W.
W. Otey, Contender for the Faith: A History of Controversies in the Church of
Christ from 1860-1960 (Akron, Ohio, 1964), published by the author, Cecil
Willis, is a very different sort of book from the one I talked about in my two
previous blog posts. Otey, as I will
abbreviate the title, is a biography, not a memoir. Moreover, it focusses on a
limited aspect of its subject, as the subtitle suggests. William Wesley Otey
was a redoubtable debater; the author writes near the end, “It was extremely
difficult for Otey to stay out of a fight.” (p. 350) He debated Mormons,
Primitive Baptists, Dunkards and the progressives and digressives of his own
church. He argued forcefully, always from the conservative side, in the
controversies over instruments, societies, colleges, co-operation among
congregations, evangelistic oversight, premillennialism, and church unity.
The cover of W. W. Otey, Contender for the Faith, by
Cecil Willis
Perhaps I am less informed than I
ought to be, but I had no idea what most of these controversies were about. And
the biographer does not offer much explanation; Willis was writing for
initiates, who were aware of these matters beforehand. In a nutshell, as I
understand it, all these controversies within the Church of Christ concerned
the mission to recreate the church as Christ had founded it – that is, nothing
would be allowed in the church for which there was no precedent in Scripture.
According to Otey and other “Anti” evangelists, nothing in Scripture authorizes
musical instruments in church, or any delegation of the individual
congregation’s authority to a society of any sort. Add to the book’s narrow
focus the fact that “Otey was dead serious most of the time” (p. 280), and
except for historians of religion, Otey
is not much fun to read.
The accounts of this argumentative
culture are nevertheless sometimes entertaining, and remind me a great deal of
the Presidential debates of recent years. According to the biographer, 1908 was
the most significant year in Otey’s life, because it was the date of the
“famous Otey-Briney debate” (pp. 194-212). John Benton Briney was a “digressive”
preacher in the Church of Christ, reputed to be a formidable debater, and his
party issued the challenge. The two men agreed to argue two propositions: “The
use of such organizations as the Illinois Christian Missionary Society, the
Foreign Christian Missionary Society, etc., is authorized in the New Testament
Scriptures and acceptable to God,” and “The use of instrumental music in
connection with the songs sung by the church on the Lord’s day, when assembled
for edification and communion, is opposed to New Testament teaching and
sinful.” Otey took the negative on the first and the affirmative on the second.
Shortly before the scheduled
meeting, however, Briney demanded a change of venue, which Otey arranged with
some difficulty, for a site in Louisville. Otey then tried to arrange a
planning meeting with Briney, who declined to come to a hotel and refused to
allow Otey to bring his team to Briney’s home. Otey bargained to bring at least
a stenographer, but Briney would permit only Otey’s words to be recorded. Then
Briney refused to argue an affirmative version of his position on instrumental
music. When the event finally occurred, it was generally agreed that Otey won,
and the printed account of the debate sold out quickly.
Not long afterward, another
opponent, R. O. Rogers, resorted to personal attacks, calling Otey “a sort of
ecclesiastical tramp” who deserted his wife and children for eight months a
year, leaving them “to shift for themselves on a fourteen-acre tract of the
most sterile land that lay beneath ‘the shining canopy of God’s blue heaven.’”
He charged that Otey had his own “Ladies Aid Society” in the form of his wife
and daughters, and that while the family fed “on the husks that the swine did
eat,” the preacher was feasting on “floating islands and two story pies” (p.
217). This debate concerned instrumental music again, and somewhere amidst the
invective Brother Rogers invoked 1 Corinthians 14 in support of it; but
observers considered it an easy win for Otey, despite the effort to Swift-Boat
him.
I confess to a certain sympathy for
Rogers in my feelings about this biography. Otey’s family are virtually invisible.
In the opening pages, the author quotes a moving passage Otey wrote in 1956 as
an obituary tribute to his wife. It describes their first meeting: “Our eyes
met and held as if by magic for a moment,” and ends “I loved her more than
seventy years.” (p. 35). They had nine children, of whom seven were still
living in 1956, along with fourteen grandchildren and four great-grandchildren
(p. 358). There is almost no mention of them, though. We learn that his two
eldest daughters attended Lynchburg College, a fact which some critics found
inconsistent with Otey’s views on colleges and the Church of Christ (p. 220);
and that his son Ray wanted to go to Abilene Christian College in 1929, but
Otey moved to Rocky, Oklahoma – and Ray went instead to an osteopathy college
in Missouri (pp. 255-56).
W. W. Otey, his wife
Minnie, and their children, in 1920
Front: Joe, W. W.,
Minnie, D. S.
Back: Ray, Ola, Bentley, Willie, Verna, Lucille
As related by Willis, Otey’s life
was almost entirely made up of preaching, debating, leading church meetings, submitting
articles to church periodicals, and writing books. He began his career in
western Floyd County, Virginia, in the corner formed by the borders with
Pulaski and Carroll Counties; the post office was called Showalter, Virginia,
and it no longer exists, alas. Otey was baptized there in 1886 and began to
preach in the late 1880s. Except for a few months in Ohio, he remained in
western Virginia until 1904, when he moved to Indiana. After seven years there,
he moved to Kansas in 1911, then to Oklahoma in 1929, to Texas in 1934, and
back to Kansas in 1939, residing in Belle Plaine until his wife’s death, after
which he moved to Winfield, near his daughter’s home. He died there on 1
November 1961, at the age of 94, justly honored for his lifetime of service to
his church.
I have omitted something up to this
point, which will explain why I read this book and thought it was worth talking
about in this blog. W. W. Otey’s mother was named Sarah Ann Showalter. The wife
he loved for seventy years was Amanda Elizabeth “Minnie” Showalter. He was
baptized by Josiah Thomas Showalter. George Henry Pryor Showalter’s periodical Firm Foundation published 192 of Otey’s
articles between 1928 and 1954. Even though Cecil Willis devotes very little
space to Otey’s family, he says a good deal about the connections with the
Showalters and about the complicated relationships between Otey and his
Showalter kin. The next two posts will explore those topics.
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