Leader of the Christian Church in the West. In 1832 Stone led many of the Christians in the West to unite with the followers of Alexander Campbell, known as Reformers or Disciples of Christ, forming the Stone-Campbell Movement. 

Leader of the Christian Church in the West. In 1832 Stone led many of the Christians in the West to unite with the followers of Alexander Campbell, known as Reformers or Disciples of Christ, forming the Stone-Campbell Movement. 

1. Introduction

By 1832 the Christian Church in the West, born out of a separation from the Presbyterians in 1803, numbered more than 16,000 members in Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Ohio, and Indiana. The leadership of the younger and more prolific Alexander Campbell eclipsed that of Stone in the Movement born of the 1832 union. Nevertheless, Stone was a reformer in his own right and had an abiding influence on the Stone-Campbell Movement. 

1.1. The Saintliness of His Character

Beginning with John Rogers, who published Stone’s autobiography along with his own “Additions and Reflections” in 1847, Stone has been honored in the Movement for the saintliness of his character. Rogers developed this theme under several headings. Under the headings of “Husband” and “Father” he reported, “The writer of this sketch was much about the house of the venerated Stone, for many, many years … [and] never heard him speak a harsh or unkind word to any member of his family; nor does he remember to have seen him angry, during an acquaintance of a quarter of a century.” 

Photo Caption: An engraving of Barton W. Stone appearing in his Biography, published posthumously in 1847. For Stone, Christian unity was the Movement’s “polar star,” not as an end in itself but as the platform from which the churches could more powerfully and univocally communicate the gospel. 

Rogers sought to show that Stone was loved for his Christian spirit even by many of his religious opponents and that his good moral character was recognized by all. He noted a reference to Stone’s good moral character by the Presbyterian Joshua L. Wilson in the published account of the heresy trial of Lyman Beecher. He reported a conversation in 1843 among a group of women, some of whom were members of the Christian Church and had known Stone for many years and spoke of their great love for him. An aged Presbyterian woman who had also known Stone for many years but opposed his views interjected, “I don’t care how much you love Mr. Stone, I love him as much as any of you.” He quoted another opponent of Stone’s views as having said, “B. W. Stone has done more harm by his good conduct than by all his preaching and writing: because … he has lived so much like a Christian, that the people take him to be one; and are deceived and led into destructive error.” 

Rogers also celebrated Stone’s humility. “Though he was a fine scholar — deeply learned in the Bible; and in consequence of his various learning, his deep piety, and popular manners, wielded an immense influence upon society, yet he was unconscious of his own strength, and seemed always disposed, modestly, to take the lowest seat.” Rogers added, “He was deeply imbued with that humility that disposes us to esteem others better than ourselves.” Rogers recommended Stone as a model for all who would aspire to true greatness. 

The theme of the saintliness of Stone’s character was picked up by others and remains alive in the memory of the Stone-Campbell Movement. 

1.2. Theological Controversialist 

Rogers may have stressed the saintliness of Stone’s character to counter another image of Stone, the image of a theological controversialist who had been “a man of war from his youth.” Stone was engaged in theological controversies much of his life. The origin of those controversies was his desire to make sense of the teachings of the Bible in light of reason and his own experience of spiritual transformation through faith in the gospel of Jesus Christ. This desire led Stone to reject the doctrine of predestination and to adopt “liberal” views of the doctrines of the Trinity and the atonement. Though Stone does not appear to have been eager to make an issue of his liberal or “heterodox” theological views, he was willing to defend them when required to do so. As a result, much of his published corpus consists of books of theological controversy. 

By the time he met Campbell in 1824, Stone had long been charged with teaching an “Arian” Christology and “Socinian” views of the significance of Christ’s death. Though Stone had denied these charges, defending his views from the Bible, many Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists viewed him as the “Great Heresiarch of the West.” As a consequence, Campbell, who was seeking to reform the Baptists and anyone else who would read or listen to his views, initially sought to ignore Stone’s overtures for a union of their forces, fearing that too close an identification with Stone would reduce his influence among the Baptists. Stone persisted, however, and despite Campbell’s resistance the union was accomplished. Later Campbell would create a stir in the Movement by stating in his 1843 debate with Presbyterian Nathan L. Rice that he had “saved” Stone and his followers from their heterodoxy. 

1.3. Wealth and Hospitality

Anyone who visits the Campbell mansion in Bethany will immediately perceive that Alexander Campbell had a gift for making money. There was never a Stone mansion. Although Stone started out with more material resources than Campbell, and reported in his autobiography that prior to his conversion he had been intent on achieving wealth and status, his economic history was largely one of downward mobility. Born to an upper-middle-class Southern family, he spent his inheritance from his father on acquiring a liberal education that might have propelled him, as it did several of his classmates, into a successful career in law or politics. Instead, following his conversion he chose to enter the Presbyterian ministry. Later he received an inheritance from his mother consisting of two slaves. Having become convinced that “slavery is inconsistent with the principles of Christianity as well as civil liberty,” he manumitted them both, after providing for their education. Later yet, after having become a husband and father, he gave up what he described as an “abundant salary for the support of myself and family” when he withdrew from the jurisdiction of the Synod of Kentucky. Henceforth he was required to teach and/or farm to support his family. And, unlike Campbell, he never seemed to make a profit from his publications. 

Stone’s reduced material resources collided with his conviction that a Christian pastor or bishop is to practice hospitality. Nevertheless, Stone practiced hospitality. Rogers reports that the poor and the helpless were welcome at his house and table, and that his house was the “resting place” of his friends and the “friends of his Master.” Rogers also notes that although Stone received little for his labors as a preacher and was often unable to accommodate his friends as he might have wished, he was not one to “murmur or apologize.” Rogers relates that Barton and Celia Stone’s table was not always as well furnished as Stone and his wife could have wished, and that sometimes Mrs. Stone would apologize for the fare. In such circumstances, Stone, when about to serve their guests, would ask with a bright and smiling countenance, “What of all these good things shall I help you to?” Rogers suggests that as host Stone more than made up for any lack of furnishings of house or table by his good cheer and personal warmth. Remembering many times when he had arrived at Stone’s home weary from travel, Rogers wrote, “We see him in imagination as he comes to meet us, with spectacles upon his venerable forehead — with that quick and dignified step, which characterized his movements — with a smile of complacency playing upon his benevolent face, and with his hand extended to greet us, and welcome us to his house!” 

And so it was that Rogers would have his readers remember this advocate of Christian unity, with hand outstretched to stranger and friend. 

2. The Making of a Presbyterian Minister

2.1. Family Background 

Born December 24, 1772, near Port Tobacco, then the county seat of Charles County, Maryland, Stone was descended from families long associated with public affairs and sizable holdings of land — the indisputable marks of Maryland’s upper class. His great-great-great-grandfather, Captain William Stone (1603-1695), had been the first Protestant governor of Maryland. His second cousin, Thomas Stone, was a signer of the Declaration of Independence and owner of one of the largest estates in Charles County. Barton Stone’s father, John Stone, who died in 1775, owned land and sixteen slaves, which identified him as upper middle class.

In 1779 Stone’s mother, Mary Warren Stone, moved with her four children and at least twelve slaves to Pittsylvania County, along the North Carolina border in western Virginia. Barton Stone, the youngest of Mary Stone’s children, was 6 years old. Stone’s father had bequeathed his land to his two oldest sons, who were from an earlier marriage, but Mary legally owned one-third of the Port Tobacco estate following her husband’s death. The reason for Mary Stone’s move is unknown, but many Southern planters moved west in the latter decades of the eighteenth century in the hope of improving their economic circumstances.

2.2. Education

Stone was sent to school after his family settled in Virginia. In the autobiography that he wrote in 1843, he reported that his first teacher was a “tyrant” who “seemed to take pleasure in whipping and abusing his pupils for every trifling offense.” Stone indicated that he could not learn because of his “fear” of the teacher. After a few days, he was sent to a teacher of “a different temper.” Rather than subscribing to the “break the will” philosophy of child rearing, the upper classes generally advocated either the “moderate” or the “genteel” methods that honored the will of the child. The moderate method sought to bend the will of the child, while the genteel philosophy tended to allow free expression of the child’s will. As an adult, Stone advocated the moderate approach, admonishing teachers to use the rod “rarely” and advising that if teachers would gain the “respect and love” of their pupils they would “delight in obedience, and rarely fail to learn the lessons given to them.” Stone’s second teacher was Robert W. Somerhays, whom he identified as “an Englishman.” Stone remembered that he learned easily with Somerhays and that after “four or five” years of studying reading, writing, and arithmetic, Somerhays pronounced him “a finished scholar.” 

Stone reported that when he was “fifteen or sixteen” years of age his older brothers were ready to launch out into the world for themselves and proposed a division of the property they had inherited from their father. He recalled that after his part of the inheritance had been assigned, his “mind” had been “absorbed day and night in devising some plan to improve it.” At length, he decided to invest his inheritance in a liberal education that would qualify him to pursue a career in law. Such an education included sciences, the classical languages, and moral philosophy. In January of 1790, Stone entered David Caldwell’s academy in Guilford County, North Carolina. Caldwell, the sole teacher of the academy, was the 65-year-old pastor of the Presbyterian churches at Buffalo and Alamance, North Carolina. Following an established Presbyterian pattern of combining teaching with pastoral ministry, Caldwell conducted the school in his home. Stone continued at Caldwell’s academy for three years, completing his liberal education in 1793. 

2.3. Conversion and Call to Ministry 

When Stone entered the academy, there was “a great religious excitement” among the students. Of the probably no more than fifty students enrolled, thirty or more had recently “embraced religion” under the ministry of James McGready. McGready had received a grammar school education from Caldwell and had studied in western Pennsylvania with Presbyterian preachers John McMillan and Joseph Smith prior to assuming a Guilford County pastorate in the spring of 1789. The “awakening” at Caldwell’s academy was not Stone’s first exposure to Christianity. Stone had been baptized as an infant in the Church of England. Following their move to Pittsylvania County, Stone’s family had continued their association with the once-established church. Stone had also been exposed to the preaching of Baptists and Methodists, who had evangelized Pittsylvania County following the Revolutionary War. 

Stone claimed that his first response to the religious excitement at Caldwell’s academy was to try to ignore it. Stone saw the revival as a distraction from his studies. A significant cost of studying at the Guilford academy was the expense of boarding in a nearby home. Thus, for financial reasons, it was desirable to complete the program as quickly as possible. He reported that it was not easy, however, to ignore the religious excitement in Caldwell’s academy. He was “not a little surprised” to find the recent converts assembled every morning before the hour of recitation, singing and praying in a private room. Moreover, his observation of the “daily walk” of the recent converts showed him “their sincere piety and happiness.” At length he accepted the invitation of his roommate to attend a preaching service conducted by McGready. McGready’s message focused on the pursuit of happiness. For McGready, ultimate happiness was not to be found in physical pleasure or through the possession of wealth or honor, but in the knowledge and enjoyment of the “infinite glory” and “adorable attributes” of God; that is, through relationship with God. Stone remembered that McGready’s preaching powerfully impacted him. “Such was my excitement,” he later wrote, “that had I been standing, I should have probably sunk to the floor under the impression.” 

