THE INFLUENC OF THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES ON OLD SCHOOOL BAPTISTS

 

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FOREWORD

There are moments in the history of the church when the survival of a people depends not upon wealth, buildings, institutions, or political influence, but upon whether scattered believers can still hear one another’s voices.

The Old School Baptists of the nineteenth century were such a people.

They possessed no national convention to command them. They established no denominational headquarters to govern their churches. They rejected the missionary boards, theological institutions, benevolent societies, and centralized machinery that were rapidly transforming American Baptist life. Their congregations were autonomous. Their associations possessed no legislative authority over the churches. Their ministers were often farmers, craftsmen, physicians, laborers, and ordinary men who preached because they believed God had called them, not because a denominational institution had certified them.

And yet they were not isolated.

Across mountains and rivers, through growing cities and lonely rural communities, across the Appalachians and eventually onto the western frontier, they found one another.

One of the principal instruments that made this possible was a newspaper.

That newspaper was Signs of the Times.

It is difficult for a modern reader to appreciate what a religious newspaper could mean in the nineteenth century. We live in an age in which a message can cross a continent in seconds. A theological controversy can involve thousands of people before breakfast. A sermon preached in one state can be heard throughout the world before the congregation has left the meetinghouse.

The Old School Baptists inhabited another world.

A brother in Maine might never meet a sister in Georgia. A minister in Virginia might never stand in the same meetinghouse with an elder in Illinois. A Baptist family moving into Kansas Territory might settle many miles from another family believing substantially the same doctrine and never know that they were there.

Into that world came the printed page.

A letter was written.

It traveled to the editor.

It was printed.

The paper traveled outward again.

And suddenly brethren separated by hundreds or even thousands of miles were sitting, in a sense, at the same table.

That is the story examined in these pages.

Signs of the Times did not create the Old School Baptist movement. That distinction must be maintained. Opposition to the new religious institutions preceded the newspaper. Kehukee had already taken its decisive stand in 1827. The Black Rock meeting of September 1832 gave public expression to objections that had been developing among Baptists for years. Gilbert Beebe did not become a bishop of the Old School Baptists, and his newspaper possessed no ecclesiastical authority over their churches.

But something extraordinary happened when Signs of the Times began publication in 1832.

A protest became a conversation.

A conversation became a network.

And a network helped a scattered people recognize themselves.

Black Rock could issue an address once. An association could meet annually. A church could correspond with another church. But a newspaper could return every few weeks carrying letters, sermons, doctrinal arguments, meeting notices, obituaries, church troubles, Christian experiences, questions, answers, warnings, encouragements, and news from brethren hundreds of miles apart.

The significance of that achievement should not be underestimated.

The Old School Baptists were attempting something inherently difficult. They wanted fellowship without centralized government. They wanted cooperation without surrendering church authority. They wanted communication without constructing another denominational bureaucracy. They wanted ministers to travel and preach without turning the gospel ministry into an enterprise administered by missionary corporations.

Signs of the Times became one of the mechanisms by which that seemingly impossible balance could be maintained.

The newspaper could speak—but it could not command.

It could persuade—but it could not legislate.

It could warn—but it could not exclude a church member.

It could publish the writings of an elder—but it could not ordain him.

It could announce an association—but it could not govern that association.

It could carry the experience of a believer from Kentucky to New York—but it could not receive that believer into a local congregation.

Those powers remained where Old School Baptists believed Christ had placed them: in His churches.

This distinction is essential.

Without it, the history of Signs of the Times can easily be misunderstood. One might look at its enormous influence and conclude that Beebe simply created another form of denominational authority. That would miss the peculiar character of the newspaper. It possessed influence precisely because people voluntarily read it, answered it, argued with it, defended it, criticized it, and sent their own voices into its pages.

Even disagreement became evidence of its importance.

Gilbert Beebe was not universally followed. Samuel Trott was not universally followed. The absolute predestination controversy alone demonstrates that Old School Baptists were never intellectually uniform. Some of Beebe’s positions became extraordinarily influential; other Primitive Baptists vigorously opposed them. Books were written against positions associated with Beebe and his allies.

But that itself reveals the importance of the paper.

Men do not devote years to answering voices nobody hears.

The Signs mattered.

It mattered doctrinally.

It mattered ecclesiologically.

It mattered geographically.

It mattered devotionally.

And eventually it mattered historically.

Within its columns, Old School Baptists wrestled with regeneration, election, predestination, gospel means, church authority, ministerial qualifications, baptism, Christian experience, the nature of associations, the legitimacy of religious institutions, and the meaning of the separation between the Old and New Schools.

Samuel Trott could effectively preach from a pulpit larger than any meetinghouse he ever entered. A reader could send him a question concerning Scripture and later find an extended answer in print. Beebe could publish an argument in New York and find himself answered by brethren many states away.

Without establishing a seminary, the Old School Baptists created a vast theological conversation.

Without creating a national convention, they developed national consciousness.

That is one of the most striking paradoxes in their history.

The geographical evidence makes the story even more compelling.

The surviving record places agents, correspondents, readers, and distribution networks across a remarkable expanse. New York, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, Kansas, Texas, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, California, Oregon, Washington Territory, and other regions appear within the documentary trail. Canadian Baptists entered the story as well.

The agents list preserved in Signs of the Times is especially powerful evidence.

These were not merely abstract dots on a map.

They were people.

Each name represented a human connection.

Someone received papers.

Someone collected subscriptions.

Someone carried copies to neighbors.

Someone handed an issue to another Baptist.

Someone read an article aloud.

Someone recognized familiar doctrine in words printed hundreds of miles away.

Someone discovered that he was not alone.

