El Meta and the Church of Christ at Minco in 1919

In 1919, the newspapers in Minco were mostly quiet about El Meta Bond College. The local school system and business colleges in the area appeared to be in full swing. At the end of August, for example, the Minco Herald reported that local public schools would open on September 2 and that the teachers for the coming term had all been employed. The next page of the paper contained an advertisement for the Chickasha Business College, which had been operating for sixteen years.[1] In nearby El Reno, Oklahoma, there was another business school, apparently with wild aspirations. In a city of 8,000, it was called Metropolitan Commercial College.[2]

Finally, on September 19, a notice appeared in the Minco Herald: "Thirtieth Re-Union El Meta Bond College." That night, the college would host a community gathering at which the grounds would be "lighted and decorated." The faculty and students would provide entertainment. Locals were encouraged to "come and welcome the old students back, and to let the new ones know that you are glad to have them in your community." The notice concluded with a nod towards the near future: "This might be your last opportunity to attend such an occasion as no one can tell what a year will bring forth."[3] Meta would soon complete three decades of nearly non-stop work in Oklahoma, and it seems the Sagers were already thinking about closing the school the following spring.

Meanwhile, Minco public schools started the year with 229 students. Superintendent J. W. Morgan warned parents that a new law made it "compulsory for all children between ages eight and sixteen to attend school six months," and he was determined to enforce that law.[4]

Both the Methodist and Baptist churches in Minco held revivals at the end of the summer.[5] But the papers made no mention of the congregation that met on Sundays at El Meta Bond College.

Notes

[1] "Schools Opens September 2," Minco Herald, August 29, 1919, 4, 5.

[2] Minco Herald, September 5, 1919, 3.

[3] "Thirtieth Re-Union El Meta Bond College," Minco Herald, September 19, 1919, 1.

[4] J.W. Morgan, "The Minco Schools," Minco Herald, October 10, 1919, 1.

[5] "Baptist Revival to Begin Sunday," Minco Herald, September 12, 1919, 1; "Revival Meeting at the Methodist Church," Minco Herald, September 19, 1919, 1.

Reaction to Meta Sager's 1936 Speech in Minco

The reaction to Meta's speech that night was a fond memory of hers for the rest of her life. A few days after the event, she wrote to Clara:

"I sold the old College ground in Minco, and a United States Armory has been built on part of it. I was asked to make a dinner speech at the Dedication Banquet . . . I was on the program with all of the biggest Generals . . . in the state. I was given the last speech . . . and when I had finished the whole house stood to cheer, led by all of those high officials. I was surprised that my little speech was so well received by those army grandees. I had been introduced at the laying of the Corner Stone in the afternoon, and at night in the Armory exercises was introduced on the platform as the most honored guest of the evening."[1]

Note

[1] Meta Chestnutt Sager to Clara Sager, December 20, 1936, MCSC, box 3, folder 26.

Meta Sager's 1936 Speech in Minco, Oklahoma

On Tuesday, December 15, 1936, Meta Sager spoke during a large banquet held in Minco. The occasion was the laying of the cornerstone for the U.S. armory, which stands to this day. It was built on the land where El Meta Bond College had stood not many years before. Local men, employed by the Works Progress Administration, a popular jobs program in Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, built the armory. Perhaps the organizers of the day's festivities decided that a speech from the president of the old school might give the place a greater sense of history. Whatever their reasons, they had asked her to speak. She delivered a gem of nostalgia, patriotism, and religion.

She began with a commonly-known couplet, the first two lines of "Rock Me to Sleep," an 1859 poem by Elizabeth Akers Allen: "Backward, turn backward, O Time, in your flight. Make me a child again just for tonight!"[1] From there, she told of Silver City on the Chisholm Trail and the town's move several miles west, to the site of Minco, founded in 1890. This was where for thirty years she operated her academy, a school that "carried all the grades and some Junior College work." She decided to have a little fun. A number of the men in attendance had been her students, she noted, and they were not always well-behaved. In fact, she said, "in almost any audience I can look around and see men whose pants I tanned when they were little boys. Some were not so very little either."[2]

Meta recalled that during the Great War, "there hung in the window of El Meta Bond a flag with thirty white starts on a blue field. They were our boys . . . for all we knew, then asleep on Flanders Field." Yet, they all came back "from somewhere in France." Sometime in 1919, after their return, "under the shade of the trees of the college campus," the school had hosted a picnic for all sixty-five service men from Grady County and their families. The day's festivities had been complete with "a brass band, a big barbecue, and hearts full of love for our boys and gratitude to the Prince of Peace for their return." With great satisfaction, no doubt, she claimed that El Meta's 2,500 alumni were then sustaining "the better institutions of learning in the greater Oklahoma of today."[3]

She concluded with a toast: "So now with abiding love to that which was, and with all honor to that which has come to be, I lift my glass and drink to the last drop--then 'Fold my tent like the Arab, and silently steal away.'"[4]

Notes

[1] Allen's poem "Rock Me to Sleep [, Mother]" appeared in Hazel Felleman, ed., The Best Loved Poems of the American People (New York: Doubleday, 1936), 371-73.