Following McGready’s sermon, Stone decided to “seek” religion. He did not believe that he had been converted. McGready taught that God converts sinners by giving them a “view” of the “glory of God in the face of Christ Jesus.” The glory of God in the face of Christ Jesus was the glory of One who sent the only begotten Son to save sinners. McGready argued that a view of the excellence or glory of God in the face of Christ Jesus caused sinners to fall in love with God and thus to grieve over the evil of sin, and not merely its penalty. As a result of such love, and the genuine sorrow for sin produced by such love, the sinner was “willing” to “come to Christ” both for pardon from the penalty of sin and for release from the power of sin. This change of the will, a change of heart toward God, and not merely a desire to avoid the penalty of sin, was conversion. From his exposure to the Baptists and Methodists in Pittsylvania County, Stone expected a “long and painful struggle” before he would be “willing” to “come to Christ” for both the pardon of his sins and release from the power of sin. The pain of seeking conversion was the anguish and grief born of the seeker’s desire to be saved coupled with the seeker’s increasing discovery of the power of sin. In the latter part of the eighteenth century, Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians alike assumed that the awakened sinner’s period of seeking conversion prior to receiving it, which they commonly referred to as “distress,” would typically last from several weeks to a year. Stone recalled that for a full year he was “tossed on the waves of uncertainty — laboring, praying, and striving to obtain saving faith — sometimes desponding, and almost despairing of ever getting it.” At length he attended a meeting at Alamance, one of the churches pastored by Caldwell. On Sunday evening, William Hodge, a preacher whom Stone had not heard before, addressed the congregation. Stone remembered that Hodge’s text was “God is love” and that Hodge spoke “With much animation, and with many tears … of the love of God to sinners, and of what that love had done for sinners.” Stone was deeply affected: “My heart warmed with love for that lovely character described.… My mind was absorbed in the doctrine — to me it appeared new.” According to Presbyterians, to find one’s heart “warmed” with love to God and to find something “new” in the preaching of what God had done for sinners were signs of conversion — a change of heart toward God. Stone reported that he began to hope that he had been converted, while at the same time seeking to repress his hope for fear that he was deceiving himself. 

Following Hodge’s sermon, Stone retired to the woods with his Bible. “Here I read and prayed,” he later wrote, “with various feelings, between hope and fear.” Judging from Stone’s reference to the texts “Him that cometh unto me I will in no wise cast out” and “Jesus came to seek and save the lost,” it appears that Hodge concluded his sermon with a call to the “broken-hearted” or “helpless” sinner to come to Christ. Hodge’s sermons were never published; however, McGready’s sermons, which were published, used these very passages of Scripture in urging the sinner who felt “ruined and undone” to come to Christ for salvation. The purpose of this appeal was to convince the sinner who felt helpless to save him- or herself, and who now loved the God who saves helpless sinners, that he or she was welcome to “come to Christ” for forgiveness and release from the power of sin. Stone was reading the Bible and praying in order to determine whether he now loved God and had a will to go to Christ for forgiveness and release from the power of sin. Stone reported that he discovered his answer in the response of his heart to the message he had just heard: “The truth I had just heard, ‘God is love,’ prevailed. Jesus came to seek and save the lost. ‘Him that cometh unto me, I will in no wise cast out.’ I yielded and sunk at his feet a willing subject.” 

Following his conversion, Stone’s goal of practicing law gave way to a desire to preach the gospel. He reported that he informed Caldwell of his desire to preach but indicated that he had no assurance of having been divinely called to preach. Stone may have heard Baptist and Methodist preachers tell of having been divinely called through dreams and visions. In keeping with Presbyterian tradition, Caldwell assured him that he had no right to expect a miracle to convince him that he had been divinely called to preach. Rather, Caldwell advised, if he had a hearty desire to “glorify God and save sinners by preaching,” and if his “fathers in the ministry” should encourage him, he should not hesitate to pursue ordination.

2.4. Early Difficulties with the Doctrine of the Trinity

In the spring of 1793, the 20-year-old graduate of Caldwell’s academy became a candidate for the ministry of the Orange Presbytery. It was the responsibility of the Presbytery to receive, educate, and try candidates for the ministry. The Presbytery assigned Stone and other candidates particular subjects in divinity to study as “parts of trial” on which they were to be examined at the fall meeting of the Presbytery. The subjects given to Stone and a former classmate, Samuel Holmes, included the being and attributes of God and the doctrine of the Trinity. To aid them in their studies, they were assigned a text by seventeenth-century Dutch Reformed theologian Herman Witsius. As Stone recalled, “Witsius would first prove that there was but one God, and then that there were three persons in this one God, the Father, Son and Holy Ghost — that the Father was unbegotten — the Son eternally begotten, and the Holy Ghost eternally proceeding from the Father and the Son — that it was idolatry to worship more Gods than one, and yet equal worship must be given to the Father, the Son, and Holy Ghost.” Stone had previously prayed to both the Father and the Son without fear of idolatry or concern for according them equal worship. The result of his effort to follow Witsius’s teaching of the doctrine of the Trinity was that he “knew not how to pray.” Consequently, the enjoyment of God that he had known since his conversion was soon curtailed. “Till now,” he wrote, “secret prayer and meditation had been my delightful employ. It was a heaven on earth to approach my God, and Saviour; but now this heavenly exercise was checked, and gloominess and fear filled my troubled mind.” Upon discovering that Holmes had been similarly affected by Witsius, Stone and Holmes “laid the book aside,” believing that it was “calculated” to involve their minds in “mystic darkness” and to “cool the ardor” of their devotion. 

Stone, like other citizens of the early American republic, was influenced by the broad currents of the English Enlightenment. The Enlightenment identified propositions that were “inconsistent” with our clear and distinct ideas as “contrary to reason.” To Stone, the idea that there was more than one God, implied in Witsius’s teaching that equal worship must be given to the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, was inconsistent with the clear and distinct idea that there is but one God. Witsius, of course, had not taught that there is more than one God. Rather, he had countered the idea that there is more than one God, implied by the teaching that equal worship must be given to Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, by “proving” that there is but one God. Stone, who noted that Witsius was the first theological text that he had read other than the Bible, was not familiar with the method of doing theology that defined Christian truth by holding in tension seemingly contradictory propositions. For Stone, Witsius’s treatment of the doctrine of the Trinity was simply “unintelligible.” 

Stone and Holmes were not the only North Carolina Presbyterians to have difficulty with Witsius’s treatment of the Trinity. Henry Patillo, one of the oldest and most respected members of the Orange Presbytery, preferred and had done much to publicize Isaac Watts’s alternative treatment of the doctrine. Although remembered now primarily for his hymns, such as “Joy to the World” and “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross,” Isaac Watts (1674-1748) was also widely recognized in eighteenth-century England and America as a philosopher and theologian. Watts wrote on the Trinity for persons who, like himself, had been influenced by the Enlightenment. He argued that the biblical doctrine of the Trinity was not contrary to reason. To be sure, the doctrine that “three Gods are one God, or three persons are one person,” was contrary to reason. However, according to Watts, the Scriptures did not teach that three Gods are one God. Rather, the Scriptures taught that “the same true Godhead belongs to the Father, Son and Spirit, and … that the Father, Son and Spirit, are three distinct agents or principles of action, as may reasonably be called persons.” Thus, according to Watts, to say “the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Spirit is God” is not contrary to the proposition that there is one God. The mistake, according to Watts, is to confuse “opinions” or human explications of the revealed doctrine with the doctrine itself. Watts promised that the theologian who “well distinguishes between the plain Scriptural doctrine itself, and the particular explications of it,” will hold “faith in the divine doctrine firm and unmoved, while several human forms of explication are attacked, and perhaps destroyed.” 

As for human forms of explication of the doctrine of the Trinity, Watts argued that the primary problem with most explications of the doctrine was the identification of “the Son of God” as the second person of the Godhead. According to Watts, it was this identification of the Son of God that led to the idea that three Gods are one God, or three persons are one person. This problem was solved, he suggested, by recognizing that the Scriptures identified the Son of God, not as the second person of the Godhead, but as the human soul of Christ — a human soul “formed” by God. This human soul had been “united to the divine nature” long before his human body was born of Mary. To be sure, the proposition that the human soul of Christ was a distinct agent or principle of action belonging to the one Godhead was above reason. That is, the truth or probability of this proposition could not be derived by reason. However, the proposition that the human soul of Christ was a distinct agent united to the one God was not contrary to the idea that there was one God. 

In regard to the matter of the proper worship owed to the members of the Trinity, Watts asserted that the Scriptures revealed all that was necessary for proper faith and practice. For Watts, it was not necessary to fully comprehend the doctrine of the Trinity in order to worship God aright. He argued that the Christian could be sure that it was proper to offer “divine worship and honors” to Father, Son, and Spirit because “their godhead, or communion in the divine nature” is clearly revealed in Scripture. On the other hand, the Christian could be sure that it was wrong “to pay the same form of address and adoration to each of the sacred three” since the very content of revelation implied that one should worship and address the various members of the Trinity with an eye to the “special offices and character, which the Scripture assigns them.” 

Stone and Holmes obtained a copy of Watts’s “treatise” on the Trinity and adopted his views. Henry Patillo administered the theological examination of the ministerial candidates at the fall 1793 meeting of the Orange Presbytery. Stone reported that when Patillo “came to the subject of the Trinity, he was very short, and his interrogatories involved no peculiarities of the system.” Stone remembered that Holmes’s answers and his own had been “honest and satisfactory.” 

2.5. Further Theological Difficulties and Decision to Seek Another Calling 

Stone reported that before the spring 1794 meeting of the Orange Presbytery, when he was scheduled to complete his theological trials and be licensed to preach, he became “much depressed” and decided to abandon the idea of preaching and to pursue some other calling. A major source of his depression was theological. “My mind,” he wrote, “was embarrassed with many abstruse doctrines, which I admitted as true; yet could not satisfactorily reconcile with others which were plainly taught in the Bible.” Two of the doctrines that “embarrassed” Stone’s mind were the doctrines of “God’s eternal decree” and “the secret will of God.” Both of these doctrines, as taught in the Westminster Confession of the Presbyterian Church, combined what Stone viewed as a proposition “plainly” taught in Scripture with another proposition that appeared to him to have implications that were inconsistent with the proposition plainly taught in Scripture. In the case of the doctrine of “God’s eternal decree,” the proposition plainly taught in Scripture was that God is not “the author of sin.” But the doctrine of “God’s eternal decree,” as taught in the Westminster Confession, also stated that “God from all eternity did by the most wise and holy counsel of his own will, freely and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass,” which implied, to Stone, that God was the author of sin. In the case of “the secret will of God,” the idea plainly taught in Scripture was that God desired the salvation of all persons. This was the “revealed” will of God. But the doctrine also stated that God had a “secret will” by which God had determined that certain individuals would be damned, which implied, to Stone, that God did not desire the salvation of all persons. As earlier, when he had been confused by Witsius’s treatment of the Trinity, Stone’s intellectual embarrassment affected his devotion. “Having been so long engaged and confined to the study of systematic divinity from the Calvinistic mould,” he wrote, “my zeal, comfort, and spiritual life became considerably abated.” 

