The Independent Church

The principle. The differences seen in the preceding articles, save those of the covenant and of baptism, come from a single idea, and Savoy formulates it with all clearness in the sixth article of its platform. For Westminster there is a visible church, universal, to which Christ has given the ministry and the ordinances, and the congregations are members of it; that is why they can and ought to be governed together. For Savoy the catholic visible church exists, but has received nothing: neither ordinances, nor officers, nor authority. All the power that Christ has left on earth is in each congregation, which receives it "immediately from himself", and outside it there is no church whatever with authority. London copies the fourth article and, with it, the principle.
From this the rest follows. If each congregation is a complete church, there can be no synod with jurisdiction over it, and chapters XXX and XXXI of the Confession are superfluous. If one enters the church by the consent of those who gather, the church consists of those who are able to consent, and of the children of believers one no longer knows what to say. And if the congregation receives its power without mediation, the minister is a minister of that congregation and by its election, not of the church.

Where it comes from. The idea is older than Savoy, and it has two histories which it is well not to confuse.
The first is continental. The Swiss Anabaptists had already confessed in 1527, in the articles of Schleitheim, a church formed only of those who have been baptised after professing the faith, separated from the world, which exercises discipline within the congregation and chooses its own pastor.
The second is English. Robert Browne formed at Norwich, about 1581, the first congregation separated from the Church of England upon these principles, and the following year he published them from Holland in two books; one of them carries his programme in its title: reformation "without Tarying for Anie", that is, without the magistrate. From him, and from the Separatists who followed him, comes English Independency. It passed to New England, whose churches settled their government in the Cambridge Platform of 1648, and from there it returned to England: the men of Savoy had it before them.
What relation is there between the two histories? One man of the Westminster Assembly was clear about it. Robert Baillie, a Scottish commissioner, gave this title to a book in 1647: "Anabaptism, the True Fountaine of Independency, Brownisme, Antinomy, Familisme". He maintained in it that the Brownists were theological children of the Anabaptists, and that in becoming Anabaptists they did no more than return to their origin. Historians still debate how much Browne owed to the Dutch Anabaptists of Norwich, who formed a very numerous colony there: some take the influence as certain, and others recall that Browne retained the baptism of infants and never taught rebaptism, and derive Independency from English Puritanism. What is not disputed is that the principle is the same, that the Anabaptists confessed it half a century earlier, and that the Presbyterians of the time saw it as one single thing.

What the Independents did not want. It must be said, in fairness, that neither Savoy nor London wanted isolated churches. Both enjoin that the churches hold communion with one another, that they pray for one another and that, in case of difficulty, they meet by their messengers to take counsel together. Savoy devotes several articles to the communion between churches "though they walk not in all things according to the same rules of church-order". And the men who signed those texts had a common confession of faith, long and precise, which is almost that of Westminster. The Independency of the seventeenth century is a doctrine of the government of the church, not a rejection of confessions nor of the universal church.

Where it led. But a principle does not stay where those who formulate it leave it. If no church has authority over another, the advice of the messengers binds only him who is willing to hear it; and if the congregation receives everything immediately from Christ, neither is it bound by the confession of faith of the others. One restraint only remained, which was common conviction, and it was enough for this to fail for every disagreement to end in a new church.
Where this was seen was in America. Between 1790 and 1840, in the revivals which historians call the Second Great Awakening, the churches which grew most on the frontier were the Baptist and the Methodist, and out of those years there came besides wholly new movements, such as Adventism and Restorationism. The latter is the clearest case. In 1804, in Kentucky, a group of ministers who came from Presbyterianism dissolved their own presbytery with a document which rejected the "divisive" use of the Westminster Confession, defended the government of each congregation by itself, and wanted no other name than that of "Christians". Its watchword would come to be: no creed but Christ, no book but the Bible. What Independency had done with synods, Restorationism did with confessions. Those years, and what they did with Presbyterianism, are the subject of an article in the section on the revisions.
It would not be accurate to lay everything to this account. The Methodists, who grew as much as the Baptists, were not Independents; the Presbyterians divided several times while having synods; and the disappearance of the established churches, the frontier and the democratic spirit of the new republic also had their weight. But among the causes of the fragmentation of Protestantism, which is today its most visible feature, this is one of the greatest: where each congregation is sovereign, to divide costs nothing.

What this shows. That the underlying question between Westminster and its two daughters is not baptism, nor even synods, but what the visible church is: a body to which Christ has given ministry and government, or the sum of the congregations which have each received it separately. The Assembly had answered with the example of the church of Jerusalem, which consisted of more congregations than one under one government, and with Acts 15:2,4,6, where an assembly of apostles and elders decides a matter which did not belong to one church only.
And it shows something else, which links with the section on the revisions. The text with which the American Presbyterians replaced in 1788 the paragraph on the magistrate speaks of "the voluntary members of any denomination of Christians". It is the language of Savoy, not that of Westminster: the church as an association of those who consent. The Presbyterians kept their synods, but they had already accepted the idea of the church which made them unnecessary.

Sources. The platform of Savoy, according to the tabular comparison cited in the introduction to this section; the Form of Church Government, from this site; the articles of Schleitheim (1527), the works of Robert Browne (1582) and the Cambridge Platform (1648), by their texts and titles; for Restorationism, the "Last Will and Testament" of the Springfield Presbytery (1804).