[2] Meta Chestnutt Sager, "A dinner speech at the Banquet given in Minco at the Laying of the Corner Stone and Dedication of the U.S. Armory, Dec. 15, 1936," MCSC, box 5, folder 17.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

Dust Bowl: General Description

From 1909 to 1929, farmers on the Great Plains, many of them desperate to make a living as agricultural-commodity prices fell, plowed up for the first time some 32 million acres of sod. Immediately after that transformation of the land, in the 1930s the Plains set new records for heat, drought, and wind. The hardest hit region was made up of western Kansas, southeastern Colorado, and the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma, the center of what came to be called "the Dust Bowl." In many parts of the region, 1934 through 1936 witnessed the most intense drought ever recorded. These conditions created wind erosion of topsoil never seen before or since.[1] "The wind lifted the surface powder into the skies, creating towering eight-thousand-foot waves known as 'black blizzards."[2] By 1938, at least ten million acres had lost five inches of topsoil. An additional thirteen million acres had lost at least two inches.[3]

Notes

[1] Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 30; Donald A. Wilhite, "Dust Bowl," EOHC, 1:424-25. 

[2] David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 194.

[3] Wilhite, "Dust Bowl," 425.

The Viability of El Meta Bond College post-1920

Shortly after 1920, when Meta Sager sold El Meta Bond College to a con man, the school went out of business. Given the growth of public education in twentieth-century America, it is tempting to assume that the school was not viable anyway. However, in Oklahoma, as late as 1935 nearly 60 percent of public schools were conducted in one-room school houses.[1] In fact, there was a good chance that Sager's college might have survived in one form or another. For example, it might have been moved to a town with a larger population. Or, it might have been adopted by a larger school somewhere else in Oklahoma. Consider the destinies of two colleges in Oklahoma, both established around the same time as El Meta.

In 1895, the Congregational Church founded Kingfisher College in present Kingfisher, Oklahoma. The school fell on hard times when the U.S. mobilized for the Great War. By 1922, it closed its doors and became part of the University of Oklahoma. A vestige of the school survives to this day as the Kingfisher College Chair of the Philosophy of Religion and Ethics at OU.[2]

In 1894, William Robert King, a Presbyterian minister, established Henry Kendall College in Muskogee. In 1907, the school was moved to Tulsa during its oil-boom phase. And in 1921, it became today's University of Tulsa.[3]

Notes

[1] Danney Goble, "Education in the Young State," in Historical Atlas of Oklahoma, 167.

[2] Ibid.; Carolyn G. Hanneman "Kingfisher College," in Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, 1:801-02.

[3] Goble, "Education in the Young State," 167; Linda D. Wilson, "King, William Robert (1868-1951), EOHC, 1:799-800; Marc Carlson, "University of Tulsa," EOHC, 2:1543-44.

Eva Heiliger's Book about Meta Chestnutt Sager (3)

Heiliger's book is replete with dialogue among the characters. This raises the general question of direct discourse in historical accounts. How can historians accurately report conversations and speeches for which there is no record? In some instances, the author actually heard the dialogue or the address, yet no one transcribed it. In other cases, the author was not present and only knows that something was or might have been said. The first historian to deal with this question in print was Thucydides. In a famous passage in The Peloponnesian War, he wrote:

As to the speeches that were made by different men, either when they were about to begin the war or when they were already engaged therein, it has been difficult to recall with strict accuracy the words actually spoken, both for me as regards that which I myself heard, and for those who from various other sources have brought me reports. Therefore the speeches are given in the language in which, as it seemed to me, the several speakers would express, on the subjects under consideration, the sentiments most befitting the occasion, though at the same time I have adhered as closely as possible to the general sense of what was actually said.[1]

Due to its practicality and often necessity, this approach has had many followers ever since. For example, in the "Introduction" to his 2008 memoir, Flying High: Remembering Barry Goldwater, William F. Buckley Jr. wrote:

The reader is entitled to ask if the material here is factually reliable. Reliable is the perfect word in this context. The book is not strictly factual, in that conversations are reported which cannot be documented as having taken place word for word. Yet it is reliable in that these words might well have been spoken. There are zero distortions here--no thought is engrafted in anyone that alters the subject's character or inclinations, or even habits of speech.[2]

Although Eva Heiliger never explained it as Thucydides and Buckley did, she seems to have taken the same approach. That leaves the question of the reliability of everything else in her book. Here, the reader is on much firmer ground. As noted earlier, she intended and worked to make her book "factual." No one else who actually knew Meta Chestnutt Sager did more research or wrote nearly as much about her. It is true that although Heiliger understood the significance of context in a historical accounts--her manuscript ends with a bibliography of four books--she did not have the training to write a critical biography.[3] Nevertheless, for the reasons cited here, aside from its occasional dialogue, the biography by Heiliger should be considered a reliable source.

