Sandemanianism
Sandemanianism was a sect within Christianity with a flawed doctrines. They equated faith with mere intellectual assent to the facts of the Bible. Defined as a “simple faith” or “bare faith,” the faith they promoted required just intellectual assent to Biblical doctrine for salvation but taught that there need not be any emotional consequence of this belief or even an act of the will.
Its teaching started in about 1730 with a Scottish Presbyterian minister John Glas, who believed in the total separation of church and state, a concept completely contrary to the teaching of the time. Later, Robert Sandeman, Glas’s son-in-law, became the recognised leader of the sect, whose members in both England and America came to be called Sandemanians.
Glas and Sandeman were admirers of John Calvin, and Sandemanians claimed to be Calvinists, but Calvin would not have accepted their aberrant beliefs. Glas was expelled from the Church of Scotland in 1730.
It was an extreme version of 'easy believism'. Sandemanians did not look for any spiritual or emotional changes in Christians. They reacted against the motional consequences of the preaching of the Welsh’s and George Whitfield and taught that an intellectual belief was enough. The need for repentance was thought of as an intellectual decision and not a change of the will about who they will serve. Sandemanians thus opened themselves up to charges of antinomianism. They wanted to return to a ‘pure’ New Testament religion, as they understood it. Other doctrines included included foot washing, the love feast, weekly communion, the holy kiss, and control over how church members used their money. This gave their elders great authority. They also taught that Christ’s kingdom was entirely spiritual and absolutely not of this world, and thus a national church was unbiblical.
In his epitaph, Sandeman said “that the bare death of Jesus Christ without a thought or deed on the part of man is sufficient to present the chief of sinners spotless before God”
As Sandemanianism spread around England and to America, so did opposition. Critics said that Sandemanianism produced a cold orthodoxy, an authoritarian church, and too much of a focus on the local church over the universal church. Sandemanians strayed from the Westminster definition of faith, and some said that they had the faith of devils because it was absurd to propose that God justified any person through a faith unaccompanied by love (see James 2:19). Sandemanians were missing the important trust aspect of faith—actual reliance on God’s Word instead of only rational acceptance.
Even with such harsh criticism, it took a long time for Sandemanianism to completely die out. The last of the Sandemanian churches in America closed in 1890. Their London meeting house did not close until 1984, and the last elder of the church started by Glas and Sandeman died in Edinburgh in 1999.