Having decided to abandon the idea of preaching and to seek some other calling, he traveled to the home of his brother, Matthew Stone, in Oglethorpe County, Georgia. Through the influence of Matthew and Stone’s half-brother Thomas Stone, who had also immigrated to the region, Stone was chosen professor of languages at a newly established Methodist academy near Washington in Wilkes County. This appointment was fortuitous, as the sources of Stone’s depression in the spring of 1794 were not only theological but also financial. His funds were exhausted, and none of his relatives had been willing to aid him. While in Georgia, Stone attended the preaching of John Springer, whom he described as “a very zealous Presbyterian.” Born near Wilmington, Delaware, Springer (1744-1798) was a graduate of Princeton who had pursued theological studies under the direction of James Hall, one of the leading members of the Orange Presbytery. His published works are remarkably similar in both style and content to those of James McGready. Under Springer’s preaching, Stone “began to feel a very strong desire again to preach the Gospel.” He tried to “resist” and “suppress” these “impressions,” but as a result, his “comforts were destroyed.” Among Presbyterians, such experience was evidence of a divine call to ministry. 

2.6. Licensure and Ordination 

In the spring of 1796, after a year and a half of teaching in Georgia, the 23-year-old Stone returned to North Carolina. On April 6, 1796, he successfully completed his remaining theological examinations and was licensed by the Orange Presbytery to preach the gospel as a “probationer” for the ministry within the bounds of the Orange Presbytery or wherever he should be “orderly called.” This does not mean that he had overcome his earlier embarrassment with Calvinist theology. He claimed that during the first years of his ministry, he viewed the Calvinist doctrines of election, reprobation, and predestination as “true, yet unfathomable mysteries” and “confined” his preaching to “the practical part of religion.” He may have adopted this stance on the advice of David Caldwell, who advised just such a course of action to another of his students who was troubled by the same questions. 

Stone reported that, despite initial feelings of inadequacy, he itinerated for the next year and a half as a probationer for the ministry in western Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky. In the winter of 1797, he settled with the Presbyterian congregations at Cane Ridge and Concord in northern Kentucky. In his autobiography, Stone did not offer any reason for his settling at Cane Ridge and Concord, other than the coming of winter. There are two reasons, however, why this area may have been especially attractive to him. First, the religious background of nearly the entire population of the Cane Ridge and Concord communities was Presbyterian. As a convert to the Presbyterians from the former Church of England, Stone valued the company of Presbyterians. Second, as Stone noted in his autobiography, the Cane Ridge and Concord communities were composed of “wealthy” farmers. Although Stone, like other Presbyterian ministers, warned that wealth was a snare that could draw one’s affections away from God, he was associated by background and education with the middle and upper classes of frontier society.

In the spring of 1798, Stone received a call through the Transylvania Presbytery to become pastor of the united congregations of Cane Ridge and Concord. Stone accepted the call, and the date of October 4, 1798, was set for his ordination. Knowing that he would be required to “sincerely receive and adopt” the Westminster Confession of Faith as “containing the system of doctrine taught in the Holy Scriptures,” he undertook a careful reexamination of the Confession. In his autobiography he wrote, “This was to me almost the beginning of sorrows. I stumbled at the doctrine of Trinity as taught in the Confession; I labored to believe it, but could not conscientiously subscribe to it. Doubts, too, arose in my mind on the doctrines of election, reprobation, and predestination, as there taught.” 

On the day appointed for Stone’s ordination, the eleven members of the Transylvania Presbytery assembled at Cane Ridge. Prior to the session of the Presbytery in which Stone was to be examined and ordained, he met privately with two members of the Presbytery, James Blythe and Robert Marshall, informed them of his difficulties, and told them that he had determined to decline ordination at that time. Blythe and Marshall sought to remove Stone’s “difficulties and objections,” but to no avail. The extent of the difficulties that Stone revealed to Blythe and Marshall was later the subject of some controversy. In a letter written in 1822, James Blythe allowed that Stone “did at that time, make some objections to the terms in which certain doctrines” were expressed in the Confession of Faith, but did not object “to any of the leading doctrines of the Confession.” In a response to Blythe’s letter, Stone stated that he had objected to the term “Eternal Son of God” in the doctrine of the Trinity and had been unsettled as to whether three “persons” in the doctrine of the Trinity meant three “intelligent beings” or three “appellations or relations.” He did not share with Blythe and Marshall his “doubts” regarding the doctrines of election, reprobation, and predestination. According to the Adopting Act approved by the Presbyterian Synod of 1729, it was permissible to ordain a ministerial candidate who would only partially subscribe to the Confession of Faith if, in the view of the Presbytery, the candidate’s objections to the Confession concerned only “non-essentials.” Blythe and Marshall asked Stone “how far” he would be willing to adopt the Confession. He answered that he would be willing to adopt the Confession as far as he saw it consistent with the Word of God, and they concluded that partial subscription would be sufficient. Thus Stone was ordained by the Transylvania Presbytery. 

3. The Great Revival

3.1. Stone Visits a Revival in Southern Kentucky

Meanwhile, in southern Kentucky, a revival had begun under the leadership of James McGready and several of Stone’s former classmates from Caldwell’s academy that would help to resolve his theological difficulties. In 1796 James McGready had become pastor of three congregations named after southern Kentucky rivers — Red, Muddy, and Gasper. By the spring of 1797 there had been a brief awakening at Gasper River. Over the summer and fall of 1798, all three of the congregations seemed to have been awakened, and several young people professed to have been converted, through a series of “sacramental meetings.” The sacramental meeting was a Scots communion tradition that had been widely adopted by eighteenth-century American Presbyterians. Though hosted by a single congregation, typically several congregations and preachers shared in these occasions. On Friday, Saturday, and Sunday the ministers preached sermons on the character of conversion and the Christian life. On Sunday members of the participating churches observed the Lord’s Supper. The pattern of heightened religious interest and reported conversions associated with sacramental meetings was repeated during the summer of 1799. Then, during the summer of 1800, hallmarks of what became known as the Great Revival in the West (1797-1805) first appeared — the unusually large crowds, the practice of camping on the grounds for sacramental meetings, and the physical phenomena of persons “falling.” 

Hearing of the revival, Stone traveled to southern Kentucky early in the spring of 1801 to attend a sacramental meeting led by McGready and other North Carolina Presbyterians. In his autobiography, he described the phenomenon of falling as he first observed it. “Many, very many fell down, as men slain in battle, and continued for hours together in an apparently breathless and motionless state — sometimes for a few moments reviving, and exhibiting symptoms of life by a deep groan, or piercing shriek, or by a prayer for mercy most fervently uttered.” Gradually they would obtain release; the “gloomy cloud, which had covered their faces” giving way to smiles first of hope and then of joy, they would finally rise “shouting deliverance” and would address the surrounding crowd “in language truly eloquent and impressive.” “With astonishment,” Stone exclaimed, “did I hear men, women and children declaring the wonderful works of God, and the glorious mysteries of the gospel.” He reported that their appeals to others were “solemn, heart-penetrating, bold and free.” Noting that he was amazed at “the knowledge of gospel truth displayed” in their addresses, he observed that hearing their appeals, others would fall down “into the same state from which the speakers had just been delivered.” 

3.2. New Light on Faith 

Following his ordination, Stone had continued to struggle with the Calvinist doctrines of election, reprobation, and predestination. According to those doctrines, God gave faith to the elect, but not to the reprobate. Stone’s problem was how to reconcile God’s love for sinners with the teaching that God chose to give faith to some sinners but not to others. 

In a brief account of his theological development that he published in 1805, Stone reported that “all” his difficulties were removed while observing “the work of God” in southern Kentucky. “Many old and young, even little children,” he wrote, “professed religion, and all declared the same simple gospel of Jesus. I knew the voice and felt the power.” The “voice” that Stone knew was the voice of God. The “power” that he felt was the power of the gospel — the spiritual or “moral” power that made sinners willing to go to God for both forgiveness of sin and release from the power of sin. Stone reported, “I saw that faith was the sovereign gift of God to all sinners, not the act of faith, but the object or foundation of faith, which is the testimony of Jesus, or the gospel; that sinners had power to believe this gospel, and then come to God and obtain grace and salvation.” That is, Stone saw that God gave faith — the spiritual or moral willingness to come to God — through the message of God’s love revealed in Jesus Christ, and that sinners had the power to believe that message, which revealed the moral excellence or glory of God and would make them willing to come to God. The gospel was the means by which God gave faith; hence, persons who ignored the message of God’s love were responsible for their own condemnation. 

There was nothing new to Presbyterians in the idea that God spoke through the gospel, revealing the moral excellence or glory of God, to give sinners a will or desire to “come to Christ” for release from the penalty and the power of sin. The new feature was Stone’s assertion that sinners had the power to believe the gospel — to perceive the glory of God revealed in Jesus Christ — without a previous work of the Spirit to convince them of the power of sin. Stone had developed his understanding of how God gives faith, and shared it with another minister, prior to attending the meeting in southern Kentucky. However, the idea that God gives faith through the hearing of the gospel, without a previous work of the Spirit to convince the sinner of the power of sin, was more compelling in the midst of the Great Revival, with persons falling and conversions appearing to occur in a matter of hours. Lengthy periods of “distress,” such as the one Stone himself had experienced, had been the norm in an earlier day. 

3.3. Stone Promotes Revival in Northern Kentucky and Weds Elizabeth Campbell 

Stone returned to northern Kentucky eager to tell others what he had witnessed and confident that he could urge the sinner “to believe now, and be saved.” Soon there were reports of the distinctive features of the Great Revival among the Presbyterians of northern Kentucky. The first Sunday in June, Stone conducted a sacrament at Concord that was the largest religious meeting in northern Kentucky to that date. Colonel Robert Patterson, a famed Indian fighter and militia captain, judged the crowd to have been 4,000. In an account of the revival written twenty-six years later, Stone indicated that Baptists and Methodists, as well as Presbyterians, participated. The meeting went on continually day and night for five days and was conducted outdoors, since the Concord meetinghouse was not large enough to contain the crowd. Seven Presbyterian ministers were present. At least one Methodist preached. Patterson reported that 150 fell and that 250 communed. He also noted that twelve families brought provisions and camped on the grounds. Well-attended communions marked by “falling” and the participation of Baptists and Methodists continued in northern Kentucky throughout June and July. 