Notes

[1] Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 1.22.1, Charles Forster Smith translation, Loeb Classical Library.

[2] Buckley, William F. Jr. Flying High: Remembering Barry Goldwater (New York: Basic Books, 2008), xi-xii.

[3] Eva Heiliger, "Born to Meet Adversity," unpublished book manuscript, 203.

Eva Heiliger's Book about Meta Chestnutt Sager (2)

In May 1979, Heiliger sent a form letter to several "Family and Friends of Aunt Meta," requesting information about her. "We need to receive from each of you a letter or a tape recording telling us as little or as much as you know. A sentence isn't too little and a long letter or 12 tapes isn't too much."[1] Heiliger wrote several more letters to Stenholm in 1979, going so far as to send her a few pages of a proposed film script. Finally, in September of that year, Stenholm wrote, "I wish I could be more encouraging about it, but I am afraid, judging from the material you have sent, that we could not use it for a film."[2]

At that point, Heiliger changed her plan. She wrote to Stenholm that she would, instead, write a book. She was still determined and had to be the best qualified person: "I find that I am the only one still living who really knew her (and that in her later years)."[3] Around the beginning of 1982, Eva Heiliger had completed her book manuscript. But it was rejected by three publishers.[4] She was encouraged by at least one editor to revise the book by turning it into something more like a historical novel: "The only route to go now is to add fiction to Aunt Meta's life story," she wrote to friends and family. But Heiliger made it clear she was unwilling to do it. The idea of adding fiction to her account, she said, "goes against my grain. . . . I am a factual writer."[5] 

Notes

[1] Eva Heiliger to "Family and Friends of Aunt Meta," May 1, 1979, box 1, folder 1, Meta Chestnutt Sager Collection.

[2] Mrs. Katherine Stenholm to Mrs. Dick Heiliger, September 26, 1979, box 1, folder 4, Meta Chestnutt Sager Collection.

[3] Mrs. Dick Heiliger to Mrs. Katherine Stenholm, October 29, 1979, box 1, folder 4, Meta Chestnutt Sager Collection.

[4] Eva Heiliger to "Family and friends," April 4, 1984, box 1 folder 1, Meta Chestnutt Sager Collection.

[5] Ibid.

Eva Heiliger's Book about Meta Chestnutt Sager (1)

Although never published, a book about the life of Meta Chestnutt Sager has already been written. As early as the 1940s, Eva Heiliger, Sager's great niece, aspired to tell her story. Heiliger was a freelance writer with over a decade of experience as a reporter for a small daily newspaper.[1] Her mother had attended El Meta Bond College. Sager had visited in the Heiliger home on at least one occasion. And the two women carried on an extensive correspondence for several years, due mainly to Heiliger's fascination with her great aunt.[2] Even with that, Heiliger felt she knew far too little to write a book about her subject when Sager died in 1948. For the time, she contented herself that she had published an article or two about her illustrious relative. But thirty years later, at the age of sixty-three, Heiliger was thinking about film, not print, and she had new resolve: "It just seems that the life of Aunt Meta should be told." She wrote those words to Katherine Stenholm of Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina.[3] By then, Stenholm was well-known in American fundamentalist circles as the founding director of Unusual Films, a production company affiliated with BJU. In 1950, Bob Jones Jr. had announced to Stenholm, a speech instructor at the school, "Dad says we're starting a film program, and you're going to head it." Overwhelmed, Stenholm explained to Bob Jones Sr., the president of the school, that she would need training for a job like that. Soon, she was spending the summer on the west coast, where she took film classes at the University of Southern California and completed an internship in Hollywood with Stanley Kramer who would go on to produce High Noon (1952) and direct films like Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? (1967). Upon returning to South Carolina, Stenholm devoted herself to the new challenge. She served as chairperson of the School of Cinema at Bob Jones from 1950 to 1989, during which time she produced dozens of Christian films, including five feature-length movies she directed.[4] In 1977, just two years before Heiliger first wrote to her, Stenholm had directed her magnum opus, Sheffey, a film about nineteenth-century, circuit-riding preacher Robert Sayers Sheffey (1820-1902).[5] Heiliger thought that if the life of Sheffey was worthy of a Christian film, then why not the life of Sager?

