Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 61:241 (Jan 1904)
Article: Church History As An Aid To Christian Unity
Author: Allen Dudley Severance

BSac 61:241 (Jan 1904) p. 141

Church History As An Aid To Christian Unity

Prof. Allen Dudley Severance

There is no necessity of insisting upon the evils of denominational rivalry. It has been fitly termed “the sin of schism.”1 We are all too familiar with the sad spectacle. On the fine avenues of our large cities there are elegant church edifices of different denominations every few blocks, sometimes on the same block,—altogether too much money locked up in brick and mortar. In the rapidly growing suburbs it is even worse. The denominations seem to act as though possessed by a haunting fear that their chance to preach the gospel would be forever lost if they did not hasten to plant a chapel, totally regardless of the needs of the little community; and, on what we are accustomed to call “home mission territory,” the state of affairs is even worse. In town after town in the West, there are half-a-dozen weak, struggling churches where one or two would suffice; their pastors underpaid, their accommodations pathetic in the extreme, and their expenses defrayed in large part by home missionary boards in the East, themselves already deep in debt. And what are the conditions on foreign missionary ground? Take Japan as an illustration. Dr. Amory H. Bradford says: “I have seen in one place after another in that country Presbyterians, Baptists, Anglicans, American Episcopalians, Methodists North and South,

BSac 61:241 (Jan 1904) p. 142

Wesley an s from Canada, confusing natives by different names, insisting on insignificant details of their own organizations, when an impression had hardly been made on surrounding heathenism.”2 Do not such things justify the indignant words of Bishop Maret? “If, after eighteen centuries, idolatry prevails over the greater part of the globe; if Mahometism desolates once flourishing Christian countries; if a thinly disguised atheism ravages even the Christian world, doubt not that one of the most powerful causes of so many moral and social miseries, so many shameful humiliations, lies in the many unhappy internal divisions of Christians, which constitute schism and heresy”3

I. Deprecating, as all must, this sad state of affairs, cannot church historians do something to help put an end to it? Let us face the fact that our divisions arise in large measure from (1) ignorance of one another, (2) prejudice, and (3) mistakes. Cannot the study of church history do something to remove all three?

1. Ignorance.— One of the arguments commonly urged in favor of the study of general history is “that the limitations of the man who know...