Baptists in Early North America, Vol. VII: First Baptist Church, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania ed. by Deborah Bingham Van Broekhoven (review)

Any historian who has sifted through handwritten ecclesiastical records will recognize the service that Deborah Bingham Van Broekhoven has performed in transcribing, annotating, and introducing the minutes of Philadelphia's First Baptist Church. These records include the decisions of the church's membership between 1757 and 1806, as they procured ministers, oversaw properties, disciplined sins, distributed charity, and managed membership. Interwoven with the congregation's regular business are dozens of episodically unfolding dramas, some tragic (a marriage destroyed by a husband's drinking) and others comical (the decades the church members spent figuring out how to sing together tolerably well). Even with modern typesetting, fifty years' worth of minutes remain challenging to navigate, but this volume offers indispensable aids: a brief "Series Introduction" by William Brackney; a thematically organized "Historical Introduction" by Van Broekhoven; 10 images; and an index of subjects and names.

The editors expertly situate the significance of First Baptist Philadelphia in the history of Baptists. They are well-positioned to do so, given that these minutes are published as volume seven in the Baptists in Early North America series and that Van Broekhoven previously directed the American Baptist History Society (where these records are held). Such a framing also addresses a major lacuna in the denomination's historiography. Brackney identifies Philadelphia as the "the capital of Baptist American" (iix) and Van Broekhoven places First Baptist at the "geographic, organizing and spiritual center" (x) of North America's Baptist movement. As the colonial "mother church" (xvi), it provided leadership and resources to Baptists from Nova Scotia to Charleston and preserved ties to co-religionists across the Atlantic. Yet because Baptist scholarship has been tightly bound to issues of religious liberty, the influential but tolerated Baptists in Pennsylvania have received far less attention than the Baptists that fought for disestablishment in the South and New England. This volume will help rectify that imbalance.

Other historians of early American religion will take interest in the schism between Calvinists and Universalists in the 1780s. The episode illustrates both the limitations and the potential of these records. After First Baptist's minister, Elhanan Winchester, endorsed the heterodox doctrine of the "universal Restoration of Bad men & Angels" (153–63), the congregation's Calvinists ousted their pastor and approximately half of the membership, and then spent years stamping out stubborn Universalist sympathies. Some readers will be perplexed at how little theology appears in this theological dispute. The minutes record decisions but not the preceding debates and motives. Yet this inattention to theology offers an important corrective to histories of religious conflict that rely exclusively on sermons and pamphlets: Despite its ideological origins, the ecclesiastical divorce unfolded primarily as a struggle to control communally owned property. Indeed, while most Baptists could surely give reasons for their commitment to either limited or universal salvation, they advanced these commitments by organizing to pay like-minded preachers or closing the meeting house to opponents.

First Baptist's preoccupation with the material foundation of its spiritual community is perhaps the most pervasive characteristic of these records. As Van Broekhoven warns, financial issues "fill most pages in these minutes," (xxx). The church collected offerings, sold pews, and even rented properties, yet it constantly fell short of the resources it needed to pay the minister, maintain the building, and care for the poor, sick, and old. On occasion, disciplinary proceedings also provide a glimpse into individual household economies, such as when members defaulted on their pledges to the church, battled with creditors, or quarreled over money. Van Broekhoven suggests that these records indicate "the interplay between religion and the political economy of early Philadelphia" (liii). She leaves this as a challenge to future researchers, but has provided abundant data demonstrating that churches not only operated as intermediaries in various economic relationships but also...