“That they may be one as we are …” – What I Learned From The “CHURCH OF CHRIST”

“That they may be one as we are …” – What I Learned From The “CHURCH OF CHRIST”

 

All of the sincere movements to restore Christ’s Church to her apostolic foundations have been the result of some group of earnest Christians realizing that some portion of the teachings of Jesus and His apostles that they noticed were intended to be taken more seriously and literally than they had been in the past.

 

That was what occurred among those who came to be known as the “Church of Christ.”

 

As I have mentioned before, my junior and senior high school years were spent in a small and mildly liberal Methodist church, from whose ministry I NEVER heard about any need to make decisions that God would require of me before I could actually be considered by God to have become a Christian. Like my own unregenerate parents, I just naïvely assumed that I already was one!

 

One summer between my sophomore and junior years, six new families moved from Texas into our small town –  600 souls – of Commack, Long Island. Several of their boys were in my high school class, so I got to know them and their new church. All six fathers had quit their jobs in Texas in order to plant a Church of Christ congregation in our town. I was invited to their church and became a periodic visitor. As a kid who just took my version of “church” for granted, I was deeply impressed that they would take their version of “church” so seriously that they would quit their jobs and move across the country just to recreate the kind of a church that they had known back in Texas!

 

Their frequently written and stated principle or “motto” was, “Where the Scriptures speak, we speak; where the Scriptures are silent, we are silent.”

 

It was from them that I first heard of the idea of carefully searching through the New Testament for SPECIFIC things to believe, obey, and imitate. It seemed rather radical to me at the time: a Bible that you actually use to BUILD something concrete! Using that principle, on each and every Sunday they had “the Lord’s Supper on the Lord’s Day,” basing it upon what they had discovered in Acts 20:7. For us Methodists, the “Holy Communion” had been once a month, but for no particular reason other than that, “If you do something too often then it quits being special,” that they used to say.

 

It was also from them that I first encountered the idea that there were actually “true” and “false” churches, and that they believed that they were one of the few “true churches.” I had always assumed that in “free market” America, churches were quite naturally just like restaurants, automobiles, and recreational preferences: “different strokes for different folks!” The idea of finding a “true” church, to which you would be conscience-bound to join was brand new to me! And they had a significant list of things that would constitute a “true church” – for example, what you teach and practice about baptism was very essential for them. Also, in order to combat the fragmentation of Christianity into denominations, they rejected the use of any historical creeds (no matter how ancient); they also insisted (strongly!) upon using only Scriptural names to identify your church: “Church of Christ” or “Christian Church” would be ok, but definitely not “Methodist,” or “Lutheran,” or “Roman Catholic.”

 

It was from them that I first came across people who were carefully disciplined in demonstrating how the New Testament Scriptures were to be used in creating their official practices. They explained to me – who had been sprinkled at age four – that one must not be allowed to be baptized until after they have made the decision to yield their lives to Jesus. And they also pointed out that God does not consider you to be forgiven UNTIL that confession of Christ was made at your baptismal immersion: Their literature and preaching were careful to regularly quote Peter’s command to be, “baptized in the name of Jesus Christ FOR THE FORGIVENESS of your sins” (Acts 2:38), and his, “… corresponding to that, baptism now SAVES you” (1 Peter 3:21). I had never heard of that before. Yet, once again, their instinct was merely to understand and obey carefully what the Scriptures clearly and specifically SAY, which must be a goal for all who think that God was careful when He caused things to be written down. I suspect that they were the first ones to get me interested in examining and meditating upon SPECIFIC words and phrases within the New Testament.

 

Never having even met a “fundamentalist,” I had not been trained yet to consider such detailed obedience as theirs to be a form of that detestable word, “LEGALISM,” so to liberal but open-minded Reed, it just seemed to make sense: if that is what the Bible says then that is what it means and that is what you are to do! I give them credit for introducing me to that valuable but, sadly, highly unusual principle among denominational Christianity, and also introducing me to the idea of actually using that principle to BUILD teachings and practices. I continue to believe and live by their principle, just hopefully deeper applications of it!

 

 

Decades later, I learned that they were the offspring of an early nineteenth century anti-denominational movement called the “Restoration Movement,” which also included the later “Disciples of Christ” as well. Their foundational leaders had been two Presbyterian clergymen, Alexander Campbell and Barton Stone, and their goal was the “the unification of all Christians into a single body patterned after the church of the New Testament.” They were consciously motivated to be a unifying movement among the denominations from the very beginning. Their only acceptable input came from the New Testament; neither the Old Testament nor the early centuries of post-Apostolic churches possessed any significant authority for them.

 

In retrospect, I might have done well to join them and leave my form of Methodism behind, since I am convinced that Wesley would detest what Methodism has become, but at that time in my life, I simply was not interested enough in “religion” to feel any motivation to make that break and join with them. And even though I was not yet a repentant and committed disciple of Jesus, I was not racially bigoted (for which I probably CAN thank those liberal Methodists!). When I went to a tent preaching “revival” with those Church of Christ families, their southern revivalist preacher started preaching that blacks got their skin color because they were all descendants from Cain, and that the famous “mark” that God had placed upon the murderer Cain (Genesis 4:15) WAS that dark skin color. I was so shocked at such racial bigotry – not to mention such twisted Scriptural exegesis – that I never set foot in their church again.

