One poster wrote:

The name of Michael Faraday is known to scientists and students everywhere. He was a British physical scientist whose discoveries contributed much to our knowledge of electricity. … When Faraday was dying someone asked him, “Mr. Faraday, what are your presumptions, your hypotheses now?” “I do not entrust my head to presumptions at this moment, but to certainties,” he replied. “‘For I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I committed unto him against that day’” (2 Timothy 1:12).

Another responded:

The Glassites, otherwise known as the Sandemanians, believed that the church should be governed by apostolic doctrine. They abstained fronm eating blood and strangled animals, practiosed the ceremonial washing of feet, and believed that to eat and drink with an excommunicated person was a grievous sin. The great scientist Michael Farady was a sandenmanian elder.

Peter Bowler “The True Believers” (Methuen; Sydney:1986) p. 97

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In the early 1840s Faraday suffered a breakdown in health and also became an Elder of the Sandemanian Church. These two items taken together account for the sharp decline in the quantity of Faraday’s scientific work (in both research and lecturing) during the early 1840s compared with what he had achieved during the 1830s.

http://bofhcam.org/co-larters/assembling-etherkillers/author.html

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Sandemanianism

by Michael Haykin In December 1967, Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones gave an address to what was then known as the Puritan Conference on the topic of ‘Sandemanianism’. Our initial reaction might be that the topic is esoteric, of little interest or value to modern men and women. But we would not feel this way if we were well-versed in the history of eighteenth-century Evangelicalism, the womb from which this particular doctrinal viewpoint came forth. Dr Lloyd-Jones proceeded to show that this theological aberration is of paramount importance for our own day. This article seeks to explore some aspects of the long-forgotten Sandemanian controversy.

Sandemanianism and the nature of saving faith

The roots of Sandemanianism lie in the 1720s when John Glas (1695-1773), minister of the Church of Scotland work in Tealing, Scotland, and a man of considerable erudition, gradually came to the conviction that Christ’s kingdom is one that is completely spiritual and, as such, independent of both state control and support. A church of some seventy believers was formed in the parish of Tealing, and over the next couple of decades ‘Glasite’ congregations could be found in Dundee, Perth, Edinburgh and booming textile centres such as Paisley and Dunkeld. Although the Glasites were never numerous, Glas’ views exerted wide influence throughout the British Isles and America, especially through the travels and writings of his son-in-law Robert Sandeman (1718-1771), whom Lloyd-Jones rightly describes as ‘a born controversialist’. In addition to adopting such practices as foot-washing, holy kissing, the use of lots to determine God’s will, and an insistence on unanimity in all church decisions, Glas’ and Sandeman’s followers also distinguished themselves from other eighteenth-century Evangelicals by a predominantly intellectualist view of faith. They became known for their cardinal theological tenet that saving faith is ‘bare belief of the bare truth’.

Bare faith

Sandeman, who assumed the leadership of the movement in the 1750s, insisted that faith becomes a work of human merit if it includes anything beyond simple assent to the truth of what God has done through Christ’s death and resurrection. In Sandeman’s reading of New Testament passages like Romans 4:5, justification by faith has everything to do with God instilling into the minds of impenitent men and women, the belief that God gave his dear Son for sinners. Essentially, it has nothing to do with the exercise of the will in repentance or the engagement of the heart’s affections towards God. Sandeman also turns to 1 John 5:1 to argue that regeneration accompanies intellectual assent to the central truth of the Christian faith, namely, that Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ and that he died and rose again for sinners. Thus, Sandeman can talk of ‘bare faith’ and ‘bare persuasion of the truth’.

In a genuine desire to exalt the utter freeness of God’s salvation, Sandeman sought to remove any vestige of human reasoning, willing or desiring in the matter of saving faith. He was convinced that if the actions of the will or the affections are included in saving faith, then the Reformation assertion of ‘faith alone’ is compromised. Thus, in the Sandemanian system, saving faith is reduced to intellectual assent to the gospel proclamation about Christ. To be fair to Sandeman, it should be noted that he was quite prepared to admit that affections come into play once a person believes. But at the time of conversion, they play no role in saving faith.

It should occasion no surprise that many of those who embraced Sandeman’s intellectualist view of faith became stunted in their Christian lives. For instance, Christmas Evans (1766-1838), an influential Welsh Baptist leader, adopted Sandemanian views for a number of years in the late 1790s, but eventually found himself dwelling in ‘the cold and sterile regions of spiritual frost’, and in the grip of ‘a cold heart towards Christ, and his sacrifice, and the work of his Spirit’.

Sandemanianism, however, did not go unopposed. A number of key eighteenth-century Evangelical leaders wrote replies and rebuttals of this system, including; William Williams of Pantycelyn (1717-1791), the Welsh Calvinistic Methodist poet and hymn writer; Isaac Backus (1724-1806), the American Baptist champion of religious liberty; and Thomas Scott (1747-1821), the Anglican biblical commentator. It was the Calvinistic Baptist theologian Andrew Fuller (1754-1815), though, who drew up what many regard as the definitive response to Sandeman and his views.

from http://www.the-highway.com/sandeman_Haykin.html

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Faraday’s religion

If Faraday’s beginnings make a life in science seem unlikely, his religious beliefs make it even more improbable that he should have made so great a contribution. Faraday’s family were Sandemanians or Glasites, a dissenting Christian sect who believed that the truth of the Bible was to be recovered by as literal a reading as possible. Sandemanians avoided theology and had no established clergy, making the Bible central to the conduct of their lives. Acquired in childhood but affirmed by his public confession of faith in July 1821, Faraday’s Christianity required that he express his faith in the smallest details of everyday life as well as the greatest.

As a Sandemanian Faraday would not accept that the book of nature is written in a language so removed from experience as the language of mathematics. Theories could be admired and used but to him they were more tinged with humanity than with the divine. Sandemanian suspicion of theology and mathematical abstraction suggested that those come between observers and the book of nature. This is why Faraday insisted on separating the discussion of religious from scientific matters. In a lecture given in 1854 in the presence of Prince Albert, he argued that their humanity makes all people-including scientists-’active promoters of error.’ How, then, is scientific knowledge possible? The Sandemanian element in his Christianity promised that, like the Bible, the book of nature would be open to anyone who sought to read it without prejudice.

By ‘prejudice’ Faraday did not mean personal bias that could be removed by adherence to scientific method. Scientific methods demand intellectual honesty and require scientists to submit to critical appraisal by their colleagues. These methods winnow out the objective, natural phenomenon from the personal or ‘observer-effects.’ By contrast, Faraday argued, these are just what scientists need to be aware of. Objectivity requires observers to be just as aware of the disturbing effects of emotions and desires as they are of external experience, lest they be satisfied by mere projections of their own hopes and fears.

These unconventional claims express his attempt to integrate his approach to science with other aspects of life. As the physicist John Tyndall saw, “his own relation to [nature] produced in Faraday a kind of spiritual exhaltation . His religious feeling and his [science] could not be kept apart; there was an habitual overflow of the one into the other.” His faith assured Faraday that the value of his endeavors would be decided by God, not men, so there was no need to triumph over the views of others. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Faraday hesitated to establish his own views: he did not seek influence and did not ensure the continuation of his work through a school of ‘Faradayan’ students. Faraday became influential, of course, but this reflected his success. Even after he had completed a theory that explained the properties of matter in terms of the “great field of nature,” and even after he had become famous-Faraday remained apprenticed to Nature. Despite his mastery of experimental skills, he never assumed the status of a Master theorist.

from http://www.bath.ac.uk/~hssdcg/Michael_Faraday.html

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