Meanwhile, during the last week in June, after publicizing a sacrament for Cane Ridge to be held the first weekend in August, the 28-year-old Stone traveled to Greenville, in Muhlenberg County, Kentucky. Greenville was the home of Elizabeth Campbell, eleven years his junior, whom he married July 2. Stone reported that following the wedding, he and Elizabeth “hurried” from Muhlenberg County to prepare for the August sacrament at Cane Ridge. 

The sacrament of Cane Ridge, later known as the Cane Ridge Meeting or the Cane Ridge Revival, began Friday, August 6, 1801, and continued through the following Thursday. The number of wagons encamped on the grounds, at least over Saturday and Sunday, was variously estimated at between 125 and 148, covering, as one observer reported, an area the equivalent of four city blocks. In addition, thousands of participants arrived for the day, including not only those who lived within horseback riding range but also people who found accommodations in neighboring communities. Estimates of the number of people on the grounds Saturday and Sunday ranged from 10,000 to 20,000 and beyond. One participant counted “seven ministers, all preaching at one time” in different parts of the camp, some using stumps and wagons as makeshift platforms. Sixteen and maybe as many as eighteen Presbyterian ministers participated in the meeting. At least four Methodist ministers also preached. An unidentified African American preacher may have been a Baptist. Estimates of the number of communicants ranged from 800 to 1,100. Estimates of the number who fell ranged from 300 to 3,000! 

3.4. Separation from the Synod of Kentucky 

Stone’s new light on faith was accepted by several of his Presbyterian colleagues. However, not all Presbyterians were pleased with Stone’s call for sinners to believe now and be saved. Opposition to the view that God gives faith through the hearing of the gospel, without any previous work of the Spirit to convince sinners of the power of sin, first emerged in Richard McNemar’s Cabin Creek, Kentucky, congregation. On November 3, 1801, three elders from the Cabin Creek congregation sent a statement of charges against McNemar’s doctrine to the Washington Presbytery. As the Cabin Creek elders were not present when the Presbytery met at Springfield, Ohio, on November 11, 1801, the charges were dropped. Shortly thereafter, McNemar accepted a call through the Washington Presbytery to the Turtle Creek congregation in southern Ohio. 

Stone later wrote that the “sticklers for orthodoxy” among the Presbyterian clergy “writhed” under the doctrines preached by him, McNemar, and others but, seeing the “mighty effects” of these doctrines on the people, did not at first publicly oppose them for preaching their views. By the fall of 1802, the stance of the Presbyterian clergy had changed. The reason for the change, according to Stone, was the loss of members to the Methodists and Baptists. Although Stone did not identify the persons who became Baptists or Methodists, it may have been young persons raised in Presbyterian families who were the most likely to “profess religion” at a sacramental meeting. Stone reported that the “friends of the Confession” responded to the success of the Baptists and Methodists in “drawing away disciples” by boldly preaching the doctrines of the Confession of Faith and using “their most potent arguments in their defence.” In response, the Methodist and Baptist preachers began to preach their distinctive doctrines. Stone claimed that, in the ensuing confessional strife, the “friends of the Confession” were “indignant at us for preaching doctrines contrary to it” and “determined to arrest our progress and put us down.”

Matters came to a head at the Synod of Kentucky that opened in Lexington on September 6, 1803. From early actions of the Synod, it was evident to Stone, McNemar, and three other ministers who shared their doctrine of faith, Robert Marshall, John Thompson, and John Dunlavy, that the majority of the Synod was determined to suspend them from the ministry for failing to adhere to the Confession of Faith. On September 10, Stone, McNemar, Marshall, Thompson, and Dunlavy drew up and presented to the Synod a protest declaring that they were withdrawing from the jurisdiction of the Synod rather than be “prosecuted before a Judge [the Confession of Faith], whose authority to decide we cannot in Conscience acknowledge.” 

Efforts to heal the breach began almost immediately but were not successful. Meanwhile, Marshall, Dunlavy, McNemar, Stone, and Thompson formally united as the Springfield Presbytery, choosing the name Springfield because of positive associations with Springfield, Ohio, in their history with the Washington Presbytery. In January of 1804, the Springfield Presbytery published a 100-page pamphlet titled An Apology for Renouncing the Jurisdiction of the Synod of Kentucky, To Which Is Added a Compendious View of the Gospel and a Few Remarks on the Confession of Faith. Marshall wrote the first section of the pamphlet, the “Apology.” The two following sections were written respectively by Stone and Thompson. 

Stone’s “Compendious View of the Gospel” was the theological statement of the new presbytery. Stone discussed human depravity, regeneration, the gospel, and faith. Opponents had charged that they denied that faith was the gift of God by denying the work of the Spirit in preparing sinners to believe the gospel. Stone responded to this charge, insisting, “We hold faith to be the gift of God, in the same way.” The difference, he declared, was as follows: “They say the mind must be enlightened by the spirit, in some secret, mysterious way, to see and approve the truth, before the sinner can believe it. We say, the truth which the spirit speaks, is that which enlightens the mind; and which cannot produce this effect until it is believed.” 

4. The Christian Church 

4.1. Last Will and Testament and the Christian Name 

On June 28, 1804, the members of the Springfield Presbytery adopted a document titled Last Will and Testament of Springfield Presbytery, declaring, “We will, that this body die, be dissolved, and sink into union with the Body of Christ at large.” Appended to the Last Will and Testament, which the members of the former presbytery signed as “witnesses,” was “The Witnesses’ Address,” which stated their reasons for dissolving the presbytery. They noted that they had viewed with deep concern “the divisions, and party spirit among professing Christians, principally owing to the adoption of human creeds and forms of government.” Though they had “endeavored to cultivate a spirit of love and unity with all Christians,” they had found it “extremely difficult to suppress the idea that they themselves were a party separate from others.” Also, at their final meeting as a presbytery they had begun to prepare for publication an address titled “Observations on Church Government” in which the world would see “the beautiful simplicity of Christian church government, stript of human inventions and lordly traditions.” As they had proceeded in their investigation of that subject, they had “soon found that there was neither precept nor example in the New Testament for such confederacies as modern Church Sessions, Presbyteries, Synods, General Assemblies, etc.” They had realized that “However just … their views of church government might have been, they would have gone out under the name and sanction of a self-constituted body.” Therefore, “from a principle of love to Christians of every name, the precious cause of Jesus, and dying sinners who are kept from the Lord by the existence of sects and parties in the church,” they had “cheerfully consented to retire from the din and fury of conflicting parties — sink out of the view of fleshly minds, and die the death.” 

Behind the presbytery’s reasons for dissolving their presbytery was their conviction that the revival was strong evidence that the millennium, the one thousand-year rule of Christ that many Christians believed was prophesied in Revelation 20:1-6, was near. The association of the growth and increased influence of Christianity with the coming of the millennium can be traced through English Puritanism as far back as the sixteenth century. In the eighteenth century, Jonathan Edwards had referred to the worldwide evangelism and social transformation that he taught would usher in the millennium as “the glorious work of God.” Division or “partyism” in the church was widely viewed as a hindrance to the coming of the millennium. Included in the Last Will and Testament was the following “item”: “We will, that preachers and people, cultivate a spirit of mutual forbearance; pray more and dispute less; and while they behold the signs of the times, look up, and confidently expect that redemption draweth nigh.” In concluding their “Witnesses’ Address,” they declared, “We heartily unite with our Christian brethren of every name, in thanksgiving to God for the display of his goodness in the glorious work he is carrying on in our Western country, which we hope will terminate in the universal spread of the gospel, and the unity of the church.” In dissolving their presbytery, the signers believed that they were participating in God’s glorious work and thus hastening the coming of the millennium. 

Lest anyone think that the signers of the Last Will and Testament intended to retire from public view, they wrote of themselves in their “Witnesses’ Address” that though dead as a presbytery and “stript of their mortal frame,” they “yet live and speak in the land of gospel liberty … blow the trumpet of jubilee, and willingly devote themselves to the help of the Lord against the mighty.” Moreover, they published the Last Will and Testament as a tract, along with an announcement of a mass meeting for those holding like sentiments to be held at Bethel Church over the weekend of October 14, 1804. They noted that Bethel, seven miles northwest of Lexington, was a central location for attendance from Kentucky, Ohio, and Tennessee. Neither did the signers intend to give up their ministerial prerogatives. What they gave up was their power of “making laws” for the church by virtue of their own authority, a power explicitly forbidden by the Form of Government of the Presbyterian Church! As “elders” or ministers of the Church of Christ, they maintained the right to govern the church according to the revealed will of God (rather than a Confession of Faith), to try candidates for the ministry, and to assist in the ordination of ministers. 

Stone reported that in addition to signing the Last Will and Testament, he and his colleagues determined at the June 1804 meeting to take “no other name than christians,” noting that Christians was “the name first given by divine authority to the disciples of Christ.” The idea of taking no other name than Christians, as the name given by God to the followers of Christ, had been recommended to the presbytery in a sermon by Rice Haggard at Marshall’s Bethel Church two months earlier. Thus, in taking the name Christians, Stone and his colleagues understood themselves not to be doing something original but to be joining a movement already under way, a movement that they believed would usher in the millennium. 

4.2. New Light on Atonement 

The influence of the former presbytery’s confidence that the millennium was near was not limited to efforts specifically in behalf of Christian union. Jonathan Edwards had declared that in the millennium theological problems that had long perplexed believers would be solved. During the winter of 1804, the members of the Springfield Presbytery had become “sorely pressed” by an objection to their preaching voiced by members of the Synod of Kentucky. Like other nineteenth-century Protestants, Stone and his colleagues preached the “substitutionary” theory of atonement that they had inherited from the Reformers of the sixteenth century. According to this view, Christ died as a substitute for humanity. Humanity had violated the covenant of the law that God made with Adam and, through him, with all of Adam’s posterity. Without Christ’s death, humanity could have looked forward only to the wrath of a God who hated sin and punished violations of the law. With Christ’s death, the elect of God could be assured that justice had been satisfied and that God had been propitiated toward them. The righteous Christ had taken the place of the guilty, suffering in their stead in order that his righteousness might be imputed to them. He was the “surety” or substitute of justified or forgiven sinners and had fulfilled the law on their behalf; he was their sacrificial lamb, the typological fulfillment to which the animal sacrifices under the Old Law looked forward. 