Notes

[1] Mrs. Dick Heiliger to Mrs. Katherine Stenholm, February 1, 1979, box 1, folder 4, Meta Chestnutt Sager Collection.

[2] Several long letters from Sager to Eva Heiliger, written between 1940 and 1945, are in box 1, folder 10, Meta Chestnutt Sager Collection.

[3] Mrs. Dick Heiliger to Mrs. Katherine Stenholm, Bob Jones University, January 16, 1979, box 1, folder 4, Meta Chestnutt Sager Collection.

[4] Ellyn Bache, "Unusual Films started with Katherine Stenholm," Greenville (South Carolina) News, April 18, 2001, 57, 60; "Katherine Corne Stenholm," Greenville News, November 7, 2015, A10. On Stanley Kramer, see David Thomson, New Biographical Dictionary of Film, 6th ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), 574-75.

[5] Internet Movie Database page for Sheffey, accessed August 17, 2021, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0278031/. Stenholm's movies flourished only in the world of distinctively-Christian film. There is no entry for her or any of her movies, for example, in Barry Keith Grant, ed., Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film, 4 vols. (Detroit, MI: Thomson Gale, 2007).

"For Five Years I Even Buried the Dead": Meta Chestnutt's Ministry, 1889-94 (1)

In a brief retrospective piece she wrote near the end of her life, Meta Chestnutt Sager spoke about her thirty years of work as an educational missionary in Indian Territory and Oklahoma: "Christian work was always paralleled by the intellectual and social training, for five years I even buried the dead."[1] The "five years" ranged from 1889, when she first arrived at Silver City, Chickasaw Nation, until 1894. By then, several more preachers affiliated with the Stone-Campbell Movement had come to the area and sometimes visited the congregation at Minco, the town along the railroad that replaced Silver City in 1890. Around the same time she penned those words, she also wrote her own funeral service. The document details the order of her funeral, Scripture selections, prayer leaders, the songs to be sung and who should sing them. It also includes five pages of her life story, a eulogy of sorts. It even provides specific directions for the committal service: "The three ministers standing at the head of the open grave, Brother Smith give the words, The others join him in the 'Amen'."[2] (Even in death, the old school teacher and college president would direct everyone and everything). In the eulogy section of the service, she wrote, "In that early day, beginning September 8, 1889, I taught school, I taught the Bible, I buried the dead, I set the Lord's table. There was no man to do it then."[3] There is no record of her officiating at a wedding or baptizing a new believer.

Notes

[1] The two-page document written in her hand is titled "Meta Chestnutt Sager," box 3, folder 12, Meta Chestnutt Sager Collection.

[2] "Funeral Arrangements Written by Mrs. Meta Chestnutt Sager before Her Death," box 3, folder 13, Meta Chestnutt Sager Collection.

[3] Ibid.

Meta Chestnutt Sager Genealogy and Early Life

By her own account, Meta Chestnutt "was born on a plantation near Kinston" in "Lenoir County, North Carolina, September 8, 1863."[1] Her earliest experiences included being "taught the Bible around the fireside in a Christian home."[2] Wiley Nobles, her maternal grandfather, was a planter and physician who served as a preacher among the Disciples of Christ. He became acquainted with Alexander Campbell during his visit to North Carolina. Her mother, Almeda Nobles Chestnutt, was "a charter member" of the Bethel church, a Disciples congregation.[3] Eventually, every member of Meta's immediate family became a member of that church, her father "being the last of the family to come in."[4] Her father, Lemuel Allen Chestnutt, was a believer who had perhaps been immersed before he became a part of the Bethel church. Meta notes that he entered the church "having dropped his denominational name."[5] At the age of twelve, in August 1876, she was baptized by a "Dr. H. D. Harper" in Contentnea Creek, while those gathered on the shore sang "On Jordan's Stormy Banks I Stand."[6]

Notes

[1] Meta Chestnutt Sager, undated manuscript, Meta Chestnutt Sager Collection, box 3, folder 12.

[2] Meta Chestnutt Sager, "Funeral Arrangements written by Mrs. Meta Chestnutt Sager before Her Death," MCS Collection, box 3, folder 13.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

My Dissertation

The following paragraph might show up in my dissertation. It's my partial attempt to define and explain the project:

While it does present a biographical narrative, it is not a biography per se. It is, instead, what might be called a series of case studies based on one life, all related to a wide range of topics and sub-fields of history. These include American religion, especially the Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement; Native Americans, narrowed to the Five Tribes of Oklahoma, especially the Choctaws and Chickasaws; biblical studies and Christian theology; the history of Indian Territory, Oklahoma Territory, and the State of Oklahoma, especially Grady County and the towns of Silver City, Minco, and Chickasha; women's and gender history; education and educational theory in the United States; North Carolina's Coastal Plain, where Meta Chestnutt was born and raised, and the city of Nashville, Tennessee, where she attended the Peabody Normal College and the University of Nashville, and where she worked among the Churches of Christ and Christian Churches during the late 1880s.

