Old-time religion with its hell-fire sermons, sentimental ditties, Sabbath observance and a sharp distinction between sheep and goats may have had its day but we are a nostalgic people and we are sometimes tempted to hark back to what are seen as better days.
The Revd J.N. Darby, Anglo-Irish clergyman, who had Lord Nelson for a godfather, was similarly tempted. In 1830 he thought it was time to turn the clock back. He did so to some effect. He brought into being a new Christian organisation, the Brethren. They were referred to as the Plymouth Brethren because they became known in that West Country location. The essence of his idea was to recreate the Church as it was in the days of Andrew, Peter, James, John, Barnabas and Paul. The outcome would be a replicated version of the New Testament Christian community cleared of all the contaminating influences that had deformed it over the centuries. The Bible and the Bible alone was their guide.
Assisting in this enterprise 79 years later in the USA was Cyrus I. Scofield, former Confederate soldier and Congregational minister. He suggested that the Bible could be divided into seven sections (he called them dispensations), successive measures the Creator took to correct his wayward creatures. This gave readers a broad-brush picture of the story from the Garden of Eden to the new Jerusalem. The Scofield Bible was joined hot-foot by a series of booklets, also from the USA, called ‘Fundamentals’. Hence ‘fundamentalism’.
The quest for a replication of the New Testament church encouraged like-minded Christians (particularly those in the New World) to believe that the Church ought to be an unchanging entity. It was also one that, give or take a few outstanding exceptions such as D.L.Moody, church leaders had failed to honour. To envisage a static, unchanging church and to reproduce it is as problematic as it is to search for perpetual motion or the philosopher’s stone. The Church has, after all, accommodated itself to worship in the vernacular, professional clergy, women in positions of leadership, Sunday as the Lord’s Day, established Churches and a great many other things not prescribed in the New Testament.
Yet Mr Darby has been a pervasive, if unrecognised, influence on some Christians, including followers of Charles Simeon. JND and his successors have been esteemed, with or without good reason, as uncompromising custodians of the unsullied biblical faith. Which hardly helps today’s worshippers in the 21st century to play their part in the developing story of Christianity.
The Brethren have produced champions of the Gospel as they see it. These have included A.N. Groves, a missionary who practised ‘living by faith’, G.H. Lang and George Muller. Early on they split into open and exclusive sections, the latter headed at one stage by Jim Taylor, who stressed uncompromising separation from worldly influences such as radio and television. The current tendency to use the word ‘open’ to qualify the word ‘evangelical’ is an uncanny reminder of the enduring quality of this distinction.
I speak as one who has in his time been best man at a Brethren wedding.
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