The objection to the preaching of Stone and his colleagues stated by members of the Synod of Kentucky was that if Christ died to satisfy the claims of law and justice for all sinners, and not merely for a portion or part of humanity whom God had chosen to save before the foundation of the earth, as Stone and his colleagues proclaimed that he did, then all sinners would be saved. That is, if Christ had satisfied the claims of law and justice for all persons, then no one could be punished for his or her sins. Stone and his colleagues, they charged, were teaching universalism, the doctrine that God not only loved and desired the salvation of all persons, but that God would save all persons, whether converted in this life or not. Stone and his colleagues, like most Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists, believed that universalism was not taught in Scripture. Thus, Stone wrote, they had turned to the Bible “with prayerful attention to find the truth” regarding atonement. 

Stone claimed that he began his study of the atonement by seeking to find where Christ was said to be the surety or substitute for sinners. He reported that, to his surprise, he could not find the idea in a single scriptural text. He next sought to find where the “surety righteousness of Christ” was said to be “imputed” to sinners, with the same result. He then searched the Scriptures to see where law and justice were said to be satisfied by the “vicarious obedience and suffering of Jesus.” But, again, he could not find a single text. Finally, he inquired for what purpose Christ was said to have come into the world, lived, and died. He found the purpose of Jesus’ life and death to be “to declare the Father — to bear witness to the truth — to confirm the promises — to reconcile sinners to God — to save sinners — to bring us to God.” During the winter of 1805, Stone addressed two letters on the subject to Presbyterian minister Matthew Houston, the substance of which he published in the spring of 1805 as a thirty-six page pamphlet titled “Atonement: The Substance of Two Letters Written to a Friend.” 

Stone’s pamphlet failed to answer the objections of members of the Synod of Kentucky to his teaching that Christ died for all. On the contrary, the publication of his letters initiated a written controversy with former Presbyterian colleagues who viewed the letters as an attack on their doctrine and the fundamental truths of the Christian faith. David Rice responded to Stone’s letters in An Epistle to the Citizens of Kentucky, Professing Christianity; Especially Those That Are or Have Been, Denominated Presbyterians. John P. Campbell responded to Stone’s letters with Strictures, On Two Letters, Published by Barton W. Stone, Entitled Atonement. Stone did not formally reply to Rice’s Epistle, possibly out of deference to Rice, whom he considered to be “father” in the gospel. He did respond to Campbell in A Reply to John P. Campbell’s Strictures on Atonement. Campbell, in turn, responded to Stone’s reply with Vindex: Or The Doctrines of the Strictures Vindicated Against the Reply of Mr. Stone.

4.3. Separation from Former Colleagues and Adoption of Believers’ Immersion

The six years following Stone’s publication of “Atonement” were marked by dissension and division among the Christians. In his Strictures, Campbell alluded to Stone’s unorthodox views of the Trinity — the views he had learned by reading Isaac Watts as a theological student in North Carolina. Stone commented in his autobiography that he regretted that Campbell had accused him of being heterodox on the Trinity, as it required him to defend himself “and the doctrine I believed.” He noted that he had never written on the Trinity and claimed that for years he had been “silent on that subject” in his public discourses. Though Stone’s views of the Trinity were widely accepted among the Christians, they would become a subject of internal discord. 

In the spring of 1805, the Christians were visited by Shaker missionaries from the East. Two of the original members of the former Springfield Presbytery, Richard McNemar and John Dunlavy, became Shakers. Stone opposed the Shakers with all his might. 

Two years later some of the Christian preachers, including Stone, adopted believers’ immersion as baptism and were themselves immersed. Stone claimed that despite the decision of a conference of the Christian ministers that “every brother and sister should act according to their faith” regarding believers’ immersion, “Some of our preaching brethren appeared rather uneasy and dissatisfied that their congregations were submitting to this ordinance, while they could not be convinced of its propriety.” He noted that although those ministers “said but little” regarding the growing popularity of believers’ immersion among members of their congregations, some of them began to recommend “that we should have some other bond beside the Bible and brotherly love; that these were insufficient to unite our growing churches, and keep them pure.” Among the ministers calling for the adoption of a “formulary” were Marshall and Thompson. Stone stated that he and others “saw plainly” that the arguments being used in support of a formulary were the same as those used for “the introduction of every human party Creed, which has ever been imposed on the world, and therefore opposed formularies, from a full conviction of their injury to the cause of Christ.” At a conference of Christian ministers at Bethel in August of 1810, a compromise was worked out by which the Christians would establish a “formal” union and publish a statement of their current views, but not adopt a formulary. A committee composed of Stone, Marshall, Thompson, and two other ministers attempted to write the statement but could not come to consensus on their current views, as Marshall, Thompson, and one of the other ministers desired to affirm orthodox doctrines of the Trinity and the atonement. When a conference of ministers meeting at Mount Tabor in March of 1811 declared, following Stone’s lead, that a consensus statement was not necessary, as the doctrinal differences of the committee members need not sever fellowship, Marshall and Thompson returned to the Presbyterians. Thus, by the spring of 1811, of the five original members of the former Springfield Presbytery, Stone, alone, remained as leader of the Christians. 

4.4. Publication of An Address, Marriage to Celia Bowen, and Move to Tennessee

In 1814 Stone published An Address to the Christian Churches in Kentucky, Tennessee and Ohio. On Several Important Doctrines of Religion. Included in An Address were sections on the Trinity, the divinity of Jesus Christ, the atonement, the operations of the Spirit, and faith. Stone noted in his autobiography that the foundation of this book was the response he wrote in 1811 as a member of the failed writing committee to a “connected” statement of doctrines by John Thompson. The three-year delay in Stone’s publication of An Address was most likely due to a series of changes in his personal circumstances that began three months before the appointment of the writing committee. 

In May of 1810 Elizabeth had died. Following her death, he had broken up housekeeping, boarded their four daughters with members of the church, and devoted full time to preaching and establishing churches in Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee. On October 31, 1811, he had married Elizabeth’s 19-year-old cousin, Celia Wilson Bowen, and reestablished a family home on the Bourbon County, Kentucky, farm that he had purchased prior to his marriage to Elizabeth. At the end of a year, he and Celia had been induced, according to Stone, “by advice and hard persuasion” to move to Tennessee, near Celia’s widowed mother. Mrs. Bowen had put them on a good farm, but without a comfortable house. The result, Stone noted, was that much of his time had been devoted to building a house, as well as improving the farm. Stone may also have been distracted from publishing An Address by the addition of two sons to their household, one born in 1812 and the other the following year. 

In 1815 the Presbyterian minister Thomas Cleland of Mercer County, Kentucky, published a 100-page response to Stone’s Address titled The Socini-Arian Detected. Stone had not written his last word on Christian doctrine. However, he would not publish again for another seven years, most likely because of another succession of changes in his personal circumstances that began shortly after his publication of An Address. 

4.5. Return to Kentucky 

In his autobiography, Stone reported that he “labored hard at building a house and improving the farm” in Tennessee until he learned that his mother-in-law did not plan to give him the deed to the farm, but rather to deed it to her daughter and her children. He claimed that he did not blame her for this decision, as the lands of his first wife, by the laws of Kentucky, had become the property of her children at her death. Nevertheless, as soon as he learned of her decision, he decided to return to Kentucky. He reported that Celia approved of his resolve. 

Returning to Kentucky turned out to be more difficult than Stone could ever have imagined. He had sold his Bourbon County farm in 1812. In the meantime, the building of turnpikes in Kentucky and the beginning of steamboat traffic on the Ohio and the Mississippi, along with demands created by the War of 1812, had boosted the price of farm products, significantly increasing the value of farmland in Kentucky. Stone reported that when he tried to purchase a farm in Kentucky, he discovered that land of the sort that he had sold had more than doubled in value. Unable to purchase a farm in Kentucky due to the increase in the price of land, he accepted an invitation to settle among “the brethren in Lexington,” who promised to provide for his family’s needs. The Lexington brethren, however, did not make good on their promise, and Stone, who had been well received as a teacher in Georgia, was required to open a high school in Lexington to support his family. 

In 1819 Stone was appointed principal of the Rittenhouse Academy in Georgetown, twelve miles north of Lexington. That fall he bought a farm near Georgetown, where he moved with his family. In addition to fulfilling his duties as principal of the academy during the fall and winter of 1819-20, he preached in Georgetown, with the result that a Christian Church was constituted in Georgetown and soon grew to over 200 members. 

Without Stone’s knowledge, the Christian churches in northern Kentucky met, determined that he should devote all of his time to preaching the gospel, and, in order to release him from the academy, agreed to support him and his family and to pay the debt he had incurred in purchasing the farm near Georgetown. The churches had made a substantial pledge, as the number of Stone’s children had increased since his publication of An Address to nine with the births of another two daughters and another son (Stone’s tenth child, another son, was born in 1824). But the United States had entered a major economic depression in 1819, and when the time came to pay the note on his farm, the promised funds were not forthcoming. Stone had to borrow funds to pay the debt on the farm and was required to open a school in Georgetown to repay the funds he had borrowed. By this means, he was able to pay his debt. However, his health failed as a result, he believed, of “constant application to study.” Consequently, he gave up teaching and, though nearly 50 years of age, “turned to hard labor” on his farm. 

4.6. Renewed Controversy over Trinity and Atonement 

In 1821 Stone published a second edition of An Address. In the introduction to the second edition, he stated that “Being desirous to disseminate truth,” he was sending to the Christian Churches a work that was “corrected and considerably enlarged.” Comparison of the second edition with the first shows that most sections of the book were, in fact, unchanged. While teaching in Lexington, Stone had taken advantage of the opportunity to study Hebrew with a Prussian doctor whom he described as “a Jew of great learning.” Cleland had scoffed at Stone’s criticism of the translation of certain texts in the King James Version of the Bible, declaring that Stone had “but a smattering of the Greek, and not even that much itself of the Hebrew.” In the section on atonement, Stone added “a few remarks” from the Hebrew, “an imperfect knowledge of which,” he noted, “I have acquired since I published the first edition of my Address.” All of the corrections were in the sections dealing with the Trinity and the divinity of Jesus Christ. In the first edition, Stone, following Watts, had clearly identified the Son of God as the human soul of Christ. Moreover, he had referred to him as having been begotten or created. Cleland had charged him with Arianism, of believing that the Son was a mere creature. In the second edition, Stone did not refer to the soul of Christ as human. Neither did he refer to the Son as having been “created.” Rather, he proposed that Jesus was called “the only begotten of the Father, because the Father begat him of and by himself.” Stone made explicit his rejection of Arianism in A Letter to John R. Moreland. Moreland, claiming to have read the second edition of Stone’s Address, charged Stone in A Letter to the Church at Mount-Pleasant with teaching that the Son was “a created being, a mutable, changeable creature.” Stone asserted that the view that Moreland had charged him with teaching was the view of Arius, who had taught that the Son was created out of nothing, while his views were “high above those of Arius.” He noted that the teaching of the church fathers who had condemned Arius was that “the Son is of the substance of the Father.” If the Son was of the substance of the Father, he observed, “he was not a created being, but derived his being from the Father.” “Against this,” he declared, “I have no objection.” 