Meta Chestnutt Sager's Letter to Eva Heiliger, February 11, 1945 (9)

Near the end of her letter, Sager identifies a major part of the background to her correspondence with her great-niece. Eva Heiliger had recently given birth to a daughter. Sometime later, the Heiliger's had had the child sprinkled in a Methodist service. "When I wrote you before I did not know you were a Methodist," said Sager. "I only wanted you to know that you had no Bible for having your baby sprinkled. The hurt may come by her believing she is in the church when she is old enough to really enter into the church of the living God through full obedience to His prescribed way.  . . . She is going to be a leader. Train her well."[1] The disagreement between the two women was no idle debate.

Sager ended her forceful letter on a note of forbearance: "Your faith alone salvation won't keep me from loving you. You are all mighty fine and I love you all."

Note

[1] Meta Chestnutt Sager to Eva Heiliger, February 11, 1945.

Meta Chestnutt Sager's Letter to Eva Heiliger, February 11, 1945 (8)

In her comments on Christian denominations and church membership, Sager repeated two lines of thought that by her time were commonplace among their heirs of the Stone-Campbell Movement. First, as Sager put it, the various Protestant denominations are "manmade churches" that "all came out of the Catholic Church." Along this line, she offered a brief history lesson on the origins of Heiliger's denomination: "The Methodist Church came out of the Episcopal and that church came from the Catholic church through Henry the VIII." And the Catholic Church did not come into its own until "three hundred years after the Church of Christ was set up on the Day of Pentecost." Therefore, any church established prior to the events recorded in Acts 2 would be too old. Conversely, all churches established since that time are "too young to be the church which Christ told Peter and the other apostles He would build."[1] Second, in keeping with the unity and undenominational character of the church in the New Testament, no one "gets saved" and subsequently joins the church of his choice. Instead, the Lord adds to His church each person who is truly saved, "for it is said in the 2nd of Acts, verse 47, 'And the Lord added to the church daily such as should be saved.'"[2] Church membership is not someone's choice upon becoming a Christian. The Bible speaks of church membership as the result of a divine act; the Lord adds those who are saved to the church that Christ established.

Notes

[1] This is a reference to Matthew 16:18.

[2] Meta Chestnutt Sager to Eva Heiliger, February 11, 1945.

Walter Rauschenbusch and Meta Chestnutt Sager as Nineteenth-Century People

In his fine biography of Walter Rauschenbusch, the great theologian of the Social Gospel, historian Christopher H. Evans notes that although Rauschenbusch is associated with twentieth-century American theology, his social and cultural influences came from the nineteenth century. Born in 1861, he was very much a nineteenth-century man.[1] In the same way, although she lived until 1948, Meta Chestnutt Sager, born in 1863, was mainly a nineteenth-century woman. In her case, it was not simply the fact that she was born during the Civil War and came of age not long after the end of Reconstruction in 1877. It was also the result of her moving from North Carolina to Indian Territory in 1889, a few days before she turned twenty-six years old. When she was seventy-five, she recalled that upon arriving at Silver City, Chickasaw Nation, "there was not a sound save the prairie chicken's squawk, and no curious eyes save the jack rabbit's stare." She had brought along "clothes for a five year stay," because she knew that there in Indian Territory people "did have new clothes every time the moon changed." This was far from the industrialized world where the twentieth century would soon be dawning.[2]

Notes

[1] Christopher H. Evans, The Kingdom is Always but Coming: A Life of Walter Rauschenbusch (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2004), xviii.

[2] Mrs. J. A. Sager, "Some Wildflowers from My Garden of Memory," box 10, Meta Chestnutt Sager file, Historic Oklahoma Biographies Collection, Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma.

