Keith Sisman

"And I also say unto thee, that thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it" (Matthew 16:18).

For anyone who wishes to assert continuity with the apostolic faith of the Gospel the question of evidence of succession becomes quite important. Most in "Christendom" implicitly or explicitly accept the claims of the Roman Catholic and/or Eastern Orthodox churches that they are the inheritors of the main stream of Christian tradition, recognizing their debt to that tradition. Some, like in England, rested in the claim of continuity of the Church of England, both before and after the Reformation; in another vein, Luther and Calvin famously argued that they were the ones faithfully maintaining tradition, and it was the Roman Catholic Church that had lapsed from it. But what happens if one wishes to argue that Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy deviated from the true faith and did so long ago? A "great apostasy" can be claimed, but how can one maintain credible belief in Jesus' promise that the gates of Hades would not prevail against the church if none proclaimed the true faith for a very long period of time?

Many within churches of Christ claim to follow the Gospel in its apostolic simplicity, consider Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and even most of the Protestant offshoots from Catholicism as apostatized, and have sought to restore the church to its apostolic simplicity as seen in the New Testament. Many of its opponents have scoffed at the endeavor as a modernist project no more than 200 years old. Yet for some time now Keith Sisman of England has claimed to have found evidence in England of the proclamation of the Gospel in its apostolic simplicity in England for the better part of the past millennium, long before not only Stone and Campbell but also Luther, Calvin, and others, on his website Traces of the Kingdom. A book by the same title was released in 2010 providing the story and some of the discovered evidence.

I, the reviewer, as a Christian who strongly believes in the Restoration project and the continuity of the proclamation of the Gospel in its apostolic simplicity, am naturally disposed to want to accept the claims Sisman has made in the book. In response I have attempted to look at the evidence and its presentation in a more critical way than normal so as to offset my biases and inclinations. Even so Sisman has made a good enough case to merit scholarly consideration and which is able to give confidence that indeed the Gospel was proclaimed despite terrible persecution for generations in England.

The general outline of the story Sisman tells goes somewhat as follows: early Christians preached the Gospel in its apostolic simplicity, affirming believer's immersion in water for the forgiveness of sins, locally autonomous congregations shepherded by qualified elders, known as some permutation of "churches of Christ." Within a few generations pagan influence began to lead to apostasy; that, along with Augustine and his views on divine predestination and election and thus infant baptism and original sin, would lead to complete apostasy of Roman Catholicism. Meanwhile English Christianity maintained apostolic simplicity until (another) Augustine was sent by the religious authorities in Rome to bring the English churches in line with the rest of Roman Catholicism. In this Augustine was generally successful yet dissenters remained preaching the apostolic Gospel. By the turn of the millennium these dissenters would be called Waldensians and Lollards and later, Anabaptists (before the Protestant movement of that name in the 16th century), but they did not call themselves by such terms; what documentation from their hands still remains shows they understood themselves as Christians and their congregations as churches of Christ. Despite official persecution these Christians continued to preach the Gospel in its apostolic simplicity, gained hearing in many places, and persevered throughout the upheavals of the Reformation. It would only be when tolerance came for particular types of dissenters in the seventeenth century when many of these churches were seduced into Calvinism and became known as Baptist churches, although some churches in the 17th century stood firm against Calvinism and would ultimately make contact and be in alignment with the Restoration project of Campbell. Thus Sisman claims an uninterrupted succession of the proclamation of the Gospel in its apostolic simplicity from the days of the Apostles to the present day.

Sisman does make many important contributions. The biggest contribution is to provide a Restoration Movement viewpoint of the dissenters to Catholicism and Protestantism throughout the medieval period. It is not as if Sisman has uncovered a bunch of things no one knew about before; instead he is bringing a different set of eyes upon the research of various Protestant scholars and researchers (especially among the Baptist) of this heritage. Sisman maintains constant argument with these researchers, pointing out the divergences between the primary source claims and the confessional claims of the researchers and their denominational affiliates. He also does well to remind us all that the "winners" write the history, and the characterization of the "losers" is always framed in terms of the beliefs of the "winners." If early dissenters from Catholicism called themselves Waldenses, Lollards, or Anabaptists, it was only accommodatingly; Sisman shows from primary sources that at least some people who were called such things understood themselves as Christians and their congregations as churches of Christ. They denied infant baptism and insisted on believer's baptism, hence the charge of anabaptism ("baptism again" in Greek; the confessional viewpoint of the pedobaptist). He presents many of the primary sources and they do speak for themselves. It is established beyond reasonable doubt that there were in England for generations before Stone or Campbell Christians who stood opposed to Roman Catholicism and the Church of England and who insisted on immersion of believers for the remission of sin, the definition of Christians according to the New Testament (Acts 2:37-47, Romans 6:3-7). The claim that most such churches of Christ would become Baptist churches may seem difficult to believe but in terms of one congregation in the north of England Sisman has the written evidence, not only from the primary source of documents from the church and its changes in the seventeenth century but also the recognition from a Baptist researcher that the church was not always Baptist but moved into the Baptist fold after having claimed to be a "church of Christ."