 

But all who yearn to see those who confess themselves as Christians also enter into the passion that God’s Son has for unity among His true children (as in John 17:6-26) – ALL of us owe that movement for things that would be approved by His holy Apostles:

1. COVENANT DISTINCTION: Similar to the Anabaptists, but with perhaps greater vigor and clarity, leaders among the Restoration Movement drew a very sharp restriction against any continuing binding authority of the Old Covenant Law for those under the New Testament. They original leaders took Hebrews very seriously: “When He said, ‘A new covenant’ He has made the first obsolete” (Hebrews 8:13)! For them, ONLY what was explicitly commanded in the New Testament was to be authoritative within the Church. Unlike the vast majority of Christians – whether Calvinists, Lutherans, Anglicans, Catholics, and many others – their founders were very much against “dipping” into the Old Testament to justify church practices that were not to be found within the New Testament: practices such as using Old Testament infant circumcision to justify the baptism of infants rather than of the baptizing the “disciples” that Jesus had commanded in Matthew 28:19. I used much of what Alexander Campbell so eloquently wrote about that subject within my own Blueprint for a Revolution: Building Upon ALL of the New Testament.
2. IMITATION OF NEW TESTAMENT PATTERNS: They methodically searched the New Testament for patterns, teachings, and disciplines to emulate and implement. As mentioned already, they observed – in Acts 20:7 – that the apostles celebrated the Lord’s Supper on every “first day,” Sunday, and so that is what they consistently do to this day. They looked within the New Testament for patterns of worship, baptism, preaching, evangelism, and organization. This was born out of desire to both obey and imitate all that God had inspired the first Christians to do: a most noble desire that all Christians could benefit from adopting. They did not need an explicit apostolic command to “celebrate the Lord’s Supper every Sunday.” They just noticed what the apostles did and did the same! That is what real disciples do, consistently! And all who are trapped within their self-justifying denominational traditions need to escape into that same passion that characterized the good-willed pioneers of the Restoration Movement!
3. BAPTISM: Surrendering to the plain and simple language of the apostle Peter, they taught emphatically that Baptism is “for the forgiveness of your sins” (Acts 2:38), merely surrendering themselves to what is said, instead of cleverly inventing ways to nullify God’s apostle. They do not allow any other Biblical passages to lessen the clarity of that teaching, in the sad way that so many Gnostic-tinted anti-sacramental Protestants do in order to not make things like water, bread and wine, and commanded actions seem to be of importance in the way that God deals with human beings! As it was with Peter, to them also it is the public confession that is the important part at that watery immersion, but God instituted that the saving verbal confession be made DURING that immersion (when actually possible, of course). They restored the clarity of the ancient and historic church, that you are not a Christian until you are an openly confessing and baptized Christian!

 

HOWEVER : Their movement has been justly criticized for focusing more upon the external practices of the New Testament than upon the actual meaning of those practices. For example, they were passionately literal about when and how often the Lord’s Supper was to be practiced, but they were not equally passionately literal about the MEANING of what was happening in that Lord’s Supper, as in what Jesus and Paul said what it meant (Matthew 26:26-28; 1 Corinthians 10:16). NONE of the original and ancient Christian churches attempted to avoid the plain sense of that “IS,” when Jesus said, “this IS my body…blood.” They had been taught by His Spirit that His eucharistic Supper was one of the wonderfully intimate ways in which He was fulfilling the promise, “Christ IN you, the hope of glory” (Colossians 1:27), and “I IN them and You IN Me, that they may be perfected in unity” (John 17:23), and fulfilling what He had meant for disciples in His scandalizing declaration of John 6:41-58! Our bodies are not sanctified simply by US acting “holy;” they are holy because of what they get to receive INTO them: “do you not know that your BODY is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have [received] from God” (1 Corinthians 6:19). That “hope of glory” from “Christ IN you” is from a Christ who is in our BODIES as well as the rest of us! To the chagrin of “Gnostic-tinted” Protestants, the God of both Old AND New Covenants is indeed a very SACRAMENTAL God, who uses “stuff” like water, bread & wine, and openly confessed words to accomplish wonderful but invisible blessings!

 

And while they may have imitated the “what and when” that was practiced on the Lord’s Day, like most Protestant churches back then they felt free to ignore Jesus’s own use of wine, but instead substituted grape juice on their own authority: another minor case of “selective surrendering”! Much more importantly, however, although some of their founders were against their members participating in the worlds institutionalized violence, as were all of the original Christians, the Church of Christ has long abandoned such apparently “unrealistic” idealism commanded by Jesus (Matthew 5:38-39). Their wonderful motto, “Where the Scriptures speak, we speak; where the Scriptures are silent, we are silent” is clearly very important to them – but it is only selectively applied! They should have used the same logic that they used to separate themselves from Old Covenant infant circumcision to also separate themselves from Old Covenant violence! All Christian take SOME of Christ’s teachings, promises, and commands in their grammatically natural and literal sense – the way we already accept all fact-based literature. One of the things that has fragmented Christ’s holy Movement into combative denominations has been over which of them we do NOT take that way! What if we just became those “little children” that Jesus commanded us to become (Matthew 18:3) and take them ALL that way? Perhaps then we would become that same holy movement that could take on triumphantly all the hostility that the satanic Roman Empire could dish out!