The numbers become remarkable when placed geographically. North Carolina alone appears with thirty-three agents in the list examined here. Illinois had twenty-one. Kentucky twenty. Virginia seventeen. Missouri and Ohio sixteen each. Indiana fourteen. Georgia, Mississippi, New York, and Oregon each had twelve. Texas had eleven. Maryland eleven. New Jersey ten. Iowa ten.

And still the network continued outward.

Kansas.

Nebraska.

Arizona.

New Mexico.

Washington Territory.

California.

Ontario.

The paper that began amid the controversy of 1832 had become part of a communications network stretching across a continent.

That fact forces us to reconsider one of the common caricatures of the Old School Baptists.

They were not simply people retreating from the world.

They traveled.

They migrated.

They preached.

They corresponded.

They wrote.

They published.

They read.

They argued.

They maintained friendships across enormous distances.

They established churches on new frontiers.

They carried religious books and newspapers westward with their families.

Their objection was not to communication.

Their objection was not to effort.

Their objection was not necessarily even to organization.

Their question was far more fundamental:

What has Christ authorized His church to be?

That question stood beneath the missionary controversy, beneath the seminary controversy, beneath disputes over societies and boards, and beneath much of the theology appearing in Signs of the Times.

And the newspaper repeatedly brought the question before its readers.

But there is another dimension to this story that deserves to be remembered.

Behind the doctrinal controversies were suffering human beings.

Read enough nineteenth-century Baptist correspondence and the world behind the theology begins to emerge.

Children died.

Wives died.

Husbands died.

Ministers grew old.

Families moved west and left generations of relatives behind.

Churches divided.

Friendships were broken by controversy.

Poverty was common.

Travel could be dangerous.

Disease could destroy a household in days.

Some believers lived miles from another church of their faith.

Then the newspaper arrived.

Perhaps it contained an obituary.

Perhaps a letter describing a believer’s experience.

Perhaps an exposition from Samuel Trott.

Perhaps a word from Beebe.

Perhaps an announcement revealing that Old School Baptists lived closer than anyone had known.

Perhaps only a familiar name.

But sometimes a familiar name is enough.

There is something deeply moving about imagining one of those papers being unfolded in a farmhouse in Illinois, a cabin in Kansas, a home in North Carolina, or a settlement in Oregon.

The reader was far from Middletown, New York.

But for a few moments the distance disappeared.

Brethren were speaking.

The church was larger than the little congregation visible on Sunday morning.

There were others.

That realization may have been among the greatest gifts Signs of the Times gave its readers.

It told scattered believers:

You are not alone.

It also preserved their voices for us.

This makes the newspaper invaluable to the historian. The people who appear in its pages were not writing primarily for historians living generations later. They were writing to one another. They were explaining what they believed, defending decisions, asking questions, reporting church troubles, describing providence, remembering the dead, and trying to understand the Scriptures.

Their disagreements remain.

Their mistakes remain.

Their prejudices remain.

Their strengths remain.

Their weaknesses remain.

That is precisely why the record is so valuable.

Signs of the Times must never be treated as an infallible chronicle. It was a partisan newspaper. Its editors had theological positions. Its contributors sometimes spoke harshly. Its descriptions of opponents must be tested against church minutes, associational records, opposing publications, correspondence, and civil documents.

But once that historical caution is maintained, its value becomes immense.

Here we hear Old School Baptists speaking in their own voices.

Not as later generations imagined them.

Not merely as their opponents described them.

But as they described themselves.

And perhaps this is why the story still matters.

Institutions change.

Newspapers disappear.

Buildings collapse.

Associations dissolve.

Names are forgotten.

But the question these Baptists were asking has not disappeared:

Is the church Christ established sufficient for the work Christ gave His church?

They answered that question with remarkable consistency, sometimes imperfectly, sometimes controversially, and sometimes at tremendous personal cost.

They believed the answer was yes.

And because they believed it, they attempted to build a religious fellowship unlike the increasingly centralized denominational systems surrounding them.

No national ecclesiastical government.

No denominational executive.

No missionary corporation ruling the churches.

No theological institution defining the ministry for them.

Instead:

churches,

ministers,

families,

letters,

associations,

and a newspaper moving from hand to hand across America.

A fragile network by modern standards.

Yet it endured.

The pages that follow tell the story of that network.

They tell how Signs of the Times helped give the Old School Baptists a common vocabulary.

How it sharpened theological convictions.

How it preserved Christian experience.

How it connected isolated churches.

How it allowed disagreements to cross state lines.

How it helped form historical memory.

And how a religious newspaper published in New York became one of the great arteries through which the life of the Old School Baptist movement flowed across the nineteenth-century American landscape.

The names of many of its agents are now forgotten.

Their houses are gone.

Some of their meetinghouses have disappeared.

Their graves may stand unnoticed beneath weathered stones.

But once, they opened their mail.

They unfolded the paper.

They read the words of brethren they might never meet in this life.

And across the distances of a growing nation, they knew that somewhere beyond the mountains, beyond the rivers, beyond the forests and prairies, there were others who still believed that Christ had not left His church unfinished.

This work is dedicated to recovering that forgotten fellowship.

To the editors who wrote.

To the elders who preached.

To the correspondents who poured their experiences onto paper.

To the agents who carried the publication into communities far from New York.

To the churches that remained autonomous yet refused to become strangers.

And to the countless unnamed readers who received Signs of the Times and discovered, perhaps in some lonely place on the American frontier, that the Old School was not merely behind them.

It was all around them.

The paper did not create their faith.

It gave their faith a voice.

It did not create their churches.

It helped their churches find one another.

It did not govern the Old School Baptists.

It connected them.

And in doing so, Signs of the Times helped a scattered people become conscious that, though separated by hundreds and eventually thousands of miles, they still walked together upon what they believed were the old paths.

Guillermo Santamaria