Meta Chestnutt Sager's Letter to Eva Heiliger, February 11, 1945 (7)

Sager critiques the practice of baptism by sprinkling or pouring, and advances baptism strictly by immersion, along several different lines. Specifically, she appeals to the New Testament phrase "one baptism," to church history, Greek philology, and the particulars of the setting in Acts 8:26-39, which tells the story of Philip's baptizing the eunuch from Africa. Using the language of Paul's Letter to the Ephesians 4:5, she writes: "the Church of Christ, the Kingdom of heaven on earth, has one Lord, one faith, one baptism." She adds that the "one baptism"--which she takes to as a reference to only one form of baptism--"was practiced until about three hundred years after Christ when the Catholic Church was formally established; and the one baptism was practiced by all Catholics until for convenience the Pope decreed the change to sprinkling. . . . Ask any priest and he will admit that immersion was the original form." There is no evidence that Sager ever studied Greek, the language of the New Testament. But she is able to cite what she regards as a personal authority: "I asked a Greek from Greece what they understood by baptize and he said no Greek understood anything else but to immerse." Finally, much like a good defense attorney, Sager preempts the suggestion that because the baptism of the eunuch took place in the "desert" (Acts 8:26), he could not have been immersed: "I know some try to say there was no water at that place in the desert, but it is a known fact from history that at that particular place and particular time of the year there was a pool of abundant water. No informed person will risk his scholarship in denying the fact."[1] Here, Sager is in all likelihood relying on her memory of having read J. W. McGarvey's commentary on Acts, or her memory of sermons by men like David Lipscomb and T. B. Larimore. Perhaps she had even heard McGarvey himself, who wrote:

The term desert is not here to be understood in its stricter sense of a barren waste, but in its more general acceptation, of a place thinly inhabited. Such an interpretation is required by the geography of the country.  . . . The only road from Jerusalem to Gaza, which passed through a level district suitable for wheeled vehicles, was that by Bethlehem to Hebron, and thence across a plain to Gaza. According to Dr. Hackett, this is "the desert" of Luke i: 80, in which John the Immerser grew up. Dr. S.[sic] T. Barclay, who traversed this entire route in May, 1853, says that he traveled, after leaving "the immediate vicinity of Hebron, over one of the very best roads (with slight exceptions) and one of the most fertile countries that I ever beheld."[2]

Notes

[1] Meta Chestnutt Sager to Eva Heiliger, February 11, 1945.

[2] J. W. McGarvey, A Commentary on Acts of the Apostles, 7th ed. (Lexington, KY: Transylvania Printing and Publishing Company, 1872), 95-96. The Barclay to whom McGarvey refers was J. T. Barclay, who became the first international missionary of the Stone-Campbell Movement when in 1850 he traveled to Jerusalem to launch a mission to Jews who lived there. See Paul M. Blowers, "Barclay, James Turner (1807-1874)," in Encyclopedia of the Stone-Campbell Movement (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2004), 69-70.

Meta Chestnutt Sager's Letter to Eva Heiliger, February 11, 1945 (6)

On the question of infant baptism, Sager highlights how the conversion stories in the Book of Acts apparently do not support the practice. "You will read in Acts 8:12--'But when they believed Phillip preaching the things concerning the Kingdom of God, and the name of Jesus Christ, they were baptized, both men and women' (not babies)." Further on in her letter, Sager notes that in the story recorded in Acts 10, Cornelius spoke for himself and his entire household with the words, "Now therefore are we all here present before God, to hear all things that are commanded thee of God" (Acts 10:33b). She remarks that this did not include infants, "for those in the house were able to understand."[1]

Note

[1] Meta Chestnutt Sager to Eva Heiliger, February 11, 1945. Compare J. W. McGarvey, A Commentary on Acts of Apostles, 7th ed. (Lexington, KY: Transylvania Printing and Publishing Company, 1872), 43, where, commenting on Acts 2:39, says that the reference to the salvation of "children" must mean descendants and not "children as children," because the promise in question is based upon repentance, "with which infants could not possibly comply."

Meta Chestnutt Sager's Letter to Eva Heiliger, February 11, 1945 (5)

It appears that much of what Sager wrote to Heiliger was in response to a Methodist pamphlet Heiliger had sent as a way of explaining and defending her beliefs and practices.[1] It is impossible to know which pamphlet Heiliger had sent, but it certainly taught the same things found in the 1944 edition of Doctrines and Discipline of the Methodist Church: "We hold that all children, by virtue of the unconditional benefits of the atonement, are members of the Kingdom of God, and therefore graciously entitled to Baptism."[2] The same manual begins its discussion of the administration of the sacrament by saying, "Let every adult person, and the parents of every child to be baptized, to have the choice of sprinkling, pouring, or immersion."[3]

Notes

[1] "Your little pamphlet is good in so far as it goes," wrote Sager, "but your Methodist friends always stay short of baptism." Meta Chestnutt Sager to Eva Heiliger, February 11, 1945.

[2] Doctrines and Discipline of the Methodist Church (New York: Methodist Publishing House, 1944), 40. See also Frank S. Mead, Handbook of Denominations in the United States (New York: Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, 1951), 131-32.

[3] Ibid., 448.

