But Campbell devoted as much or more energy to fighting the Protestants theologically nearest him, especially Presbyterians and Baptists. It was in these debates that Campbell delineated what he believed constituted true Christianity and articulated his distinguishing theological tenet: immersion baptism for the remission of sins. Campbell considered this doctrine nonnegotiable. Due to his training in Scottish commonsense philosophy at the University of Glasgow, Campbell operated with what Foster calls an “intellectual naïveté” (56)—a confidence in the reliability of his own perception that enabled him to dismiss opposing doctrines as divisive distractions while enshrining his own views as the only fair reading of the New Testament. Many attributes came to define the restoration movement, including congregational autonomy, unadorned worship, and close adherence to New Testament language and practices. But this view of baptism, Foster argues, constituted the foundation stone of Campbell's reform and the chief stumbling block for his enemies.
By focusing heavily on these debates, Foster follows Campbell in emphasizing the role of theology in defining the Stone-Campbell movement. Placing the book into a conversation that has recently animated historians of American evangelicalism and fundamentalism helps to reveal the consequences of this decision. Scholars following David Bebbington have prioritized theological convictions in describing these movements. Other historians, meanwhile, argue that evangelicalism and fundamentalism have been marked as much by racial biases, gender ideologies, and political allegiances as by doctrines per se. Located along this divide, Foster appears to fall into the former camp, crafting a narrative driven by theology rather than sociology. The strength of this approach is to demonstrate that Campbell, his followers, and their detractors all considered the specifics of restorationist beliefs to be central to the movement. The drawback is to leave underexplored questions about how realities that were not explicitly theological nevertheless shaped restorationist convictions. The discussion of race, slavery, and the Civil War that closes the book offers an opportunity to do just that. As Foster explains, Campbell offered only tepid opposition to slavery. He spent most of his energy trying to convince abolitionists that the Bible did not condemn slavery. Campbell only opposed slavery insofar as the controversy surrounding it imperiled his plan for Christian unity. Campbell stated explicitly that he cared more for the “Anglo-Saxon” (295) men entrusted with this religious mission than the African Americans they enslaved. But how did his commitment to white supremacy and his biblical defenses of slavery relate to his reform? In The Civil War as a Theological Crisis, Mark Noll argues that the same Scottish commonsense philosophy that inspired unshakable certainty in personal biblical interpretations blinded believers like Campbell to the worldly realities that shaped their reading of scripture. Convinced that they read the Bible without creed or comment, many white Protestants nevertheless imposed nineteenth-century conceptions of lifelong, Black-only slavery onto the ancient text (The Civil War as a Theological Crisis, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2006). In this argument, Noll models an approach that respects religious convictions as first-order beliefs while also grappling with their inextricable connections to antebellum American life. Exploring this recursive relationship between conviction and context may bridge the growing gap between two camps of historians of American Protestantism. Foster devoted years to crafting the definitive account of Campbell's theology. In so doing, he has laid the foundation for such integrative work.
