Although these churches did not subscribe to creeds and confessions, they were in many ways more committed to orthodox doctrines than many churches that recited them each week. This tradition mediated to me, mostly informally, a basic familiarity with the Bible and a living knowledge of the gospel of salvation by grace, through faith in Christ. Yet this tradition was also the product of the Radical Reformation, pietism, and American revivalism. So the emphases of the Reformers, such as Luther and Calvin, sat uncomfortably alongside the more Arminian — even Semi-Pelagian and outright Pelagian — emphases of Charles Finney and Benjamin Franklin. It was the tradition of a distinctly American revivalism with its curious mixture of separatism and civil religion