In 1822 Thomas Cleland published a 172-page review of the second edition of Stone’s Address, entitled Letters to Barton W. Stone Containing a Vindication Principally of the Doctrines of the Trinity, the Divinity and Atonement of the Saviour, Against His Recent Attack in a Second Edition of His “Address.” Having found the style of both The Socini-Arian Detected and Cleland’s Letters abusive, Stone responded to Cleland’s Letters in 1824 with a book titled Letters to James Blythe, D.D. Designed as a Reply to the Arguments of Thomas Cleland, D.D. Blythe, along with Robert Marshall, had been one of the members of the presbytery to whom Stone had confided his difficulties with the Presbyterian Confession on the day of his ordination in October of 1798. While referring to the Father and the Son as persons or “beings” in both editions of An Address, Stone had never referred to the Spirit as a being. In his Letters to Blythe Stone clarified his position on the Spirit. “By the Spirit of God,” he wrote, “I understand the Spirit of a person and not the person himself.” He noted, “we often read in the Bible, that the Father loves the Son, and that Son loves the Father; but we never read of either the Father or the Son loving the Spirit as a person, or of the Spirit loving the Father or the Son.” He also noted, “We have examples and precepts to love and worship both the Father and the Son; but there is neither example nor precept for worshipping the Spirit in the Bible.” Cleland lobbed the last volley in the exchange over Stone’s second edition of An Address in 1825 with Unitarianism Unmasked: Its Anti-Christian Features Displayed: And Its Foundation Shewn to be Untenable; in a Reply to Mr. Barton W. Stone’s Letters to the Rev. Dr. Blythe. 

5. Union with Followers of Alexander Campbell 

Within two decades of the return of Marshall and Thompson to the Presbyterians in 1811, the Christian Church in the west numbered more than 16,000 members in Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Ohio, and Indiana. Many had joined the Christian Church through profession of faith and baptism. Others had been identified with the Christian Church movement in Virginia and North Carolina. A sizable number, however, had come as members of Baptist congregations, and sometimes whole associations of Baptist congregations, which had united with the Christians in response to their call to Christian union on the Bible alone. 

Stone met Alexander Campbell, who was sixteen years his junior, in the fall of 1824, while Campbell was on a two-month preaching tour of Kentucky that included Lexington, Versailles, Louisville, and smaller communities and rural churches in between. Stone, who was 51, later noted that he “heard him often in public and in private” and that he was “pleased with his manner and matter.” At Stone’s invitation, issued to Campbell while he was at Paris, Kentucky, Campbell spoke at the Christian Church in Georgetown and lodged in Stone’s home. A year earlier, Campbell had begun publication of his monthly journal, the Christian Baptist, in which he rejected confessions of faith and called for reform of the churches by a restoration of the New Testament or apostolic order. 

A division of Kentucky Baptists over Campbell’s views was foreshadowed in 1825, when a Baptist church in Louisville rejected the Baptist Philadelphia Confession of Faith and took the Bible alone as its guide for faith and practice, becoming the first church in Kentucky to formally identify with Campbell’s reformation. Vigorous opposition to Campbell’s reforms soon emerged among the leadership of Kentucky Baptists. In the spring of 1826 Baptist Spencer Clack of Bloomfield, Kentucky, charged Campbell in the pages of the Christian Baptist with setting up his own creed in his series on “A Restoration of the Ancient Order of Things,” while attacking confessions of faith. Within a year, Campbell’s opponents were using their own magazine, the Baptist Recorder, to oppose Campbell’s reforms, and associations had begun suspending preachers who advocated Campbell’s reforms.

One of Campbell’s reforms that became increasingly prominent after 1827 was baptism for remission of sins. Baptists taught that the design or purpose of baptism was to set apart or “seal” believers as members of the church. Prior to baptism, candidates were required to demonstrate that they were believers, typically by describing their conversion. On the second day of Campbell’s debate with the Presbyterian W. L. Maccalla in October of 1823, Campbell had introduced an argument against infant baptism based on a distinctive view of the “design or import of baptism.” Campbell had stated that he would be as “full as possible” on the topic because “of its great importance, and because perhaps neither Baptists nor Paedobaptists” sufficiently appreciated the design or import of baptism. After quoting a handful of New Testament texts that Campbell suggested pointed to the importance of baptism in the New Testament, he declared that the design of baptism was to give believers an assurance or “formal token” of their “cleansing” from all sins. Campbell argued that baptism “being ordained to be to a believer a formal and personal remission of all his sins, cannot be administered unto an infant without the greatest perversion and abuse of the nature or import of this ordinance.” 

Campbell’s biographer, Robert Richardson, stated that Campbell did not “make a direct and practical application” of the doctrine of baptism for remission of sins. By a direct and practical application of the doctrine, Richardson meant recommending baptism to penitent believers who desired an assurance of the forgiveness of their sins and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Richardson claimed that the first person to make a direct and practical application of Campbell’s view of the purpose of baptism was Campbell’s colleague, Walter Scott. Scott was appointed evangelist of the Mahoning Baptist Association in August of 1827, and he began recommending baptism to penitent believers in November. However, as early as the spring of 1826, Christian Church preachers who were acquainted with Campbell’s views had been recommending baptism for remission of sins to penitent believers. In January of 1827, Stone had publicly endorsed the practice. 

In November 1826, Stone began the publication of a monthly journal, The Christian Messenger. Stone addressed Campbell in a July 1827 article entitled “To the Christian Baptist.” He professed high respect for Campbell’s talents and learning and “general” approval of the course Campbell had followed. “Your religious views, in many points,” he noted, “accord with our own — and to one point we have hoped we both were directing our efforts, which point is to unite the flock of Christ.” He continued, “We have seen you, with the arm of a Samson, and the courage of a David, tearing away the long established foundations of partyism.” He observed that it was “not as unconcerned spectators” that the Christians had followed “the mighty war” between Campbell and his opposers — a war in which he asserted that many of the Christians had been engaged for many years before Campbell “entered the field.” 

Stone had not written, however, to praise Campbell, to encourage him in the good fight, or to sympathize with him as one well acquainted with religious controversy. Claiming to have learned from Campbell “more fully the evil of speculating on religion,” Stone expressed surprise and sorrow to have discovered that Campbell had “speculated and theorised on the most important point in theology,” and in a manner “more mysterious and metaphysical” than his predecessors. Stone was referring to an article on the Trinity in the May issue of the Christian Baptist. Articles published in the Messenger over the next year showed that Stone and Campbell differed on other issues in addition to the doctrine of the Trinity. While Stone believed that ordained ministers or “elders” were required for the ordination of a candidate for ministry, Campbell taught that the vote of a congregation was sufficient. Regarding the Lord’s Supper, Campbell taught that communion should be restricted to the immersed, while Stone argued that since it was evident that God had converted persons who were not yet convinced that immersion, alone, was baptism, communion should not be restricted to the immersed. Nevertheless, Stone continued to believe that the Reformers and the Christians had much in common. 

By the end of the decade, the division of Kentucky Baptists was nearly complete. Perhaps as many as one-fourth to one-third of Kentucky Baptists (possibly 10,000 persons) had sided with Campbell. In September 1829, Stone reported in the Christian Messenger that “a worthy Baptist brother” had recently asked him why the Christians and the “New Testament Baptists” did not become one people. Stone responded that “the New Testament reformers among the Baptists have generally acted the part which we approve.” They had “rejected all party names” and had taken the name Christian, they allowed each other “to read the Bible, and judge of its meaning for themselves,” and they did not “bind each other to believe certain dogmas as terms of fellowship.” If there was a “difference” between the two groups, he knew it not. “We have nothing in us to prevent a union,” he declared, “and if they have nothing in them in opposition to it, we are in spirit one.” “May God,” he added, “strengthen the cords of Christian union.” 

Campbell did not respond directly to Stone’s statement. Rather, he allowed others to express through the Christian Baptist and its successor, the Millennial Harbinger, the view that the name Christian was associated with Arianism and Unitarianism. Stone raised the issue of a union of Reformers and Christians in the Christian Messenger a second time in August 1830, advising that the Reformers should not make their “particular views of immersion” a term of fellowship or reject the name Christian. This time Campbell himself responded in the Millennial Harbinger. He expressed his hope that Stone’s examination of his “Extra” to the Millennial Harbinger on “Remission of Sins” would convince him that “there is no immersion instituted by Jesus Christ, save that for remission of sins.” As for the name Christian, he stated that it had become associated with “peculiar views of the Deity” and now represented a “sect” rather than the body of Christ. Moreover, he asked how the Reformers, if they were to assume the name Christian, would be distinguished from Christians who had not adopted reforms such as baptism for the remission of sins and weekly observance of the Lord’s Supper. Thus, he was inclined to recommend to the Reformers the name “disciples of Christ.” 

Stone did not immediately reply to Campbell’s response. He did, however, come out in the September 1830 issue of the Messenger in support of weekly observance of the Lord’s Supper. Campbell commended Stone’s endorsement of weekly celebration of the Lord’s Supper in the October 1830 issue of the Harbinger. He added, however, that he had thought “some time ago” that Stone had endorsed immersion for remission of sins, though he could not see how Stone could teach immersion for remission of sins and continue to commune with the unimmersed. In the Messenger for August 1831, Stone defended his practice of communing with the unimmersed and commitment to the name Christian. 

The exchange between Stone and Campbell continued through December 1831, though, in Stone’s view, it achieved little progress toward union. Be that as it may, Stone remained committed to the union of Christians and Reformers. Earlier in the year, he had established a cordial relationship with the Reformer John T. Johnson. Johnson, a lawyer and former member of Congress, had been a member of the Baptist church in Great Crossings, just west of Georgetown. Having failed to lead the Great Crossings Baptist Church into Campbell’s reformation, Johnson and two others had withdrawn their memberships and formed a Disciples congregation at Great Crossings in February 1831. In October, the Disciples and Christians in the vicinity of Georgetown and Great Crossings had begun meeting and worshiping together. The prospectus for the 1832 volume of the Christian Messenger announced that Johnson would join Stone as coeditor of the Messenger. 

Late in November, there was an informal and private conference in Georgetown regarding the union of Reformers and Christians. Among those present were the Christian John Rogers and the Reformer John Smith. Smith and Rogers expressed their willingness to travel together throughout Kentucky to conciliate and unite congregations of Christians and Reformers. It was agreed, however, that before launching this effort, they would hold a four-days’ meeting at Georgetown over Christmas Day and a similar meeting at Lexington over New Year’s Day and would invite Christians and Reformers from across the state to be present. 

