Abstract
This study by an American Presbyterian reworks a doctorate pursued under the distinguished Methodist theologian William Abrahams at Southern Methodist University. It maintains that the idea of the denomination has lacked theological justification or self-understanding, and in a way that hampers ecumenical dialogue. The classic work in this area as far as the wider reading public is concerned is Richard Niebuhr’s The Social Sources of Denominationalism (1929). Niebuhr provides a sociological analysis of the various factors, such as class and ethnicity, that foster denominations, and provides a theological critique of their existence as tearing apart the unity of the one holy Catholic and Apostolic Church embedded in the creed.
It was only many years later that Niebuhr seriously modified this critique to acknowledge the positive aspect of the existence of denominations as religious bodies free of the coercive power of the state and emphasizing different aspects of the plenitude of Christian truth. The development of the denomination occurs in various phases, beginning with the Magisterial Reformation in the sixteenth century and developing in the seventeenth century with the Cromwellian Revolution, followed by the Methodist/Evangelical Revivals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Here, I should indicate the academic commentators carefully reviewed by Ensign-George, beginning with Philip Schaff, who is considered at some length as a European who arrived, like De Tocqueville, when the last establishments had been dismantled, and proceeding to the church historians Winthrop Hudson, Sidney Mead and Russell E. Richey. It is with the help of perspectives provided by the church historians that Ensign-George can elucidate the key concept of the symbiotic relation between unity and diversity.
Throughout this book there is a tension between theological normativity and the denomination understood purely as a sociological concept, such as I elaborated in 1962 and which Ensign-George does not discuss. From here on I make purely sociological comments translated from Ensign-George’s theological observations. I begin with revivalism as a movement smudging denominational boundaries and throwing up its own version of apostolicity in the persons of Moody and Sankey, Torrey and Alexander and Billy Graham, as well as persons more embedded in denominational identities such as Spurgeon, Lloyd-Jones and Sangster. I link revivalism with the loosening of the sense of denominational identity in favour of a generic Evangelical Christian identity. There are other questions to be put. The emergence of the Franciscans is not related to the sociological concept of ‘the order’. The sociological dichotomy of ‘church’ and ‘sect’ is too easily dismissed in the context of the New World. There are quasi-churches in particular territorial areas and sects are still active, such as the Mennonites, defined by territorial segregation and a peace witness. A final question to be asked goes in the reverse direction. In the south Indian situation, do not the numerous Christian bodies emerge as denominations, while in the north-western Indian states of the margin, such as Mizoram, do not denominations emerge as virtual territorial churches?