Alexander Campbell on Infant Baptism

According to historian Douglas A. Foster, the birth of Alexander Campbell's first child in 1812 made the hotly-debated issue of infant baptism a personal matter. Campbell had been brought up in the home of a Seceder Presbyterian minister and certainly had been sprinkled as an infant. With the question now pressing, he threw himself into deep study of the Bible on the topic and at the end of several weeks of investigation "concluded that he could accept only immersion of penitent believers as legitimate baptism."[1] As Campbell came to understand the New Testament, especially passages like Acts 2:37-38, baptism was only for believers and brought the remission of sins. Infants obviously could not understand and believe the gospel. Moreover, since baptism was for the remission of sins, it made no sense to baptize infants because they had not yet committed any sins and could not make a profession of faith.[2] Campbell never taught that those who failed to understand this aspect of biblical teaching were lost. "I cannot . . . in my heart regard all who have been sprinkled in infancy without their knowledge and consent as aliens from Christ and the well-grounded hope of heaven."[3] Nevertheless, the New Testament taught believers' baptism, by immersion, for the forgiveness of sins and the gift of the Holy Spirit, and so would Campbell.[4]

It is worth noting that as early as 1820, in his debate with Presbyterian minister John Walker, Campbell had developed and was enunciating several arguments against infant baptism. These arguments went far beyond an interpretation of the conversion stories in the Book of Acts, according to which the approved examples did not depict infant baptism, but did, rather, suggest inferential evidence against the practice.[5]

Notes

[1] Douglas A. Foster, A Life of Alexander Campbell, Library of Religious Biography (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2020), 53.

[2] Ibid., 71.

[3] Alexander Campbell, "Any Christians among Protestant Parties," Millennial Harbinger, September 1837, 412. See also Foster, Life of Alexander Campbell, 160-61.

[4] Campbell preferred to avoid theological words that could not be found in the Bible. Yet, his mature view of baptism pictures the ordinance as a "sacrament," a divinely-appointed means of grace. See, for example, the entry for "sacrament," in Donald K. McKim, Westminster Dictionary of Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), 245. See also Millard J. Erickson, The Concise Dictionary of Christian Theology, rev. ed. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2001), 174, who defines "Sacramentalism" as "The view that grace is conveyed through certain religious rites."

[5] See, especially, Alexander Campbell, "Evils of Infant Baptism," Millennial Harbinger (September 1848), 481-92, in which Campbell reprints the arguments he put forward in his 1820 debate with John Walker. See also the brief but helpful discussion in Royal Humbert, ed., A Compend of Alexander Campbell's Theology (St. Louis, MO: Bethany Press, 1961), 201, n. 16.

Meta Chestnutt Sager's Letter to Eva Heiliger, February 11, 1945 (4)

Having quoted Acts 8:35-38, Sager sets out to make two points about baptism. The first is a follow-up to her discussion about the necessity of the ordinance. She observes that the author of the Book of Acts does not quote Philip's sermon to the eunuch. Chapter 8, verse 35 merely says "he preached unto him Jesus." As Disciples were wont to do, Sager focused on that phrase in order to make her point: "something must have been said about baptism since the eunuch asked to be baptized."[1] According to the inference, because baptism is inherent to preaching Jesus, it is therefore an essential part of the faithful response to the gospel. In his commentary on the Book of Acts, first published in 1863, J. W. McGarvey had emphasized this point. McGarvey, an 1850 honor graduate of Alexander Campbell's Bethany College, was the leading biblical scholar in the second generation of the Stone-Campbell Movement. Disciples widely read and often cited his work on Acts. Commenting on the eunuch's question to Philip, "what doth hinder me to be baptized?" (Acts 8:36), McGarvey wrote:

The appearance of the water to which they had come suggested this question, but it could not have been done so unless the eunuch had been taught something concerning immersion as a religious ordinance. But he had enjoyed no opportunity for instruction on this subject, except through the teaching of Philip. Had Philip, then, preached him a sermon on immersion? No. Luke says Philip "preached to him Jesus." How, then, had he, while hearing Jesus preached, obtained instruction in reference to immersion? There is only one answer to this question. It is, that to preach Jesus, after the apostolic method, involves full instruction upon the subject of immersion. The prejudice, therefore, which exists at the present day against frequent introduction of this subject in discourses addressed to sinners, is altogether unscriptural; and those only preach Jesus correctly who give to it the same prominence which belongs to it in apostolic discourses. It was a part of Peter's sermon on Pentecost, of Philip's preaching to the Samaritans, and of his present discourse to the Ethiopian; and we will yet see, in the course of this commentary, that it always occupied a place in the preaching of inspired men on such occasions. Indeed, it would be impossible to preach Jesus fully without it.[2]

Sager's second point is related, but takes up a separate question: the scriptural mode of baptism. As noted earlier, the Methodist tradition to which Eva Heiliger belonged asserts that baptism may be administered by sprinkling, pouring, or immersion, and that infants as well as adults my be baptized. In practice, sprinkling has been common among Methodists. It seems clear that the pamphlet Heiliger had sent defended the position of her church. For, having quoted the passage in which "they went down both into the water, both Philip and the eunuch; and he baptized him," Sager comments, "And surely he was neither sprinkled nor water poured upon his head."[3]

Notes

[1] Meta Chestnutt Sager to Eva Heiliger, February 11, 1945. 