 

When we compare some of Jesus’s revolutionary commands that created a people who were deeply separated from participation within many of the institutions of this world, and which create deep threats to our “fight and flight” instincts (e.g., Matthew 5:38-42), what that Restoration Movement focuses upon – while often very laudable – has also produced a movement that is sadly, “majoring in minors”: too much copying rather easy to accomplish external practices and patterns and not enough focusing upon God’s teachings, promises, and commands that radically change your instincts, your character, and your actual Sprit-anointed experiences which make you too gentle and good-willed to do harm to others, even if your nation commands you to do so!

 

In my understanding, the “ecumenical” vision that Barton and Campbell had was sadly limited to uniting and comparing the way of life among the standard groups of Protestant churches that were commonly known to them. For example, they do not seem to have known or at least paid any attention to the far more radical and separated teachings and lifestyle of Anabaptist Christians when considering what a “true church” would look like. To my knowledge, the Anglicans – and probably Lutherans also – had nothing Biblical to offer as far as they were concerned when constructing their definitions of a “true church.” And the Roman Catholic Church was considered far too apostate and irredeemably saturated with evil to possess ANYTHING that might challenge them to consider, even for a second! For one example, even though both Jesus and Paul highly recommended embracing the celibate lifestyle for “those who have ears to hear”  – (Matthew 19:12; 1 Corinthians 7:6-9, 25-39) – the fact that the wicked Romans required it of their priests and nuns “obviously” justified overriding and incorporating anything that Jesus and Paul may have had to say about it! But then, ALL of us within our various denominations and traditions have no cause to judge them any more harshly than we should be judging ourselves, no?

 

They also manifested the problem endemic among Christians who have become serious about being Biblically “correct,” by developing divisions among those among them who claimed to be more correct than others. For example, since the New Testament does not mention the use of instruments within New Testament churches, they rather quickly divided over that issue, into “instrumental” and “NON-instrumental” Churches of Christ! Such splits occurred over how to interpret their own “motto” (“Where the Scriptures speak…”). One wing began to believe that unless the New Testament provided permission, then any unmentioned practice was forbidden. The other group took the opposite course: unless the New Testament explicitly forbade a practice then the church had liberty to do it. (Sadly, this is a problem with which other movements can empathize!). In the days of America’s founding fathers, the same controversy arose over the “strict interpretation of the Constitution” versus the ”loose interpretation.” Such controversies arose even in the apostolic days – for which, see how it arose and was resolved in Acts 15. But back then, His Pentecostal Holy Spirit was still ACTUALLY being experienced in the personal and corporate experiences and decisions of His Church in the way and depth that Christ has desired and made POSSIBLE for those to bear His name, even in our own age! But when His Pentecostal Spirit is not present and/or listened to, then instead of “resolutions,” we wind up with more and more “denominations” and competing “parties” WITHIN those denominations!

 

The writings that the Holy Spirit inspired to be written, were written in the context in which the disciples reading them had actually remembered RECEIVING Him within them, in the distinct and life transforming manner described within the New Testament (For which see Acts 2 – the 120; 8 – the Samaritans, 9 – Paul; 10 – Cornelius; 19; Galatians 3:2 – “do you REMEMBER…”). And when Spirit-filled, Spirit-sensitized disciples who had to struggle and then embrace His demanding “Sermon on the Mount” – when such disciples  came upon Scriptural principles that might be interpreted in various ways, the presence of that active and communicable Holy One could guide them into a common mind, rather than watch them split up into the “factions” that were starting to begin when Paul addressed those Corinthians: “For I have been informed concerning you … that there are quarrels among you. Now I mean this, that each one of you is saying, ‘I am with Paul,’ or ‘I am with Apollos,’ or ‘I am with Cephas,’ or ‘I am with Christ’” (1 Corinthians 1:11-12). In our anemic “Pentecostal Spirit FREE” age, we would wind up with FOUR new denominations, but those Corinthians did not; nor did those zealous disputing disciples in Acts 15!

 

No matter HOW many things that you can indeed legitimately find to criticize within those early centuries of the Church, we should never forget – to OUR great shame – that for almost one thousand years, apart from rejected heretical movements, there was only “THE Christian Church” and one common version of the “faith once for all delivered to the saints” that was acceptable within all apostolically-founded churches. And the fact that it was the arrogance of the leaders of what became the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches (note the plural: churchES!) that created the first antagonistic “denominationalized” versions of Christianity, they have lost the right to condemn Protestants for merely continuing the divisive, degenerative process that THEY started! It is more likely that the Jesus who prayed as passionately as He did in John 17 will wind up saying to our denominational leaders, “A plague on ALL your houses!”

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Next Up: “What I Learned From the Anglican Movement”

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