The four-day Christmas and New Year’s meetings planned by the Georgetown conference were well attended by both Christians and Reformers, and, according to John Smith’s biographer, John Augustus Williams, the participants “worshipped and counseled together with one spirit and one accord.” Though there are no official records of either meeting, Williams provided an account of the Lexington meeting. Smith, a Reformer, called on the Reformers and Christians to unite on the Bible alone. Stone affirmed Smith’s appeal, concluding his remarks by offering to Smith “a hand trembling with rapture and brotherly love,” which Smith grasped “by a hand full of the honest pledges of fellowship.” Others in the assembly now joined hands, and “a song arose.” On Sunday the participants communed together. 

The Messenger for January 1832 announced “the union of Christians in fact in our country.” It also announced that “to increase and consolidate this union” John Smith and John Rogers, “the first known formerly, by the name of Reformer, the latter by the name Christian,” had been set apart “to ride together through all the churches, and to be equally supported by the united contributions of the churches of both descriptions.” In response to the question, “Will the Christians and Reformers thus unite in other States and sections of our country?” Stone and his new coeditor answered: “If they are sincere in their profession, and destitute of a party spirit, they will undoubtedly unite.” The coeditors rejoiced to have received information of unions in Rush County, Indiana, and Maury County, Tennessee, noting that “It appears that the spirit of union has simultaneously acted in the three states, and in a very similar way.” 

For Stone, the key to Christian union was the spirit — the spirit believers received through faith in Jesus Christ. In the Messenger for October 1833 Stone described four kinds of union. Book union was founded on a creed or confession of faith. Head union was the same as book union, except that the articles of the confession were not written in a book. Water union was founded on immersion into water. Fire union was “the unity of the spirit — a union founded on the spirit of truth.” Fire or spirit union, he argued, alone would “stand,” and no other union was “worth the name.” “This spirit,” he asserted, was “obtained through faith, not in a human form or set of opinions, whether written or not written, but in the Lord Jesus Christ, the Savior of sinners; and by a cheerful obedience to all his known commands.” “This spirit,” he continued, “leads us to love God and his children — to love and pray for all mankind.” He stated that it was fire union “for which Jesus prayed, and by which the world will believe that he is the Christ of God.” Employing another image, he observed, “How vain are all human attempts to unite a bundle of twigs together, so as to make them grow together, and bear fruit!” To grow together, he continued, twigs “must first be united with the living stock, and receive its sap, and spirit, before they can ever be united with each other.” “So,” he asserted, “must we be first united with Christ, and receive his spirit, before we can ever be in spirit united with one another.” “Men,” he observed, “have devised many plans to unite christians — all are vain.” “There is,” he admonished, “but one effectual plan, which is, that all be united with Christ, and walk in him.” 

The efforts of Stone and others to achieve the union of Christians and Reformers were largely successful in Kentucky. Many Christians in Ohio and some in Indiana, who rejected Campbell’s teaching of baptism for remission of sins, refused to unite with the Reformers. Stone worked for union in the spirit the rest of his life. By 1834, however, much of his attention was directed toward moving his family from Kentucky to Illinois. This move was occasioned by his concern over slavery, an issue to which he had devoted much attention throughout his ministry. 

6. Church and Society 

6.1. Early Opposition to Slavery 

Stone became an opponent of slavery shortly after settling among the congregations at Cane Ridge and Concord, congregations already known for their antislavery sentiments. In a letter to neighboring Presbyterian pastor Samuel Rennels, Stone stated eight reasons why he favored emancipation. The portion of the letter including the date and the first three reasons has been lost. The remaining five reasons focus on the cruelty of slavery and its incompatibility with the fulfillment of familial obligations. “Slavery,” he declared, “dissolves the ties of God and man; ties the most strong and indissoluble of all others. One of these ties is conjugal affection. The loving husband is torn from the weeping distracted embraces of the most affectionate wife[,] carried far off & sold like a beast … how must the happiness of this loving pair be forever destroyed! Perhaps they had children too (‘dear to both’ crossed out).…” “Say,” he asked Rennels, “can this be right? Can it be agreeable to a good God? Or that word which commands us to leave father and mother and cleave to our wives?” Stone concluded the letter by observing that it was often said by white Christians that it was not good policy to set the slaves free “amongst us.” “Many,” he observed, thought otherwise. In any case, he continued, “christians ought not to let civil policy oppose the express will of God. If we know God’s will, we are not to enquire whether it will be [in] our interest to do it.” 

In 1800 Stone presented a resolution from the Cane Ridge and Concord churches to the West Lexington Presbytery declaring that slavery was “a moral evil, very heinous, and consequently sufficient to exclude such as will continue in the practice of it from the privileges of the church.” The presbytery referred the resolution to the Synod of Virginia and the General Assembly, noting that although it was the opinion of the large majority of the presbytery that slaveholders should be excluded from church privileges, they hesitated to decide the matter until directed by higher judicatories. 

The following year Stone manumitted two slaves, Ned and Lucy, whom he received as a bequest from his mother. In the deed of manumission that Stone filed at the Bourbon County Courthouse, Stone declared that slavery was “inconsistent” with “the principles of Christianity as well as of civil liberty.” His provisions for manumitting Ned, whom he reported was about 30, in two years and Lucy, whom he reported was about 12, in ten years were in accord with the philosophy of gradual emancipation that required that slaves be prepared for freedom before being set free. Stone trained Ned in a skill before giving him his freedom. He reared Lucy in “the Bible and religion” as well as teaching her a skill before freeing her as a young woman. 

By 1808 Stone had changed his position on fellowshiping slaveholders in the church. This may well have been a result of the series of conflicts that had begun with Stone’s separation from the Synod of Kentucky. At a meeting of the Christians held near Lexington, Stone was reported to have said that “so far as it had come, to his knowledge, he knew of no members among them that held slaves whose conduct and upright deportment, but what was worthy of example in every other particular, that numbers of them had borne the burden and heat of the day, and had suffered great persecutions for the Christian cause and name, and that to declare them out of fellowship would be ungenerous and cruel in the extreme.” Stone may have also been convinced that the best way to influence slaveholding Christians to manumit their slaves was for emancipationists to remain in fellowship with them. He later noted that although he had refused in 1807 to make believers’ immersion a term of communion, within twenty years there was not “one in 500” among the Christians who had not been immersed. 

6.2. Support for Colonization of Free Blacks and Move to Illinois 

Stone’s position on fellowshiping slaveholders in the church may have also been influenced by experiences with emancipation. Though Stone had advised Samuel Rennels that “many” disagreed with Rennels’s view that manumitting slaves among whites was not good policy, Stone’s biographer, John Rogers, noted that “subsequent observation” convinced Stone “that as a general thing, that something called freedom which the free blacks have, is a curse both to them and the whites.” Thus, during the 1820s, Stone became a vigorous advocate of the American Colonization Society, whose stated purpose was “to ameliorate the condition of the Free People of Colour now in the United States, by providing a colonial retreat either on this continent or that of Africa.” The founders of the society believed that slaveholders would manumit their slaves if assured of their removal. Founded in 1816 as a voluntary organization, the society sought public funding. In 1821 it purchased a tract of land in western Africa and established the colony of Liberia to demonstrate to the federal and state governments the feasibility of colonizing free blacks in Africa. 

The Messenger for September 1834 carried a notice of Stone’s intention to move to Jacksonville, Illinois, that fall. Although Stone offered no explanation for his decision to relocate, longtime readers of the Messenger knew that it was related to his opposition to slavery. In December 1830, Stone had responded to the rumor that he had become a slaveholder. The basis of the rumor was the fact that Stone had at his home at Georgetown one African man, two African women, and four African children. Stone explained that these persons had been bequeathed to his wife and her children forever by the will of his wife’s deceased mother, which placed them under the authority of trustees. He stated that as he could not emancipate them, he was seriously disposed to emancipate himself and his family from them. Such emancipation could be effected by moving his family to a free state, in which case the slaves willed to his wife and children might be considered as free. “This,” he had added, “may be realized not long hence.” 

From 1830 to 1835, Stone bought four tracts of land in the vicinity of Jacksonville, Illinois. On October 30, 1832, he bought three lots in Jacksonville, two blocks south of the pubic square, which was to become the location of his home. Late in the fall of 1834, Stone and his family moved to their new home. Four years later Stone had the satisfaction of confirming that his intention with regard to the Africans who had been willed to his wife and her children had been accomplished. While on a trip to Kentucky, he paid a visit to the former servants whom he found living in Georgetown as a family of free persons. 

6.3. Support for Immediate Abolition of Slavery 

Stone continued through the early 1830s to promote the Colonization Society. However, by 1833 it was evident that he was disappointed in the failure of Christians to manumit their slaves and allow them to go to Liberia. His move to Illinois coincided with his abandonment of the colonization scheme and his endorsement of the call for the immediate abolition of slavery, without the removal of Africans from the United States. In the April 1835 issue of the Messenger, Stone began serialization of an “Address to the People of the United States on Slavery” by William Lloyd Garrison’s New England Anti-Slavery Society. 

Stone left off printing the “Address” after three installments. In its place, he published in the July issue of the Messenger two articles defending immediate abolition as desirable and not to be feared. In the November issue of the Messenger, he explained why he had discontinued the “Address of the New England Anti-Slavery Society” after the third installment in June. Not long after he had begun publishing the “Address,” he had “heard of the evil effects of the ultra abolitionists in the North” and had “determined to desist from publishing more of the piece, fully persuaded that it would do no good in the present ferment, and might do harm.” The evil effects to which he referred were riots and acts of violence against abolitionists and the growing resistance of proponents of slavery to all efforts to abolish slavery. He noted that “For publishing these few [installments], numbers of my old patrons and friends in the East and South are offended, and have ordered a discontinuance of the Messenger.” He declared, “I have in principle and practice been a conscientious opposer of slavery for nearly 40 years; but how to remedy the evil I know not.” “I am persuaded it will be done; but I am ignorant of the means by which it shall be accomplished.” 

6.4. Slavery, Christian Union, and Premillennialism 

Stone was confident that slavery would not exist in the millennial age. Moreover, he was confident that the millennium was near. Post millennialists believed that Christ would reign spiritually on earth with the saints for the thousand years prior to his coming to judge the world. Pre millennialists believed that Christ would come in judgment at the beginning of the millennium and personally reign on earth with the saints for a thousand years. Stone was a premillennialist, at least from the 1830s onward. The key to Stone’s millennialism was his view that “the return and salvation of the Jews” and “the fulness of the Gentiles brought in,” both of which he believed would precede the return of Christ, depended upon the union of Christians. For Stone, the union of Christians was the hinge on which the millennium turned. Because Stone believed that God was working in the nineteenth century to unite the church, he remained confident that the millennium was at hand, and with it the abolition of slavery, even when, as he acknowledged in 1835, he did not know the means by which it would be abolished. 