Thus many good insights can be gleaned from having a set of Restoration Movement eyes upon the evidence; nevertheless, questions remain. The Christian seeking to find evidence that the Restoration Movement existed before Campbell will be able to find some evidence of that; of course Baptists and other Protestants have already looked at that evidence and made their own claims that their denominational heritage existed since the Reformation or beforehand from it as well. In short the question, which is impossible to answer, ends up being "if some of these persons were to find themselves, say, Sir John Oldcastle, Simon Fish, or William Tyndale, were to find themselves transported to 21st century England or America, with what group would they find the most doctrinal agreement with their views? With Fish especially, perhaps with Oldcastle, maybe with Tyndale, the answer would be among members of churches of Christ, according to the evidence Sisman provides. A major problem is that we are retrojecting a diversity of views that exists today that did not exist then; these earlier Christians were not thrust into the disputes of the 19th and 20th centuries. Thus I would wish to exercise a bit of caution: yes, these historical figures are most likely fellow Christians, and while there would be many points of doctrinal agreement between us and them, such does not mean we can be certain that they would have believed and did exactly as we do and believe, as if they were Restoration Movement churches of Christ in their fullness long before Campbell. No doubt the Baptist researchers portray the evidence to make them all look like Baptists; the same may be true with other groups. We must be careful with the evidence in these matters.

Unfortunately there are other aspects to Sisman's work that do not maintain the researched and well-argued rigor of many of the matters discussed above. Chapter 5 on America and its Early Christianity sounds almost Mormon in its attempt to project Christianity on American shores long ago with absolutely no evidence for the claim, merely hypotheticals and possibilities that strain potential let alone feasibility; in this chapter Sisman is attempting to make evidence fit his interpretation of Colossians 1:23. Such tortured logic is unnecessary; understanding Colossians 1:23 in terms of the greater Roman world and recognizing that all early Americans will be held to the same Gentile standard as seen in Romans 2:14-16 relieves the theological conundrum. Throughout the text Sisman oversimplifies the apostasy to the point of distorted caricature. In Sisman's work paganism is the root of apostasy within Roman Catholicism; while paganism had its place, maintaining the Old Testament as a source of practice at the same level as the New Testament is just as necessary to explain how Roman Catholicism came to be. Sisman's understanding British Christianity and Pelagius leads him to claim Pelagius as an early Christian and to characterize what he believes as Pelagian in contrast to Calvinism since he believes in free will (pp. 72-80). Granted, it is near impossible to know how much of "Pelagianism" was believed by Pelagius as opposed to over-reactions by his later adherents, but it remains true that what has become known as "Pelagianism," the belief in free will to the point of believing in perfectability and sinlessness, is as wide of the mark in one way as Augustinian Calvinism is wide of the mark in the other. While Sisman will make it clear that he is not claiming that all dissenters were seeking to promote the Gospel in its simplicity, he seems too willing to consider the Cathari and Albigensians in France to at least contain some preachers of the truth; such groups seem to have more in common with Manicheanism and Gnosticism than anything resembling New Testament truth from all the evidence that has come down to us, and thus we should be skeptical of any such associations. "Calvinism" becomes the bogeyman after the Reformation, and it's always an either-or proposition; either Christians have fallen for Calvinism or have repented of Calvinism, and it still seems a bit suspicious that almost all of these "churches of Christ" became Baptist in the seventeenth century even though they had theoretically maintained purity for over 400 years. There is also the matter of "Church of Christ." I'm not aware of any historic denomination that would not claim to be the "Church of Christ" or part of the "Church of Christ"; the term can even be found in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Is it possible that these dissenting Christians intentionally chose "church of Christ" in opposition to the names of Catholicism and Anglicanism? Certainly. Did they mean by it what we mean by it? Hard to know. In all such things later disputes are being imposed on the past, and the hyper-simplistic way of describing the points of disagreement gives reason, unfortunately, to cast aspersions on the overall integrity of the endeavor. If it weren't for the primary sources and even some legitimating secondary sources I would have lost confidence in Sisman's evidence because of these over-simplistic portrayals and clear and aggressive biases at work throughout. The book would have been better as pure history without bringing in modern issues, modern forms of understanding, and "the distinctives" as they exist both within the church and between the church and the world.

Sisman's work has its problems, yet despite them he does provide good evidence for his claims: at least in England there were Christians seeking to maintain the purity of the apostolic Gospel, having been immersed as believers into Jesus, immersing other believers into Jesus, and often suffering immense persecution. Traces of the Kingdom provides sufficient evidence to make it clear that what its opponents call "Campbellism" existed long before Campbell, and in fact some of their groups later derived from said Christians, for they existed before John Smythe and the Baptists and even before Luther and the Lutherans. By faith we can have confidence that the Gospel in its apostolic simplicity has been heard, believed, and proclaimed since the days of the Apostles; it continues to this day. Let us participate in God's work in Christ and serve Him in His Kingdom!… (plus d'informations)