[2] J. W. McGarvey, A Commentary on Acts of Apostles, 7th ed. (Lexington, KY: Transylvania Printing and Publishing Company, 1872), 98. See also McGarvey's, New Commentary on Acts of Apostles (Cincinnati, OH: Standard Publishing Company, 1892), 1:157-58, which presents similar remarks. For the place of McGarvey in the history of Disciples biblical scholarship, see M. Eugene Boring, Disciples and the Bible: A History of Disciples Biblical Interpretation in North America (St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 1997), 221-23. For McGarvey's impact on all subsequent interpretation of the Book of Acts within the Stone-Campbell Movement, see Ibid., 248-49. For excellent brief biographies, see Henry Warner Bowden, Dictionary of American Religious Biography, 2nd ed. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993), 325-26; and M. Eugene Boring, "McGarvey, John W. (1829-1911)," in Encyclopedia of the Stone-Campbell Movement, (Grand Rapids, MI: William. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2004), 506-07.

[3] Meta Chestnutt Sager to Eva Heiliger, February 11, 1945. A standard reference work of the time noted that in Methodist churches in America, baptism was administered "usually by sprinkling." Frank S. Mead, Handbook of Denominations in the United States (New York: Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, 1951), 132).

Meta Chestnutt Sager's Letter to Eva Heiliger, February 11,1945 (3)

Next, Sager cites another passage from the Book of Acts, the episode in which the evangelist Philip teaches the gospel to a eunuch, an official in the government of "Ethiopia." According to the story, the eunuch had gone to Jerusalem to worship, and was now returning (Acts 8:27-28).[1] As he traveled, the eunuch was reading the Book of Isaiah, specifically Chapter 53, one of the Church's favorite messianic texts ever since: "He was led as a sheep to the slaughter; and like a lamb dumb before his shearer, so opened he not his mouth: In his humiliation his judgment was taken away: and who shall declare his generation? for his life is taken from the earth" (Acts 8:32-33). At this point in her letter, Meta picks up the story:

You will note in the 35th verse that Phillip [sic] "began at the same scripture and preached unto him Jesus. And as they went on their way they came unto a certain water: and the eunuch said, See, here is water; what doth hinder me to be baptized? And Phillip said, If thou believest with all thine heart, thou mayest. And he answered and said, I believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God. And he commanded the chariot to stand still: and they went down both into the water, both Phillip and the eunuch; and he baptized him.[2]

Two features of this part of Meta's letter suggest she was writing out the biblical passage from memory. First, while she quotes the eunuch confessing, "I believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God," the King James Version, which she no doubt read and from which she memorized Scripture, reads: "I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God." Second, she misspells Philip's three times as "Phillip." On the other hand, the placement and specific type of punctuation are perfect in Meta's transcription of the passage, suggests use of the printed text.[3]

Notes

[1] I. Howard Marshall, The Acts of the Apostles (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1980), 162, states that the man "came from the country now known as Sudan (rather than modern Ethiopia)." Likewise, Ben Witherington, III, The Acts of the Apostles: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1998), 295, writes: "The geographical location Luke has in mind is the Nubian kingdom whose capital is Meroe, south of Egypt, which is part of Sudan." If not a proselyte, the eunuch was one of the gentile admirers of Judaism, like the centurion Cornelius of Acts 10:1-2, described as "one that feared God with all his house." The Book of Acts contains several more references to this category of people, virtuous Gentiles. See Acts 13:16, 26, 43; 16:14; 17:4, 17; 18:7. The existence of these people in the Greco-Roman world has been established by, among others, John G. Gager, "Jews, Gentiles, and Synagogues in the Book of Acts," Harvard Theological Review 79, no. 1-3 (1986): 91-99; and Louis H. Feldman, "The Omnipresence of the God-Fearers," Biblical Archaeology Review 12, no. 5 (1986): 58-63. See also the good discussion in Craig S. Keener, Acts: An Exegetical Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013), 2:1566-67.

[2] Meta Chestnutt Sager to Eva Heiliger, February 11, 1945, Meta Chestnutt Sager Collection, Oklahoma History Center, Oklahoma City.

[3] Ibid.