Congregationalism

This or any other history of Congregationalism, as it follows the movement through, must take account of the modifications to which this fundamental document will be subject. Much of it was projected against backgrounds now greatly changed. In detail it lacked balance and made too much of what has since proved inconsequential. There is in it an excess of separatism and independency which time would correct, and yet behind its dated phrasing and spelling there is a conception of the Church, its fellowship and its office, which goes to the root of all Christian organization and communion. It opposed itself simply and superbly to all then existing hierarchies and establishments. One reads it blindly who does not feel its prophetic quality. One reads it superficially who does not see that a millennium and a half of Church history are needed to explain it.

No Christian communion has ever been quite content until it has claimed for its doctrines, polities, and practices the authority of the New Testament, and usually to the exclusion of any other communion's right to advance such claims. An earlier school of Congregational historians claimed New Testament authority and priority for Congregationalism and supported their claims both with zeal and documentation. Most competent historians would now agree that they made their case too strong. No competent scholar would deny that there have been throughout the entire course of church history marginal movements tending to assume group forms of organization and asserting some independence from outside ecclesiastical authority. These movements were fluid as water, appearing and disappearing without apparent organic connection and yet with arresting persistence.

This has made it possible for so sound a historian as Dale to find true Congregationalism in Corinth and Ephesus , and prophetic intimations of Carr's Lane Church throughout the whole course of church history. Waddington traces what he calls "the development of the principles denominated Congregational" from the zenith of the papacy under Innocent, the Third, to the commitment of the poor folk of Richard Fitz's group - the first church of the Congregational order in the English Reformation, he says, of which we have information-to Bridewell Jail in 1567. His learned and voluminous survey includes many movements whose leaders would be much surprised to find themselves nominated the forerunners of English Congregationalism and whom most Congregationalists would not, without some urging, accept as their spiritual forebears.

And yet there is through these hundreds of now yellow pages a principle of historic control and an approach to Fitz and the Plumbers' Hall group, which any historian of the genesis of Congregationalism must at least broadly take into account. In substance it comes to this: there has never been since apostolic times an entirely unified Christian Church. The task of completely satisfying the incalculable variety of minds, temperaments, regions, and races included for at least twelve hundred years in the administration of western Christianity, was beyond the power of any ecclesiastical organization.

The association of clerical vestments with such vindications of the Church and her faith may also have prejudiced the Puritan and Separatist against such garmenture. The more extreme would be led to question the Christian necessity of bishops, and specifically such bishops. That would lead to consideration of the nature and constitution of a Church more truly apostolic and more essentially Christian. This was in the main the line which English Separatism, eventually to become Congregationalism, took.