Meanwhile, Stone’s premillennialism emboldened him to exhort slaveholders to free their slaves by threat of the imminent judgment of Christ. Stone’s first application of premillenialism in the Messenger appeared in what turned out to be his last appeal to the Christians to manumit their slaves and allow them to go to Liberia. “Let not the wares of Babylon, among which are slaves, be found among us at the coming of the Lord,” he advised in 1833. “Behold, he comes quickly.” Stone applied his premillennialism in the Messenger a second time in November 1835 after explaining why he had discontinued the “Address” of the New England Anti-Slavery Society. He admonished his readers to “beware of being swept from their foundation, the Bible, by temporizing principles and practices.” “The day of righteous Judgment,” he advised his fellow Christians, “is at hand — prepare for it by cleansing yourselves from all filthiness of flesh and spirit that at the coming of the Lord, we may be found without spot and blameless.” 

6.5. Adoption of an Anti-Government Position and Pacifism 

In the 1820s Stone endorsed asking Christians to sign petitions calling for Congress to fund the colonization of former slaves. By the 1840s, Stone’s disillusionment with the failure of Americans to end slavery and his disapproval of the popular electioneering that had emerged led him to propose that Christians should not participate in civil government. Stone made this proposal in a series of four articles published from 1842 to 1844: a dialogue between two “Christian brethren” regarding “Civil and Military Offices Sought and Held by Christians,” “Reflections of Old Age,” “Reply to T. P. Ware [a Mississippi lawyer and Christian who wrote to Stone in response to the first article in the series],” and “An Interview between an Old and Young Preacher.” In these four articles, Stone advanced two arguments for why Christians should not participate in government. The first argument was that participation in government had a negative impact on Christian spirituality. The second was that the spiritual reign and laws of Jesus were sufficient to rule the world. 

What, then, was the Christian’s duty to civil government? In the dialogue, the brother representing Stone’s views stated that the duty of Christians to civil governments was “To be subject to them, and to all their ordinances, which do not stand opposed to our king’s.” He advised that Christians were to “pay tribute to whom tribute is due; custom to whom custom; and honor to whom honor.” He indicated, alluding to Acts 4, that in the case of a conflict, Christians were to follow the example of the apostles in obeying God rather than humanity. Christians, he declared, were also to pray for human governments and to “so live and shine” in their own government “as to show its superiority over all human governments, and by this means engage others to receive it and be saved.” 

Related to the question of participation in government was the issue of military service. A peace movement had emerged in the United States following the War of 1812. Most members of the peace movement distinguished between the use of force in aggression and in defense, opposing only the former. However, in 1838, “ultraists” within the movement, led by Henry Clark Wright and William Lloyd Garrison, formed a Non-Resistance Society to oppose the use of force even in self-defense. Wright and Garrison proclaimed that the practice of nonresistance would usher in Christ’s reign on earth. Stone had been open, as late as 1827, to arguments in support of Christians defending themselves against aggression. By July of 1844, he was an advocate of nonresistance. “A nation professing christianity, yet teaching, learning and practicing the arts of war,” he warned, “cannot be the kingdom of Christ, nor do they live in obedience to the laws of Christ — the government is antichristian, and must reap the fruits of their infidelity at some future day.” 

Photo caption: This widely used portrait of Stone is one of the few extant images of the beloved church leader. 

Stone knew that there would be opposition in the church to his view that Christians should not participate in civil government. In the 1842 dialogue, the character representing Stone’s view indicated that he hesitated to speak, knowing that his views would be classified as “fanaticism or ultraism.” As Stone saw it, however, his proposal that Christians not participate in civil government was only an extension of views long held by Christians in relation to the church. In his “Reply to T. P. Ware,” he stated that “Our brethren have not seen the legitimate issue of what they have been doing, in arguing against human creeds and laws for the government of the church. In doing this they were clearing away the rubbish from the foundation of God’s government of the world.” 

7. Late Reflections on the Movement and Christian Union 

Stone stated in June 1844 that the prospects for Christian union were “gloomy.” He noted, in particular, that ministers were “discordant in their views of truth, and entirely wedded to their systems, from which, it seems, they will never move.” In March 1844 he had expressed disappointment in the Christian Churches. He noted that earlier he had been “greatly cheered” with “the hope that christian union would soon be effected, when so many thousands from the various sects banded together in love, rejecting their party man-made creeds — and taking the Bible alone as the rule by which their faith and lives should be formed — abandoning their party names, and cleaving to the good old name Christian.” “Had we only,” he continued, “lived and walked in the fear of God, and in the comforts of the Holy Ghost as we commenced, doubtless, the effect anticipated would have been realized; real good men of every sect could not oppose, but would unite in so holy a cause.” He lamented that “We have neglected to keep ourselves in the love of God, and in the humility and gentleness of Christ,” that some had “turned aside to vain jangling for opinions, and to provoke to disputation and debate and strife,” and that many were “more intent to proselyte than to convert souls to pure christianity.” Three years earlier he had declared, “The secret is this, that want of this spirit, the spirit of Jesus, is the grand cause of division among Christians: consequently, this spirit restored will be the grand cause of union.” Promising that “With this spirit, partyism will die,” he had warned that “without it antipartyism in profession only will become as rank partyism as any other, and probably more intolerant.” 

Nevertheless, he did not relinquish his hope that Christian union might soon be accomplished. In June 1844 he noted that he had “sometimes thought that God, by some strange, unexpected work in providence, may drive or draw” Christians together. He suggested, for example, the notion that “Popery may prevail, and drive the alarmed shepherds together for common safety.” “They may unite with their flocks in the truth,” he observed, “and spread it through the world.” He proposed alternatively that God might unite the church by restoring the miraculous gifts of the Holy Spirit that had ceased since the time of the apostles. 

Neither did he give up on the possibility that Christian union might be achieved without papal persecution of the true church or the restoration of the miraculous gifts of the Holy Spirit. In the March 1844 article in which he confessed disappointment in the Christian Churches, he nevertheless declared, “Yet there are enough of wise and holy men amongst us to steer the ship by the word and spirit of truth, and the expected good be yet effected.” In the introduction to the fourteenth volume of the Messenger, published in May 1844, Stone noted that Protestants of every name had formed, or were forming, “antipapal societies, in order to counteract and stop the influence of popery.” After expressing his fear that the “reverse” would be the consequence, unless such societies were “managed in the spirit of truth,” Stone asserted that if, however, “all the parties among the protestants would agree to reform their lives, to be holy, humble and obedient to all God’s commandments — if they would agree to cease from their unhallowed debates and striving one against the other, and to unite as one to promote godliness and brotherly love in the earth — if they would abandon their human schemes and platforms, exchange them for the Bible and the Bible alone — if they would agree to become active and diligent in their Master’s cause, and set an example before their flocks and the world, and exhort them affectionately to follow them as they follow their professed Lord — if they would agree to meet together at the throne of grace in fervent, solemn and faithful prayer, then the spread of popery would cease, and skepticism be confounded and silent if not converted to the Lord.” “Nothing short of this,” he vowed, “will save us from the iron grasp of popery — nothing less will save the world.” 

Less than a year earlier, Stone had expressed his hope for Christian union, on the Bible alone, based on what he perceived to be the sheer attractiveness of scriptural union. He quoted a Catholic priest as having said that “now there were but two great antagonistic powers in christendom … the Roman Catholics who build upon the traditions of the fathers; and … those who rejected all such traditions, and built upon the Bible alone.” Using an image from the farming world in which he had lived most of his life, he wrote, “I have seen sheep pent up in a lean pasture, looking through the crevices of their inclosure at a flock grazing on a rich field at liberty — I have seen their manifestations of anxiety to be with them, in their bleating, and running along the fence to find a place of escape.” “At length,” he continued, “one made the leap and many followed.” 

Since Stone believed that Christian unity would precede the return of Christ, he was certain that to work for Christian unity was to hasten Christ’s return. Although discouraged in the summer of 1844 by the immediate prospects of Christian union, he repeated his long-standing counsel: “We must be co-workers with God; every one should be engaged; and as large bodies move slowly, let each one begin in himself.” 

8. Death and Burial 

On October 2, 1844, Stone wrote his will. The following day he left Jacksonville with Celia and their youngest son to visit children and friends in Missouri. An annual district meeting of Missouri Christians was held October 18-21, 1844, at Bear Creek Church in Boone County, three miles north of Columbia. After preaching on October 21, Stone spent a day or two with a son who was a doctor in Missouri before leaving for Illinois. He got no farther than Hannibal, where he stopped at the home of his eldest daughter. Surrounded by family, he died November 9, 1844. He was buried in a locust grove on his Illinois farm. The farm was sold in 1846, and his body was moved to the cemetery of the Antioch Christian Church. In 1847 his remains were moved to Cane Ridge. 

9. Stone’s Influence on the Stone-Campbell Movement 

Although Stone’s leadership in the Movement was eclipsed by that of Campbell, his influence on the Movement has been considerable. Stone’s advocacy of communion with followers of Christ who have not yet been convinced that believers’ immersion, alone, is baptism was the foundation of what became the normative stance of the Movement: that Christ is host at the table, and that the church neither invites nor debars. Stone’s pacifism and antigovernment position were adopted by David Lipscomb and other early leaders of the Churches of Christ. In the 1930s, Stone was appropriated by Disciples of Christ involved in the modern ecumenical movement, who saw him as a precursor of their concern for Christian unity. More recently, Stone has been appropriated by members of the Churches of Christ who see his premillennialism, pacifism, and antigovernment stance as a judgment upon what they view as the world-affirming ways of contemporary Churches of Christ. 

Bibliography Anthony L. Dunnavant, ed., Cane Ridge in Context: Perspectives on Barton W. Stone and the Revival (1992) • Richard T. Hughes, Reviving the Ancient Faith: The Story of Churches of Christ in America (1996) • Barton Warren Stone, Biography of Elder Barton Warren Stone, Written by Himself, with Additions and Reflections by Eld. John Rogers (1847), reprinted in The Cane Ridge Reader (1972) • Charles C. Ware, Barton Warren Stone, Pathfinder of Christian Union (1932) • William Garrett West, Barton Warren Stone: Early American Advocate of Christian Unity (1954) • D. Newell Williams, Barton Stone: A Spiritual Biography (2000).

 D. Newell Williams

This entry, written by D. Newell Williams, was originally published in The Encyclopedia of the Stone-Campbell Movement (Edited by Douglas A. Foster, Paul M. Blowers, Anthony L. Dunnavant, and D. Newell Williams; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004), pages 701-721. Republished with permission. 

Foster, Douglas A.. The Encyclopedia of the Stone-Campbell Movement (pp. 2144-2204). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.