A BRIEF VIEW OF THE FORMATION, GOVERNMENT AND DISCIPLINE OF THE "CHURCH OF GOD"
Harrisburg, PA: Montgomery and Dexter, Printers, 1829. Hardcover. Full pebbled leather, 3.5" x 5.5" redleather gilt lettered label on spine. 174 pp. VG, with significant foxing in areas. COvers are quite nice, a solid impression. Hard to imagine a finer copy being found. Extensive but very faint pencil writing on ffep. Item #156828
Extremely scarce first printing of this treatise by Winebrenner, who was written about extensively in Richard Kern; John Winebrenner and the Church of God. Gossard writes (in his lengthy essay John Winebrenner: From German Reformed Roots to the Churches of God) "...John Winebrenner was a German Reformed minister who founded a religious movement known as the Church of God.(1) In the 1820s, as pastor of the Salem German Reformed Church in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, he came into conflict with the vestry over his use of New Measures revivalism and other issues. Eventually this dispute led to his dismissal by the vestry and his removal from the rolls of the Synod of the German Reformed Church. He developed new theological views about the Bible, the church, free will, baptism, the Lords Supper, and foot washing that were in opposition to the beliefs of the German Reformed Church. In 1830 his followers officially organized, forming a denomination known as the Churches of God, General Conference.
In the 1840s he became an antagonist of John Williamson Nevin, a professor at the German Reformed seminary in Mercersburg, Pennsylvania. Winebrenner's activities, letters, and publications were among the precipitating factors that led Nevin to write The Anxious Bench and "The Sect System," two important early expressions of what became known as the Mercersburg Theology..."
Price: $350.00